Mission 2000 Database

Notes:
Newspapers from Hawaii to New York City in June of 1903 say he was a professional political agitator from Romania. His baptismal record attests to the fact that he was a native of Mexico. Thirty years later, in Arizona, his Anglicized name would become William H. Loustaunau. The newspapers of the day called him "Three Fingered Jack," even though he only had the third and little finger on his left hand, the result of a blacksmithing accident.

Although he may have made some poor choices as a young man in his mid-thirties, and while his efforts failed miserably in the end, in June of 1903 he did something that no one before him had ever done, and especially anybody of Mexican. He focused the attention of the entire nation on a disparity that virtually no one outside of a few mining camps in Arizona knew existed, and the few who did either refused to acknowledge it or else rationalized that it was something deserved by non-white immigrants.

He and a tiny group of cohorts stood up to an oppressive mega-corporation with economic and political connections to seemingly every powerful business and individual in the country, including the President of the United States. It had control over nearly every aspect of their lives when they led over 3000 men in the first strike against unfair and prejudicial labor practices in what would become the State of Arizona. They succeeded in bringing the massive copper mining and smelting operations at Clifton and Morenci to a complete standstill. In the end it took near torrential rains and floods, local law enforcement officers, the Arizona Rangers, the National Guard, and the United States Cavalry to force the Mexican miners back to work.

Although Loustaunau and his handful of friends were accused of being "professional agitators," they were, for the most part, poorly educated, uninformed, disadvantaged Mexican and Italian hard rock miners, simply trying to scratch out a living on the harsh territorial Arizona frontier. Regardless of the accusations against them, designed to make the mine owners look like the victims, they accomplished what they did without the aid of professional strike planners, labor organizations, or unions.

Although the Western Federation of Miners issued a statement in their favor at the end of the strike, it was "too little too late" and amounted to nothing more than lip service, anyway. As Loustaunau and his four companions clambered aboard a west-bound train in shackles, destined for at least a two-year stint in the territorial prison in Yuma, no one stood by their side or even offered encouragement. As they sweltered and suffered among the most desperate criminals in the Territory in the stifling heat of that so-called "hell hole" (one of them dying within the first year), no union or organized labor representatives, lawyers, or councilors came to assist them in their struggle for their rights, or even to talk to them. Considering the deplorable conditions of life inside the territorial prison, conditions that might well have taken his life, and the feeling of having been beaten down by an unfair system, is there any wonder that Loustaunau was involved in an escape attempt a a few months later? -- an attempt that would net him an additional ten-year sentence!

In 1903, Loustaunau was a man ahead of his time, an instigator of reform in an industry that was still in its infancy. Like so many such individuals who first promote new and revolutionary ideas and initiate change in somebody else's comfortable world, he and his companions were ruthlessly put down, even destroyed by the system. Though it does them no good now, we can definitely see in our day that they set the stage for a long, uphill battle that would ever so slowly bring about some of their desired changes.

Just three years later, following the example of Loustaunau and his companions, miners in Cananea and Nacozari, Sonora staged a strike against the mine owners for the same reasons. Although they, too, were brutally crushed in their attempt, their actions sparked the Mexican Revolution, which eventually brought about parity in the wages that were paid to Mexicans and their North American counterparts. Miners at Morenci struck again in 1907, 1915-16, and again in 1983. After eighty years, the progress for which Loustaunau had laid his life on the line was still being fought over. He, however, paid a terrible price for initiating the first action, dying in prison of heat prostration at the age of thirty-seven. He died at 2:05 a.m. on the morning of August 20, 1906.