Frank Little (U.S. Trade Unionist)

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Frank Little (1879-1917) joined the radical union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1906. He organized miners, lumberjacks and oil field workers.

Frank Little was born in 1880. Little is known about his family background, but he told friends that he had "Indian blood". He joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1906 and took part in the free speech campaigns in Missoula, Fresno and Spokane and was involved in organizing lumberjacks, metal miners and oil field workers into trade unions. On one occasion, he was sentenced to 30 days imprisonment for reading the Declaration of Independence on a street corner.

In 1910, Little successfully organized unskilled fruit workers in the San Joaquin Valley. This brought him to the attention of the national leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World and, by 1916, he was a member of the party's General Executive Board.

Little was a strong opponent of the US becoming involved in the World War I. The leader of the party, William Haywood, shared Little's opinions, but this was a minority view in the party. When the US joined the war, in April 1917, Ralph Chaplin, the editor of the trade union journal, Solidarity, claimed that opposing the draft would destroy the IWW. Little refused to back down on this issue and argued that: "...the IWW is opposed to all wars, and we must use all our power to prevent the workers from joining the army."

In the summer of 1917, Little was helping organize copper miners in Butte, Montana, which included leading a strike of miners working for the Anaconda Company. In the early hours of August 1, 1917, six masked men broke into Little's hotel room. He was beaten up, tied by rope to a car, and dragged out of town, where he was lynched from a railroad trestle. A note: "First and last warning" was pinned to his chest. It was widely believed that Pinkerton agents were involved, but no serious attempt was made by the police to catch Little's murderers. It is not known if he was killed for his anti-war views or his trade union activities.