Narrator:

An uneasy peace would settle on the mines of the West for the next twenty years. Many mining regions, like the Coeur d'Alene district of Idaho, held fast to their anti-union employment standards.

Katherine Aiken/Historian

"Now there's not a strike at the Bunker Hill works until 1949. So fifty years of labor peace is what they got for their efforts. So from the company perspective it was an incredibly successful experience."

Narrator:

The dreams of a worker's revolution had been dealt with harshly throughout the nation, and notably in the West. Some would never let go of a tattered banner from a moment that had passed. Eugene V. Debs would run for president four times as a socialist. . .The last time in 1920 as prisoner 9653 in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving time for opposing the nation's efforts in World War One.

William Haywood was also convicted of leading opposition to the war. Wobblies were jailed in roundups that battered the radical labor movement. Awaiting an appeal, "Big" Bill Haywood fled to the Soviet Union, where he would befriend the Bolsheviks. Half his ashes would eventually be buried in the walls of the Kremlin. . .the other half buried in Chicago

Harry Orchard. . .the man who confessed to being the "mad bomber" for mine workers at the turn of the century. . .would be one of the last living connections to the days of fire in the hole. He lived the rest of his life in the Idaho penitentiary. . . Seldom talking about his earlier claims to being the most prolific mass-murderer in the West. He died in 1954 at the age of 88.

Trying to cope with the devastating impacts of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the federal government would enact new labor laws that standardized many working conditions and provided protection to workers. New laws throttled vigilante committees and the use of private armed forces. As the nation changed, the images of the Western labor wars would fade from most memories. It would soon seem to be such a different time.

Jerry Calvert/Political Scientist:

"Try to remember that they were looking at the world differently than we are. . . They believed, especially these radical unionists, that a just and good society was possible and attainable because of rational ability of people and their common sense and their common empathy with their fellow human beings."

Narrator:

It was the turn of a new century, when optimism and fear existed largely in equal measure. A time when new technology was revolutionizing the way America worked and did business. . .some would profit enormousl -- some would fear change and the loss of traditional ways. Immigration added new texture to the profile of the American nation, and debate raged over who should be admitted.

The very order of the world was rapidly changing. . .And a nation moved forward in pursuit of its promise. Promise, as both potential and as pledge. A nation whose future and potential would be shaped by each page of its past.