"In Laurie Mercier's Anaconda, the smelter city once called the 'City of Whispers'â rings with the
voices of working people whose community unionism contested corporate control and whose memories challenge corporate
history. Subtle, sophisticated, passionately human, Anaconda recasts in local textures the opposing claims of class,
capital, and gender in the cold war West."
--Elizabeth Jameson, author of All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek
Publisher Web Site, June, 2004
Summary
Laurie Mercier's hard-hitting study of "community unionism" examines the tenacity of union loyalty
and communal values within the confines of a one-industry town: Anaconda, Montana, home to the world's largest
copper smelter and the namesake of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company.
Mercier depicts the vibrant life of the smelter city at full steam, documenting the early history of the town and
the distinctive culture of cooperation and activism that residents fostered in the 1930s and 1940s. Ultimately,
their solidarity and discontent with the company converged in the successful 1934 strike and sustained five decades
of devoted unionism.
During the cold war years, Anacondans held to their communal values and to the union in the face of antilabor and
anticommunist pressures, embracing an "alternative Americanism" that championed improved living standards
for working people, rather than unlimited corporate power, as the best defense against communism. Mercier chronicles
the bitter struggle between two rival unions that undercut the town's labor solidarity in the postwar years. She
also explores how gender definitions shaped the nature and outcome of labor struggles. Mercier carries her investigation
through the closing of the smelter in 1980.
Underscoring the role of the community in molding working-class consciousness, Anaconda offers important insights
about the changing nature of working-class culture and the real potential for collective action under the midday
sun of American industrial capitalism.