The Dollop with Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds · All Things Comedy

705 - Bisbee Deportation - live

·1 hr 25 min·5 clips

Armed men kick in doors at dawn to arrest miners for sympathizing with a strike in Bisbee.

Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds perform the story live before an audience, in the Dollop's characteristic format of Dave reading and riffing on research while Gareth reacts in real time with escalating horror and improvised commentary. The episode sets up the labor context: Bisbee in 1917 was a copper mining town entirely owned by Phelps Dodge, which held the Copper Queen mine, the major hotel, the hospital, the department store, the library, and the local newspaper — total company control of every civic institution. The IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies) had organized roughly 80-90% of the miners in a strike calling for basic safety improvements, $6 daily wages, no contract work, and no racial discrimination. The demand for no discrimination is treated by the companies as the most outrageous of all, serving as a sharp illustration of the era's values. The AFL local union sided with the company, calling the Wobbly demands ridiculous, unpatriotic, and disloyal. A parallel story in Jerome, Arizona, where IWW successfully struck for $6 a shift and a six-hour day, ended with 100 strikers jailed and 67 deported to Needles, California. When the Copper Queen superintendent received the Wobblies' demand list, he tore it up. Company executives invoked German agent conspiracy theories to frame the strike as treason. Sheriff Harry Wheeler requested federal troops; the War Department refused. Eventually, on July 12, 1917, a posse of over 2,000 armed men deputized by Wheeler rounded up more than 1,000 workers, loaded them into cattle cars, and dumped them in the New Mexico desert. The live audience adds to the comedy-horror dynamic as Dave delivers the facts and Gareth provides reactions ranging from bewildered outrage to absurdist tangents about three dogs in a human suit.

As heard by us

A labor-history episode where the jokes keep colliding with violence.

The episode turns the Bisbee Deportation into a bleak comic mess, with the host pressing the history forward while the co-host keeps dragging it into absurd side roads. A U.S.

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Why you'd press play

A labor-crackdown episode where a union roundup gets heckled into chaos.

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