The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company dominated the Copper Country of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula. By 1913, approximately 15,000 men worked in the region's mines. The Western Federation of Miners claimed 9,000 of them as members and demanded a conference with management to discuss wages, hours, and working conditions. The mine managers refused. On July 23, 1913, the strike was called. It would last until April 1914, but by Christmas the two sides had reached a bitter impasse. The miners' families were struggling. Company housing was threatened. Tensions ran through every interaction between strikers and the mine operators' allies. The WFM's Ladies Auxiliary organized the Christmas Eve party as a moment of normalcy - a gathering where children could receive gifts and families could forget, for an evening, the grinding uncertainty of their situation.

Italian Hall had one steep stairway to its second floor. A poorly marked fire escape existed on one side, and ladders at the back of the building could be reached only by climbing through windows. When more than four hundred people crowded the upstairs hall and someone appeared at the front door shouting 'Fire,' the result was catastrophic. The crowd surged toward the stairs. People fell. Others piled on top of them. In the crush, seventy-three people were killed - suffocated or trampled on that single narrow stairway. The dead were overwhelmingly children: fifty-nine of the seventy-three victims were under the age of eighteen. The ethnic composition of the dead reflected the immigrant workforce that powered the mines: fifty Finnish Americans, thirteen Croats, seven Slovenes, and three Italians.

The coroner's inquest lasted three days. Witnesses who did not speak English were forced to answer questions in English. Most were not asked follow-up questions. Many of those called to testify had not actually seen what happened. The coroner issued a ruling that did not identify a cause of death. Early in 1914, a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives traveled to the Copper Country to investigate. They took a full day of sworn testimony on March 7, 1914. Charles Moyer, president of the WFM, was shot and kidnapped by members of the Citizens' Alliance at his hotel in nearby Hancock, then placed on a train with instructions to leave Michigan and never return. After receiving medical treatment in Chicago, Moyer held a press conference displaying his gunshot wound and vowed to continue the union's work.

A persistent story claims the doors at the bottom of the stairway opened inward, trapping the crowd. Photographs of the doors show both sets opening outward. Steve Lehto, in his 2006 book Death's Door: The Truth Behind Michigan's Largest Mass Murder, documented that the doors were never mentioned as a contributing factor in the 1913 inquest, the 1914 congressional hearing, or any newspaper coverage of the time. A newspaper article from the hall's dedication specifically noted safety features including doors that opened outward. Woody Guthrie's 1945 song '1913 Massacre' gave the disaster its lasting place in American folk memory, claiming 'the copper boss' thug men' held the doors shut from outside. Lehto's exhaustive examination of news reports, survivor interviews, and coroner's records concluded that the person who shouted 'fire' was most likely an ally of mine management, though no specific individual was identified.

Italian Hall was demolished in October 1984. Only its stone archway survives, standing in a small park maintained by the Keweenaw National Historical Park. A state historical marker was erected in 1987; it originally and incorrectly stated that inward-opening doors contributed to the disaster, an error that was later corrected. The site sits in Calumet's historic district, surrounded by the sandstone buildings of a community that the disaster helped hollow out. The strike ended in April 1914 without the union winning recognition. The Italian Hall disaster became one of the defining tragedies of the American labor movement - a story of immigrant workers, corporate power, and a single devastating word shouted in a crowded room. Maria Doria Russell's 2019 novel Women of the Copper Country brought renewed attention to the event and the strike that surrounded it.