by Studs Terkel
It got bad in ‘29. The Crash caught us with one $20 gold piece. All mines shut down—stores, everything. One day they was workin’, the next day the mines shut down. Three or four months later, they opened up. Run two, three days a week, mostly one. They didn’t have the privilege of calling their souls their own. Most people by that time was in debt so far to the company itself, they couldn’t live.
Some of them been in debt from ‘29 till today, and never got out. Some of them didn’t even try. It seem like whenever they went back to work, they owed so much. The company got their foot on ’em even now.
When the Crash come, they got about ten cents an hour—that is, if they begged the supervisor for a job. They had to load a seven-ton car for fifty cents. If they found three pieces of slate as big as your hand, they took that car, and you didn’t get paid. That’s what they called the dock. A man couldn’t predict what’s gonna fall on that car, goin’ through maybe a couple of miles of tunnel, and everything fallin’ anyhow.
One time they hauled a mule out. They fired the guy that got that mule killed. They told him a mule’s worth more’n a man. They had to pay $50 for a mule, but a man could be got for nothin’. He never had worked another day since. Blackballed for costin’ ’em that money.
I remember one time, the Red Cross shipped in about four ton of flour in twenty-four pound bags. Unloaded it in the company warehouse. It was a Red Cross gift. But the company said they have to work a day to get a sack of flour. That started it. Pretty much like walkin’ the inferno.
An old woman, about sixty years, she come down from Canyon Creek. One time she was makin’ a speech near a railroad track. She was standin’ on a box. The strikebreakers shot her off with a shot gun. So she come down to Logan County where we was and made speeches and helped get them organized. But they had a time.
The county sheriff had a hundred strikebreakers. They were called deputies. The company paid him ten cents a ton on all the coal carried down the river, to keep the union out. He was beaten in the election by T. Hatfield of the feudin’ Hatfields. He was for the union. They had pretty much a full-scale war out there for about three years.
They brought the army in. The county was under martial law, stayed till about ‘31. What strikes me is the soldiers along the company road, dis-persin’ people. When people’d gather together, they couldn’t talk. Two guys could, but three couldn’t.
About that time, a bunch of strikebreakers come in with shotguns and axe handles. Tried to break up union meetings. The UMW deteriorated and went back to almost no existence. It didn’t particularly get full strength till about 1949. And it don’t much today in West Virginia. So most people ganged up and formed the Ku Kluck Klan.
The Ku Klux was the real controllin’ factor in the community. They was the law. It was in power to about 1932. My dad and my older brother belonged to it. My dad was one of the leaders till he died. The company called in the army to get the Ku Klux out, but it didn’t work. The union and the Ku Klux was about the same thing.
The superintendent of the mine got the big idea of makin’ it rougher than it was. They hauled him off in a meat wagon, and about ten more of the company officials. Had the mine shut down. They didn’t kill ’em, but they didn’t come back. They whipped one of the foremen and got him out of the county. They gave him twelve hours to get out, get his family out.
The UMW had a field representative, he was a lawyer. They tarred and feathered ‘im for tryin’ to edge in with the company. He come around, got mad, tryin’ to tell us we were wrong, when we called a wildcat. He was takin’ the side of the company. I used the stick to help tar ’im. And it wasn’t the first time.
The Ku Klux was formed on behalf of people that wanted a decent living, both black and white. Half the coal camp was colored. It wasn’t anti-colored. The black people had the same responsibilities as the white. Their lawn was just as green as the white man’s. They got the same rate of pay. There was two colored who belonged to it. I remember those two niggers comin’ around my father and askin’ questions about it. They joined. The pastor of our community church was a colored man. He was Ku Klux. It was the only protection the workin’ man had.
Sure, the company tried to play the one agin’ the other. But it didn’t work. The colored and the whites lived side by side. It was somethin’ like a checkerboard. There’d be a white family and a colored family. No sir, there was no racial problem. Yeah, they had a certain feelin’ about the colored. They sure did. They had a certain feelin’ about the white, too. Anyone come into the community had unsatisfactory dealin’s, if it was colored or white, he didn’t stay.
I remember one family moved in from acrost us. They had a bunch of women. I remember where I saw out the window, it didn’t look right. The Ku Klux warned ‘em once. Gave ’em twenty-four hours. They didn’t take the warning. The next night they whipped Hughie (that was the man), his wife and his niece, his uncle and his aunt, and whipped six more that was acrowdin’ around. They whipped ’em with switches and run ‘em out, all of’em. They was white; they wasn’t niggers.
One time a Negro slapped a white boy. They didn’t give him no warning. They whipped ‘im and run ’im out of town. If a white man’d slapped a colored kid, they’d a done the same thing. They didn’t go in for beatin’ up niggers because they was niggers. What they done was kept the community decent to live in. What they did object to was obscenity and drinkin’.
What about bootlegging?
Oh, they objected to raisin’ a fuss in town. What you do private, that’s your business. You’re talkin’ about mountain people now. This ain’t the Deep South.
People’d get their temper rubbed off quick. In organizin’ the union, we didn’t go through the Labor Relations Board. We went through what we called “mule train.” We’d figure how many people were workin’ at that certain mine, and we’d just tell ‘em to organize it or we’d close ’em. We’d give ‘em three days. Sometimes they’d stand at the mouth of the mine with a club. There was seventeen thousand in the whole district. I have knowd every one of them to come out on account of one man bein’ called out. And join the UMW.
At a UMW meeting, they’d iron it out themselves. I had to pull out a .38 once to get out of a union meetin’. Our chairman of the local was thick with the superintendent of the mine, and I made mention of it in the meeting. Some guys didn’t like it: they followed him close. We was in a school building. I was up next to the blackboard, and the door was on the other end of the room. So they blocked the door. My wife’s half-brother was sittin’ about half way back. So he pulled out his gun and throwd it to me. I told ‘em I’m goin’ out and anybody stops me, I’m gonna shoot. They followed me outside, there was about fifty. They blocked the gate. So I told ’em I’m gonna shoot the first six gets in my way.
The next day I went back to work. I took my gun with me. They cooled off. It took ’em a week, they cooled off.
In my life, I’ve found people won’t take anything. If things get real bad again, I’m afraid there’d be some millionaires made paupers because they’d take their money. They’d take it the rough way. The people are gonna take care of their families, if they’d have to shoot somebody else. And you can’t blame ‘em for that. You think I wouldn’t take what you got if you had a million dollars and I had to protect my family? I sure would. I’d take your money one way or the other. Some people don’t have courage enough to fight for what they have comin’. Until 1934, more than half the people of Logan County were scabbin’. Gives you an idea how they don’t know….
Explosions? Had one back in ’35, killed a few men. They had one in Bartley, killed 136 men. In Macbeth the same year—when was that?—a fire and explosion killed eighteen and twenty men. Then in 1947, they had an explosion that killed a couple of men.
They sent me for a job in Virginia. Shaft was fifteen hundred feet deep. I went down and looked it over and went up and didn’t go. Gas and dust. That was 1965. Supposed to have been the most safest mine in the wor
ld. They had an explosion about four months after that. Killed two men, injured nine more….
POSTSCRIPT: Suddenly, a light laugh: “I remember the first radio come to Mingo County, next to Logan. Wayne Starbuck, a cousin to me, brought that in in 1934. That was a boon. It was a little job, got more squeals and squeaks than anything else. Everybody came from miles around to look at it. We didn’t have any electricity. So he hooked up two car batteries. We got ‘Grand Old Opry’ on it.”
Edward Santander
A director of adult education at a small Midwestern college. “I never had the slightest intention of being anything other than a schoolteacher. My whole life is bound up in this. The Depression played a role: if I could just add my two cents worth to making life better… .”
MY FIRST REAL MEMORIES come about ‘31. It was simply a gut issue then: eating or not eating, living or not living. My father was a coal miner, outside a small town in Illinois. My dad, my grandfather and my uncle worked in this same mine. He had taken a cut in wages, but we were still doing pretty well. We were sitting in a ’27 Hudson, when I saw a line of men waiting near the I.C. tracks. I asked him what was the trouble. They were waiting to get something to eat.
When the mine temporarily closed down in the early Thirties, my dad had to hunt work elsewhere. He went around the state, he’d paint barns, anything.
I went to an old, country-style schoolhouse, a red-stripe. One building that had eight rows in it, one for each grade. Seven rows were quiet, while the eighth row recited. The woman teacher got the munificent sum of $30 a month. She played the organ, an old pump organ with pedals, she taught every subject, and all eight grades. This was 1929, ‘30, ’31…. At the back corner was a great pot-bellied stove that kept the place warm. It has about an acre of ground, a playground with no equipment. Out there were the toilets, three-holers, and in the winter—You remember Chic Sale?91 You had moons, crescents or stars on the doors. You’d be surprised at the number of people in rural areas that didn’t have much in this way, as late as the Thirties.
One of the greatest contributions of the WPA was the standardized outdoor toilet, with modern plumbing. (Laughs.) They built thousands of them around here. You can still see some of ’em standing. PWA built new schools and the City Hall in this town. I remember NYA. I learned a good deal of carpentry in this.
Roosevelt was idolized in that area. The county had been solidly Republican from the Civil War on. And then was Democratic till the end of Truman’s time. F.D.R. was held in awe by most people, but occasionally you’d run across someone who said: “Well, he has syphillis, and it’s gone to his brain.” The newspaper in the area hated Roosevelt, just hated him. (Laughs.)
Almost everybody was in the same boat, pretty poorly off. I remember kids who didn’t have socks. We all wore long-handles—you could get ‘em red, you could get ’em white. These boys would cut the bottoms off their long-handles and stuff ’em into the top of their shoes and make it look like they had socks
We had epidemics of typhoid and diphtheria. Houses would be placarded with signs. This one girl who came to school had had typhoid and had lost all her hair. There was absolutely no way they could purchase a wig for her. This was the shame of it. The girl had to go around bald-headed for as long as I knew her. It wasn’t the physical thing because we all got used to that. But what did it do to her inside? Along about ‘34 and ’35, the state began giving diphtheria and typhoid shots and all this sort of thing.
His grandfather was the patriarch of the family; a huge man, born in a log cabin; took home correspondence courses and became a hoisting engineer in the mines. He was a Socialist, a strong supporter of Debs and was elected a three-term mayor of Central City, near Centralia. “In those days, women had just received the right to vote. Many of them were hesitant. He urged them to vote, no matter what ticket, as long as they went to the polls.”
There were any number of Socialists in this area. Today people don’t think and discuss as much as they did in those days. I remember men with thick calluses on their hands from handling shovels. They would be discussing Daniel De Leon and Debs and Christian Socialism and Syndicalism and Anarchism. A lot of them came out of the IWW into the miners’ movement. Many were first generation, Polish, Italian, Croatian…. They changed the spelling of their names as they’ve gone along. The ones who couldn’t read, someone would read it to them. There were thousands of presses that would run off little booklets, like the group in Girard, Kansas. 92 My grandfather, father and uncle were self-educated men. There were less distractions then.
Was drinking a problem when the Depression hit?
I remember driving through one town that had less than a thousand people in it. There were ten taverns. But they always did put it away rather heavily. They were a hard-drinking society under any standards. Many of them made their home brew. One old fellow I remember would drink his own during the week. On Saturday, he would become royalty and go to town and drink what they called factory-made. (Laughs.)
My grandmother was a very saving woman. The women in our family took care of the money. When the Depression really hit us in 1936, when the mine closed down completely, there was no income. We tried opening a filling station and went absolutely broke on that. The only livelihood these men had was mining coal. Where would you go? Down in Harlan County, Kentucky? They were out of work, too. West Frankfort? Carter-ville? They had the same problems.
Natural gas was being used, and cities began having ordinances against dirty coal in those days. This mine was simply not making a profit. The family that owned it, pretty decent people, decided to sell. The miners, bullheadedly—who could read the handwriting on the wall, anyway?—decided they would buy the mine themselves. This was ‘36 , ’37. So they sold shares of stock. They collected $33,000. The owner’s widow accepted it rather than a $38,000 bid from a St. Louis scrap dealer, who was going to close it up.
For eighteen months, these men worked for nothing to get the mine back in shape to show a profit. It started with four hundred men. The mine operated until the Fifties. By that time, only eighteen men were left….
Some people go into strip mining. Fifteen or twenty of them get together and get the mining rights from someone. Then they put a ladder and a shaft in and strip down the area. There are very few pit mines left in this state.
This area was not ready to convert to any other type of work. The people who had the money were absentee owners. There was plenty going out but nothing coming in. When the mines decided it wasn’t profitable to operate, they closed down. That took away whatever income this area had.
In the Thirties, UMW came along. The union was the only salvation the people had. It grew violent at times, quite violent. If mines did open with scabs, it wasn’t long before someone was done away with.
Do you recall any mine disasters?
I can take you to a cemetery where there is only one mausoleum. Everybody else is buried underground. In this mausoleum is a miner who died in an accident at Junction City. He oft expressed himself that he had spent so many years below ground that when he died, he wanted to spend the rest of it above. This was always on their minds: an accident.
He remembers the Centralia disaster of ‘47. “When number Five blew up.” 111 men were killed. He remembers ’51, West Frankfort: 119 were killed. “Illinois had always been notoriously lax in its rules regarding the safety of the mines. Even the old-fashioned method of using birds to check the gas—not too many of them did this.”
His uncle was killed in the Centralia disaster. He recalls: “All the mines had wash houses. After a miner got done washing up, he’d go home and sit in a galvanized tub and just soak. Because he’d have this coal dust under his fingernails and ground into his skin. In the morning, they hang their clothes up on a hook in the wash house. They’d pull a chain and the clothes would go up to the ceiling… .
“In this ‘47 thing, we’d all be sitting in the wash house. It was damp and cold. Someone would unwind the chain, and he’d
let these clothes down. And the most profound silence. No weeping or anything like that. You’ve seen these pictures of women in their babushkas, waiting patiently, hoping… . In this ’47 thing, all were killed. When the rescue team got to one group, they were still warm.
“In Centralia, they turned about everything into a mortuary. In the funeral home where my uncle was … my cousin said, ‘I’ve got to see him.’ The man lifted up the sheet. It wasn’t even human. ‘Is this your father?’ He said, ‘No.’ He lifted up another one—and my cousin said to me, ‘I’ve had enough.’ My father went and identified him by his wedding ring. There was only one open coffin in the whole place: the mailman, who had died a natural death.”
People in the Thirties did feel a bit different. When the pig-killing was going on, the farmers would kill the pigs well enough, but they’d tell the people where they buried them, and they’d go dig ‘em up and take ’em home. The farmers couldn’t sell the pigs anyway, so they weren’t out anything.
It isn’t true that people who have very little won’t share. When everybody is in the same position, they haven’t anything to hide from one another. So they share. But when prosperity comes around, you hear: Look at that son of a bitch. When he didn’t have anything, he was all right. Look at him now.
The Depression was such a shock to some people that when World War II was over—you’d hear men in the army say it: “When I get back, I’m going to get a good job, a house and a car, some money in the bank, and I’m never going to worry again. These people have passed this on to their kids.” In many cases, youngsters rebel against this.
I never heard anyone who expressed feeling that the United States Government, as it existed, was done for. It was quite the opposite. The desire to restore the country to the affluence it had. This was uppermost in people’s minds. Even the Socialists who talked about taking the corporate system out were just talking, that’s all.
If we had a severe depression today—I’m basically an optimist—I don’t think this country would survive. Many people today are rootless. When you have this rootlessness, we’re talking about the Germany of the Twenties. You’d see overt dictatorship take over. You would see your camps….
