When Miners March

by William C. Blizzard

  West Virginia Fight Typical

  Certain features of the West Virginia battle, which are typical, are as follows: Huge combines of capital move from exploited to unexploited territory. Coal operators of one section war among themselves, then combine to fight coal operators of another section, then all together make a common front against the coal miners’ Union. The coal miner attempts to build himself an organization so that he can have something to say about his own life – and is beaten, jailed, starved and shot.

  It sounds like war, and it is. The only time this battle ceases, oddly enough, is when the United States Government is at war. Then a halt of sorts is called and it becomes a violation of the law for the coal miner to engage in any sort of industrial battle to improve his conditions, no matter how serious the provocation.

  Pledged not to strike, the miner sees his plight worsen because of increased prices, while the coal operator wallows in super profits and bathes in the blood- money which flows into his coffers during every foreign war.

  The coal operators like to have the technical state of war exist as long as possible, so that the miners’ Union is powerless. This was true after both World War I and World War II, when the United Mine Workers of America was subjected to censure and penalty because the “war” was still going on. This was a silly state of affairs, as not a shot had been fired in many months, and “business as usual” was being resumed. But it happened – twice.

  Always the Same

  In a passage of touching beauty, Mother Mary Jones, the miners’ great champion of another era, had this to say. “The story of coal is always the same. It is a dark story. For a second’s more sunlight, men must fight like tigers. For the privilege of seeing the color of their children’s eyes by the light of the sun, fathers must fight as beasts in the jungle. That life may have something of decency, something of beauty – a picture, a new dress, a bit of cheap lace fluttering in the window – for this, men who work in the mines must struggle and lose, struggle and win.”

  And a life of danger and struggle it was for the men born and yet unborn who were destined to burrow into the earth for the great natural resource which John Turner had discovered. But the great giant of energy which lay sleeping beneath the round green hills of West Virginia was not to be awakened until over his head was heard the whistle-toot and rumble of the locomotive. Coal, except for slow river shipments from convenient points, could not be sent to market until there were rails to ship it over.

  And the rails came. In 1873 the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway was completed to Huntington and made steady progress toward tidewater. The Capitol City of Charleston, then a thriving village of about 3,200 population, had a wagon bridge across the Kanawha connecting it to the railway. The Kanawha & Ohio Railroad came to Charleston in 1884, while the Coal & Coke Railroad, later bought by the B. & O. was built to Sutton in 1893. The West Virginia Central Pittsburgh (later the Western Maryland), was built to Davis in Tucker County in 1884 and extended to Elkins by 1891.

  Production, however, remained relatively small scale until shortly before the turn of the century. In 1875 there were only nine mines in the Great Kanawha Valley. But in the following twenty-five years many schemes were hatching, much planning was taking place, and the stage was being set for bloody, ruthless, industrial war. West Virginia’s potential was obvious to many men and these men were dreaming and acting. The eyes of great corporate combinations, full of lust, were intent on rape of the virgin state.

  11/19/1952 (Second)

  In 1879 Edmund Kirke wrote a little book about West Virginia titled The Workman’s Paradise, Hints To New Settlers. If the state, with its comparatively untouched coal and virgin timber, was an Eden at that date, the idyll was soon to be shattered by the advent of that venomous, but wealth-producing serpent, Industrialism. A foretaste of this is given in Kirke’s remarks: “…in about 5 years it (West Virginia) has sent to market products which have paid the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway a freight which may be roughly stated at five million dollars. This had been done during five years of great business depression.”

  Exceedingly primitive mining legislation was on the West Virginia statute books as early as 1879. According to Mary Elizabeth Hennessey, a Legislative Act of March 10, 1879 authorized the Judge of the Circuit Court of any county to appoint an inspector of mines upon presentation of a petition verified by the affidavit of any credible person and signed by 100 voters of the county. The number of such inspectors appointed is not on record, but it will be guessed that they were few.

  Mine Department Created

  In the same year the state authorized the appointment of a mining inspector and a mine boss was supposed to look out for the safety of the miners. In 1887 two mining districts were created with an inspector for each and a “fire boss” was authorized to check the miner’s working places. The inspection system was enlarged again in 1897, and on Feb. 24, 1905 the Act was passed which created the West Virginia Department of Mines.

  The above measures were without doubt created because of coal miner pressure for some kind of safety precautions. How well they were enforced may be deduced from the fact that on March 7, 1891 it was declared unlawful for any corporation or company to pay its men in script. The issuance of script, a token money which is good only in the company store, still goes on today, although wages may not be paid directly in this manner.

  Patterns of industrial conflict were set very early in the Valley. What was apparently the first major dispute was at the Marmet mines in Putnam County in January, 1891. The men went on strike and the company imported Negroes as strikebreakers. This vicious practice accomplished two things: It brought the miners to terms, and it divided the labor movement by setting the Negro against the white and vice-versa. In this manner good workingmen, black and white, were blinded to their common interests. A great deal of the so-called “race” problem in the United States is due to such company practices.

  Private Thugs Hired

  This strike also saw the hiring of private “detectives” – this time the Pinkertons – to protect the strikebreakers and company property.

  As early as 1894 the National Guard was called upon as a strike-breaking agency. This was at Eagle, in Fayette County and at Boggs Run in Marshall County, where the strike lasted only 8 days. The operator tactics were effective. In 1897 there were only 206 Union men of the 18,000 coal miners employed in West Virginia.

  To the north, by 1898, was a society which had already traveled much of the road which West Virginia was to follow with so much hardship and brutality. Coal had been mined in huge quantities for many years in the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois, and in lesser quantities in several others.

  The coal miners of these sections had early found that in order to obtain a decent living it was necessary to do more than petition their employers. In 1849 the first Union of coal miners was formed by a miner named John Bates in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. Its career was short and it died with its first unsuccessful strike. A much larger organization came into being at St. Louis, Mo., on Jan. 28, 1861. This was the American Miners’ Association, which did a great deal of organizing in all states which then produced coal and put out the first official journal of the American coal digger called the Weekly Miner.

  John Siney’s Union

  In 1864 the Workingmen’s Benevolent Society, headed by John Siney, was formed by anthracite miners. This organization had as its aim not only the organization of miners, but of all workingmen. As it happened, it outlasted the American Miners’ Association, which fell victim to the post-Civil War slump. To John Siney goes the credit for negotiating the first wage agreement with a coal operators’ association. This was signed at Pottsville, Pa., on July 29, 1870, between the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association and the Anthracite Board of Trade. But there was an economic panic in the mid-seventies and Siney’s organization also fell by the way.

  On May 15, 1883 the miners again formed a union, this one known as the Amalgam
ated Association of Miners of the United States. It was in a strike almost before it was formed and was badly defeated, but the miners met again in 1885 and established The National Federation of Miners and Mine Laborers. About the same time the Knights of Labor set up National Trade Assembly No. 135 as a miners’ branch of that organization. And the National Federation changed its name to the National Progressive Union of Miners and Mine Laborers.

  The next step in this process of struggling and losing, struggling and winning, was marked by an event which has become a landmark in American Labor history. At a convention in Columbus, Ohio, on Jan. 25, 1890,Master Workman John B. Rae of the Knights of Labor announced that the National Progressive Union of Miners and Mine Laborers and National District Assembly 135, K. of L., had voted to unite their ranks into one big union.

  UMW Is Formed

  That Union was to be called the United Mine Workers of America. It had a membership of 20,912 and a treasury of $139.00. President John B. Rae was to receive a salary of $1,000 a year and the dues to the national Union were 20 cents a month.

  The infant which was destined to become a mighty giant very nearly perished in its diaper days. First came the failure of the Connellsville coke strike in 1891,and then a mixed-up situation wherein the miners were supposed to strike for the eight-hour day on May 1 of that year. But the strike order was countermanded and the strike fizzled. Sixteen thousand men dropped from the UMW rolls.

  Then came the panic of 1892, with consequent poverty, unemployment, and cutting of wage scales. After that was an unsuccessful strike in 1894. These were the days of the famous march of “General” Coxey’s army and the use of the Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 to jail Eugene Debs. Individual workingmen whose total wealth might be a pair of pants and a mule were penalized under a Sherman Act which was to have been used, the politicians claimed, against great corporations.

  By 1897 there were fewer than 10,000 members of the UMW in the whole United States – probably a whole lot fewer. The treasury contained something less that $600. The infant UMW seemed in bad need of an oxygen-tent. But none was available and there must have been many who had mentally engraved R.I.P. on the Union’s headstone. Except the operators, of course, who were probably, with great glee, engraving the initials R.I.H.

  11/20/1952 (Third)

  A new president, Michael D. Ratchford of Ohio, was elected in 1897. The prospect could hardly have been more dismal. The UMW was cashless and very nearly member-less. Ratchford’s thought processes at this time have not been recorded, so it can not be said by what line of reasoning he called a strike on July 4, 1897. Certainly he must have felt that matters could be no worse, come what may.

  In any event, he shot at the moon and hit it. The miners came out and stayed out. Three long months it took. But the operators capitulated. And this was the magic medicine the puny UMW needed for survival. At the 1898 convention, Ratchford was able to report that the Union now had 33,000 members and $11,000 in the treasury.

  In 1898, and for many years prior thereto, the principal coal-producing area in the United States was composed of Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, generally called the Central Competitive Field. The effects of the panic of 1892 were still felt by the coal industry in this area, and many miners were working as little as one and a half to two days a week. The operators in the Field, as the name implies, were certainly competitive, all of them trying to sell in the same market, cutting one another’s throats.

  West Virginia Looms

  And by 1898 these coal operators saw the threat of another major competitor – nonunion coal from West Virginia. It took no seer to forecast that the stream of coal from the Mountain State would soon turn into a river which might easily sweep away the shaky financial structure of the northern operators. The Union miner in the Competitive Field was just as worried as his boss. He was hardly making a living, while in nonunion West Virginia his fellow miners were working around the clock six days a week – and knocking him out of a job while making only a pittance for themselves. Also, the northern coal miner had seen the scab from West Virginia break his strike of 1894.

  Something had to be done. So, on Jan. 26, 1898, a joint conference of Union representatives and coal operators from the Central Competitive Field met in Chicago, Ill. The UMW, of course, was aware of its own grievances and anxious to help its miners and increase its membership. The operators had two things in mind. One was to sit down and agree to quit underselling each other, to establish a regulated and stabilized program to which all members would adhere. In this way all could live. The other important point on the agenda was West Virginia.

  Being coal operators they could profess no love for unionism, but they saw little chance to shake off the UMW in the Central Competitive Field. So there was only one thing to do – encourage the Union to organize West Virginia. If the Union succeeded it would mean increased costs to the southern operators, which would help to keep West Virginia from underselling. If the Union failed it would still give the C.C.F. temporary relief, for southern production would be cut in the event of a strike, and the W.Va. operators would have to spend money for guards and rifles and machine guns.

  Wins 8-Hour Day

  The UMW certainly wanted to add to its membership by organizing miners everywhere, and was quite agreeable to the operators’ proposal – which was never formally incorporated into the conference proceedings. But it did not make an agreement without certain concessions, especially with its new-found strength after the 1897 victory. It demanded and got a 10-cent increase, so that miners in the Central Competitive Field now made the handsome sum of 66 cents a ton for screened coal. And there was another concession so startling that it was hard to believe – Union soft-coal miners after April 1, 1898 were to work an 8-hour day!

  Only a few years before, agitators for the 8-hour movement had been called wild-eyed anarchists, public enemies and fit objects for hanging or deportation. The press had intimated that such a short workday would in all likelihood wipe the coal industry off the map. Somehow, though, the coal industry did not expire, and has managed to struggle along until this day. Actually, in 1898 the northern miners would be lucky to get two to three days work a week at any hours, so the concession was not too costly to the operators.

  For the operators the most important point in the inter-state conference was the agreement to civilize their commercial warfare to the extent that prices would be uniform and no backstairs chicanery would be permitted any single operator.

  T.L. Lewis, the vice-president of the UMW, summed up the inter-state conference of 1898: “As I understand it, it is for the purpose of wiping out competition between us as miners first, viewing it from our side of the question; next, for the purpose of wiping out competition as between the operators, in these four states.”

  Operators Yell

  Down in West Virginia the local coal operators were eyeing these proceedings with nervous and indignant mien. They were quick to cry “conspiracy!” and they kept yelling it for at least 22 years, taking it to court in attempted Union death blows in 1913 and again in 1920. They forgot that the Kanawha Coal Operators Association might have been called a conspiracy just as easily as the Confederation of Northern Operators. The UMW was merely serving its own interests by utilizing the competition between the two employer groups.

  Newspaper and official propaganda sources painted a horrible picture for the West Virginia public of Union and alien northern forces combining to swoop down upon the Mountain State. Meanwhile the coal barons of the South laid in rifles and ammunition and contacted the proper sources for mine guards and strikebreakers.

  It is true that part of the picture was a war for coal markets between the Unionized Central Competitive Field and the nonunion West Virginia territory. For the northern coal operators it was a question of economic survival. They used what weapons they could to prevent pilfering of their markets by the underselling southern operators. They were closer to the Great Lakes markets, and they tri
ed to get their freight rates lower and West Virginia’s higher. The West Virginia operator was out to make as much money as he could – he saw millions in the offing – and if the northern operator was forced into bankruptcy that was too bad.

  The quality of mercy is more apparent in a shark’s attack than in these economic forays.

  11/21/1952 (Fourth)

  The mine owner in West Virginia had several advantages over his Central Competitive Field rivals. He had “high” coal, seams of six feet or over, highly adaptable to mechanized mining, and free from impurities. The coal was soft, high grade, and easily mined. Production cost was a fraction of that of his rivals. His men were not unionized, so he could pay what he pleased, pay attention to safety as he pleased, maintain living conditions as he pleased. His labor overhead was low. For instance, as late as 1912 he was paying his men less than 25 cents a ton. At this time the C.C.F. was paying 90 cents.

  In addition the “company town” plan was stronger in West Virginia than elsewhere. The company owned the store, the houses, the recreation, if any, the blacksmith – everything. And each thing it owned was made to show a profit. No wonder West Virginia operators could undersell the C.C.F. in their own backyard!

  It was not true, however, that the Union was in collusion with the operators of the Central Competitive Field. The UMW was aware of the vast industrial potential of the Mountain State, and organizing attempts had been made before the Interstate Conference. When the UMW was formed in 1890 a convention was called in Wheeling by M. F. Moran to form a West Virginia branch called District 17, and Moran was elected president.