The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  Thousands of miners moved in, tripling the area’s population by 1920 and doubling it again by 1930. Harlan (confusingly, the name of both the county and the town formerly known as Mt. Pleasant) became the leading coal-producing area in the state, with the largest operations near the town of Benham, which was under the control of Wisconsin Steel Co., a subsidiary of International Harvester Co. Two miles from Benham, U.S. Steel subsidiary U.S. Coal & Coke Co. built the community of Lynch, ultimately constructing 2,000 buildings and, by 1919, housing a population of 10,000. All the coal from Lynch was sent to another company town—Gary, Indiana, home of giant steel mills run by U.S. Steel.20

  Harry M. Caudill, a lawyer, Kentucky state legislator, and lifelong resident of Letcher County, chronicled developments in Kentucky. He felt the coal companies took far more than they gave to the Appalachian region—if indeed they gave it anything at all. Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963), one of eight books he wrote about Kentucky and what he considered its sad fate, is a Kennedy-era classic that, like Michael Harrington’s The Other America, helped U.S. progressives “rediscover” poverty and build a movement that shook the country’s middle-class complacency.

  Caudill took note of the smaller coal towns, which “copied in the most shabby fashion” the pattern laid down by the likes of Lynch and Benham. In places with “a variety of startling names—such as Neon, Blackey, Cumberland, Hellier, Hi-Hat, Garrett, Whitaker, Chevrolet, and Jeff,” houses were built for miners on which “not a dollar was spent . . . beyond the barest necessity” and which “were slums as soon as they were occupied.” He excoriated those he called “the Big Bosses,” who he said “exercised absolute dominion over the towns they had built,” whether these were the so-called model communities or “a cluster of thirty or forty grimy shacks centering about a rickety commissary and tipple.” In such locations, Caudill wrote,The miner came to be almost wholly insulated against the world outside his coal camp. In return for his labor, his employers clothed his back, filled his belly, sheltered and lighted his household, and provided his family with medical treatment, fuel and water. The thoughtful operators even organized burial associations, withholding a couple of dollars each month from the workman’s wages for payment to a favored undertaker, so that when death came the mortician’s bill had been paid in advance. Needless to say, the company realized a profit on each of these endeavors. The miner found himself on a treadmill from which he lacked the knowledge and self-discipline to escape.21

  Daily life in these communities was unremittingly grim, according to Caudill, plagued by the “monstrous coaldust genie” that hovered in the air above the tipple and “crept into every nook and cranny in the town.” Then there were the huge slate dumps—mountains of unwanted rock and low-grade coal that arose near every tipple and that tended to spontaneously burst into flames, with accompanying clouds of sulfurous, oily smoke. In the polluted atmosphere, paint peeled from the walls of houses, eyes and throats ached, and “communities gradually took on that sickly hue which miners called ‘coal-camp gray.’”22

  With their solid grip on the state’s politicians, the companies ensured that taxes stayed low—with the effect that infrastructure was little developed and state governments were mired in debt, he wrote. Caudill traced the coal industry’s history, including its World War I boom, Depression-era bust, World War II revival, and ultimate collapse. But perhaps the author’s most adamant and angry prose focuses on the area’s environmental devastation. “Nowhere in the [Cumberland] plateau does a single tract of virgin forest remain,” he wrote. “Hundreds of worked-out mines have become subterranean lakes. . . . The valleys are sprinkled with hideous car dumps where Fords, Chevrolets, Cadillacs and once magnificent limousines lie piled in rusty array. As eyesores they are second only to the ghastly trash dumps . . . [that] abound on roadside and stream-bank.” For all of this, Caudill left little doubt, it was the Big Bosses who deserved the blame—the corporations that siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of resources and treated the Appalachian region as “a colonial appendage of the industrial East and Middle West.”23

  Caudill remained an outspoken rebel until his self-inflicted death in 1990. (Parkinson’s, it seemed, had sapped his will to live.) In a 1975 interview with Mother Earth News, he contrasted the fate of Switzerland, one of the world’s richest countries despite its natural handicaps, and that of West Virginia, one of the poorest areas in the United States despite its natural wealth. His bête noire had become the strip miners, who he felt had taken up where the previous generation of coal operators had left off. The impoverishment of the Appalachian region could have been avoided, he insisted, had the states simply collected a very small tax, as little as 10 cents per ton, on the coal moving out of the area and used it to finance public education. “We’ve got everything in the world here in these mountains that’s required to build anything we want to build except the willpower and the mind,” he concluded. 24

  The legendary “company store” owes its infamy largely to practices in coal-company towns. Who doesn’t know the phrase “I owe my soul to the company store”—and perhaps other lyrics of the song “Sixteen Tons”? We owe that to the repeated airplay of a recording by 1950s television personality Tennessee Ernie Ford, but the song was in fact penned by Merle Travis, a hillbilly musician and the son of a coal miner, born in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, in 1917.

  Travis attended classes through the eighth grade at a one-room schoolhouse in Ebenezer, near the digs of Beech Creek Coal Co. At age sixteen, he enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal-era make-work agency, and thereafter became an entertainer. After appearing on radio shows in Evansville, Indiana, and in Cincinnati—and with a break for World War II service in the Marines—he moved to Hollywood and signed with Capitol Records.

  In his album-cover photos, his broad forehead, sleepy eyes, and toothy grin make him seem the very picture of an unaffected country boy. Capitol Records encouraged Travis to record some coal-country songs (at first he said he didn’t know any), so he wrote and recorded several such tunes on a 1946 album, Folk Songs of the Hills. “Dark as a Dungeon” ponders the coal miner’s attraction for work in pits “where the sun never shines,” noting that “it will form as a habit and seep in your soul” and that “a man will have lust for the lure of the mines.” (Curiously enough, Travis penned that miner’s lament just after a musical appearance in sunny Redondo Beach, California.) Meanwhile, in a spoken aside recorded along with “Sixteen Tons,” Travis reflected,Yessir, there’s a-many a Kentucky coal miner that pretty near owes his soul to the company store. He gets so far in debt to the coal company he’s a-workin’ for that he goes on fer years without being paid one red cent in real honest-to-goodness money. But he can always go to the company store and draw flickers or scrip—you know, that’s little brass coins that you can’t spend nowhere, only at the company store. So they add that to his account and every day he gets a little farther in debt.25

  The song became a hit for Ford in 1955, thanks to the power of television and, in significant part, to the public’s growing ability to relate to the condition of permanent indebtedness. But were coal miners of Travis’s father’s generation really living in a condition of debt peonage? Historians have disagreed about the charge, with some saying that the existence of railroad networks meant that miners were far from isolated and hardly dependent on their town’s store.26 Caudill believed that “most miners got into the habit of living almost entirely by scrip,” which they spent at the company store. His analysis is supported by one study conducted by New Deal agency the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which found some workers who had received no cash payments for fifteen years. Moreover, Caudill asserted that “an increasing harshness” among Depression-era Big Bosses led them to insist that miners make all their purchases at the company store, where prices were often twice as much as elsewhere. (The NRA study found the disparity to be lower, from 2.1 percent to 10.4 percent higher than at neighb
oring independent stores.) John Brophy, a second-generation miner from age twelve who in time became an official of the UMWA, wrote in his autobiography that prices in the Urey, Pennsylvania, company store were much higher than at private stores and a miner’s chances of saving anything were worse than slim. “Only my mother’s rigidly economical management of what income we received saved us from getting into debt slavery,” he recalled. By avoiding debt, Brophy’s family was able to move regularly, living what he called “a gypsy life.”27

  The actual company stores varied greatly. Some were little more than small-town groceries, but those in the larger communities sold a variety of goods, from food to furniture, clothing, window screens, nails, pharmaceuticals, refrigerators, and garden tools. They might offer services such as haircutting and dry cleaning, and the buildings might house meeting rooms, a post office, a payroll window, and administrative offices for the company.

  If some stores were little more than shacks, others were substantial: Photographs of the company store (now demolished) in Lynch, Kentucky, show an appreciable, three-story modern stone building with large plate-glass windows. Colorado Fuel and Iron’s Colorado Supply Co. operated large, well-stocked emporia featuring branded consumer goods, meat departments, furniture, Indian handicrafts including Navajo blankets and Zuni bows and arrows, and more. It isn’t difficult to imagine that in such a place miners might while away hours of free time, jawing and smoking. Many stores served as a meeting place and a center of town social life.28

  Company stores, scrip, and indebtedness were hardly the subject of every coal-miner ballad. There were a great many songs, of course, given that making old-timey music was a regular Appalachian pastime. Other subjects included romance, honky-tonks, moonshine whisky, work (the traditional folk ballad “Nine-Pound Hammer” also appeared on Travis’s 1947 record), migration to distant cities, dramatic weather events, bloody car crashes, favored pets and livestock, religion, and, inevitably, union-management conflict. Of these, some of the most well-known include the traditional “Only a Miner,” on death due to a mine collapse; Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?” which grew out of a 1930s Harlan County labor battle and urges listeners not to scab; and Sarah Ogan Gunning’s “Dreadful Memories,” which relates her experiences with the Communist-led National Miners Union in the 1930s.

  The coal industry boom lasted from the 1880s into the late 1920s, during which time there was ever a shortage of willing workers. Gangs of laborers, many of whom were black, built the railroads, and some companies prevailed upon these men to stay and dig coal. Construction gangs from such cities as Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Louisville built the mushrooming towns, but few of these construction workers changed occupations. Although large companies brought supervisory personnel, clerks, executives, and the necessary engineers into Appalachia from coalfields in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, the actual miners were always in short supply.

  Company labor agents scoured the countryside, and many poor whites—some pushed off the land by the big companies’ land grab or by hard times—gave up farming to mine coal. But, particularly in the early years, Appalachian hillbillies proved unreliable: They were willing to go into the mines during the harsh winter months but gravitated back to the farms during planting and harvesting seasons. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, only a quarter of West Virginia mining families stayed in one place for longer than five years.

  While some mine operators turned to convict labor, there was hardly enough to go around. There were reports, too, of Deep South states freeing black convicts so long as they agreed to migrate and take up coal mining.

  Finally, labor agents began recruiting workers from Europe, particularly Italy, Hungary, Poland, Albania, and Greece. Sometimes recruiters went to these countries, but mostly they haunted the docks and ethnic neighborhoods of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Recruits were hastily loaded onto train cars, the doors of which were sometimes sealed to prevent escape. “These penniless ‘transportation men’ stepped from their cars at Jenkins, McRoberts, Benham, Lynch, Middlesboro, Way-land, Wheelwright and numerous other wild coal towns to jeers and hoots from crowds of mountaineers,” reported Caudill. Shunted off to separate-but-not-always-equal housing in “Woptowns” and “Hunkytowns,” or crammed into ten- to twenty-five-room boardinghouses for single men, the recruits discovered that their train tickets were not gratis: The men were already in debt for their “transportation.”

  This massive influx of people swelled the Appalachian population: The Harlan County population rose almost threefold, from 10,564 in 1910 to 31,546 in 1920. The work was hard and dirty—and labor recruiters worked for other employers, too, notably those in Detroit and other Midwestern cities. In Stonega, Virginia, about a quarter of the Europeans fled before they’d worked off their transportation. World War I interrupted the flow of foreign workers, and some immigrants returned to Europe. Restrictive immigration laws of the early 1920s ended such practices altogether. 29

  The immigrants worked side-by-side with southern whites. Blacks were generally given the worst, hottest, heaviest labor, such as “pulling,” or extracting, the heavy coke from blistering coke ovens. The others worked below ground in the mines. Most Appalachian digs were “drift mines” dug into hillsides above the valley, meaning workers entered laterally rather than via the long, vertical shafts that were common elsewhere in the United States.30

  Here’s how coal mining was done: The miner awoke early, perhaps at 3 or 4 a.m., and, as “Sixteen Tons” suggests, he picked up his gear and walked to the mine, which after all was close by his house. That equipment consisted of a manually operated augur or drill, a pick, a shovel, a lamp, and his dinner pail. Some electric machinery appeared as early as 1915 but wasn’t widespread until the 1930s. He walked down to his “room” at the mine—a tunnel cut through the coal seam that might be anywhere from three to eight feet in height and twenty-four feet wide. Surrounded by solid walls of coal left standing to support the roof, he and his workmate (it was common for two men to work a room) went to the front wall, or “coal face,” at the bottom of which they chiseled out a wedge-shaped section. Given the low ceiling, a miner usually lay on his side and swung his pick in the confined space. Then, using the drill, he and his workmate bored holes several feet above that wedge and filled these with black powder and a fuse. “Fire in the hole!” they would yell to alert those in other nearby “rooms” as they lit the fuse. The subsequent explosion would dislodge a layer of coal that they would then shovel into a railcar and push to the entryway to be hauled off. This set of tasks called for “an unusual blend of a craftsman and a laborer,” according to labor historian David Montgomery, since “to bring down that coal so it could be loaded required artistry, judgment, and self-reliance.” Not to mention plain ol’ guts.

  Though there were “day men” who received straight-time, hourly wages for such work as pumping water or doing carpentry, most miners were paid by the ton. That meant that time spent laying more railway track into a room or cross-cutting tunnels to other rooms—needed for ventilation and communication—was time wasted in terms of pay. On the positive side, miners worked at their own speed and faced few hassles from supervisors, since there was only one such straw boss for every ten to twenty men. It was not unusual for miners to knock off for the day whenever they felt they had met whatever expectations they’d set for themselves.31

  But miners had to balance their schedules with other concerns—namely death and dismemberment. For years, coal mining was regarded as the most dangerous occupation in America. Risks ranged from cave-ins, gas explosions and poisoning, electrocution, and, especially, roof falls. Mine explosions—including dramatic ones at Switchback and Layland, West Virginia; Pocahontas, Virginia; and Briceville and Rock-wood, Tennessee—claimed one hundred workers per year in the 1920s. Less infamous but more destructive were falling slate and coal, which killed 50,000 miners between 1906 and 1935. Then there were respiratory ailments, which the industry poo
h-poohed for years. An incalculable number of miners fell because of chronic bronchitis, silicosis from breathing rock dust, and the now-infamous black lung, or pneumoconiosis. Workers’ compensation, begun in most states during the 1910s, might pay as little as $4,000 for a death and $2,200 for permanent partial disability.32

  Hazardous-duty pay? No way, although pay in the southern mines rose steadily from the 1910s through the late ’20s, from about $1.50 for a ten-hour day to $4 for an eight-hour stint. During boom years, pay might go as high as $6 per day—and it fell during the Great Depression to under $3. Pay varied greatly from mine to mine: At some, miners were paid by the ton, elsewhere by the carload. Some were paid by the day, others by the shift.33

  Was there something about coal mining that compelled abuse of the miners? Two thoughts come to mind: First, the work was disagreeable and brutal, combining dangers almost comparable to those of combat with inescapable grime and illness. And that might have been enough to compel workers to flee—if they had not somehow been held fast by their bosses. Second, the bituminous industry was very competitive, with many smaller mines just eking by even as the big operators raked in the profits. Such conditions naturally led to stinginess—which in turn likely prompted some coal operators not only to skimp on wages but also to squeeze money, in the form of rents and company-store earnings, from their workers. Then again, maybe there’s just something about mining: Both George Orwell in Britain and Emile Zola in France reported oppressive conditions in those countries’ coal-mining areas.

  A logical response was unionization, the very thing the coal operators most reviled. The dispersed nature of the mines—spreading across the Midwest, into western states such as southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, and southward through the Appalachians—and the isolation of the miners meant that many struggles were local, spontaneous, and short-lived.