Coal Miners

COAL MINERS. Long a center of radical labor activity, workers and supporters in the coal industry left a record of militant unionism, unique strategies, and Leftwing political beliefs.

In the era when craft unionism dominated the American Federation of Labor (AFL), miners built the nation’s largest industrial union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which admitted all workers without regard to skill or race. Coal miners engaged in some of the most militant labor battles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, producing class struggles so dramatic they became the basis for proletarian novels. During the 1930s. the UMWA funded and helped to organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the federation that contested craft unionism. Radical miners argued for “rank-and-file” democratic control of the labor movement, opposing the drift of their union toward autocracy. The fight for democracy failed, only to be revived in the 1970s, just as the union declined as a major factor in the labor movement. It remains large within labor history.

The American Miners Association, the first national union of miners in the United States, was formed in Belleville, Illinois in 1861 by veterans of Chartism and the British general strike of 1842. The imprint of these experiences was clear in the early praxis of coal miners, who immediately created political petitions and mass actions as organizing strategies. The AMA called for working class unity against “the insatiable maw of capital,” and proposed that labor could “rule capital” through political activism after the end of slavery. By the end of the Civil War, the union had spread to other mining states, growing to 20,000 members across the coal fields of the nation, a significant portion of mining workforce.

The AMA was met with fierce opposition from coal operators wherever it took hold and disintegrated by the late 1860s. But the methods deployed during its existence, including pit committees at the point of production, marching strikes with roving pickets, community and women’s involvement, and attempts at class-based political action, all continued to define radical strategies in the decades afterwards.

The period of the 1870s-1890s left indelible lessons for radical perspectives. Coal operators were notoriously resistant to miners’ overtures to cooperate in order to tame the market forces that drove down wages, led to high death rates, theft of miners’ production, and impoverished mining communities. The operators used a growing list of nefarious methods to thwart unions: the “ironclad” contract that barred strikes and union affiliation, importation of strikebreakers, flooding the coalfields with surplus supply of labor, and use of private and public police during strikes.

These years of persecution convinced some miners of the need for independent political action and the potential for a national coal miners’ general strike. Some miners turned to the Greenback Labor Party and the Socialist Labor Party, but also sought elected office in the main parties, on platforms to eliminate payment in scrip, company stores, to enact proper weighing of coal, weekly wage payments, the eight-hour day, and a host of other legislative proposals. Even when miners achieved legislation at the state level, it was declared unconstitutional by the courts or left unenforced. Radicals like Belgian Louis Goaziou established independent newspapers in Pennsylvania that stirred miners for a general strike in the 1880s. Syndicalist perspectives spread among immigrant coal miners in Pennsylvania anthracite and in enclaves such as Pittsburg, Kansas, and in Spring Valley, Illinois, where one of the largest communities of miner anarchists, mostly Italians, in the United States flourished. Similar sentiments in favor of a general strike were apparent in Knights of Labor miner lodges that came out from the shadows of secrecy in the early 1880s. The task at hand proved daunting, because Knights leaders and official policies opposed strikes.

The United Mine Workers of America, organized in 1890 and affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (until 1894, some locals chose the Knights of Labor), provided a new base for miners’ struggles. The UMW constitution called for formal equality among immigrants and Black miners and welcomed into membership all who labored in mining. Miners in the Midwest and in Alabama built ties with the Populist movement, both in its marching unemployed armies of early 1894, and its political operations. UMWA national leadership built formal alliances with Populists. UMWA president John McBride won election against Samuel Gompers for leadership of the American Federation of Labor as well, albeit for a single year only, putting an industrial union advocate briefly at the head of a craft-dominated federation.

The insurrectionary promise of labor struggles in this period inspired the 1891 eastern Tennessee miners’ uprisings against the use of convict laborers to break strikes and compete with union workers. This campaign dramatically included the forced release of prisoners and included political action against the convict lease system, winning support from farmers and communities. The uprising successfully battled the state militia until subdued by the US army.

Labor Populism and experience with national leadership also cast some miner radicals in oppositional roles, especially on strike strategy. The UMWA general strike call of 1894 that garnered the support of most coal miners across the nation included union leaders’ explanation that a strike would also benefit operators, by reducing the coal supply and raising the market price. The ranks of unionists held a more radical view. Miners in Illinois spread a leaflet across the coalfields denouncing the unjust capitalist system with its market competition as a failure “based upon fraud, robbery and brute force,” and called for a real general strike to boldly “stop the wheels of industry” and put workers in charge. The 1894 Illinois miners’ convention called for collective ownership of the mines and other radical demands. When mine operators who had expressed support for union bargaining reneged on their agreement, coal miners commandeered trains to block train shipments. This led to troops and marshals being sent into the coalfields of the Midwest. When the UMWA leadership called off the strike, many miners denounced both the political system and their leadership as corrupted. The following year, Gompers took back control of the AFL from McBride, dashing the dreams of a labor movement unified with mine workers for political action and of more democratic, inclusive unionism.

In 1897, miners launched another national strike, and this time socialists Eugene Debs and Mary Harris “Mother” Jones found an enthusiastic welcome as organizers and speakers. The success of the strike, in large part due to the marching strikes that surpassed all previous efforts, made these actions among the largest series of labor marches in US history. This turned the tide, especially when the Illinois governor refused to call out troops. When the Governors of Pennsylvania and West Virginia also indicated that they would not enforce injunctions against marching, socialists called for a general strike and a mass organizing drive in West Virginia. Gompers and the AFL leadership first endorsed the initiative, but then retreated and effectively undermined this effort.

The 1897 strike settlement brought about the Central Competitive Field contract bargaining system, operating in a crescent from Pennsylvania to Illinois. This structure sought orderly resolution to the conflicts with operators. The effort by Illinois operators to roll back these gains led to a series of mine wars that miners won at the cost of dozens of lives, and secured Illinois as the base of the Left in the miners’ union for the next generation. A 1910 Illinois district strike, in defiance of the national leadership, resulted in a major victory. For Illinois miners, this success affirmed the need to enforce militant strike action. For UMWA national leaders, it prompted a desire to restrict district autonomy.

The UMWA won agreement from the AFL in 1901 to allow the UMWA jurisdiction for all workers in the mines. This proved a model for other attempts, such as that of the Brewery workers, to move the AFL toward an industrial union federation. But this success also led socialist miners to oppose the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as dual unionism, putting them in opposition to some of the other radical currents of the era.
By 1912. Debs himself described the miners’ union as the “most revolutionary in spirit.” By this time, more than 40 percent of delegates to the UMWA convention in 1908 had become members of the Socialist Party, and the union passed resolutions in favor of government ownership of industries and the “full social value of their product.” Socialists were elected to District President in critical areas such as Illinois, Pittsburgh, and Indiana and prospects seemed bright for socialists to win the national leadership of the union. Indeed, the membership repudiated leaders’ efforts to work with class collaborationist groups like the National Civic Federation in 1910.
Miner networks harbored a significant number of radicals and socialists in this era, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was at all odds the most famous, a radical folk hero among labor nationwide. She carried a socialist message from one coal field to another as she organized, linking it to visions such as the four-hour day as early as 1902. She taught mathematics to young miners so they could calculate the “surplus value” they produced for the coal operator. She organized women of the coal towns into “mop and broom brigades,” part of a radical tradition that were condemned by some leaders as undignified. She had become the most popular speaker in mining communities in Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas encampments, thanks especially to her fearlessness, when she faced down bayonets and cannons in West Virginia and Colorado, the sites of two of the bloodiest confrontations in US labor history.
Miner activists and socialists strategized to create insurgent organizing campaigns in West Virginia and Colorado in 1912-1914. Coal operators responded that the socialists’ influence in the union was an explanation for their hard stance against recognition of the union, especially the union’s formal language about the “full social value of their product. The high point of socialist influence among miners in West Virginia coincided with the Cabin Creek and Paint Creek mine wars of 1912-1913. But just as important was the insurgent militant stance of miner communities against what Mother Jones called “medieval” methods of control. These included the installation of iron and concrete forts, a full flank of armed guards, evictions from their homes, an armored train and Gatling guns, abridgment of free speech and assembly, freedom of the press and an alliance between coal operators and the state authorities.
Miners engaged in mass action and confrontations, with women and children sometimes in the lead. Mother Jones along with dozens of other socialists were actually court-martialed but defied that as well. Radicals had become nationally strategic in the Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1913-1914, taking up a battle against John D. Rockefeller’s dominion, his defense of the principle of the open-shop, and the coal operators’ control of local and state politics. Their strategy, to compel politicians to remove troops and to rout coal company mercenaries out of the state, fell to violent reprisals. In April, 1914, troops and mercenaries burned out the Ludlow tent colony, resulting in the deaths of eleven children and two women. Armed miners answered with a ten days’ war and prevailed, although the union did not actually fight the federal troops sent to bring peace, or gain a victory for their efforts.
In the aftermath of this defeat, miner radicals elevated the campaign for nationalization of the coalfields. Mother Jones travelled back and forth across the country, publicizing the massacre in urban communities as well as remote towns, but also elevating the issue of nationalization as a solution to the brutal conditions inherent in capitalism. Some hoped President Woodrow Wilson might be inclined to nationalize coal to win the war. US entry into World War I brought, instead, serious divisions over strategy. The war effort did facilitate organization of West Virginia and other non-union holdouts. But success in that area quickly soured after the armistice, when the administration refused to end the wartime wage freeze. A postwar push for a general strike developed into a struggle between rank-and-file and national leadership. In West Virginia, the push to end the public-private police state in two counties led to a 1921 march on Blair Mountain and the largest armed uprising of workers in US history. This near-insurrection collapsed with the entry of US troops.
Radicalism remained a vital force in the miners’ union during the 1920s, but the rise of autocratic John L. Lewis and the splintering of the Left between Socialist, IWW and Communist Party factions led to a difficult standoff. The 1921 convention revealed wide support for nationalization of the mines as one solution, and a union-authorized panel called for “production for use” and workers’ control through democratic management, not government bureaucrats. Miners also sought a thirty-hour work week to address mechanization of the mines. They directed their leaders to unite with railroad workers and advocate a labor party to push the politics of the AFL once again in the direction of industrial unionism.
Most of all, miners wanted a militant response to coal operators, in order to complete the organization of the non-union mines. Lewis and the national office had, as the Left charged, been corrupted thoroughly by coal operators, so miners sought allies wherever they could. For example, in Colorado, 10,000 miners went on strike in 1927 with the organizing support of the IWW, in a dramatic campaign that required a full-fledged state troop deployment to subdue.
Communists arrayed themselves against Lewis in the 1920s, and the more that the UMWA failed to offer solutions on issues like unemployment, mechanization, organizing the unorganized, the more Communists and other renegades played a role in rebellion. Working with Kansas, Illinois and Pennsylvania militants, they held rank-and-file conferences and became a force behind a formal Save the Union campaign that finally won the support of John Brophy, the Pennsylvania district leader who had authored the UMWA pamphlet on nationalizing the mines in 1923. This Left slate almost certainly won the 1927 UMWA election, but voter fraud coupled with blacklisting and employer collusion enabled Lewis to retain power.
From 1929 to 1932, the UMWA seemed to be teetering towards collapse, but insurgent campaigns against Lewis and for labor militancy kept an old spirit burning. The Communist-organized National Miners Union, a splinter movement organized in 1929, participated in rebellions in Illinois, western Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky (Harlan County), several locations in Ohio, northern West Virginia, Gallup, New Mexico, and Utah. These were losing campaigns, but they sustained methods such as the marching strike and family-based organizing at unprecedented levels. Such efforts provided experience and lessons for many drives of the 1930s.
Other radical-led movements sprung up in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Washington in 1932-1933. In Illinois, still the dominant dues-paying district, Lewis sought to impose a contract through vote-stealing. Miners formed the Progressive Mine Workers of America (PMA), led by socialists. The PMA newspaper’s masthead declared “for the full social value of our labor,” recalling the high-point of radical influence in the UMWA, as progressives sought district autonomy within a firm national policy and organizing strategy. By 1933, Pennsylvania and West Virginia miners joined progressives or formed their own rival union. In Jellico, Tennessee, a “spontaneous parliament” of thousands of miners threatened the Lewis-appointed leadership. In Washington, a Western Miners Union of America split from the national organization and proclaimed a militant program. At least half of the UMWA districts expressed serious opposition, most of them with women’s increased involvement, an added element that Lewis formally opposed as both radical and unseemly.
Lewis used this miners’ rising as a bargaining chip to gain a role in the early New Deal and then used state agencies and coal operator alliances to remove the vestiges of rebellion. He manipulated the no-strike clause in the coal code authority under the New Deal’s National Recovery Act (NRA), which mandated compulsory arbitration, but also threatened the insurgents’ jobs and sometimes their lives. He made contracts with Illinois and Pennsylvania operators and won the support of New Deal-allied governors to stop mass picketing. The PMA, in turn, purged its own Left in an attempt to gain state sanction through the NRA and later the National Labor Relations Board. Radicals regained leadership in the PMA for a short time in 1935, engaging in the only coal miners’ sit-down strike of the era. But the mass organizing of the miners, a leading base for a revived labor movement of the 1930s, could not revive the Left within the UMWA. Lewis ruled with an iron hand.
These events and reactions had significant consequences for the CIO, which split with the AFL in 1935 and led mass-organizing drives. Lewis’s UMWA provided the funding, staff and structural model for the new industrial union movement. Lewis hired Communists as organizers for that campaign, and the miners mass struggles were part of a larger mix of experience brought to bear in these campaigns. In Birmingham, Alabama, the UMWA proved the linchpin for a wall-to-wall organizing campaign of community-based organizing that included communists, socialists and other radicals.
Lewis’s structuring of the CIO, and the fact that it was dominated by men who had their tutelage in suppressing radicals at his behest, had been anchored in his earlier purge of the UMWA Left. He appointed UMWA socialist-turned-bureaucrat Adolph Germer to tame rank-and-file ambitions, with Germer the special guardian against Communists. Thus, Germer sacrificed a promising southern organizing drive of timber workers in order to ensure that Communists would not control the union. CIO leader Phillip Murray, who had been Vice President of the UMWA, likewise ensured that community labor federations could not create major campaigns without obeisance to existing union bureaucracies. This recreation of the AFL model dealt a devastating blow to the goal of wall-to-wall organizing. Despite the major role played by the Left in the UMWA, the CIO replicated many of the features of AFL conservatism, including the explicit obstruction of the Left.
Lewis withdrew the UMWA from the CIO in 1942, and set an iconoclastic, unpredictable course, at once defying State power and also embracing corruption and autocracy, all the while directing campaigns against both left-led unions and the AFL. He nevertheless became a hero to miners thanks to his courage against the wartime Roosevelt administration, and even more for the long run goal of forging an independent pension and medical fund. His command remained nearly total, and democracy within the union expired along with radical visions of democracy, often without even members’ votes on their own contracts. He also gave operators a free hand to set workplace rules, including the acceleration mechanization of the trade. Nevertheless, in many regions, especially Pennsylvania, ethnic communities of miners supported leftwing causes in significant ways, South Slavs forcefully mobilized against fascism and for the Partisans behind Tito.
After Lewis stepped down, democratic opposition once again became possible. A brutal murder of the leader of the opposition, Tony Boyle, along his family in 1969, met the challenges in the most brutal way imaginable. In response, union members formed the Miners for Democracy, which eventually led to democratic reforms, if not an explicit radicalism, within the UMWA. A handful of notable campaigns, especially the 1988-89 “Camp Solidarity” set up around the Pittston, Virginia, campaign to save pensions, harkened back to some of the old militancy. The months’ long marches, occupations and other expressions of class-consciousness caught national attention and prompted labor muralist Mike Alewitz to one of his most remarkable creations, painted on the spot by unionists and community members. Richard Trumka emerged as another reform president, steadily less interested in radical causes as he ascended to power within the UMWA and then the leadership of the AFL. But for veteran unionists and labor historians, Pittston was a final militant, community-based struggle within the fading coal industry, a vivid memory of what had gone before.

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