by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s PBS documentary was an American Experience episode called “Mine Wars,” about the 20-year
struggle by the United Mine Workers to organize the coal miners in southern
West Virginia and how it was systematically thwarted by the mine operators, the
government officials who (with two intriguing exceptions, both noted in the
program) went along with whatever the bosses wanted them to do, and the private
army the bosses hired (in the guise of a private-investigation firm called
“Baldwin-Felts,” though whoever Baldwin might have been it was three brothers
named Felts who actually ran the company) to smash any union campaigns before
they started. It’s a vivid portrayal of just how much control the mine owners
exerted — they put up their workers in company-owned towns (where they could be
evicted if they quit or were fired, and just being a union member was grounds
for being fired), they paid them in company currency (“scrip”) which they could
only spend at company stores (where the prices were far higher than they were
elsewhere in the area) and, like the sharecroppers in the Deep South, they
often ended up not only with no money but actually in debt to the company for
their rent and groceries — remember the song “Sixteen Tons,” with its chilling
lines, “Tell St. Peter I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store.” The
companies also controlled the towns so utterly that they had no local governments of their own, and installed their
agents as postmasters at the towns’ post offices so they could ensure that
workers couldn’t receive pro-union leaflets or letters in the mail.
The
combination of low pay and virtually feudal living conditions, as well as the
mine owners’ callous disregard of worker health and safety — coal mining is an
inherently dangerous business, since you’re not only tunneling through
mountains and the tunnels might cave in at any moment, you’re also releasing
huge amounts of dust and gas in the air, and many of the gases are themselves
highly flammable and potentially explosive (while the miners were working by
the open flames of the lamps attached to their hats — electric lights for
miners were well in the future), or else they’re damp and suffocating — and the
owners basically regarded the workers as dispensable resources. If they got sick,
had accidents, got injured or even killed on the job, tough; there were always
more where they came from, and in addition to pressuring politicians to enforce
laws against union organizing, the mine owners also lobbied to make sure no
health-and-safety regulations were passed. The first attempt to organize West
Virginia’s mines (or at least the first one covered here) took place in 1902
and was led by the legendary Mother Jones (she’s been so surrounded by legend it’s hard to realize she was an
actual person!) and a local she recruited named Frank Keeney, and that strike
was inspired by the United Mine Workers’ (UMW) success in winning union
recognition and at least some economic gains in the mines in Pennsylvania. (In
1903 President Theodore Roosevelt had personally intervened to settle a miners’
strike in Pennsylvania and invited both the owners’ representatives and the United Mine Workers’ head to the
White House — and the spectacle of a U.S. President involving himself in a
labor dispute and not doing so
100 percent on the side of the owners was itself galvanizing to what existed of
a labor movement in the U.S.) Alas, the owners and their Baldwin-Felts thugs
managed to smash the union after an eight-month strike that left many of the
workers literally living in tents
pitched on the few patches of land in the area the mine companies didn’t own.
Even by the cruel standards of U.S. labor relations in that era, this situation
was especially mean; several times during the “war,” as the film depicted it,
there were attempts by outsiders (including federal officials, less concerned
about workers’ rights than maintaining coal production) to mediate, the UMW
officials were willing to negotiate and the owners weren’t.
One issue was that
many of the mine owners had themselves worked their way up from poverty — or at
least that’s how they liked to portray themselves, and the nastiest and most
viciously anti-union of the bosses was Justus Collins from Alabama, who’d
worked his way up from the Pennsylvania coal fields and was a true believer
that anyone could do what he had done — and if they didn’t, that just proved
they were inferior beings, not worthy of serious consideration and certainly
not worthy of being regarded as individuals with human rights. It’s the sort of
ideology that was popularly propounded in the late 19th century by
Herbert Spencer and in the 20th by Ayn Rand: that being wealthy
indicates your genetic superiority to the common run of humanity and therefore
it’s not only bad policy but morally wrong for the government to use its taxing and regulatory powers to take
“your” money and give it to those with less than you. (It’s what Mitt Romney
was saying when he complained to his fellow 1-percenters that the Democrats
went into every Presidential election with 47 percent of the voters because
they were convinced the Democrats would “give them stuff.”) The battles between
the miners on one side and the mine owners, government officials and private
thugs on the others all followed a depressingly similar pattern: miners walked
off the job, owners evicted them and did everything they could to starve them
into submission, the UMW leadership (more concerned with preserving their gains
in Pennsylvania than expanding into more hostile territory) gave them lukewarm support
at best, and ultimately the strikers lost and conditions in the mines stayed as
they were. The one exception was in Matewan (pronounced “MATE-wan,” by the
way), where in 1920 — after the miners had followed the U.S. government’s and
their own union’s pledge not to strike for the duration of the U.S. involvement
in World War I, and naïvely hoped to be rewarded for it after the war was over
with higher wages, better working condition, an end to exploitative practices
like short-weighting the miners’ output and disbanding of the owners’ private
armies through Baldwin-Felts — Keeney and his fellow long-time unionists
decided to use the town as a base for organizing. They picked Matewan because
the town was on the West Virginia-Kentucky border and was one of the few
communities in the area that was incorporated as its own city and was not on land owned by a coal company. They also had a
sympathetic mayor, Cabell Testerman, and sheriff, Sid Hatfield — who was
apparently only a distant relation of the Hatfields who had famously feuded
with the McCoys, but liked to encourage that reputation so people would think
of him as a man not to be trifled with if you valued your life.
The owners’
response was to demand that miners sign so-called “yellow dog contracts” promising
not only that they wouldn’t join subversive organizations like the UMW or the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) but they affirmed their belief that
unions per se were wrong and they
supported the “American Plan” of workers negotiating with their employers only
as individuals. The show notes that while most of the tactics used by the mine
owners were familiar, after World War I and the Russian Revolution they had a
new weapon in their arsenal: anti-radical propaganda to convince people not
directly involved on either side of the mine struggles that the owners’ cause
was “pro-American” and the unionists were plotting to introduce subversive
ideas into the mines as the start of a plot to take over the U.S. and bring
Bolshevism and chaos. On May 19, 1920 — a day the UMW District 17 local, headed
by the militant Frank Keeney, had chosen to deliver money and food to striking
miners — a dozen armed Baldwin-Felts staffers came to Matewan with a huge stack
of eviction owners against the striking miners and demanded that Testerman and
Hatfield carry out the evictions instead of delaying them. The result was a
shoot-out in which Testerman and some of the Baldwin-Felts agents, including
Albert and Lee Felts, were killed during a gun battle after Hatfield sent his
deputies to arrest the Baldwin-Felts people for carrying out illegal evictions
at gunpoint. (This part of the story was more or less dramatized by John Sayles
in his 1987 feature Matewan; his
main characters were fictional but Testerman and Hatfield appeared among his dramatis
personae under their own names.) The story
ended as most of the previous ones had; the West Virginia governor declared
martial law, giving the sheriff’s deputies who weren’t union-friendly the right to throw people in jail and
hold them indefinitely without charging them with anything. Sid Hatfield and 22
others were put on trial for murdering not only the Felts brothers but Mayor
Testerman (Hatfield had married Testerman’s widow two months after the incident
and that gave the owners and their stooges in law enforcement the ability to
claim that Hatfield had personally killed Testerman because he wanted
Testerman’s wife), and while they were acquitted, that didn’t help the miners’
cause any — unable to get rid of him legally, the remaining Baldwin-Felts
people simply ambushed Hatfield and shot him.
The administration of President
Warren G. Harding sent in federal troops, and once again the miners naïvely
thought the feds would either be on their side or would at least be impartial —
instead the feds openly took the side of the mine owners and Army general Billy
Mitchell, famed as the father of U.S. military aviation, not only brought in
three planes but threatened to use them to bomb the miners’ camps, first with
tear gas and then with explosives, if they didn’t surrender — though when the
miners were bombed from the air
it turned out Mitchell hadn’t had anything to do with it: Baldwin-Felts had
rented two planes and done it themselves. Nonetheless, the strike, like all the
others before it, was decisively broken and the UMW didn’t succeed in
organizing West Virginia until the Depression, the election of Franklin
Roosevelt as President and the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, which
outlawed many of the anti-union practices the owners had used, finally made it
possible. The film presents this as at least something of a happy ending and
ignores the sequel — the systematic dismantling of protections for American
workers’ right to organize, the resulting decimation of the U.S. labor movement
(it currently represents less than 7 percent of America’s private-sector work
force and is likely to shrink even further as the U.S. Supreme Court and
Republican-controlled state governments strip public workers of their labor rights as well), the export
overseas of most of the blue-collar jobs on which the American labor movement
was built, the shift in coal mining from expensive and labor-intensive
tunneling to simply blowing up the mountains to get at the coal within (which
is both far more environmentally destructive and much cheaper in terms of the
number of workers needed), and the ideological shift in West Virginia, which
has moved from a swing state to a solidly Republican one, largely because
Republicans have been able to use the strong environmental presence within the
Democratic Party to persuade West Virginia’s remaining coal miners that the
Democrats, if they get in power, will abolish coal production altogether. It’s
a deeply sad story — like most of America’s labor history — but also a profoundly
moving one showing how the most unlikely rebels can sometimes arise once they
are pushed too far down for too long.