Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday June 15, 1920
Logan County, West Virginia – Bastion of Industrial Feudalism
From The Nation of June 12, 1920:
Company-Owned Americans
By ARTHUR GLEASON
Montani semper liberi
(Motto of West Virginia)
Harrisburg Telegraph October 16, 1919
THE attorney of the Mine Workers has filed suits against the coal companies who have evicted miners. Each suit is for $10,000 damages for unlawful eviction. This touches the heart of the West Virginia trouble. In the non-union counties, houses are owned by the coal companies. Justice is administered by the coal companies. Constitutional rights are interpreted by the coal companies. Food and clothing are sold (though not exclusively) in company stores. The miners worship in a company church, are preached at by a company pastor; play pool in the company Y. M. C. A.; gain education in a company school; receive treatment from a company doctor and hospital; die on company land. From the cradle to the grave, they draw breath by the grace of the sometimes absentee coal owner, one of whose visible representatives is the deputy sheriff, a public official in the pay of the coal owner. As a worker under similar conditions once said: “We work in his plant. We live in his house. Our children go to his school. On Sunday we go to hear his preacher. And when we die we are buried in his cemetery.”
The employees live in company houses. Everything belongs to the mine owners, and home ownership is not permitted. The lease of the Logan Mining Company reads that when the miner’s employment ceases, “either for cause or without cause the right of said employee and his family to use and occupy premises shall simultaneously end and terminate.” The miners generally pay $8 a month for a four room house, a dollar for coal, 50 cents to a dollar for lights. Fulton Mitchell, deputy sheriff, states:
My understanding is that most of the companies have a form of lease, and when they lease to miners they reserve the right to object to any person other than employees coming on their possessions.
They do object. Mr. A. Bays is a traveling salesman who “works” the Logan District. He describes it:
Every operation has its armed guard—usually two. I was served with a little notice by a deputy sheriff in Logan, at Logan Court House, Fult Mitchell, to not go up Island Creek any more, that it was dangerous and I was liable to get shot. I had an option on a piece of coal land. The notice served on me by this man Mitchell forbade me using the railroad going up there and back.
The children of the employees receive company-aided education. E. F. Scaggs is Logan County Superintendent of Schools. He says:
We have 250 schools, every teacher counts a school, with a school population of 10,361. Actual enrollment is 8,650. There are three districts. In every district in the county the salaries of the teachers are supplemented. The Stone Branch Coal Co. proposed if I would get them a teacher, they would pay $15 on the salary. The Board of Education pays $1,125 for a principal at the Omar Schools. The Main Island Creek Coal Co. made it $2,500. J. W. Miller at Ethel is being paid $15 a month extra by the Coal Companies. I am trying to tell the interest taken in the schools by the Coal Companies. The Coal Companies at a number of places have built schoolhouses, and it cost them from seven down to five and up to eight thousand dollars, and they are waiting on the board until the board is financially able to reimburse them. A lot of medical inspection is being looked after in the schools by company physicians.
Wheeling Intelligencer October 1, 1919
The company stimulates religion. Mr. W. O. Percival superintends the Island Creek Coal Company, and says he dismissed Dan Chapple for talking unionism. He adds:
We have one Y. M. C. A. located at Whitmans (H. C. Mix) and one at Monaville (J. G. Suttles). We contribute $1,000 a year to each Y. M. C. A. The county employed teachers for six months, and the Island Creek Coal Co. extended this term on all schools for three months, and the expense for teachers was $4,360.50. At the school buildings we also supplied such things as slides, teeter-totters, and such things that cost us $600. I don’t believe we mentioned the church game. On the churches, we have one Union Church, one Catholic, one Greek Catholic, and the two Y. M. C. A.’s are used for Sunday School. One church is used principally by the Holiness people. One colored church and two schoolhouses are used by the Negroes. We also operate a sanitary dairy. This is a photograph of the dairy. We have five deputy sheriffs. The company contributes enough to cover the service that they render us.
The Logan Mining Company employs 600 men, and is managed by J. J. Ross. Mr. Ross says:
In 1916 our company paid an 18 per cent dividend; in 1917, 12 per cent. Our company contributes about $50 a month toward the minister at Earling, $40 a month at Dingess Run, and also contributes to the Y. M. C. A. on Island Creek. I have always been opposed to unionization. I object to groups dealing with us to this extent: I don’t think they can make their wants known as well as they would individually. We pay the deputy at Monaville. We did pay the man on Dingess Run extra, but I don’t know whether we do now or not, and at Earling we pay the man extra. We try to consider our employees and ourselves the same as one large family, realizing that the company must make a reasonable profit if they want to do the best they can for the men in the way of wages and living conditions.
The coal companies subsidize health.
Dr. R. R. Vaughn states:
The United States Coal and Oil Company of Holden own a hospital. They check off from their men to pay for that hospital or to take care of it. My own employment is by assessment on the men. The married men are assessed $1.20 a month, and the single men 70 cents a month—checked off from the pay roll.
The President and General Manager of the Rum Creek Collieries Company, J. M. Vest, says:
We are doing this as a business policy. A lot of this welfare work is done with that object in view. We think that it is good business. We have had no strikes in seventeen years.
Logan County, where justice is administered by privately-owned agents, is a peaceable and orderly community. Property is safe. Womanhood is guarded. The only item with which folks are careless is human life, and that only when it concerns itself with forming unions.
The Nation of May 29 described the efficient system of deputy sheriffs, paid for by the coal companies. These cool, alert men do not approve of “union agitation.” John Napier, a Logan miner, confesses:
Us boys called for our rights, asking to be as American citizens, and for pay like other coalfields had. We wasn’t getting enough for our families. Don Chafin takes me to the office and they fired me. Chafin says, “In the morning when we come, if you ain’t out we’re goin’ to take you out with a wagon.” I says, “My wife is in a condition she can’t move.” He says, “We are not responsible for anything like that.”
Elliott Hargis, miner of Logan, says:
Mr. Wilson, our superintendent, when he wants anything done, he calls up Don Chafin. “Don, where is your men? How many men can you get at such and such a time?” and he tells him. I heard it myself. He called Don up and told him “something is goin’ on in this camp. Get your men and look about it.” Don Chafin and Joe Hatfield come down the road and met me. Don hit at me. One of the other deputies hit me on the side of the head and knocked me down on my knees. They got me down and beat me a while and stomped me in the head, and finally Don quit. Don says: “I don’t want to catch you in here again.”
So faithful is the guard kept against unions that the miners, who violate this tradition of Logan, carry concealed weapons—in one case, a long knife up the sleeve.
It is felt to be expedient by Logan officials that miners should not get together in groups and talk. This is called “bunching,” and the danger is that they might discuss unionizing. Randolph M. Dial, deputy sheriff, tells how he saw a group forming:
A bunch of men gathering up there that way was something unusual. You don’t see it in the coalfields. I expect there was 25 or 30 bunched together, and I asked what they were doing there.
The companies create and control living conditions.
The Logan coal fields are new. As the result, a number of the operators have come in with modern ideas, and installed housing that is superior to that of the average of older organized mining towns. Logan County compares favorably with other West Virginia fields and with Ohio fields in housing, health, sanitation, recreation.
Last year Logan produced nine and a half of the 76 million tons of the State, with 9,444 persons employed in and about the Logan mines.
One of the points of grievance is that Logan miners are paid for the car-load instead of by weight. A miner, W. M. Lyons, says:
We come out and asked them to weigh our coal. They give me a house notice and put me out. About 90 per cent of the men want to organize. I ain’t heard but two men that spoke against it.
J. S. Terry is a merchant of Aracoma, Logan County. He states:
There is a difference in the size of the cars, I think, and a difference in the prices for the car. All the miners that I know of over there would be glad to have scales. They are now paid by the car, some at 50, some at 60, and 70, up to 90 cents a car. I think the living conditions are very good, so far as I know. The biggest complaint in that field is about those guards. They claim they are taking it off of the coal to pay those fellows. When they really ought to give it to them. They think these guards are against the right of free speech, that they have them to keep them from organizing.
Some of the miners believe that those coal cars contain on an average 2.53 tons and that they are underpaid. They desire a system of weighing. The latest report of the Department of Mines shows that for the State of West Virginia pick miners received 92 cents a car and 69 cents a ton. In Logan County they received 71 cents a car and 52 cents a ton. Machine miners received on the average for the State 55 cents a car and 89 cents a ton. In Logan, they received 53 cents a car and 32 cents a ton. The Federal Trade Commission reports that labor costs in Logan are $1.24 a ton, as compared with $1.59 for the State, and $1.78 for the United States.*
In organized districts, overtime work is paid at increased rates. Thomas F. Downing, General Manager of the Monitor and Yuma Mines, Logan County, makes this statement:
We pay the same rate for hours over eight hours.
Mr. Jones says:
We have to work over eight hours in a great many instances, but the men are paid. We pay one-eighth of the day’s work per hour for overtime. He is paid for his overtime at the same rate he is paid per hour for work on the other eight.
Says Mr. Downing:
Whenever you have the union, you reduce the production materially. It is a continuous series of petty strikes.
R. L. Wildermuth, an operator in both West Virginia and Ohio, states:
I should say the efficiency is 25 per cent greater in Logan than in Ohio.
West Virginian September 6, 1920
I wish to pay my tribute to the courtesy and fair-mindedness of Governor Cornwell. He placed at my disposal all the facts in the possession of the State Government. His one request was that they should be revealed. He said to me:
I am unwilling to discuss these matters with a propagandist who does not respect facts. In your visit to Logan County, made for the purpose of an impartial investigation of the health, sanitary, and industrial conditions, you doubtless found some of the best housing and hospitals for workers in the State. The living conditions are better in Logan than in many of the counties of the State.
You have noted that the union men arrested by the deputies were carrying weapons. You are aware that it is the policy of the United Mine Workers to plant their own men inside a district. It is perfectly true that Logan officials do not want organizers inside the county. On occasion, they have treated organizers roughly, even beaten them up. But it has not been proved that the majority of Logan miners wish to be organized. In fact, some of them were in the force that went to oppose the invasion of Logan on September 6 by armed miners who marched from Lens Creek, Kanawha County, to Coal River, Boone County, and whose purpose was to invade the Guyan Coal Fields.
The point of the whole controversy is whether unions in Logan are to be organized from the outside, or not. The United Mine Workers organizers claim it as a constitutional right.
I made a visit to Logan to witness the health campaign of Dr. S. L. Jepson, State Commissioner of Health, in conjunction with Dr. Lewis, of the International Health Board. This board and the State Department of Health are carrying on a health drive for Logan County. They study rural sanitation, make a survey of sickness, emphasize child welfare. They use stereopticon, motion picture, posters, and pamphlets. They visit the schools and homes. The local educational authorities, the best of the operators, are welcoming this work. That is a picture of peace.
Then we have the Senatorial Report of the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek outbreak with 21 murders. Senator James Martine said that “the hiring of armed bodies of men by private mine owners” and other devices are “but a little way removed from barbarism.”
Of the making of reports on West Virginia there is no end. A famous Y. M. C. A. leader made a searching investigation a few years ago. A report slumbers in the Department of Labor. But these reports are always made after the killing. The southwest of the State is preparing for another civil war. These two articles in The Nation are respectfully submitted to the Federal authorities as a report before the event.
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*One Logan operator averaged his total pay roll and finds he is paying $108.59 a month to each worker.
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