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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday August 25, 1910
“The Irwin Coal Strike” by Thomas F. Kennedy, Part I
From the International Socialist Review of August 1910:
[Part I of III]
THE fourth startling shock sustained by complacent, self-satisfied American Plutocracy within ten months is the strike of 20,000 or more miners in the Irwin coal fields in Westmoreland county, Pa.
It is a shock not because of its magnitude or duration, but because of the feeling of absolute security enjoyed for years by the operators. They convinced themselves that their kingdom was strike proof. They had established a perfect quarantine against labor agitators from the outside. Numerous failures of small strikes extending over a long period of years clinched their convictions that they had established ideal labor conditions. They felt as secure as the ancient slave masters, the Feudal barons or Schwab when he drank that toast to “The best, most contented and CHEAPEST labor in the world,” meaning of course the workers in his private Siberia at Bethlehem.
The first of the four tooth-loosening shocks was the unorganized, spontaneous revolt of the workers at McKees Rocks in June 1909. The second was at Bethlehem, and the third the general strike at Philadelphia.
The fourth, the strike in the Irwin field, presents some features that were absent in all of the others.
First there was a feeling of distrust between workers in different sections of the field. This began when the Greensburg men refused to join the Latrobe men in a strike some ten years ago. This feeling of distrust has grown with every failure of local strikes.
Although the organizers of the United Mine Workers had been working all through the field the first mine to be closed was at Greensburg. When the Greensburg men and the organizers visited other mines they were met with the cry: “You fellows would not join us when we wanted to strike, now you can go to H—”. In spite of these first repulses those that first came out remained out; continued the agitation and within a month had the field pretty well tied up. At this writing (July 15) the field is practically idle.
Another feature that distinguishes the Irwin strike from the other three epoch marking strikes of the last year is the wide area covered by the mines involved.
At McKees Rocks all worked for one company in one enclosure and entered through the same gate. Six hundred determined men quit one day and next morning planted themselves at the entrance gate, and as thousands of the workers were eager to join them anyhow the strike was on and within 48 hours the works were idle. At Bethlehem the situation was similar and the same tactics were practiced but not with the same success. The car men at Philadelphia were organized. They had the backing of what labor organizations there were and the sympathy of the whole working class and some of the middle class. And almost all of them lived in a city having an area of only about 100 square miles.
Westmoreland Co. has an area of 1060 square miles, and the strike affects nearly half of it. The whole anthracite field has an area of less than 500 miles so that the Irwin strike extends over a larger area than the anthracite region. From Export on the North to Herminie on the South, is twenty miles as the crow flies, but 25 by rail. Bradenville on main line of P. R. R., 43 miles east of Pittsburg, is the eastern limit of the strike belt. From Export to Bradenville is 35 miles, and from Herminie to Bradenville 25 miles.
Twenty-seven years ago this summer the miners along the Pan Handle R. R. west of Pittsburg went out on strike. The railroad mines all came out, but the mines at Castle Shannon and Allentown, which supplied the Pittsburg domestic market and some of the mills remained at work.
With an American flag, a fife, a tenor and a bass drum they marched boldly from Mansfield (now- Carnegie) to Castle Shannon through Allentown. The contingent from my old home (Fort Pitt) returned in a few days footsore and be draggled but rejoicing at the success of their expedition. Some of the men that took part in that demonstration will surely see this. Jim Croughan who played the bass drum still lives near Carnegie, and the fife player John Riley lives at Oakdale. The coal companies began to import “black legs,” as scabs were then called, and on a rocky bluff near my old home, commanding a good view of the two mines at Fort Pitt, tents were erected and a camp maintained until the strike was settled.
In the early days of the present strike in the Irwin field the miners adopted the same tactics practiced with such good results by their fellow craftsmen on the Pan Handle over a quarter of a century ago. They gathered in large bodies and marched past the mines that were working and past the homes of the miners that refused to join them in the battle. They offered no violence to person or property. But messages written in letters of blood could not have had such magic power to move those that remained at work as did these silent bodies of marchers. The purpose of the marchers was not to slug, not to intimidate, not to antagonize their fellow craftsmen, but to win them to the support of the strike.
[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Mother Jones, Last Great Battle, UMWC p420, Jan 26, 1910
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=WyH1VOBn6BsC&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA420
The International Socialist Review, Volume 11
(Chicago, Illinois)
-July 1910 to June 1911
Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1911
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/
https://books.google.com/books?id=8-05AQAAMAAJ
ISR – Aug 1910
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=8-05AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA65
“Irwin Coal Strike” by Thomas F. Kennedy
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=8-05AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA99
See also:
Westmoreland County Coal Strike of 1910–11
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmoreland_County_coal_strike_of_1910%E2%80%9311
McKees Rocks Pressed Steel Car Strike of 1909
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressed_Steel_Car_strike_of_1909
Report on Strike at Bethlehem Steel Works
by Chas. P. Neil, Commissioner of Labor
WDC, Government Printing Office, 1910
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008892134
Philadelphia General Strike of 1910
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_general_strike_(1910)
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There Is Power in a Union – John McCutcheon
Lyrics by Joe Hill