Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday June 21, 1921 Miners’ of Mingo County, West Virginia, Fight for Right to Organize
From The Survey of June 18, 1921:
The Conflict on the Tug
[-by Winthrop D. Lane]
Kansas City Star of June 18, 1921
THE gunfire that has been awakening echoes in West Virginia Hills as well as in the United States Senate chamber, where a resolution calling for a Senate investigation of the industrial trouble in that state has been under discussion, is neither a new nor an unexpected feature of the conflict over unionism in the coal fields there. No doubt some of the pictures recently drawn of the reign of feudism in that country have been too vividly colored; private families are not now engaged in the planned extermination of each other as they once were. But if the feud is no longer an active and malignant eruption in the life of the region, the tradition of feudism remains. The men who shot their personal enemies from ambush or in the open did not die without issue; their descendants still tramp the West Virginia and Kentucky hills in large numbers, sit at clerk’s desks in stores and village banks and even occupy the sheriff’s and county clerk’s offices.
The fact is that in the mines and mining communities of those regions there are today men who saw their fathers or grandfathers take their guns down from the wall, go a hundred yards from the house and lie in wait for prospective victims. Life is not held as dearly in such a civilization as in some others. The traditional method of settling disputes is too much by the gun; and when two men cannot agree, the courts are likely to find that the arbitrament of the law has been superseded by the arbitrament of the levelled pistol barrel.
Introduce into such a community, now, an acute modern industrial conflict. Let capital enter and bring forth coal from the hills. Let the whole country become an industrial area. Let the trade union enter and try to persuade the workers to organize. Let the owners and managers of coal mines say: “You shall not organize. We will not let you.” The methods that have been used to settle other disputes will be resorted to in settling this. The nature of the trouble is different, but the way of meeting it is the same. There are in the mines of West Virginia many men who know nothing of this tradition, who were brought up in other environments. But there are also, both in the mines and among the general population, many to whom the tradition is a keen memory. They are familiar with the use of firearms; most of them possess guns. They regard a fight between capital and labor as no different, in the tactics evoked, from any family or domestic quarrel.
This is not to say that all the stories of violence that have come out of West Virginia are true, or that the natives and miners have committed all the violence. Who fired the first gun in the industrial conflict there is now a matter of twenty years or more ago; certain it is that the policy of the operators employing armed guards and resorting to other questionable means of combating the union must be given a large share of credit for all of the bloodshed and property destruction there have been. But the point is that the present spectacle in Mingo county can be interpreted only in the light of this fundamental characteristic of the civilization. Violence is to be expected. And so long as the fight lasts between the operators of coal mines, on the one hand, and the men who produce coal, on the other, we shall read in the daily papers of casualty lists from the Tug River.
What the Senate Committee on Education and Labor will find, should it eventually go into the state, cannot now be predicted in detail. Doubtless it will try to discover what led immediately to this renewed outbreak of shooting. The most definite suggestion carried by the press is that more miners were evicted from their company-owned houses and that this augmented the existing bitterness. The committee will find that the Mingo county episode is only part of the larger situation throughout the coal fields of the state. It will find that the West Virginia conflict is essentially a conflict over unionism. More than half of the mine workers in the state are members of the United Mine Workers of America; the operators and the union are engaged in a death struggle over the organization of the others. It will find that wages and working conditions are an active subject of discussion, but that the crux of the West Virginia warfare is whether or not men shall belong to the United Mine Workers.
It will find that many operators believe the union an illegal and malevolent body. It will find current a charge that the union and the operators of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, whose men are organized, are engaged in a gigantic conspiracy to put the non-union operators of West Virginia out of business; this object is to be attained by compelling them to accept the union and so to compete on less advantageous terms than now with their unionized rivals. It will find the union accused of using violence to achieve its ends and its leaders charged with all sorts of socialistic and anarchistic aims.
It will find that the union accuses the operators of every repressive and vindictive action from the use of armed agents to evict families to the maintenance of an industrial system that is alleged to keep the worker in a species of feudal bondage. It will find that the coal companies own whole towns and that they use their power to prevent organization by the men. It will find, if it looks far enough, deputy sheriffs working almost exclusively for operators and paid out of their private funds, and “yellow dog” contracts compelling the worker to agree that he will not join a labor union so long as he retains his employment. It will find a history of industrial warfare going back a score of years.
With respect to the Mingo county situation in particular, it will find that a strike of mine workers has been in effect there since July 1, 1920. In the spring of that year, the United Mine Workers, strongly entrenched in many other parts of the state, began an organizing campaign in Mingo county. It met a considerable response from the miners there and formed a number of locals. Finally feeling itself strong enough, it invited the associated operators of that district to a conference; the purpose of this conference was to be to negotiate a wage agreement. The operators did not answer. Telegrams repeating the invitation were sent to nearly every operator in the county. This time the operators, with one voice and with marked similarity of language, refused to meet the union in any way.
The strike called July 1 was intended to compel the operators to enter a conference. It has been on ever since-a bitter and costly struggle. Not only have huge sums of money been spent—by the operators in advertising and in bringing in strike-breakers, by the union in supporting many families of the unemployed-but federal troops have twice been called into the district and the state constabulary has practically lived there. The present quartering of federal troops in Mingo county is the third and has been accompanied by the declaration of martial law. Evicted families have lived in tent colonies and, despite heroic efforts by the union to keep them in comfort, have suffered both from privation and, during the winter, from exposure. The union has never admitted that it was beaten, though the operators have for months now claimed that they were producing nearly their normal amount of coal and that the strike was over.
The whole West Virginia conflict, in this view, is a cross-section of the labor struggle throughout the country. It answers the question: What happens when an aggressive labor union undertakes to organize a particular region, and a group of determined employers says that it shall not? It takes its place in the orthodox history of the labor movement. If there has been a disposition in some quarters to regard the West Virginia conflict as the beginning of the “revolution” in the United States, there is no justification for such a view; the sniping and musket fire along the Tug will not grow into the booming of proletarian cannon.
The United Mine Workers, affiliated as it is with the American Federation of Labor, is out to better the conditions of miners. It is trying to extend its organization and to negotiate wage agreements. These agreements propose no changes in the economic basis of the industry. True, the union has declared in convention for the nationalization of the coal mines. This is more an ideal of certain local leaders and a vague sentiment among part of the membership, however, than a practical program of the rank and file of the official organization. Moreover, nationalization is to be sought, apparently, through the asserted will of a majority of the people; it is not to be attained, soviet-like, through a sudden seizure of the machinery of government.
The United Mine Workers has not even, as some unions have, a definite plan of workers’ participation in the control of the industry. It is not proposing a scheme for increasing production and efficiency. It has not yet attained to this conception of its relation to the industry and the public interest. It will get what it can for its members, and let the industry take care of itself. It has not come to the clear conviction, held by the leaders of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, for example, that by making the industry more efficient and productive it can better increase pay, shorten hours and improve working conditions. Perhaps there are progressive operators who would regard it as a more statesmanlike body if it should accept some such conception of its obligation. Meanwhile, so long as the union is an integral and orthodox part of the labor movement of the country, it is folly to grow fearful that West Virginia may loom forth as the battleground of a revolution by the workers.
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