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Hellraisers Journal – Monday February 21, 1921
Winthrop D. Lane on Civil War in West Virginia
From the Appeal to Reason of February 19, 1921:
Coal Barons, Guns and Courts in Hand, Fight
Attempts of Miners to Organize Unions
(You have read endless dispatches about the troubles in the mining district of West Virginia. But the Associated Press true to its time-established policy has obscured the issues of the struggle. The daily press, as a rule, presents no clear account of the conflict. In fact, in the ordinary news dispatches the miners are given the worst of the account. But one daily paper—the New York Evening Post-has seen fit to send a special reporter to the scene of the conflict, with instructions to tell the truth. He tells it in the following story, which, coming from a capitalist daily, cannot be accused of bias in favor of the miners. Indeed, you will note that this reporter is exceedingly careful not to tread too severely upon the toes of the coal operators. But, with all his caution and moderation, he gives the facts. Winthrop D. Lane, the author of the following article, is well known in the labor movement as a writer for The Survey, a liberal magazine which has in the past published many exposures by Mr. Lane of the persecutions of the workers:)
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BY WINTHROP D. LANE.
Mr. Lane has just spent six weeks in the bituminous coal field of West Virginia for the New York Evening Post. He went there to try to get a picture not only of the industrial conflict going on in that state, but also of the civilization back of it. He talked to operators, sat by the fire in miners’ homes, visited many mining camps, entered mines, and discussed the struggle with officials of the union.
WEST VIRGINIA is today in a state of civil war. This civil war is of a peculiar kind. It is not being fought by armies in the field, led by military commanders and seeking military victory. It is more subtle and covert than that. It is being fought through many of the ordinary channels of civilization.
It is being fought in the courts, through the power to withhold jobs, through the ownership of men’s homes, through the control of local government. It is being fought by strikes, by appeals to class interest, and the occasional resort to violence. Its weapons are injunctions, special kinds of contracts of employment, impassioned oratory and the refusal to work .
The forces opposed to each other in this war are the owners and operators of coal mines, on the one hand, and the men who produce coal, the miners, on the other. The miners are assisted and encouraged by the United Mine Workers of America, a labor union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The issue between these two forces is: Shall the miners have the right to belong to the United Mine Workers of America and to bargain collectively with their employers?
Naked Right Isn’t Denied.
Nobody denies the miner’s naked right to join the union. The men who manage and operate the coal mines of West Virginia do not say: “You cannot become a member of the United Mine Workers of America.” They do say: “You cannot become a member of the United Mine Workers of America and continue to work for us.” Those who join are discharged.
And the operators say to the union: “Your organizers shall not come among our men. We will not let you make your appeal to them.”
The operators believe that their position is justified. They believe that the union is selfish, domineering, unscrupulous. They believe that it will change their relations with their employees, and they see in its power rising costs of operation. They are determined, therefore, to keep it out.
The miners, on the other hand, believe that they have a right to belong to the union. They believe that this is an important and fundamental right. They believe that they have as much right to belong to the United Mine Workers of America as their employers have to belong to associations of operators.
See Certain Advantages.
Moreover, they believe that certain tangible advantages will come to them from joining the union. They can then secure wage agreements, specifying that certain rates of pay and conditions of employment shall be binding over a definite period of time. They believe that in this way they can earn more money and make better homes for their families.
The operators are in the position of power. Their power comes chiefly from their ownership of property. They own-or if they do not own, they lease, which is the same thing so far as power is concerned-practically all of the property that exists around a coal mine. The mining town is built on their property; they build it. They own the houses. They own the stores and the amusement places. They often build the churches and frequently the schoolhouses.
They guarantee the church against loss and sometimes supplement the salary of the school teacher. They own the building in which the Y. M. C. A. is located and can put the secretary out if they want to. They own the meeting halls. Sometimes they own even the roads.
Thus the operators are not only the miner’s employer; they are his landlord, his merchant, the provider of his amusements, the sanitary officer of his town, sometimes the source of his police protection, and the patron of his physician, his minister, and his school teacher.
Strike Is Miner’s Power.
On the other hand, the power of the miner is his power to refuse to work. He can exercise this power to the great inconvenience of the operator. He can shut down plants. He can interfere with the production of coal. He can cause financial loss. He can deprive the public of coal.
He can also, through the union, make appeals to the class interest of his fellow workers. He can cause disaffection and stir up strife. He can make capital out of the hostility of the operator. His power is neither so many-sided nor so controllable as that of the operator, but it is effective.
These are the forces that are opposed to each other in this West Virginia warfare.
The war is being fought through the control of public officials. In one strongly non-union county there are twenty-five deputy sheriffs stationed on the properties of various coal producing companies. These deputy sheriffs are public officials, nominated by the sheriff and appointed by the county court. They give bond as required by law. Their salaries are paid by the operators.
The treasurer of the local operators’ association gives $32,700 a year to the sheriff for this purpose. These deputies perform certain services for the operators. They guard the company payrolls from the office to the mine twice a month, for example. The operators defend this arrangement and say the county needs this extra police protection.
But several hundred pages of testimony taken by a commission appointed by Gov. Cornwell showed that these same deputy sheriffs clubbed men who talked unionism and ran union organizers out of the county.
Union Members Discharged.
The war is being fought through the control of men’s jobs. Men are being discharged for joining the union. Nor is that all. Throughout a large part of the non-union territory jobs are being given only to men who will sign contracts agreeing to leave the union, if they are already members, or not to join if they are not.
The war is being fought through the ownership of men’s houses. Miners have been evicted for joining the union; their families and their furniture have been put out on the street. Ten men were killed at Matewan in May last, following such evictions; among those killed were seven armed guards of the Baldwin-Feltz Detective Agency who had been employed to perform the evictions. The trials growing out of these killings are now in progress in Williamson.
But forcible evictions lead to trouble. So the operators have sought other means of putting men out of their houses. They have attempted to do so by law; and in so doing they have set up the contention that miners living in company-owned houses are not tenants but servants. This means that the miners are not entitled to notice that they must vacate by a certain date, but that they can be evicted the moment their employment ceases. The courts have, in effect, sustained this contention. Thus, one-fourth of the adult males in West Virginia, comprising the labor force of a basic industry, have no security of residence.
The war is being fought through injunctions. The state courts have enjoined the union representatives from trying to persuade the miners of two counties to join the union, and an injunction granted by a Federal court does the same thing with respect to the miners of a single company in another county. Another Federal injunction prohibits the officials and organizers of the union from even making the statement that a strike exists in a district covered by a strike order issued last July and still in force.
The war is being fought through the use of private detectives. Two operators’ associations have contracts with the Baldwin-Feltz [Felts] Detective Agency for a number of “secret service” men. These “secret service” men work in and about the mines without letting any one know of their presence and report upon whatever activities their employers want them to report upon.
United States troops have been used in the war. Twice in the last six months troops have been thrown into Mingo County, where there was a strike, and several hundred of them are there now.
If you are an operator you believe that these soldiers are necessary to protect property and to preserve order. If you are a member of the union you believe that they are there to protect strikebreakers and help to break the strike.
On the side of the miners and the union, the war is being fought by opposing the legal measures of the operators, by striking, by appeals to class interest, by trying to make unorganized men want the union, by bitter denunciations of the operators, and by meeting violence with violence.
The union has lost most of its legal battles. It has called one strike recently to secure recognition of the union; that was in Mingo county, after a large number of miners there had joined the union and the operators had refused to meet union representatives in conference.
The miners have been appealed to in many of the customary phrases of class warfare. They have been told that they are being “robbed” and “enslaved” by their employers, and have been urged to use their power for the advancement of the working class. Agitation has been intermittent and based upon an opportunist policy. Organizers have gone into non-union territory, at times when their own safety was in danger, to appeal to the workers.
Back of the attempt to organize West Virginia, the operators have seen the demands of the international union of the United Mine Workers of America for a six-hour day and the nationalization of coal mines.
Violence has been resorted to on both sides. Who brought the first gun into West Virginia, or who fired the first shot, is now a question of history, of twenty years or more ago. It would be profitless to try to answer it. The secretary of an operators’ association told me that following the strike of 1902 it became a widespread practice among operators in non-union districts to employ “private police,” whose job was to know when organizers came into the territory and to tell them that they were not wanted.
Private Police Armed.
Many of these private police were armed. The operators have openly employed bodies of armed men during the course of several strikes; T. L. Feltz, a partner of the Baldwin-Feltz agency, told me that he had supplied the operators with 300 armed men during the Cabin Creek strike of 1912. The secretary of an operators’ association already referred to told me that the ownership of arms and the resort to violence by the miners had been “in imitation of the methods employed by the operators after the strike of 1902.”
But today both sides are armed in many places. During my visit the civil authorities of Mingo County, encouraged by the presence of United States troops, took great quantities of arms from both miners and operators. An operator in Logan County showed me his “arsenal.” Several union officials have deemed it necessary to take out licenses to carry revolvers.
This is, in brief, an outline of the civil war that is being waged in West Virginia today. The war is not State-wide. Of 95,000 mine workers in the state, some 53,000 are already unionized. There are large territories where the operators and the union are working amicably under joint agreements. The fight centers about the rest of the state. It is hottest in a few counties.
Both sides are determined. Both believe they are right. There is no prospect of a peaceful solution.
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[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Fred Mooney, Mingo Co Gunthugs, UMWJ p15, Dec 1, 1920
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=2hg5AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.RA23-PA14
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Feb 19, 1921
https://www.newspapers.com/image/612855379/
See also:
Civil War in West Virginia by Winthrop D. Lane, 1921
https://books.google.com/books?id=3hYtAQAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
https://archive.org/stream/civilwarinwestvi00lanerich#page/n3/mode/2up
Tag: Winthrop Lane
https://weneverforget.org/tag/winthrop-lane/
Tag: Mingo County Coal Miners Strike of 1920-1922
https://weneverforget.org/tag/mingo-county-coal-miners-strike-of-1920-1922/
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They’ll Never Keep Us Down – Hazel Dickens