Hellraisers Journal: From The Survey: “West Virginia, The Civil War in Its Coal Fields” by Winthrop D. Lane, Part II

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Quote Mother Jones, Doomed, Wmsn WV, June 20, 1920, Speeches Steel, p213—————

Hellraisers Journal – Monday October 31, 1921
Winthrop D. Lane on West Virginia’s Coal Field War, Part II

From The Survey of October 1921:

WV Civil in Coal Field, Title, by Winthrop Lane, Survey p177, Oct 1921

[Part II of III.]

WV Mingo Tent Dweller, Survey p177, Oct 29, 1921

Throughout the country today the bituminous coal fields are largely organized. Soft coal is produce in some twenty states. Such large coal-producing areas as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Western Pennsylvania have almost solidly accepted the union. The United Mine Workers of America is a relatively advanced element of the American labor movement. Its national body has demanded the nationalization of the coal mines and certain districts have begun to demand a share in the maintenance and control of production. Among the most important non-union fields are the Connellsville section in Pennsylvania, another strip along the Allegheny River, the Alabama fields, Utah, and these non-union areas of West Virginia. Bit by bit the union has succeeded in wresting one section after another of West Virginia. Bloody scenes have marked this progress at intervals. Today approximately half of the 95,000 miners in the state are members of the union. The unorganized portions are concentrated, for the most part, in the five counties of Logan, Wyoming, Mercer, McDowell and Mingo.

Who are the operators in this district that are so hostile to unionism? Not as much is known about the ownership of coal lands in West Virginia as might be. Some clue to the forces back of the struggle is gained, however, from the fact that the United States Steel Corporation is one of the largest owners of non-union coal land. Subsidiary companies of the corporation own 53,736 acres of coking coal land and 32,648 acres of surface coal land in Logan and Mingo counties combined, according to its annual report for 1919. In the Pocahontas field—chieflyMcDowell, Mercer and Wyoming counties—the corporation leases, through subsidiaries, 63,766 acres of the best coking and fuel property. The Norfolk and Western Railway Company, which traverses the Pocahontas field, is also heavily interested in coal lands in these parts. It owns nearly every share of the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company, a leasing company, on whose lands upward of twenty-five mining companies operate. The Norfolk and WesternRailway Company is commonly understood to be controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad. There are, of course, other large owners and many smaller ones. The resident owner is not scarce, but a great deal of the land in these regions is owned by absentee holders, living in other states and the large cities.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From The Survey: “West Virginia, The Civil War in Its Coal Fields” by Winthrop D. Lane, Part II”

Hellraisers Journal: Labor World: Samuel Gompers on the Fight of West Virginia’s Miners Against Government by Gunthugs

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Mingo Co Sprigg Local Sec E Jude re Gunthugs, UMWJ p14, Aug 15, 1920—————

Hellraisers Journal – Monday September 12, 1921
Gompers on Fight of West Virginia Miners Against Government by Gunthug

From the Duluth Labor World of September 10, 1921:

Gompers re WV Gunmen v Mine Workers, LW p1, Sept 10, 1921

WASHINGTON, D. C., Sept. 8.—Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, in a statement issued this week sets forth the fundamental facts in relation to the situation in West Virginia. He declares that in the mines there an unrestrained, unlimited greed absolutely dominates.

“The appetite of this private greed is upheld by a private army of killers the like of which exists in no other state,” says the labor chief. He shows how the state government has crumbled under the rule of the mining interests and declares the federal government must destroy the rule of gunmen by restoring civil government.

Information Lacking.

[Says Mr. Gompers in his statement:]

With the situation in West Virginia at a most critical juncture it is almost beyond belief that there has not been placed before the public complete and accurate information regarding the events leading up to the position taken by the President of the United States.

There are certain basic facts which must lie considered before there can be fair and proper judgment of the West Virginia situation. These facts have not been presented adequately and in most cases not at all.

The public press has been negligent and the federal government has been equally so in not presenting to the people the full underlying truth.

Prejudice Miners’ Case.

The great mass of news relating to West Virginia conveys the impression that lawless bands of miners are roving the state without reason except an unjustified bitterness against the mine owners. “Uneducated mountaineers,” they are called.

There are four basis facts which are consistently ignored and which it is the duty of government and press to present. These are:

1—The mines of West Virginia constitute the last refuge of autocracy in the mining industry. In these mines an unrestrained, unlimited greed dominates absolutely. Absentee owners hold immense tracts of rich mining land, demanding only dividends.

Private Army of Killers.

2—T’he appetite of this private greed is upheld by a private army of killers the like of which no longer exists in any other state. This private army is paid by the mine owners and naturally seeks to justify its presence by making “business” for itself in the form of trouble. The Baldwin-Felts detective agency recruits this army, but the mine owners pay the bill. Deputy sheriffs, paid by mine owners, form another wing of the private army, equally dangerous.

A Direct Protest.

3—The present strike is a direct protest against the action of the mine owners of West Virginia in refusing to abide by the award of the United States coal commission. If the United States government at this time de­fends the mine owners and does not destroy the private armies of the mine owners the government is in the position of sustaining a defiance of an order issued by its own authority.

4—The state government of West Virginia has broken down, not because the miners have protested against lawlessness, but because it has failed to stop the mine owners from enforcing law as a private business at the hands of privately paid and privately directed gunmen.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Labor World: Samuel Gompers on the Fight of West Virginia’s Miners Against Government by Gunthugs”

Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part IV

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Quote re Mother Jones, None too low or high, Ipl Jr p3, Jan 21, 1901—————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 17, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part IV

From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:

Mother Jones in West Virginia by D Adams, Rcky Mt Ns p28, Aug 11, 1901

(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.

[Part IV of IV.]

Mother Jones, Drawing, SDH p4, Mar 9, 1901

On our journey up to Berry, where Mother Jones addressed a mass meeting just at the end of the railroad trestle on this side of Sewell, we saw a man crawl from under the rods of a freight train that had slowed up for water. He was barefooted and his clothes were in tatters. He sat down beside the little spring that bubble up behind the water tank and Mother Jones divided our luncheon with him. He was a miner hunting for work, 43 years  old, with a family back in Alabama, glad to sell himself for the miserable pittance of a West Virginia coal digger. He had traveled all the way from Alabama, sleeping on the rods of freight cars. He was going up Quinnimont on the scent of a job. The whistle blew, he drank another cup of cool water, swallowed the last bite of sandwich and all in the twinkling of an eye swung under the moving train.

We encounter most difficulty when it becomes necessary for Mother Jones to cross the river. Most of the ferries are the property of the companies who control the adjacent mines. Where Mother Jones identity is discovered the ferrymen refuse to carry her. I took a snap shot of an altercation which she had with an operator when she was about to cross to the tipple of the Sunday Creek Coal company of Ohio.

The local ferry had refused to carry her, and she was just about to step into the rowboat of an obliging colored man when the operator of one of the companies rushed up. “I tell you I own half this river, and I dare you to cross,” he shouted.

“Huh, you own half the river, do you?” retorted Mother Jones. “Well, it’s a pretty long river for a man like you to own the half of. However, I believe God Almighty owns the other half, and maybe He has a block or two of stock in your half, so I think I’ll cross, come along, uncle,” to the awe-stricken colored man.

Needless to say Mother Jones crossed the river and talked to the little company of black smeared diggers gathered behind the tipple.

The dignity of this woman is awe-inspiring. When the constable and squire met us at North Caperton the other night she treated them with the indulgence with which a grandmother looks upon the practical jokes of her grandsons. She was not at all nonplussed, but calmly sat on a pile of railroad ties awaiting her time, and after a quarter of an hour’s parley between the squire and the constable (Mother Jones never parleys with a petty law officer) they decided to ride across the mountain to Fayetteville, the county seat, and look up the law.

They have not returned thus far, and Mother Jones held her meeting that night and numerous others since.

Sitting on the river bank near Hawks Nest, Mother Jones computed that every miner in the West Virginia coal fields must dig twenty tons at the very lowest estimate to pay the various company assessments before he has anything for food and clothing and powder. He receives a wage that will average anywhere from $1.00 to $1.80 per day.

Out of this comes house rent of not less than $5 a month, water, $1 per month; squibs, 25 cents per month, two gallons of oil per month at 50 cents per gallon, which can be bought anywhere on open market for 25 cents per gallon; powder, of which he uses between three and four kegs per month in order to mine enough coal to pay him $1.00 per day, at $2.25 per keg….[there continues documentation of expenses for blacksmith, for company doctor, for hospital, whether or not doctor or hospital care are needed].

All he has left he is at liberty to spend for food and clothing at the “pluck me,” the miner’s vernacular for the company store. It is pretty well named. The prices charged for everything are exacerbated in the extreme [examples given of prices for flour and salt at the pluck-me versus at stores in “free” towns-towns not under company control-where the miners are forbidden to shop].

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part IV”

Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part III

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Quote re Mother Jones, None too low or high, Ipl Jr p3, Jan 21, 1901—————

Hellraisers Journal – Friday August 16, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part III

From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:

Mother Jones in West Virginia by D Adams, Rcky Mt Ns p28, Aug 11, 1901

(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.

[Part III of IV.]

Mother Jones, Drawing, SDH p4, Mar 9, 1901

But back again to the miners’ shack at St. Clair. The coal digger’s children are restless. They sleep, six of them, in the same tiny, moonlit room where Mother Jones lies and I write. They roll their heat pricked bodies first on one side, then on the other. Little naked legs are thrown out over the counterpane, in the adjoining and smaller room the younger children and their father are trying to sleep, while the mother hushes the fretful baby.

This room, too, is flooded with light. Not moonlight, however, but the fierce glare of the coke ovens.

But there is no rest to the West Virginia coal miner or his helpless children in this valley of dreadful night. I have been in the crowded tenements of New York on nights of record-breaking heat, but even there I have never seen the misery that is here to-night. From Quinnimont in the east to Raymond in the west the New river valley unwinds 137 miles of burning labyrinth.

From its torture none can escape; the long processions of rumbling freight trains, the shrieking of the shift engine whistle, the heat and glare and belchings of the coke ovens.

The valley is a narrow, precipitous gorge, every foot of level surface being occupied by the railroad tracks. In many of the camps that Mother Jones and I traveled through this week these tracks lay but three feet from the doors of the miners’ dwellings. All along the valley the houses on the inner side of the railroad abut against the cliffs, and on the outer side perch upon piles driven into the steep, sloping banks running down to the river. On the inner side of the tracks and between them and the row of houses are the coke ovens.

The shack usually consists of three rooms-two bedrooms and a kitchen The company that employs the coal digger receives from $5 to $8 per month rental for these three rooms, which does not include the additional $1 for water, which they must carry themselves from the company well.

The water supply is the most pitiful of all the tragedies to be found here. The family with whom we are spending the night use the river water, as many others are forced to do who cannot pay the requisite $1 per month.

It is at all seasons of the year thick and muddy as chocolate, and is bad to bathe in, to say nothing of drinking. Mother Jones hired a passing colored woman to walk up to the company well, about a quarter of a mile up the tracks, and bring us a bucket of clear water, for we were very thirsty after our long tramp in the hot sun.

A bucket of clear, pure water, not as cold as can be drawn rom any New York city hydrant, but clear as crystal. The children rushed to it like bees to a clover blossom. They fought for the dinted old dipper. They scrambled for cups and tins, and a neighboring baby came toddling in with an empty the tin can.

It is to better just such conditions as these that Mother Jones has come down into this country. She holds meetings at the coal tipples in the evening at 6 o’clock. Then the men slide down the rails on the incline that leads to the mouth of the mine in the mountain above. She urges them to join the union and preserve their liberties. She tells them of the good times that have come to the miners of Illinois since the awful object lessons at Pana and Virden. How they work eight hours there, instead of ten, as they do here. How there is no dockage there. How they have done away with the company shack, and the company store, and the company blacksmith and church and doctor. How the miners there buy their powder for $1.75 per keg instead of $2.25; how the coal companies are obliged to pay them their wages in cash, without any dockage, and how they enjoy the boon of spending their earnings where they please.

At night she holds meetings, usually aided by some one of the four men organizers who are in that country to help her. Every means possible is used by the coal companies to intimidate those in favor of organization. Immediate discharge is the penalty should an employe be discovered to have joined the United Mine Workers. Of the 28,000 miners in the state only about 3,000 are union men. The companies are very independent, because every incoming freight brings only too many idle men searching for work, who are glad to step into the job left vacant by the union recruit and to move into the shack from which his family was evicted.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part III”

Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part II

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Quote re Mother Jones, None too low or high, Ipl Jr p3, Jan 21, 1901—————

Hellraisers Journal – Thursday August 15, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part II

From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:

Mother Jones in West Virginia by D Adams, Rcky Mt Ns p28, Aug 11, 1901

(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.

[Part II of IV.]

Mother Jones, Drawing, SDH p4, Mar 9, 1901

A week ago last Sunday I met this wonderful woman for the first time. It was in her own room at the Washburn hotel, at Charleston, whence I was to set out with her the next day on her mission up the Kanawha and New River valleys.

I saw a neat, trim, comfortable looking woman of 60 years, just tall enough and stout enough to be motherly in appearance. She wore a black silk gown, her platform dress, never donned, as I afterward discovered except on rare occasions. Mother Jones must have been a handsome young girl. Her skin, even yet, is soft and white, and there are few wrinkles in her broad, thoughtful brow. Her eyes are deep set, clear, shining blue gray, shrewd, alert, tender. While she talks they flash by turns indignation, scorn, surprise, amusement, merriment.

She was engaged in the very prosaic task of putting a new velvet binding upon her walking skirt, but she now dropped her work, laid off her glasses, settled herself comfortably back in her rocking chair, and asked if I had heard any news on my trip down regarding the steel strike.

[She said:]

It means so much to us all. Everything depends upon the success or the failure of the striking steel workers. This great strike is the beginning of the end of the campaign begun at Homestead just nine years ago, and which numbers Lattimer and Hazleton in Pennsylvania and Pana and Virden in Illinois among its blood-stained battlefields. Whatever may be the outcome of this, the greatest strike we have yet instituted, its immediate effects will be but temporary. Won or lost, it means a long step forward in industrial evolution. If the union forces lose their fight it will only precipitate the crisis.

It will take but a spark from the revolutionary torch to start a conflagration that will spread from one end of the country to the other. Ten years ago I found the miners and the mill workers timid and wavering and easily subdued. Now I find them bold and firm and uncompromising. They are becoming educated in economics. While they have been using their muscles for their masters they have been training their brains to think and reason for their own advancement.

The people are patient, infinitely patient. Oppressed people have always been patient until patience ceased to be a virtue. They will sweat at the furnace, they will crawl on their bleeding knees through the dark coal caverns, they will even see their young children broken under the wheel of commercial greed. All this they have borne for a long time, with only occasional mutterings of discontent. It is always the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The wage slave must be ground down just a little more, his yoke made only a little heavier.

When the cataclysm comes the people of this country cannot expect anything different from what has befallen nations that have allowed the classes to exploit the blood and brawn of the masses. Human nature is not different to-day from the human nature of 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago. In the bosom of the hard oppressed toiler in the mine and the mill and at the furnace there is slumbering a long suppressed vindictiveness. This spirit I find in the workers everywhere.

Mother Jones’ voice, clear and ringing when she addresses a crowd, is soft and low in conversation. It is the voice of the gentle nuns of he Canadian convents where she was educated and whose schools she taught prior to her marriage. While yet a very young women there came the great tragedy of her life. Her husband and four little children were swept away by yellow fever in less than one month’s time.

For more than thirty years Mother Jones has been a student of economics and participator in the leading industrial movements of the nation. She is numbered among the agitators of the famous “Sand Lots Movement, ” in San Francisco many years ago.

She was one of the orators who were wont to address the mobs that gathered about the mint in that city, howling for Chinese exclusion. She has taken and influential part in every great strike within the last decade. Her title was bestowed upon her by the 500,000 American Railway union men during the great railroad strike at Chicago in 1897.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part II”

Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part I

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Quote re Mother Jones, None too low or high, Ipl Jr p3, Jan 21, 1901——————–

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday August 14, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part I

From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:

Mother Jones in West Virginia by D Adams, Rcky Mt Ns p28, Aug 11, 1901

(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.

[Part I of IV.]

Mother Jones, Drawing, SDH p4, Mar 9, 1901

OF IMMEASURABLE importance as a factor in the unit of organized labor is the mission that Mother Jones has been delegated to bear to the 28,000 toilers in the coal mines of West Virginia. To her the United Mine Workers of all America now look for a solution of the problem that has long baffled and harassed not only themselves but all interdependent bodies of organized labor. That problem is the unionization of the West Virginia forces and their alliance with the federations of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

For Mother Jones the state of West Virginia is a forbidden land. She enters its borders as an outlaw and in defiance of the federal judiciary. Under the ban of the perpetual injunction issued by Judge Jackson in 1897, forbidding and restraining organizers of the United Mine Workers from entering the confines of the state forever, this gentle apostle of industrial emancipation is liable to arrest and imprisonment any moment that vested interests deem it expedient to enforce that dangerous and obnoxious law.

It is my privilege to accompany Mother Jones into this forbidden land and to journey with her on foot through the enemy’s country. Constables and squires meet us at every turn and serve all manner of papers and warrants and restraining injunctions on Mother Jones, which she, with fine contempt, chucks into her black silk hand-bag, and then goes ahead and does as she pleases. Only day before yesterday, as we walked into North Caperton at dusk, the constable and squire challenged Mother Jones and forbade her the right of addressing a meeting of miners on the opposite side of the river that night.

Only this morning the miner at Mount Carbon who sheltered us last night was discharged and his family evicted from the wretched company shack they called home. The West Virginia coal miner speaks to Mother Jones at the risk of losing his job, and his family harbors her under certain penalty of eviction should the fact reach the ears of the mine superintendent.

Wherever we go there is no room for us in the company inn, and thus we are only too often obliged to partake of the hospitality of a friendly coal digger and thus it is that Mother Jones lies fast asleep to-night upon the hard, bare, moon-washed floor of a hovel at St. Clair. Our host’s family cannot afford the luxury of a lamp. I am writing in the moonlight that streams through the sashless windows and the low, open doorway and whitens the snow of Mother Jones’ hair. Her head is pillowed on her hand-bag.

Mother Jones is dead tired. Up the high mountain side, down the dark ravine, through the fastnesses of the West Virginia wilderness, along the hot, dusty railroad track in the valley, by rock and by stream for many along, hot mile, she and I have trudged this day.

But before I go into an account of our journey through this awful valley, allow me to say a word about the good old woman whom more than 500,000 sweat-dripping toilers call and reverence by the name of “mother.” Let me tell you something about the personality of this heroine of a hundred strikes.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part I”

Hellraisers Journal: From The Survey: “The Conflict on the Tug” by Winthrop D. Lane, Miners’ Battle for Union Rights

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Quote Mother Jones, Doomed, Wmsn WV, June 20, 1920, Speeches Steel, p213—————

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]

Review, Civil War in WV by WD Lane, KS City Str MO p4, June 18, 1921
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.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From The Survey: “The Conflict on the Tug” by Winthrop D. Lane, Miners’ Battle for Union Rights”

Hellraisers Journal: Winthrop D. Lane for the Appeal to Reason: “West Virginia is today in a state of civil war.”

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Quote Fred Mooney, Mingo Co Gunthugs, UMWJ p15, Dec 1, 1920————

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

Facts West Virginia, Mingo, AtR p2, Feb 19, 1921

(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:)

—–

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.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Winthrop D. Lane for the Appeal to Reason: “West Virginia is today in a state of civil war.””

Hellraisers Journal: From The Nation: “Labor’s Valley Forge” by Neil Burkinshaw -Life in Tent Colonies of Mingo County

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Quote Fred Mooney, Mingo Co Gunthugs, UMWJ p15, Dec 1, 1920———-

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday December 14, 1920
Mingo County, West Virginia – Report from Miners’ Tent Colonies

From The Nation of December 8, 1920:

Labor’s Valley Forge

By NEIL BURKINSHAW

DRIVEN from their homes at the point of a gun for the crime of joining the union , more than four hundred miners and their families are camping in tents on the snow-covered mountains in Mingo County, West Virginia. To add to their difficulties federal troops have been summoned to play the ancient game of keeping “law and order.” But it will take more than the cold clutch of winter and the presence of soldiers to make the miners surrender in their fight for recognition of their right to unionize.

Mingo Co WV, Children in Tents, Lbr Ns Altoona Tb p10, Sept 3, 1920

Across the Tug River, a narrow stream dividing Mingo County from Kentucky, is the union workers’ “No Man’s Land” held by the gunmen of the Kentucky coal operators who waylay, beat, and sometimes kill anyone even suspected of union affiliations. The same condition obtains in McDowell County of West Virginia just south of Mingo. The region was settled in pre-Revolutionary days by pioneers who crossed the mountains from Virginia and North Carolina, a hardy stock of Welsh, English, and Scotch from whom the miners are descended. One rarely encounters a foreigner there so that the industrial war now raging can not be ascribed-as is the convenient practice-to the agitation of the foreign element .

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From The Nation: “Labor’s Valley Forge” by Neil Burkinshaw -Life in Tent Colonies of Mingo County”

Hellraisers Journal: Gunthugs Cross Tug River from Mingo County to Inflict Reign of Terror on Pike County Miners

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Quote Mother Jones, Doomed, Wmsn WV, June 20, 1920, Speeches Steel, p213———-

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday June 26, 1920
Pike County, Kentucky – Miners Marched in Chains by Company Gunthugs

From The Buffalo Labor Journal of June 24, 1920:

Pike Co KY Terrorized by Gunthugs, Ellsworth Co Ldr KS p1, June 24, 1920

EVICTED MINERS IN CHAINS
—–

Charleston, W. Va.-When Pike county (Ky.) miners joined the union they were evicted from company houses, chained together and marched in mud and rain 30 miles by armed guards.

This is one of the sensational statements made in a report to President Keeney, district No. 17, United Mine Workers’ union, by Thomas West, attorney, who investigated Pike county mining troubles. Pike county is opposite Matewan, where several persons were recently killed by Baldwin-Feltz detectives.

[Said the investigator:]

The miners were chained together and were walked in a pouring rain to Pike, 25 or 30 miles away. Mud was almost knee deep. Pike county deputies shot a man’s hands off on the Kentucky side of Borderland. About 30 of them were terrorizing both sides of the river. The Pike county deputies were all drunk. In my opinion they constitute one of the most dangerous gangs of men I ever came in contact with.

[Newsclip added from Ellsworth County Leader of Kansas of June 24, 1920.]

From the Duluth Labor World of June 26, 1920:

MINERS HAVE NO TIME FOR
W. VA. PRIVATE POLICE
—–
Protest Against Continued Use-
Demand That U. S. Senate
Make Investigation.
—–

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind., June 25.— Every possible effort is being made by the United Mine Workers of America to bring about a full and thorough investigation of conditions in West Virginia under which coal miners are employed. The recent battle between coal miners and coal company gun­men at Matewan, W. Va., in which 10 men were killed, has caused the officials of the union to redouble their efforts to induce congress to make a sweeping probe of the situation.

Operating under the guise of private detectives, hundreds of gunmen and thugs, nearly all with criminal records, are employed by coal operators of some fields of West Virginia, and these men enforce a reign of terror among the miners and their families. Miners are beaten, slugged and shot. They are arrested and thrown in prison on no valid pretext whatever.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Gunthugs Cross Tug River from Mingo County to Inflict Reign of Terror on Pike County Miners”