Unions fueled rise of middle class
We are hearing a lot of talk about the contraction of the American middle class as we begin this journey through the 21st century, as well as the vast expansion of the middle class in the middle years of the last century.
According to many commentators, the emergence of the middle class after World War II was a product of gritty determination on the part of the generation that fought the war — the generation that came home to build all those homes and buy all those refrigerators, television sets and shiny new cars.
We can all agree that the men who slugged their way across Europe and took the fight to the Japanese in the Pacific and the women who stood by them were gritty all right.
As adolescents, they survived the Great Depression; as young adults, they endured the nightmare of a worldwide conflagration.
But the idea that the World War II generation fashioned the great American middle class on their own is just plain wrong. The foundation stones of the middle class were laid down long before the 1950s.
One of its cornerstones was union membership, and the unions that took flight following the war were products of a struggle that went all the way back to the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th.
To take just one example important to western Pennsylvania, the United Mine Workers, the labor union that roared on behalf of thousands of miners in Fayette, Washington, Westmoreland, Allegheny and Greene counties.
Today, the UMW is a shadow of its former self. At one time, it was a mighty host speaking for better than a half-million miners.
The UMW achieved greatness in the face of some determined opposition.
It tangled with the government.
A strike closed portals across the country in 1919, the year that followed the end of World War I. The strike was bitterly contested. For one thing, the government sent spies into the coal towns of western Pennsylvania to keep track of so-called radicals, subversive and communists.
Whether because of human nature, the confusions incidental to the spy game itself or a mish-mash of political ideologies, spying on radicals — repugnant in any case — easily morphed into spying on laboring men and women, many of whom were immigrants, and their leaders.
In the city of Indiana, agents trained their eyes on an unassuming “cigar and Catholic statue store” where “many Russian and Hungarian men” went in and out.
Charleroi Mayor J.W. Woodard came under suspicion for befriending striking miners. After a tip from a spy, police raided a pool hall in Monessen, confiscating union literature and making several arrests.
A Uniontown street corner speaker was tagged as a member of the notorious International Workers of the World, or IWW.
The union fought the notion, promulgated by companies and their allies in the press and academia, that it was un-American, un-economical and out-of-step with the times.
Management in many instances employed armed thugs, sanctioned as officers of the law, to keep order and keep the UMW at bay.
Union men took up arms themselves.
Blood flowed, men died, wives became widows and children grew up without fathers.
The 1920s and 1930s were one long fight. It was all pretty tragic.
At the same time, the way was paved to the high wages of the Fifties and Sixties to the emancipation of labor, and to the rise of middle-class America during what increasingly looks like a golden moment in our history.
“It is a melancholy fact that in the coal industry today there is a concerted drive to restore obsolete conditions of employment … out of keeping with the American Industrial System,” UMW president John L. Lewis said in the midst of the struggle.
Lewis maintained that labor and management should be partners. “One is essential for the pooling of labor … The other is the pooling of capital ….”
What was needed, Lewis said, were strong unions bargaining in good faith with companies run by men who, like labor leaders themselves, were committed to the well-being of the country.
It’s a formula that would work today.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail .com.