Coal labor conflict was once common
On this Labor Day 2022, let us remember …
By the time Ethelbert Stewart arrived on Capitol Hill to talk to lawmakers, he was a practiced hand in the struggles between management and labor.
In 1922, Stewart was in his 33rd year as chief statistician for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“I was in Ludlow the day the soldiers fired on the strikers and saw most of the bloodshed,” Stewart told Richard Barry, a reporter for the New York Times. The strike of miners at the Colorado Coal and Iron Co. in 1913-14 shocked the nation and shook the Rockefeller financial empire to its very foundation.
Two women and 11 children died at Ludlow at the hands of the Colorado National Guard and Rockefeller company guards.
Stewart’s purpose in coming to Capitol Hill was to speak to lawmakers about the dispiriting lives of miners, including those in Western Pennsylvania, in the year 1922.
“Theoretically, perhaps, the case of having nothing to do in this world ought to have made the men … happy and contended as the managers claimed … to have a house assigned you to live in … to have a store furnished you by your employer … to have public halls free for you to use for any purpose except to discuss politics, religion, trade unionism or industrial conditions … to have everything handed down to you from the top.
“This was the contented, happy, prosperous conditions out of which this strike grew…. That men have rebelled grow out of the fact that they are men.”
Nineteen-twenty-two was a strike year in the coal industry, just as 1919 had been, and 1927 and 1933 would be, and on into the future. I covered coal strikes in the late 1970s.
At one point, labor strife in the coal industry was a common occurrence. (One reason was that mining was once ubiqutious. Early in the 20th century, there were an astounding 23,000-plus coal mines in Fayette County, a number so huge it’s almost unbelievable. In those days, Fayette County was the beating heart of the coke trade in the United States.)
Take the strike that took place 100 years ago. It started in April 1922 and rolled on through the first snowfall.
The United Mine Workers went for broke that year. In addition to members of the union, the UMW called on nonmembers to lay down their tools and join the walkout. The union managed to enlist miners employed by the H.C. Frick Coal and Coke Co., the rabidly anti-union outfit which owned the majority of big mines in Fayette County.
The immediate cause of the strike was the rollback of miners’ salaries that had been brought on by World War I.
President Warren Harding tried to broker a deal. He failed, and then called on governors and local police to protect the miners who were clamoring to return to work.
A union spokesman responded, “No union miner will ever work under guard.”
In Herrin, Ill., scores of so-called scab miners were shot and killed in cold blood by striking miners. The massacre is one of the black spots in the history of the labor movement in the United States.
The sheriff of Fayette County, I.I. Shaw feared the murders would be replicated here. He clamped down on union rallies and closed pool halls. “I am not going to take any chances,” Shaw said.
In early July, three members of the tent colony at New Geneva were fatally shot by company police. The dead men left behind nearly a dozen children. One man’s wife, overcome with despair, was taken to a mental institution in Pittsburgh.
The strike left a trail of blood in the county. Dozens of men were killed and wounded.
By fall, some 4,000 striking miners and their families were living in tents in the county. Others were camped in barns. The onset of winter looked ominous.
That’s when the UMW pulled the plug on Fayette County strikers. Short of cash following a nationwide settlement, the union didn’t have the resources to continue the strike by Frick and other county miners. It would be another 19 years before the “captive” miners gained union representation, a feat engineered by Franklin Roosevelt on the day the United States entered World War II.
Credit for this achievement goes to Roosevelt and his sometimes nemesis, the legendary John L. Lewis, president of the UMW from 1919 to 1960. Yet they didn’t act in a vacuum. The true heroes were the miners and their families who took the hammer blows, and preserved despite everything.
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently, of “Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke,” available at Amazon Books. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.