When Miners March
Page 7
The reason for this is obvious. West Virginia was and is a comparatively backward state for the simple reason that its tremendous wealth was stolen by outside interests. Pratt is only one example, and the ramifications of absentee ownership are far too complex to be analyzed in this short history. But it can be pointed out that Pennsylvania operators who were also owners of the Scranton Correspondence Schools owned the Paint Creek Collieries Co.. The Christian Collieries Co. and the Imperial Collieries Co. (also on Paint Creek) were the property of a Judge Christian of Lynchburg, Va., and other out-of-state wealth-reapers.
The only money that remained in the West Virginia vaults after the looting got well under way was the tiny sum paid the coal miners. More than that, only a fragment of this sum remained, for most of the miner’s wages returned to the companies through the check-off for rent, groceries, electric lights, blacksmithing, tools and other items.
West Virginia Robbed
The native West Virginia operator, of course, made such money as he could – and sometimes this was a fortune – but as it lined his own pockets it did not contribute to the general welfare of the state. The wealth of a Croesus was in the West Virginia hills, but it did not enrich West Virginia. Such a situation, to put it as mildly as possible, is criminal.
As has been stated before, on March 4, 1913, Governor Henry D. Hatfield, a Republican from McDowell County, took office. He had in his campaign promised the miners concessions and relief from the oppression of coal company guards. It is true that he did almost immediately conclude the first “Hatfield Agreement” with the UMW international officials – Thomas “Dean” Haggerty and others.
It is also true, as has been stated above, that the miners hardly welcomed the settlement with open arms. Many old miners whom this writer spoke with felt that Hatfield was really their friend. This writer most respectfully disagrees. That Hatfield was a friend of the coal operator is shown by his support in 1914 of coal operator Edward Cooper of McDowell County in the race for United States Congressman. The Huntington Trades & Labor Assembly had denounced Cooper as a founder of the before-mentioned “Coal Operators Protective Association.”
And Cooper was also supported by Taylor Vinson, who, it will be remembered, was the coal operator attorney who broke up the “peace meeting” called by Governor Cornwell in August, 1912, by declaring that the operators would never hear of recognizing the UMW. Another supporter of Cooper, it is fairly well confirmed, was Ernest Gaujot, the meanest, most murderous, most infamous of the Baldwin-Felts thugs in the 1912-1913 strike! Cooper won the election, but it must have been no day of rejoicing for the miners of the state.
Hatfield Stops Press
Besides this defection Hatfield was guilty of two acts which were as dictatorial and hateful as any of Glasscock’s. Martial law was continued after his inauguration, and was still in effect at the time of the first “Hatfield Agreement.” At that time there were two labor papers in the Kanawha Valley. Both had Socialist editors, and both had supported the striking miners with great energy.
But they differed with Governor Hatfield and international UMW representative “Dean” Haggerty as to the excellence of the first “Hatfield Agreement.” They said so in print and in no uncertain terms. One of the newspapers was the Labor Argus, published in Charleston and edited by Charles H. Boswell. Boswell, in the spring of 1913, had just completed four months in jail. He had been sentenced by the military regime along with Mother Jones and other UMW organizers, and his allegiance to the miners’ welfare could not be doubted.
Shortly after Boswell denounced the first “Hatfield Agreement", he was visited at his printing plant by Adjutant General Charles Douglas Elliott and several National Guard members. His office was searched and a squad of soldiers later took 106 of his mailing galleys, not bringing them back until late June, when martial law was ended.
12/9/52 (Fifteenth)
The other labor paper was in Huntington, but it, like the Labor Argus, had a large following in the coal fields. It was called the Socialist and Labor Star and its editor, W. H. Thompson, also attacked the Hatfield settlement, as has been before explained. The Friday, May 30, 1913 issue of this paper sets forth the reasons why the “little truth teller” had not appeared for a few weeks.
It seems that on May 9, 1913, at one o’clock in the morning, Thompson was awakened to find his house surrounded by deputy sheriffs. He learned later that four other owners of the paper were also entrapped like desperate criminals. The deputies showed him a typewritten order from Governor Hatfield directing that he be arrested and placed in the Cabell County jail. He was then taken to his printing plant where he found a squad of militia under Major Tom Davis. All this happened in Huntington, more than 70 miles from the zone governed by martial law! As Thompson describes it:
“Some of the type in the newspaper pages was beaten to a shapeless mass of mashed metal. After the types and plates had been beaten and broken the “forms” were hurled from the composing stone and their contents scattered over the office and street. Portions of the wrecked material were found the next morning two squares from the Star office.”
Editor Is Jailed
Account books, files and records were confiscated and other soldiers went back to Thompson’s house and looked through desk drawers for more “incriminating” material. Thompson, meanwhile, had been thrown into jail at Huntington. He stayed there until that afternoon, presumably under civil authorities, and was then turned over to the military. The military, headed by Major Tom Davis, took him to Charleston to the Kanawha County jail, where he was confined for 13 days and nights, sleeping without mattress on the jail’s steel floor. He was never charged with anything, never given a trial, and finally, released.
Governor Hatfield later denied some details of Thompson’s statements, but even giving Hatfield’s denials full credence the essence of the truth is as above. All credit to a brave labor editor! All shame to a newspaper-suppressing governor! Thompson, in addition to being editor of the Socialist and Labor Star, had been for six years a member of the UMW, was at the time of his arrest a member of the International Typographical Union, where he served as a member of his local’s scale committee, was a delegate to the Huntington Trades & Labor Assembly, and had served two terms as president of Huntington ITU Local No. 533.
Justice Is Denied
There is an interesting sequel to the Hatfield-Thompson feud. Thompson sued the Governor in the Circuit Court of Cabell County, alleging clear violation of his constitutional rights and demanding charges. There were many delays, but at length the trial was set for Feb. 9, 1914. And on March 30, 1914, the West Virginia Supreme Court issued a writ of prohibition against the Cabell County Court, forbidding it to proceed with the case against Hatfield!
That this was a perversion of the law, with the connivance of the state’s highest judicial body, seems obvious. The Supreme Court decision that Governor Hatfield had been right in suppressing the newspaper was not unanimous. One judge dissented, and his name should be revered by all who value freedom of expression. He was Judge Ira Robinson. Once before he had dissented in a civil rights case of major importance. This had been when the court majority had refused the habeas corpus petition of Mother Jones, John W. Brown, and others, imprisoned by the military court at Pratt.
Judge Ira Robinson had given as his opinion that they had a right to bond, despite the hysteria of the time. And he dissented in the Thompson-Hatfield incident with vigor:
“This decision (Judge Robinson wrote) permits a governor to deal with private rights and private property as he pleases. He has only to answer that he does so officially, and an action, though alleging facts showing that his act is wholly without his political province, will be prohibited. Such a view is wholly un-American and inconsistent with constitutional government. Reason and authority condemn it, and the administration of even-handed justice cries out against it.”
The ‘Red Man’ Act
Good for Judge Robinson! But the law under wh
ich Hatfield jailed Thompson is still on the statute books of West Virginia. And many a Union man has gone to jail because of it. This is the infamous “Red Man Act". This law was taken from the code of Virginia and incorporated in the West Virginia code by the Wheeling Convention which formed the new state in 1861. It is given in Sections 5, 6, and 7 of Chapter 14, Code of West Virginia:
“Sec. 5: The Governor may cause to be apprehended and imprisoned or may compel to depart from this state all suspicious subjects, citizens agents, or emissaries of any foreign state or power at war with the United States.
“Sec. 6: He may also cause to be apprehended and imprisoned all who in time of war, insurrection, or public danger, shall willfully give aid, support, or information to the enemy or insurgents or who, he shall have cause to believe, are conspiring or combining together to aid or support any hostile action against the United States or this state.
“Sec. 7: In order to obtain information in such cases the governor may send for the person and papers of anyone whom he shall believe to be subject to these last two sections.”
The old Virginia lawmakers did not, of course, have labor Unions in mind when they drafted the above Act. But coal miners have learned that their enemies will use any legal stick to beat a miner’s head. Certainly the Red Man Act has been so used. As the State Supreme Court has not ruled it unconstitutional, every Union member should see that it is wiped from the statute books.
12/10/52 (Sixteenth)
Laws are frequently perverted by reactionary employers from their original purpose. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in 1890 in response to the demand of the people for a limitation upon the great economic monopolies which had been born as capital had gathered control of whole industries into one gold-plated, steel-cored fist.
It may be stated flatly that the Sherman Act never accomplished its avowed purpose, as the monopoly of yesterday has swollen into the cartel of today – that is, corporations now act on an international scale, affecting the futures of millions in entire nations. Comparatively mild civil – not criminal – charges were brought in some cases against large corporations but the teeth of the law were most effectively plucked. Not only did these huge interests nullify this law, insofar as they were concerned, but they turned around this legal weapon and used it to shatter the organizations of the people, the labor Unions! You may be sure that the teeth of the law, by a financial magician’s trick, were then reinstated!
An instance of this occurred after the West Virginia coal strike of 1912-1913. On June 7 of the latter year, 19 of the officials of District 17 and the international UMW were indicted for violation of the Sherman Act. The people who labor created a law for their own protection and it was turned upon them by their enemies! And this was neither the first nor the last time that it happened. In this case, litigation drug on for a couple of years, but all defendants were ultimately dismissed.
Peace in West Virginia
The furor in the West Virginia coal fields gradually simmered into an uneasy peace. The senatorial investigating committee in the autumn of 1913 concluded its labors, but came to few conclusions. Sen. William S. Kenyon did, however, recommend government ownership of the coal mines: “The basic cause (of the trouble) is the private ownership of great public necessities, such as coal…” thus agreeing with the Socialists, insofar as he went. Kenyon also censured the good Bishop Donahue for saying that the conflict in West Virginia was due to the greed of both coal operator and coal miner.
“It is a little difficult,” Kenyon said, “to realize how there can be much human greed on the side of a man who is supporting a family and working day by day in the mines at ordinary living wages, but there is greed on the part of the owners of the property, and there always will be such greed.”
But there was no remedial legislation on a national level. Sen. James E. Martine of New Jersey had furnished considerable color and excitement to the investigation in West Virginia, and he was sincere in trying to help the coal miner. In 1914 he made a speech before the U.S. Senate:
“While I had the honor to serve as a member of a committee or commission, or whatever it might be termed, in West Virginia wherein these armed thugs played an important part. I felt so incensed and so rightly justified that upon my return I drew a bill which was introduced in the Senate and referred to the Committee on Education and Labor, wherein it was provided that every individual corporation or body of men employing armed guards for private purposes should be liable to a fine of at least $5,000 and imprisonment for one year. In the ordinary parliamentary way the bill was referred to the Committee on Education and Labor, and there it seems to sleep the sleep of the unfortunate and the just.”
It must have been given a powerful dose of chloroform by the corporation lobbyists, for it still sleeps today.
District 29 Formed
That the UMW in West Virginia had every intention of continuing its organizational fight is shown by the fact that in 1913 it formed District 29 to cover the New River field. The first president of this district was L.C. Rogers, and his headquarters were in Fayetteville.
Yet the Mountain State situation remained relatively quiet. Other trouble spots involving labor occupied the nation’s attention.
On Christmas Eve, 1913, the wives and children of striking copper miners at Calumet, Mich., were having a Christmas party in a schoolhouse. Some 700 children were at the party when a member of an operator group which called itself the “Citizens’ Alliance” yelled “Fire!” at the top of his lungs. In the ensuing scramble, 72 women and children were trampled to death. The miners later refused to accept money as recompense, and 150 of the “Citizens” beat up strike leader Charles H. Moyer, then president of the West Virginia Federation of Miners, shot him three times in the back and threw him on a train with a warning not to return to the state of Michigan. A local newspaper told of the incident, and was promptly suppressed.
And then the grim struggle of the coal miners in Colorado jumped into the headlines – West Virginia all over again. “Hell and repeat,” that’s what the miners called the West Virginia and Colorado strikes. And hell they were. The same Baldwin-Felts thugs who served the coal operators so well in West Virginia were hired by the Colorado mine owners. A steel-armored automobile, fitted with machine guns and rifles, was used in Colorado, just as the “Bull Moose” was used in West Virginia.
Colorado Strike Grim
The Colorado strike was even more terrible for the miners than the West Virginia battle. During the winter months in that state it gets below zero and stays there for many days. Evicted from their homes, as in West Virginia the miners had been evicted, the strikers had to live in flimsy tents. And the militia and guards were more murderous than in West Virginia. You might say that the West Virginia strike was a sort of “boot camp” in which thugs, detectives, state officials, and coal operators received their training for the Colorado wars.
A telegram to the 1914 UMW convention, sent by International Board Member John R. Lawson and A.W.T. Hickey, secretary-treasurer of the Colorado State Federation of Labor, gives an inkling of what happened in Colorado:
“Calvary, under the personal command of Adjutant General (John) Chase, with drawn swords, ride down one thousand women and children who were peacefully marching to a protest meeting this afternoon. General Chase, who became so excited that he fell off his horse, issued orders to shoot the women and children and shoot to kill. Woman carrying American flag knocked down with butt of gun and flag torn from her hands by militiamen. Cavalryman slashed another woman with a saber, almost severing an ear from her head. Militiamen jab sabers and bayonets into backs of women with babes in their arms and trample them under the feet of their horses. Mothers with infants thrown into military prison. Feeling is intense. Union officers doing everything to pacify the people”
After receiving such treatment the people, it may be guessed, would certainly be difficult to pacify. And the worst was yet to come.
12/11/52 (Seventeenth)
From available evidence, the miners’ charge that the militia was guilty of wanton assault and murder at Ludlow is fully justified. Women and children in the strikers’ camp were awakened by the murderous cough of machine guns and the ripping canvas and wood as slugs plowed through their temporary homes. They hurriedly ducked into holes which had been dug for their protection.
The miners fired with what guns they had, staying away from the tents in order to keep their families from being killed. All day the machine guns rained lead into Ludlow. The women and children were forced to lie in their holes during that time without food or water. One 11 year-old boy, little William Snyder, tried to climb out of a hole for water and had his head blown off by an explosive bullet.
One miner’s wife, Mrs. Pearls Jolly, acted as nurse, walking through the hail of fire with a large red cross marked on her white dress. She was wounded in the arm.
Holocaust at Ludlow
Darkness came and still the shooting continued. The women and children crawled out of their holes under cover of darkness and inched along on their bellies to the safety of a freight train. And then the militia swarmed in to Ludlow, set fire to the riddled tents and conducted a kind of war dance while they watched the flames eat into the April night.