The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  Pennsylvania miners of the 1870s formed a union called the Miners’ National Association; elsewhere in years to come, the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the Communist National Miners Union (NMU) were active. In some struggles, including at Coal Creek, Tennessee, the Knights and the UMWA participated, and many rank-and-filers belonged to both. But the most enduring of the unions—as a result of a history that combined sacrifice and craven compromise, political idealism, opportunism, and corruption—proved to be the UMWA.

  The organization was formed in 1890 at Columbus, Ohio, when the Knights of Labor Assembly 135 and the Ohio-based National Progressive Miners’ Union combined. At first, the organization consisted almost entirely of native-born or British immigrant pick miners. After a strike that idled 100,000 miners in 1897, the UMWA won its first contract in 1898, the so-called Central Competitive Field (CCF) Agreement, providing wage increases and union recognition in five midwestern states. Next, the organization ventured into the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania, where miners were more ethnically diverse and more organized into the company-town system, and where child labor was common: The 22,000 working in the mines there included 5,500 “breaker boys” who sorted coal from slate and stone as it rushed by on a conveyor belt. In 1902, 150,000 anthracite miners struck and ultimately won a 10 percent wage increase in a deal brokered with magnate J. P. Morgan by President Theodore Roosevelt. Success drew in even more members, and by 1908 UMWA membership stood at 263,000. By 1914, it counted 377,688 miner members in twenty states. That figure would double again by 1919.34

  In the South, despite oppressive conditions, miners were indifferent, Caudill observed. They felt that as miners they were more prosperous than they’d ever been as farmers, the author believed. Things were going well for southern mine operators, as the anthracite strike and resulting coal shortage allowed them to penetrate new markets, including the upper Midwest and Great Lakes area. By 1910, the supremacy of anthracite in such places was at an end, and bituminous coal from Appalachia and from fields in Illinois and Indiana was on its way to becoming the predominant U.S. fuel.35

  Violence often accompanied both UMWA advances and setbacks. And out of one famous, violent incident grew a different kind of challenge.

  In Colorado, coal mines and company towns were scattered over 1,000 miles, but the operations of the corporate behemoth, CFI—owned by the Rockefellers after 1903—were concentrated in Huerfano and Las Animas counties in the south. The UMWA began an organizing drive there in 1913, reasoning that it had a network in place dating from a bitter 1903 strike, and that the state government led by Democratic Governor Elias Ammons was a likely ally. As in Appalachia, workers came from many nations: The first on the scene were Brits and Welsh, but soon came Irish, Greek, Italians, Mexicans, and Croats. But national divisions didn’t appear insurmountable—miners of every ethnicity seemed to want a union.

  Following a great parade of 3,000 marchers through the streets of the small city of Trinidad, all singing a union chorus set to the tune of the Civil War anthem “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” delegates to a UMWA meeting heard from a variety of speakers, including spellbinder Mary “Mother” Jones. Then they came up with a series of strike demands, including union recognition, a 10 percent increase in all pay scales, an eight-hour working day, elected checkweighmen to double-check company tonnage figures that determined miners’ pay, abolition of “the notorious and criminal guard system,” and three demands that challenged company-town prerogatives: the rights to trade in any store they wished, to choose their own doctors, and to live wherever they pleased. The unionists set September 23 as their strike date. CFI, along with the other leading coal firms, Rocky Mountain Fuel and Victor American Fuel, immediately rejected the union demands, and as mine guards began evictions, thousands of miners began moving themselves into ten tent cities. The largest of these, Ludlow, was set up around a railroad depot eighteen miles north of Trinidad at the edge of CFI property, and consisted of four hundred tents housing 1,000 people, over a quarter of whom were children.

  With John D. Rockefeller Jr. vowing to a CFI executive to “see the thing out, not yielding an inch,” the company’s in-house detective branch and the Baldwin-Felts firm began hiring dozens of thugs from as far away as Kansas City and Chicago.

  Violence began almost immediately. Even before the strike vote, Baldwin-Felts agents murdered a union organizer on the streets of Trinidad, and soon there were union killings, too, including the shooting of a rifle-wielding deputy sheriff. October saw four battles between strikers and guards in which at least nine men were slain. Baldwin-Felts had constructed a sort of armored car with a mounted Gatling gun, and that same month it attacked the tent city at Forbes, killing two men and wounding a nine-year-old boy.

  At the end of October, the governor sent in the Colorado National Guard, approximately 1,000 troops, with orders to disarm everybody—meaning chiefly the strikers, as company guards retained their arsenal—and to see to it that whoever wished to return to work was allowed to do so. The Ludlow encampment turned out in their Sunday best to greet the Guard, which they saw as neutral. In fact, the Guard’s ranks were increasingly filled by former deputies, mine guards, and detectives—hardly the disinterested types the strikers hoped for. Troops were soon escorting strikebreakers into the mines.

  In November, the governor attempted to broker a settlement, but talks collapsed over the issue of union recognition. Meanwhile, the National Guard began arresting strike leaders, and union efforts to turn away strikebreakers prompted federal indictments against the union for conspiracy to restrain trade. After a period of calm, the governor withdrew most of the National Guard troops in early April, leaving only two companies heavily salted with mine guards and CFI foremen.

  On April 20, the final reckoning came to pass. At 9 a.m., with many in the camp still asleep following a Greek Orthodox Easter celebration, the Guard attacked Ludlow. Machine-gun fire ripped the tents. The assault went on all morning and into the afternoon, with strikers, who included veterans of European conflicts, returning fire. Then in the late afternoon, with many dead, the militiamen entered the tent colony. No one can say how the subsequent fire started, but two women and eleven children perished in the flames.

  Ludlow was only the beginning of the violence, as leaders of the UMWA, the Colorado Federation of Labor, and the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) two days later called their members to arms. The resulting labor uprising produced further battles at several camps and widespread destruction of mine building and bridges. Unionists killed more than thirty strikebreakers, mine guards, and guardsmen.

  In late April, Woodrow Wilson sent in federal troops. By July, with thousands of nonunion men entering the Colorado mines, CFI output had returned to 70 percent of pre-strike levels. Five months later, the UMWA recognized reality and formally ended the strike.36

  It was another bitter defeat for the UMWA. National press coverage, however, helped create sympathy for coal miners and their union and left an evil stain on the Rockefeller reputation. “The charred bodies of two dozen women and children show that Rockefeller knows how to win,” one Cleveland paper darkly intoned. Demonstrations led by the likes of author and political gadfly Upton Sinclair became a regular feature at Rockefeller’s Manhattan headquarters and at the family compound, Kykuit. One beneficiary of the events: public relations pioneer Ivy Lee, who landed on the Rockefeller payroll, working to redeem the family reputation. Soon, John D. Rockefeller Sr. was out on the streets of New York in the guise of a kindly paterfamilias, handing out nickels to small children.

  More significantly, John D. Rockefeller Jr. realized that he should perhaps moderate his antilabor attitude. As fortune would have it, he made the acquaintance of William Lyon Mackenzie King, a former Canadian deputy labor minister, who soon became the head of the Rockefeller Foundation’s new industrial relations department. King was pro-union, but he also believed in labor-capital accommodation in the spirit of Christian br
otherhood. By the end of 1914, he’d devised a complex plan for a company union at CFI, which Rockefeller laid out in October 1915 to a Pueblo, Colorado, meeting of company managers and workers. There would be an elected representative for every 150 employees, and every four months these reps would meet in a conference called by CFI. “Joint committees” would discuss and make recommendations regarding safety, sanitation, health and housing, recreation, education, and “industrial cooperation and conciliation”—meaning wages and working conditions. Workers might lodge grievances via these representatives, with the possibility of appeal to a district joint committee or the company president. It had been only one year since the strike’s brutal and demoralizing end, but a majority of CFI workers voted for the plan. Even Mother Jones seemed to endorse it.37

  Rockefeller himself became a vocal advocate for progressive industrial relations, publicly excoriating U.S. Steel over its labor policies and instituting employee-representation plans at other Rockefeller companies, including Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of Indiana. The Rockefeller Plan—or Colorado Industrial Plan, as it was also known—gained further traction as the federal government’s War Labor Board adopted similar machinery in 1917. By 1919, 225 other companies employing 500,000 workers followed suit. By 1922, 725 such plans existed, and by 1928, they covered 1,547,766 employees. General Electric, Westinghouse, DuPont, International Harvester, General Motors, Procter & Gamble, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Goodyear Tire were all influenced in one way or another. As late as 1937, twenty-seven Harlan County coal companies had created and promoted such company unions as part of a campaign against the UMWA.38

  Such employee-representation plans, or company unions, represented a powerful alternative to labor organizations. Historian David Brody has argued that a broad program of welfare capitalism, including such representation plans, had won the support of most workers in the 1920s and may have become the prevailing model of U.S. industrial relations if not for the Great Depression and the New Deal.39

  That doesn’t mean that the UMWA disappeared in the interim. In fact, CFI followed the union’s lead when it came to wage increases, mimicking each of the six wage hikes the union negotiated for the Central Competitive Field (CCF) between 1916 and 1920. Moreover, Colorado miners struck for representation and better conditions again and again following the Ludlow events—in 1919, 1921, and 1922. A 1924 study by the Russell Sage Foundation found the employee representatives at CFI to be “timid, untrained, and ill-prepared to argue the grievances of the miners.” But unions can achieve little when employment falls dramatically, as it did in Colorado that decade, as oil and natural gas supplanted coal as fuels of choice in the western states.

  Nationally, the events in Colorado provided union members the sense of being part of a historic struggle in which they had a duty not to allow martyrs to have died in vain. The years of World War I saw the UMWA in an agreement with the federal government that provided for pay increases, but these failed to keep up with inflation, paving the way for a decisive confrontation in 1919. That year, more than 400,000 miners walked out and stayed out despite federal injunctions demanding that they yield. In the end, the federal Fuel Administration brokered an agreement with CCF operators that granted the miners a 14 percent wage increase, and later, a bituminous coal commission granted even higher pay hikes.

  By the end of 1920, though, economic hard times had clearly arrived, and few coal miners were employed full time during the following year. The union reached an organizational zenith with 500,000 members, but that fact disguised a chronic weakness, due in part to the ever greater introduction of labor-saving machinery such as the hand-loader. What’s more, high wartime demand led to an expansion of bituminous mining that meant a glut of coal on the postwar market. CCF operators asked for givebacks and pay cuts even as the union demanded a thirty-hour week with the same pay. A UMWA plan called for “democratic management” of a nationalized coal industry, wages fixed by national collective bargaining, and labor representation in government backed by a labor party. Instead, 1922 saw a CCF lockout that lasted for five months, benefited the nonunion coal companies, and pushed unionized mines further toward mechanization. Hundreds of companies declared bankruptcy, and 200,000 miners abandoned coal mining for other work. By 1928, union membership was one-fifth its 1922 level.40

  Things only got worse from there. The early ’30s were a period of privation, impotent unions, and broken strikes marked by sectarian division. Falling prices for coal led to lower wages, short time, and unemployment. A social worker in the Illinois coal country in 1931 found hundreds of children who hadn’t had a balanced meal in two years, while a miner’s lunch might consist of a sandwich of stale bread and lard. Incidences of disease, especially tuberculosis, rose. Meanwhile, the company towns fell into decay and decrepitude. Even though the vast majority of Appalachian men seemed to want a union, the UMWA existed only in scattered pockets.

  Harlan County, Kentucky, was one of these. A 10 percent wage cut in 1931 prompted 11,000 miners to join up with the UMWA, vowing to “strike while we starve.” A gun battle broke out near the town of Evarts between strikers and machine-gun-toting deputies: Three deputies and one miner died. The governor sent in the National Guard, arrested union leaders, and escorted in strikebreakers, many of them black. When the UMWA bailed out, the Communist-led NMU entered the fray and drew visits to the area from such intellectuals as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Edmund Wilson. But that union did no better against coal-operator force and surveillance. Meetings were broken up, gunplay was frequent, and a number of people were charged with “criminal syndicalism,” the broad, antilabor legislation that was used to crush the IWW.

  In West Virginia, the independent West Virginia Mine Workers Union (WVMWU) signed up as many as 23,000 miners by the end of 1931. Perhaps 60 percent of that state’s miners had been UMWA members by 1919, but in the years following the 1921 Blair Mountain battle, that union had disintegrated. In mid-summer, 8,000 West Virginia miners followed the WVMWU out on strike. Brutal evictions followed, and a shortage of food doomed the strikers, whose effort collapsed after one month.41

  Demands for wage cuts in Indiana and Ohio also led to violent confrontations and union defeats. Pennsylvania saw rioting and armed clashes in which three miners died, fifty-five were hospitalized, and more than 2,000 were gassed or injured. The NMU, behind most of the activity, could claim few accomplishments. 42

  Things turned around quickly after the June 1933 enactment of the National Industrial Recovery Act. The act created the National Recovery Administration, which called for industry-specific codes of fair representation to be hammered out between labor and trade groups. Section 7(a) of the act said that all codes must provide that employees had a right to organize and bargain collectively via representatives of their own choosing. Moreover, the act stipulated that no employee or job applicant could be required as a condition of employment to join a company union. Many employers, particularly in the steel industry, reacted as though the law had endorsed company unions—so long as employees weren’t “made” to join them—and the Bureau of Labor Statistics observed a great expansion in the number of company unions. But coal miners expressed an immediate and overwhelming preference for representation by the UMWA. On the day after the act’s passage, 80 percent of Ohio miners had joined up. By mid-June, the formerly union-free Logan County, West Virginia, was completely organized. During the same period, eastern Kentucky’s coalfields were likewise unanimous for the UMWA, and by the end of the month, there were 128,000 new members in Pennsylvania’s bituminous area.

  Union organizers expressed astonishment at how the miners were “flocking into the union by the thousands.” UMWA official John Brophy concluded that the miners had “moved into the union en masse . . . they organized themselves for all practical purposes.”

  Events continued to develop with eye-popping dispatch. The CCF system had collapsed in the 1920s, leading to wide disparities in wage rates: Pay vari
ed from $1.50 per day in parts of the South to $5 per day in Illinois. By the end of September 1933, a new bituminous agreement, along with a new bargaining structure, was in place. With the considerable arm-twisting of the federal government, the union and bituminous operators from Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and Tennessee agreed to wage rates of from $3.40 a day in the South to as high as $5.63 in the Northwest. The pact stipulated an eight-hour day, forty-hour week, a grievance procedure, automatic withholding of union dues from workers’ pay, and rank-and-file election of checkweighmen. No boy younger than seventeen would be allowed to work in a mine, and it was forbidden to pay wages in scrip, to require workers to live in company housing, or to mandate that workers make purchases at the company store.

  The agreement did not require miners to join the union, but they had pretty well seen to that matter on their own. As icing on the cake for the UMWA, in one of the first labor board elections conducted under the act, workers at Colorado Fuel and Iron dumped their company union, the Industrial Representation Plan that dated from right after the Ludlow events, and chose the UMWA by a vote of 877 to 273. The company had made wage cuts of 15 percent in 1932 despite the protests of representation-plan officers, undercutting any notion that these reps had bargaining clout. Shortly after the 1933 election, CFI abandoned its plan and negotiated the first UMWA contract.43

  By 1935, collective bargaining had become a way of life in the coalfields—with the exception of Harlan County, which remained an antiunion redoubt. The county was dominated by corporate giants including International Harvester, U.S. Steel, Peabody Coal, and Ford Motor Co., which liked Harlan’s low-sulfur coal for producing auto-body sheet metal. Harlan was cursed with higher freight rates than its northern rivals, and that alone was enough to drive the operators to wage war on unionism. Equally significant, Kentucky was the sole remaining state to allow deputization of private mine guards: Both West Virginia and Pennsylvania had outlawed the practice by 1933. In effect, Harlan operators had a private army backed by local government to enforce their dictates. These deputies, many of whom were mine supervisors, and sheriffs were virulently antiunion in their attitudes. But for some, there were extra incentives to keep things as they were: Sheriff Theodore Roosevelt Middleton acquired five coal mines of his own during his 1934-1937 term; he was also joint owner of the company store at Varda, where annual profits were 170 percent. Deputies in Harlan County and elsewhere were paid on a “fee system”—$2 for an arrest, 25 cents for summoning a witness, and so forth—giving them an incentive to crack down on “lawbreakers.” The result was what a 1935 Kentucky state investigatory commission termed a “virtual reign of terror” directed at union organizers in Harlan, singling out Middleton for specific mention.