After the defeats in 1921-22, the U.M.W.A. virtually abandoned West Virginia to the coal operators. There, as in a number of other regions, reaction to the John L. Lewis machine led to independent, progressive miners’ union were forming in the late 20s and early 30s. Now-legendary militant mine leader and socialist Frank Keeney brought organization back the notorious Kanawha Valley with the West Virginia Mine Workers Union. Cara Cook reports, with a supplement from Tom Tippett on the new union’s first strike.

‘The Union Returns to Kanawha’ by Cara Cook and Tom Tippett from Labor Age. Vol. 20 No. 5. May, 1931.

“DAMN! Damn! Damn!” Across the placid waters of the Tidal Basin, with the green-blurred willows drooping above it, the noble columns of the Lincoln Memorial gleamed in the early morning. Inside the great seated figure gazed out upon the Monument towering into the blue sky, masses of yellow forsythia at its base, the green lawns and darker hedges nearby, the budding trees lining the Mall, — all the signs of an awakening spring day — Easter Sunday in Washington!

To be sure, the famous cherry trees were not out; neither, therefore, were the tourists, at that time in the morning, so one could gaze undisturbed at the temple of the Great Emancipator, and reflect —

“Damn. Damn it! Oh, damn it!”

For all I could see before me in that heavenly spot were rows and rows of shacks, all alike, dilapidated, one-story, three-room hovels, loosely boarded, unpainted, bare of every comfort, surrounded with litter and red mud and black dirt — the “homes” of coal miners in the Kanawha Valley, West Virginia, where I had been the previous day.

From the filth surrounding those who dig the coal that sets our industrial pulse in motion, to the beautiful seat of the government which guides that pulse, to the very steps of the Memorial erected by that government to the “man who freed the southern slaves!” The reasoning may have been sketchy, but the contrast was inevitable. Something was rotten somewhere, and for the moment one could only sit and swear at “the system.”

Then I recalled, and felt better at once, that a week previous, something of that poverty and slavery had been brought right into the well-oiled machinery of Washington, when Brant Scott, miners’ representative, had testified before the Congressional Committee on Unemployment Insurance. Moreover, he had told his story so convincingly that a full house of newspaper men had given him wide publicity, and the country, particularly the aggrieved West Virginia operators, had learned that the “well satisfied and well housed labor supply — 85 per cent white and native born,” as described in some of Charleston’s literature, was not as “cheap and contented” as had been supposed!

Then the faces and words of some of the miners themselves came flooding in upon me again, and I felt still better, — in fact I felt fine! What a grand bunch they were! They know the fight is no tea party, that the machinery is well oiled, and the odds against them, but still they climb miles over the mountains to meetings, take the union pledge as fast as it can “be read to them, meekly receive eviction notices — and move into shacks next door — and, finally, when the screw comes down too tight, as at Prenter, with a 10 per cent wage cut, just walk out on their own hook, trusting to God and the Union to keep them alive, but preferring to starve fighting for their rights, than to starve working for the boss.

Scene of the Fight

The miners’ union battle-field is not a pretty scene just now. It is torn with intra-union dissensions, weakened by mishandled finances, betrayed by corrupt officials, drained of honest, militant leadership, and continually threatened from above by a mismanaged, over-productive, highly competitive industry. Perhaps in view of all this, some sections of the movement may be forgiven their apathy and confusion. West Virginia is the outstanding exception, and is now engaged in an effort to organize itself into an independent progressive state union. The story of the formation of the West Virginia Mine Workers was told in the April issue of Labor Age.

What is the scene of this particular fight? The Kanawha Valley lies in the southern-central part of West Virginia, extending along the course of the Kanawha River for some 50 miles. At Charleston, the capital of the state, this river joins the Elk River, forming the Great Kanawha, an all year round navigable stream.

The Valley fosters a tremendous number and variety of industries, with coal by far the most important, and chemical products coming second. It is estimated that there are 17,280 square miles of coal beds in the entire state, two-thirds of the total land area, and that this constitutes a larger potential output than the combined coal areas of Europe, exclusive of Russia.

There are about 102,000 coal miners in the state. Around 23,000 of them work in mines along the Kanawha Valley, and the newly formed West Virginia Mine Workers is at present concerned with this group. It expects later to extend throughout the state, and then into unorganized fields in adjacent states. The Union claims 15,000 members to date.

The Valley has a long and colorful fighting history, ever since 1774 when the first family moved onto one of the creeks. It was Indian country; Kanawha itself is an Indian name meaning “River of the Woods” and woods indeed there are! The River winds southeast, bordered on either side by “mountains,” the western foothills of the Appalachian range, varying from 300 to 800 feet high, covered with beautiful mountain foliage wherever there isn’t the black blot of a coal camp or the scar of a pit track down the hillside.

The topography of the Valley as seen from an airplane must be amazingly beautiful and intricate. The mountain ranges have no regularity of trend or elevation; streams flow in every direction. Branching off the main River every few miles is a creek or “crick,” as it is pronounced down there, — Campbell’s Creek, Kelley’s Creek, Coal River, Cabin, Paint, Davis —running back between the hills for miles, and other branches in turn wandering off into other “hollers.” The creeks were formerly the road beds; now there are county roads along most of the branches, generally in very bad condition. There is no way in and out except by these roads, unless it be over the hills, and often paths can be seen going up and over, the “short cuts” by which many travel afoot.

Isolation of Camps

This isolation of the camps is one tremendous obstacle in organizing work; it takes so long to get from one camp to another by road. Time seems to mean nothing when the men are off on union work, gone for days at a time, and no word of their whereabouts. Telephones? Surely, in the company stores!

The mining in this region is slope mining, where the coal is simply dug out from a hole in the hill side. The level chambers run back in some cases for miles, but the only evidence they are there is the black mouth, and the slide down which the cars run by a balanced gravity system, — the loaded car goes down, pulling up the empty car, with an unceasing rattle and roar, and a shower of dust as each load is spilled into the breaker at the foot, from which it feeds into the waiting freight cars.

Clustered at the foot of each mine slide, around the breaker, and straggling off down the “cricks,” are the coal camps, company towns every one of them, the only property not company-owned being the roads and the school houses, and sometimes the local movie. Most of these do not show pictures now, however; miners do not earn enough for movies.

I wonder if the Chamber of Commerce go-getter who wrote “It (the Valley) has developed into a section noted for its splendid, palatial and well furnished homes,” ever took a trip up the River. If so, he must have been — what he was, a paid ad man, for you don’t have to search out the camps in the “hollers”; they line the main highway all the way down to Charleston. The pictures accompanying this article speak for themselves. Perhaps they are no worse than the run of coal miners’ houses, but miners from the organized fields say they never imagined anything could be so bad, so I judge they are not average.

What struck me most forcibly, however, was not so much the utter poverty of these houses, as the lack of life in their occupants. The men at the meetings, the women “at home,” look tired and listless, without any reserves of animation or interest. The children look old in youth. If they are boys, the mine is ahead of them; if girls, the same existence over again as miners’ wives. A few “escape” to jobs in the city; a few more into the various industrial plants in the Valley.

These places they live in are not homes, of course; they are just shelters from the weather. They belong to the boss, so why should anyone take an interest in keeping them habitable and attractive. Like as not, tomorrow, you’ll get a notice like this:

HATFIELD-CAMPBELL CREEK COAL COMPANY

R. P. Brown, House No Shanty. Putney, West Va. Dear Sir:

This is to notify you that we require a quiet and peaceable possession of the house which you now occupy, within five days from the date of this notice. Yours truly,

Superintendent.

But they do have an interest now to which they respond intellectually and emotionally. The Union! It will bring them to meetings after a day’s work, tired, but willing to stand for hours listening to speeches and taking in new members. They will walk miles over the hills to Sunday meetings. They tell you stories of the old days, and the good scraps, the “Armed March” that Mother Jones precipitated and in which many of them took part; hair-raising episodes of gun-men and guards, hill law and sheriffs, and inter-county feuds, their own organizing work, and the less dramatic stories such as, “I been in the movement since the Knights of Labor was formed; been a coal miner for 42 years, but I ain’t too old to try hit again. Hit’s our only hope, as I see hit.” This a colored man, and an official in his local.

A Meeting on The Creek

The spirit you find is indicated by one meeting we attended on a week night. It was just a local meeting, and nobody knew it was to be held until about 4.30 in the afternoon. It was misting and chilly, a good night to stay indoors. When we arrived at 6.30, and forded the creek via a precarious log to the colored children’s school house, hardly anyone was in sight. Fifteen minutes later, appearing from nowhere, there were about 75, and in another quarter of an hour the school room was packed with about 200, most of them standing.

The only attraction was ”Tommy” Tippett, whom they’d heard before, two girl visitors from New York, and a miner from Illinois; no union officials, no union business, just some friends sympathetic with their movement, and in whom they too, therefore, were interested and curious. The four women present, (two colored) apologized for their small numbers, and “if we’d knowed about the meetin’ sooner, we’d run around and got some more women folks.” That’s the way they organize down there, by “running around and getting others.”

They were amused at our interest in the company “money,” or scrip, specially made tin and brass coins, stamped with the particular company’s name or emblem, and marked “Payable in merchandise only — non-transferable.” And on the other side, “Payable in cash on pay days when due to employee to whom issued.” Which is a joke, for these miners earn so little that many of them are actually in debt to the company most of the time, and their pay envelopes, read at the end “Balance due the Company, $7.40,” or $ I 375 or $48.20.

One company recently made much of the fact that while its mine was not working, it would advance its men $1 a week in company credit. The men, of course, had to have this much to keep from starving to death, but after it was spent, they were tied to the Company for another dollar’s worth of labor.

What do they buy at the company stores, and how much do they pay for it? The food is almost uniformly salt pork, pinto beans, coffee, bacon, potatoes, rolled oats, oleomargarine, and  canned milk for the children. Many companies won’t allow their workers to keep a cow on company property, for then they’ll buy that much less milk at the store, so where there are cows, they are kept way up on the hills, where “there ain’t no decent feedin’ and it’s a hell of a job to get at ’em.”

No fresh vegetables, no fruit except in cans, rarely butter, never cream, and for meat the inevitable “sowbelly.”

One of us collected samples of prices at a company store and an independent store a mile away, to check up on the common report that company store prices run 20 to 40 per cent higher than prices at independent stores. The results included such figures as these:

The companies make no bones about these higher rates. On the front of the decrepit Comet Talking Picture Theatre in Cedar Grove, anyone may read over the ticket window: Admission 15 and 25 cents; scrip, 20 and 30 cents.

And not content with maintaining* these extortionate prices for those workers who, in debt to the company, must trade at its store, one company at Ward recently dismissed some men for not trading at its store when they didn’t have to!

What do these miners earn a week to pay this company credit? It is difficult to generalize, the wages vary so, but the diggers run from 35 to 44 cents a ton, most of them getting about 38 cents. They dig from five to eight tons a day, making wages of from $1.90 to $3.00. From this has to be deducted money for powder, carbon for lamps and smithing for their implements, which altogether run about $3.75 a week. Other expenses which are checked off their pay each month are: doctor’s fee, $2; hospital, $1.30; funeral, $1.25; lights, $2; coal, $2. The motormen run about $3.40 a day on a regular day rate.

In an article on the Kanawha Valley in a biographical collection called “West Virginians” published by an association of West Virginia boosters, this statement occurs, after a long list of the industries and natural resources, in the Valley to attract aspiring industrialists:

“…and finally the equable climate, and excellent and abundant character of native white labor of the mountaineers, representing the purest strain of Americans, and whose outstanding trait is loyalty.”

They are right indeed, a thousand times! Loyalty! They have it written into their union obligations: “I do sincerely promise of my own free will to abide by the laws of this union; to bear true allegiance to and keep inviolate the principles of the West Virginia Mine Workers…as long as life remains.”

The Prenter Strike by Tom Tippett.

The West Virginia Mine Workers’ campaign to organize the 23,000 miners in the Kanawha field by the middle of May has been considerably enlivened and somewhat endangered by a strike on April 16 of 500 men employed at The Collieries Company mine at Prenter. The walkout was precipitated when the company attempted to impose a 10 per cent cut. The campaign strategy, however, was to avoid local strikes until after the coal operators had refused to meet the union in conference to work out a uniform wage scale for the entire Kanawha field.

In this walkout therefore the miners agreed to go back to work in order to permit the campaign to proceed, if the company would recognize a check-weighman, which would in reality offset the wage cut. The company refused point blank, in spite of a state law which requires that all coal companies permit the miners to put their own weighman on the tipple to check the company weigh boss. The strike, therefore, is for a check-weighman. Wages and working conditions will be considered by the union only when it is able to force the operators into a joint conference, perhaps about May 15.

Meanwhile the Prenter strike must be supported. The strikers and their families constitute a group of 1400 people all of whom must be fed. The union is now fighting evictions in court.

Prenter is the camp built by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers when that union went forth on its elaborate capitalistic ventures. The scandal and bankruptcy which followed resulted in the Prenter properties going into other mysterious hands. The Collieries Company is supposed to lease the mine at Prenter, but its main office is in the Union Trust Building at Cleveland. The town Prenter is named for an official in the Engineers’ Union.

Relief is urgently needed for the Prenter strike, and for the campaign as a whole. The address of the union is: George Scherer, Secretary-Treasurer, Room 9, Old Kanawha Valley Bank Bldg., Charleston, West Virginia.

Labor Age was a left-labor monthly magazine with origins in Socialist Review, journal of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Published by the Labor Publication Society from 1921-1933 aligned with the League for Industrial Democracy of left-wing trade unionists across industries. During 1929-33 the magazine was affiliated with the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) led by A. J. Muste. James Maurer, Harry W. Laidler, and Louis Budenz were also writers. The orientation of the magazine was industrial unionism, planning, nationalization, and was illustrated with photos and cartoons. With its stress on worker education, social unionism and rank and file activism, it is one of the essential journals of the radical US labor socialist movement of its time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborage/v20n05-May-1931-Labor%20Age.pdf