Thomas Kennedy’s powerful reporting in the midst of the sixteen month effort to bring the United Mine Workers to the Irwin coal field east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Thousands of families were evicted, living in 25 tent colonies in the region in a stubborn, ultimately unsuccessful, drive in the face of extreme and violent resistance. The author calls it war, and war it was.

‘Class War in the Coal Field’ by Thomas F. Kennedy from International Socialist Review. Vol. 11 No. 3 September, 1910.

“THE Strike” are the words most appropriate to designate an article dealing with the situation in the Irwin coal field, because it is the strike of the year if not of the decade. There was nothing out of the ordinary about any of the other strikes that have occurred so far this year. The biggest strike in point of numbers and duration is that of the Illinois miners. It has been since its inception strictly orthodox, including the conflict of authority between the district organizations and the National Board and President Lewis. In Illinois both sides were, and had for years, been organized. All of the arts of diplomacy and bargaining were exhausted before the strike was declared. It is warm, pulsing stomachs against steel safes full of gold.

The Irwin strike is rashly unorthodox. Excepting the formal declaration it has all of the characteristics of a violent revolution.

More persons have been killed, injured and taken prisoners than in many of the bloody uprisings in the Balkans or South America which are so regularly exploited on the front pages of the “Joinals.”

Fifteen persons, two of them women, have met violent bloody deaths. Some of these were killed in open conflict, others in skirmishes, but most of them were brutal, cold-blooded murder of men who dared to tell a prospective scab that there was a strike on.

Nobody knows how many strike breakers have been killed at work owing to inexperience and their bodies burned or secretly buried at night. When a big mine is running with experienced men there is hardly a day passes without some being killed or badly injured, but if there are any accidents now nobody ever hears about them. Of course they are killing men and like wise of course they are burying them secretly, probably with the connivance of the county authorities.

Some of those arrested were deputy sheriffs. One is in jail for the most brutal, cold-blooded murder in the criminal annals of Pennsylvania. Three others are out on bond charged with murder. One operator is out on bond for having kicked and killed a pregnant woman.

Some of the strikes that received so much notoriety from both the capitalist and socialist press were but child’s play alongside of this. The waist maker’s strike in New York was a case in point. Proximity of course had much to do with it. The capitalist papers could safely excoriate the little capitalists that are engaged in the waist industry. They did not own the papers. They did not furnish any of the advertising and gave the “Jionals” a chance to prove to the workers how they love them.

For shocking sensations, intensely dramatic incidents and solid elemental tragedy this Irwin strike surpasses anything since Homestead.

There were not fifteen killed in the skirmish of the waist makers, no three hundred injured, no 1100 prisoners taken as has been the case in Irwin. There were no fourteen foot stockades to keep strike breakers in and strikers out. There was no regiment of “Black Hundreds” collected from the slums and barrel houses of Pittsburg and other cities, armed to the teeth and sworn in as deputy sheriffs. There were no evictions from company houses and an enforced life in over crowded tents like nomads of the desert.

The whole labor press of America have neglected not only their duty but their opportunities in this Irwin strike. While they are discussing craft autonomy and shouting with joy about Bucks, one of the greatest battles of the class war is raging and they don’t even seem to know it, excepting in Pittsburg.

The Greensburg Argus, a Democrat organ published in Greensburg has done good service in exposing the insolent, drunken thugs that parade around armed to the teeth looking for trouble and if they can’t find it—making it. The Washington Labor Journal edited by William Black, a printer and published or edited in Washington, Pa. has published every word it could secure about the strike.

When the deputies commit an especially vicious act of villainy in true bandit style, they always cut the telephone wires so that the first report that reaches the rest of the world is their own cooked up account.

Of course the operators being the most powerful and wealthiest capitalists in Pennsylvania can easily muzzle the capitalist press. They have muzzled it and only very small harmless items appear in their inside pages except in the “Leader.”

They are offering $6.00 an oven for men to pull coke. A man can pull three ovens a day so that they are offering $18.00 a day for strike breakers. They are offering all kinds of minor inducements such as free fare, free furniture moving and free rent. The regular price for pulling coke in the Irwin field is about 75 or 85 cents an oven.

The Union War Chest.

The Syndicalists can scoff at the war chest, but had it not been for the war chest of the Miners’ Union, the strike would be but a memory. As soon as the slaves revolted they were ordered out of the company houses. Had the strikers been obliged to get out of the district there would have been no difficulty about getting and keeping strike breakers. But in anticipation of the evictions the officials of the Miners Union ordered 400 tents used in Alabama and bought 100 more, making 500 tents now in use. In many cases where a man rents from a private individual or owns his own home as some of the miners do around the larger towns, the men and boys occupy the tents while the women and smaller children sleep in the houses.

The camps are a constant reminder that there is a strike. The stupidest strike breaker is bound to discover the meaning of the camps before he is very long on the job. So long as there is one single striker’s tent in the Irwin field the strike is not over.

At first living in the camps was a picnic and was the first holiday some of the miners and their families have had in their lives. But now summer is on the decline. Already the nights are chilly and crisp October is only a month ahead so the strikers are chaffing and growing impatient. The growing frequency of clashes with guards and scabs is evidence of their growing desperation.

The scab hunters tapped a rich vein about the middle of August. In 1903 the Meyersdale region was swamped with new importations to break a long drawn out and bitterly contested strike. The Union was annihilated and the strikers driven out and pursued with a relentless black list. The scabs were never white washed and never forgiven but were treated by the survivors of 1903 as traitors and enemies. For several years the operators in the low coal of central Pennsylvania have been so hard pressed by competition with the cheaply mined coal of West Virginia that the mines have been idle or partly idle. For several years work has been slack and times hard around Meyersdale so that it was not difficult for the scab hunters to prevail on those that had scabbed in 1903 to scab again.

They know what they are doing too. They are not being deceived as are so many. They are going to stay. They are going armed and to a comrade who spoke to a batch of them going to Latrobe, they said they would shoot the first man that dared to attack or molest them even so much as by telling them there was a strike. These are the first experienced miners that have been brought in to take the places of the strikers. They are foreigners and of the same nationality that is the backbone of the strike in the Irwin field. These fellows should be able to get at least $10.00 a day and I have no doubt they will.

Cossacks vs. “Black Hundreds.”

Brutal as the state constabulary have shown themselves on numerous occasions the testimony on all sides is overwhelming that compared with the thugs and bums engaged as deputies by the coal companies the State Police are gentlemen.

One of the odd developments is the cordial dislike of the State Police for the deputies. The State Police are not backward about declaring that practically all of the rioting and killing has been caused by the deputies. You must understand that economic interests are at the bottom of this feeling of these two forces for each other. The rank and file of the Police get $60.00 a month and board, no matter what is doing. When all is quiet they get their pay for patroling some country road on a well groomed saddle horse. If there must be a strike they would much rather see a nice quiet orderly one where there are no riots.

But the deputies are in a different boat. If all were quiet they would have no occupation. So to make their jobs secure they must keep something doing all the time. They explode a charge of dynamite under the corner of an unoccupied house, fire a lot of shots some night or when they meet an unarmed striker on the highway slug him or arrest him. When there is any real duty to perform, when there is a batch of strike breakers expected who must be prevented from talking to the strikers the first thing they do is fill up with whiskey. At one hotel where a bunch of them stopped, six drinks of whiskey in their stomachs and a half pint in their pockets was the regular ration, before going out on any special duty.

Who They Are.

Not only every race but every combination and every cross of every race that ever came from Europe is represented from the Arctic Ocean to the Persian Gulf and from the Caspian Sea to the Bay of Biscay. Around Bradenville and Latrobe there are a great many Italians, the staunchest and most resolute group engaged in the battle. At Claridge and Export there are large numbers of Poles. John Potlar of Claridge who was brutally murdered by one of the “Black 100’s” was a Polish Catholic. Around Greensburg, where the strike started, there are many Americans and Americanized Germans. At Madison on the Hempfield branch, I saw more Scotch and Irish miners than I have seen since I worked in the mines on the Pan Handle 27 years ago. The Arena mine, where these men work, has not turned a wheel since the first day of the strike. A car has stood half loaded since the last day they worked. Not even one man has deserted at Madison.

Alert and Suspicious.

In the early days of the strike the Socialists at Greensburg engaged a big hall and advertised a meeting of striking miners for Sunday and had John Slayton make an address. The bills did not say anything about who was calling the meeting and as soon as the strikers, especially the foreigners, arrived they wanted to know, “Who calla that meet?” They admitted after the meeting that they suspected that it was the bosses had called it to make some move to disrupt the strike. They were delighted when they found it was a working class political party wishing to give them instruction and encouragement.

It is really dangerous for a stranger to enter the mining camps alone without something to show, some pass or some credential. I was rash enough to venture out along the New Alexander branch visiting the camps at New Alexander and Salemville. An organizer or some officer of a local went with me or I knew some one at all the camps I visited excepting those at New Alexander. The “Black Hundreds” and the state police eyed me suspiciously.

When I got to one camp, I stopped in the road opposite where a group were standing inside the fence, but there were only scowls for me. I walked over and made as if to enter when one of them asked in a low, menacing tone, “What you want?” The instant I saw the first scowl I knew I was under suspicion. I did not in the least resent it. In fact I was rather pleased to find that these latest recruits (they were the last to join the strike) were so alert that they suspected anyone that even spoke to those whom they looked upon as enemies of their class. The fellow that acted as spokesman while I was squaring myself and proving that I was not a spy nor a scab is holding the paper in the photograph. The paper is the charter of the newly organized local. This experience taught me not to visit camps without a conductor. Both the strikers and the guards are suspicious of strangers.

The Injunction.

The injunction is sweeping. It forbids marching in bodies anywhere in Westmoreland County. It forbids the strikers from coming anywhere near the mines, and is such a thoroughly workmanlike job that when the strikers wanted to attend a funeral they had to get a permit from the judge and then the deputies violated the terms of the permit and Tom Jamison compelled the man that carried the American flag to lower it passing Jamison No. 2.

This No. 2 manned by the same kind of foreigners thousands of whom are on strike, is one of the mines that the strikers have not been able to close or even cripple. It is a coke plant and many of the workers work outside. Jamison felt that it would have bad moral effect on his submissive slaves who refuse to revolt to have the American flag carried along the public highway, so backed by his armed retainers like a feudal baron of medieval times he ordered the AMERICAN FLAG LOWERED. I wonder what some of these patriots think of it, some of these fellows who are always waving the old flag until they dull the points on the stars.

The injunction of course forbids the strikers under penalty of imprisonment for contempt of court, to speak to any strike breaker in order to tell him that there is a strike.

After the injunction was secured and especially after it was made permanent, the operators with a child-like faith in its efficacy began to send strike breakers in on the regular trains. The strikers either ignored the injunction or never heard of it. Anyhow I have seen them on train and trolley scanning faces and sizing up passengers and when they suspected one, ask him for a match or a light or find some excuse to engage him in conversation. Nobody will ever know how many men have been turned back by these scouts. Lately, however, the companies have been waiting until they collected a car load or part of a car load and then they would have a special haul the car in at day light in the morning. The strikers have ignored and dodged the injunction, but hundreds of them have been arrested and held for court.

The Storm Centre.

Although only one killing has occurred at Export it has gained the most notoriety. The few sensational items that have appeared in the capitalist press of Pittsburg have nearly all borne an Export date line. The biggest mine of the Westmoreland coal company employing over 1,000 men, is located at Export. It is a wretchedly dirty, straggling settlement twenty-eight miles from Pittsburg on a branch of the P. R. R. that runs up from Trafford City along the winding banks of Turtle Creek.

The company made desperate efforts by means of threats and cajolery to operate a big mine at Export, but the best they have ever been able to do was about ten per cent of the normal output.

They erected a big searchlight on the tipple and kept swinging it around all night. The searchlight was threat, menace, irritant and challenge all rolled into one. Some persons began to shoot at the light. Strikers of course were suspected but there was no proof against them. It may have been deputies to keep up the excitement and make their jobs secure. It may have been farmers or other sympathizers. Whoever it was they were good shots because they fired from the different points on the hills always a mile or more distant. They broke the light a number of times and made it so hot for the operator that he skidooed and left the light to penetrate the night in one direction. The sharp shooters were always very considerate and fired a big charge of powder or dynamite as a warning to get out of range before the shooting began. In addition to the searchlight they perforated the shacks erected for the scabs called scabtown, but no one was ever hurt. It was a sort of retaliation for the insolence and brutality of the deputies. Most of the alleged dynamiting was done around Export.

The Scabs

The few scabs that have remained at work from amongst the strikers at the few mines that are running are not working for the sake of the trifle of money they expect to earn during the strike, but for rewards in the form of soft snaps after the strike is over. They are usually disappointed in this.

‘Andrew Carnegie is the only man that ever rewarded his scabs, or has his hirelings Schwab and Corey do it. And by the same token he pursued the strikers the most relentlessly.

The fellows who go in to scab expecting and being promised “Something good when it is over,” are by long odds the most dangerous. They are usually the fellows who believe what they have been taught by their capitalist masters that there is a chance for every man to rise in this glorious land of liberty. And they mean to rise even though they have to cut a few throats to get there. They are the fellows who accept that delicious bit of lickspittle, sucker philosophy attributed to Fra Albertus that “Only those that do more than they get paid for ever get paid for more than they do.”

The other kind of scabs are men who never work only during a strike. Men who do not want a steady job. Men who could not keep a steady job for any length of time. Some of these fellows that come in really don’t mean to injure the strikers but want to work for a stake.

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v11n03-sep-1910-ISR-gog-Corn-OCR.pdf