Some primitive accumulation in the hills of Missouri as the earth is dug for tiff (baryte), a mineral used in many products and industrial processes, by the poorest of Ozark mountain folk.

‘Doomed to Life of Poverty Ozark Tiff Diggers Rebel’ from The New Militant. Vol. 1 No. 33. August 19, 1935.

Writer Describes Misery of Men, Women and Children Suffering Untold Horrors In Effort to Earn Livelihood

(By Special Correspondent) ST. LOUIS, Mo.What promises to be the most sensational strike of the year for the Middle West is the action of the brutally exploited “tiff” miners of Washington Co., Missouri, which has just begun.

“Tiff” is the colloquial appellation given to a mineral, the trade name of which is barytes. It is used extensively in the manufacture of paint and other lead products. It likewise has its uses in the rubber tire industry and last, but not least, for the sealing of oil wells when “over-production” threatens.

The strike is a protest against wage and living conditions always low but which with the recent rise in prices of foodstuffs are no longer tolerable. These miners of the Ozark hills, comprising as they do the descendants of the heroic and self-sacrificing first settlers of the Middle West are today the neglected and the “forgotten” men of the barium sulphate industry. Reduced to a standard of living, little if coolie, there was nothing else left to do. And if early indications speak for anything we think they will do it well.

Fighting for Life

The fact that they are organizing is phenomenal in itself, after decades of suffering and privation in silence. But organizing they are and their first act was to stop not only the mining of the “tiff” but the transportation of the reserves which the company has piled up for just such an event as this. The forethought of the company will do them little good because these grim, determined men of the Ozarks are fighting not merely for an increased standard of living; they are fighting for life itself.

With families of six and eight and incomes of $2.50 a week the picture of the suffering rivals any previous expose of social conditions ever made. A survey made by the Post Despatch reporter reveals that among 2,600 miners more than half of whom are on relief, there are whole communities without medical attention, subsisting on a starvation diet and living in houses which makes the miserable hovels of the Southern sharecropper and the West Virginia coal miner seem almost grand in comparison.

Many of the miners live in company houses located on the property of the National Pigments and Chemical Co., a subsidiary of the powerful union-hating National Lend Co. Still others occupy “houses” furnished by individual producers, a description of which would defy the English language. From the standpoint of protection from the bitter, wet, cold climate of a Missouri winter they can be compared only to a pig sty or a corn crib.

In such a shack of two rooms about ten feet square were found 16 people-three families. Families of six, seven and eight were the rule rather than the exception, condemned to live in these one and two room houses. Children and adults eat, live and sleep in the same room except in cases where the children are crowded into the “loft” to sleep within a few short inches of the roof made miserably hot by the mid-summer sun. Some houses were without floors, most of them without windows and all of them dilapidated beyond description. The best houses in the entire district were the generations old log houses built by the descendants of the early French settlers led by Pierre La Clede and Henri Choutian nearly two centuries ago.

Nor were any apologies offered by the profit-hungry bosses for these housing conditions. Their own ill-gotten gains mean more than the welfare of thousands of workers and their families who slave to produce these profits. It was pointed out that the houses were already there when the land was bought two decades ago by the Lead Co. and they have not been touched since. In such a way did the National Lead Co. bring “culture” and “civilization” into the backwoods of Missouri.

Malnutrition and the diseases arising from it are rampant. Of the State’s 17,000 cases of trachoma, the dreadful eye disease that strikes at America’s army of the underfed, it is estimated that a large percentage of them comes from the poverty-stricken homes of the Washington County tiff miners. One worker told a Post Despatch reporter that he hadn’t had a doctor in three years and even as he spoke there came the wails of two sick babies from the corner of the room, the youngest of a family of eight. With families of eight the relief is set not to exceed more than $8 a month for any family. A dollar a month per person! For the rest they have to depend on the “truck gardens” which hang on despairingly on the sun-baked, drought-bitten hillsides. Two meals a day must suffice them for they dread the long winter months when even the truck gardens will be gone. In the homes boxes are used for furniture and tin cans for cooking utensils and dishes. Kerosene lamps are useless since they cannot afford the oil to burn in them. What the most lowly paid city laborer would count as commonplaces would be regarded as luxuries by these serfs of the National Lead Co.

Code “Sidetracked”

When the N.R.A., “the Magna Charta of American Labor” came along the tiff miners thought they were going to get a break. But alas! The lead bosses in conjunction with the code authorities managed to work out a code for the lead industry which put millions into the pockets of the manufacturers but the code for the tiff miners got “sidetracked” and these workers were crushed to а still lower level of existence. Persistently did the National Barytes Producers Ass’n beg for a code and just as persistently did the government and its lead code authorities turn a deaf ear. It would not be too presumptuous to guess that on this Code Administration sat a representative of the lead interests.

Hoping to break the strike of the 2,600 miners, who came out in a body, the company decided to use the huge reserves which they have been piling up just for this event. But they made their calculations without taking into consideration the temper of the miners. Since there is enough tiff in the yards to supply the mills for at least three months the strikebreaking power of these hundreds of tons of minerals is obvious. The company hired a steam shovel to load the mineral on flat cars. But when the machine got to the place it was met by a “reception committee” of 300 miners. Armed with a varied assortment of weapons ranging from clubs and stones to the old “squirrel gun” (usually a 12 bore shotgun) which nearly every miner keeps above his door. The shovel never got a chance to sink its teeth into the reserve and no ore has been moved to date.

On the morning of the strike they came a thousand strong to the Washington County Courthouse demanding immediate relief, the strike-breaking role of the federal relief authorities has already been shown by the offer to get “jobs” for them on reforestation work, promising jobs for 500 men.

When the strike vote was taken a thunderous volume of “ayes” went up. The men stood up and cheered while the women looked on with tear-dimmed eyes. The sentiments of these determined people fighting for their lives and the lives of their children was summed up in a few short words by the chairman, George Bourbon, tall, white-haired tiff digger for more than 30 years when he told W.H. Comins, general superintendent of the company:

“If you use that reserve pile of tiff we’ll starve. We are starving anyway and we are on strike to win or perish. We want to peaceable if its possible. But if not we’ll have a nice quiet, little battle here all our own.”

The organizers and leaders of the strike is the American Workers Union, an unemployed organization which will probably prove a great weakness. The Stalinists have just got through “merging” their Unemployed Councils with this organization from which the A.W.U. gained nothing except the addition to their national committee of Wagenknecht, nationally known Stalinist faker and others of the Stalinist wrecking crew to the local Executive Committee.

At any rate the bosses are fooling with the most dangerous animal in the world when they fool with the Missouri tiff digger–an animal that hasn’t got a thing in this world to lose. They are fighting under the impulsion of the first law of nature of self-preservation, of keeping body and soul together. Reared in the school of “rugged individualism” they may try to convert the empty promises of demagogues into a living reality. And they have taken the only road–the road of militant struggle.

The New Militant was the weekly paper of the Workers Party of the United States and replaced The Militant in 1934, The Militant was a weekly newspaper begun by supporters of the International Left Opposition recently expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 and published in New York City. Led by James P Cannon, Max Schacthman, Martin Abern, and others, the new organization called itself the Communist League of America (Opposition) and saw itself as an outside faction of both the Communist Party and the Comintern. After 1933, the group dropped ‘Opposition’ and advocated a new party and International. When the CLA fused with AJ Muste’s American Workers Party in late 1934, the paper became the New Militant as the organ of the newly formed Workers Party of the United States.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1935/aug-10-1935.pdf