The cost of defeat. After the failure of the U.M.W.A. drive in the early 1920s, the entire state of West Virginia is transformed into an armed labor camp. Tom Tippett was a former radical miner who became, perhaps, the premiere labor journalist of the industry and the around one million coal miners then employed.

‘Gunmen Rule in Former Union Fields in West Virginia’ by Tom Tippett from The Daily Worker. Vol. 2 No. 23. April 12, 1924.

Briar Creek Scabs Kept Like Prisoners

OLCOTT, W. Va., April 11. A strike in West Virginia does not mean merely remaining away from work. It carries with it simultaneously an influx of gunmen, eviction notices, and a general reign of terror in the camp. All of which happened at Olcott. This place is a coal mining camp on Briar Creek just off Big Coal River in Kanawha county, owned by the Black Band Consolidated Coal Co.

The Briar Creek strike has now been on for two years. It began in 1922 in the national coal strike when the Black Band operators applied the 1917 wage scale in the mines. The situation here is typical of many isolated struggles in this district. Out of the original strikers about 200 remain on the creek, involving altogether nearly 1,000 people counting the women and children, affected by the strike.

Company Offers 1917 Scale

This company would have been willing to continue union recognition had the men accepted the 1917 wage scale. The 1917 rate was 50 cents a ton for loaders and $4.30 for daily labor. The war-time scale and the one demanded by the miners and being paid in other unionized sections of West Virginia is $7 a day and 77 cents a ton for cutting and loading. This company is considered liberal because it gave the strikers at one period 30 days’ notice to get out of company owned houses and at all times the notices allowed at least five days to move instead of 24 hours or less.

Evictions in January

An examination of the eviction papers shows January as the time chosen by this benevolent coal company to give their erstwhile employes a last opportunity to return to the mines under the bosses’ terms or vacate their houses. This kind of moving does not mean into another house, but onto the road where the company does not own the land. All the houses in such a camp are owned by the coal operators for that very purpose.

January in West Virginia is real winter; 20 below zero is not uncommon on Briar Creek. When a coal strike is called in this state a tent colony appears immediately in the river bottoms or on some hillside patch which a poverty stricken farmer gladly rents to the union. In winter barracks are substituted for the canvas homes as much as possible. And so it is on Briar Creek.

This article is being written in such a one-room home. The 1000 union people making the fight have lived in these barracks crudely and uncomfortably for the last two years with escape very remote. They are supported by District 17, U.M.W.A.; the strike benefits being $3.50 a week for single men, $1.50 extra for a wife and 50 cents for each child. This buys coarse, wholesome food and they do not suffer hunger. But there are no clothes and nothing else. Very ragged and barefoot women and children are not an exception but the rule. None of the many children go to school because of their rags.

Workers Kept as Prisoners

Farther up the creek are the mines where strike-breakers are at work, except at one pit which the strikers have successfully kept closed, the 1917 wage scale is supposed to be paid but a worker there told me that the company pays “whatever it wants to” and always settles below the 1917 figures. Wages are paid in company money and the workers are kept in the camp like prisoners. Escape is 16 miles over the mountains on one side or via the company owned private railroad to the Baltimore & Ohio on the other. Thus the non-union men are kept in the valley in slavery.

Police Nab Runaway Scabs

In the beginning of the strike 100 Negro families were brought in from the southern plantations. It can be said to their credit that all but 35 of these colored families have escaped. A few days ago the strikers assisted two Negro men down the creek but later they were captured and marched back past the barracks to the mine by a detachment of the state mounted police.

In West Virginia there are three organizations that do this and other business just as pernicious for the coal barons. They are the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, chartered and operating in Logan, McDowell and Mingo counties; the operators’ private army of “watchmen” deputized by the state and paid for by the operators, and the regular state constabulary (mounted police). The function of these three organizations is identical.

Mounted Police Guard Mines

On Briar Creek, in the absence of the other two, the mounted police serve the operators. I walked 16 miles from Briar Creek over the public mountain trail (April 4) and did not meet or see a sign of a single mounted policeman except at a coal mine. Their presence on the highway with guns and cartridge belts in glaring array was the unmistakable sign of a non-union coal camp. (C.H. Minner, secretary Local 4115, U.M.W.A., Brounland, W. Va., will be glad to receive castoff clothing for men, women or children of any age to help them in their struggle. T.T.)

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1924/v02a-n023-apr-12-1924-DW-LOC.pdf