Buoyed by their choir, the singing miners of Sagamore, Pennsylvania appeal to scabs in song.

‘The Sagamore Miners Give Battle’ by Art Shields from New Leader. Vol. 3 No. 13. April 10, 1926. 

I saw the Sagamore miners bury John Cramer, who gave his life at 74 in the flight to make the Buffalo & Susquehanna Coal Co. keep its contract with the United Mine Workers. He was a charter member of the union and had been through all its big struggles in District No. 2 till the attack of influenza that followed his eviction from the company house he had occupied for 20 years in this little town in the hills northeast of Pittsburgh.

As they lowered him to the grave Paul Fuller, educational director of District No. 2, who is serving as the strikers’ pastor, prayed that Brother Cramer’s sacrifice might not have been in vain and that a leisure class might not continue to live on the blood of labor.

The evictions last fall were carried out with a ruthlessness that amazed the community. World War veterans and 20-year residents were put out without ceremony and their belongings in several cases dumped in the rain and smashed. Among the evicted ones were a constable of Sagamore who happened to be a striking miner also, and a justice of the peace, who had likewise erred against company morality by demanding a union price for the coal he dug. There were few newcomers in the town; nearly all were old and trusted employes. There were families who had spent hundreds of dollars in fixing up the places they regarded as home. One middle-aged man, who had been a Buffalo & Susquehanna motor boss for 18 years, told me of the bath tub he had just installed when the eviction order came that made way for a scab who “turned the place into a pigsty and a speakeasy.”

New Head Brought Strike

Till a year ago labor relations were unusually peaceable for a coal town. Such strikes as there had been were merely “suspensions,” and petty grievances in between were adjusted by the committees. But a year ago came a storm cloud in the person of a certain Calloway, newly elected president of the company. If you look him up in coal directories, you will find that he is also president of the Davis Coal & Coke Co., incorporated in Baltimore, and with 24 mines in West Virginia and another big one in Boswell, Somerset County, Pa. And all non-union; another merger of the many that is mobilizing the enemy’s strength against the miners’ union.

Calloway began moving in on the miners’ union. Following the standard open shop tactics, he ordered a lockout. After six months the firm went through the motions of “leasing” its Sagamore properties to a dummy concern, Sutter & Rinn, that had not signed the Jacksonville agreement. The strike began. Then Calloway brought in a trained union buster, “Billy” Diamond, once international board member for the Michigan district of the United Mine Workers.

The union promptly pulled out its members in a big Buffalo & Susquehanna mine at DuBois, some 50 miles away, and the strike there is a hundred percent effective. At Sagamore few of the old-timers have broken away, and the company is depending for its feeble production from one of four mines on imported labor, which goes as fast as it comes.

Barracks House Strikers

The evicted strikers are cared for–some by friends in nearby communities, most in union “barracks” and the hotel the union leased on the rising ground by the road the strikebreakers pass on their way to work. You can see them all there at dawn when the choir is singing to the job thieves.

It is a hard life, but the spirit is fine, even in the crowded quarters. There are 79 children and 33 adults in 10 barracks rooms and as many more crowded in the hotel rooms. They live on $3 per week per family, the standard relief furnished by District No. 2. They need clothes and they need more help of all kinds. It is a job for the labor movement as a whole to take part in. If Sagamore stands, then other towns in this important field stand, and if the miners lose, the rest of the labor movement loses with them.

The Presbyterian choir of Sagamore is welcoming spring, and the early morning sunrise. All through the long winter the chorus of 20 singers has been assembling in the snow and darkness on the land the miners’ union leased above the road. The strike-breakers must take this road on their way to the Buffalo & Susquehanna Coal Company mine, which is attempting to operate on the 1917 scale basis in violation of the 3-year contract signed in 1924.

The choir is made up of striking coal diggers and their wives and daughters, with several school teachers assisting. They began singing to the scabs when the Kitanning court issued an injunction forbidding picketing. They have sung scores of scabs away in the course of the 6-month strike.

Last Monday three more carloads of the invaders left town: They couldn’t face the singers any more. I used to watch the strikebreakers passing shamefacedly, staring at the frozen road before them, as the choir sang at them:

Oh stranger, why did you come here,
And take our homes and bread away;
Oh won’t you quit your work today,
And join us now, we pray.

So begins one of the songs composed by Clara Johnson, a public school teacher, and Mrs. Arthur Cook, a striker’s wife and choir singer. The chorus rings on:

Won’t you join us? Won’t you join us?
In fighting for our rights today:
We’re going to win, we know we will,
So join us now, we pray.

the voices appealing down the narrow road that leads past the singers from the company tenements to the mine mouth.

Only a few strikebreakers are brazen. These usually come from the farms of Armstrong county. In this part of Pennsylvania there is a wall between the farmer and the industrial worker. But the imported strike-breakers are quicker to sense the shame of their position. This is especially true of those whose skins are dark, and who were imported without having been informed of the strike. The first morning to work the strike message comes with the choir’s voices. They get the entreaty of mothers dispossessed from the homes they are now occupying. And the strike-breaker will work a few days, sometimes a few weeks, till he is able to pay his way out and say goodbye. Then the operator fetches in more to go through the same experience. But the company has never got enough to work more than one of the four mines, and that on a reduced basis.

One morning last January state police and guards raided the choir line and took a group before the justice of the peace, who fined them $5 each. The union paid the fines and the singing appeals go on.

In the early morning they raise their voices in the last triumphant stanza of the Oh Stranger song:

In union there is strength and might,
So why oppose a cause that’s right?

New Leader was the most important Socialist Party-aligned paper from much of the 1920s and 1930s. Begun in 1924 after the S.P. created the Conference for Progressive Political Action, it was edited by James Oneal. With Oneal, and William M. Feigenbaum as manager, the paper hosted such historic Party figures as Debs, Abraham Cahan, Lena Morrow Lewis, Isaac Hourwich, John Work, Algernon Lee, Morris Hillquit, and new-comers like Norman Thomas. Published weekly in New York City, the paper followed Oneal’s constructivist Marxism and political anti-Communism. The paper would move to the right in the mid 30s and become the voice of the ‘Old Guard’ of the S.P. After Oneal retired in 1940, the paper became a liberal anti-communist paper under editor Sol Levitas. However, in the 1920s and for much of the 1930s the paper contained a gold mine of information about the Party, its activities, and most importantly for labor historians, its insiders coverage of the union movement in a crucial period.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-leader/1926/v03n13-apr-10-1926-NL.pdf