Even as the massive strikes of 1927 were raging, U.M.W.A. leader John L. Lewis sought to facilitate the operators restructuring plans, and began wholesale expulsions of militants and rivals after the expiration of the national Jacksonville Agreement. The Communist Party counted many hundreds of miner members, including important local and regional leaders, for example winning the U.M.W.A.’s District 5 in Pennsylvania. As Amy Schechter reports, those supporters formed the ‘Save-The-Union’ caucus. By September of that year, the U.M.W.A. expelled enough locals that it was decided to establish the National Miners Union.

‘The Miners Are Fighting Now!’ by Amy Schechter from Labor Unity. Vol. 2 No. 1. February, 1928.

AT LAST the will to fight and the disillusionment and bitter disgust of the striking Pennsylvania miners with the abject strike policy of the Lewis machine, have found voice. On January 4th, strikers from all sub-districts of Western Pennsylvania, as well as delegates from Ohio and District No. 2, came together in Pittsburgh and formed a “Save-the-Union” Committee to begin the work of consolidating the progressive forces in the union to organize for militant action, spreading the strike, pulling out the unorganized fields, and, for that general fighting policy which alone can save the union from going to pieces beneath the coal operators’ savage attack, John L. Brophy, from whom Lewis stole the last election for President of the U.M.W. of A., addressed the meeting.

Today, in the tenth month of the lockout, with the coal operators’ offensive increasing in violence, the striking miners know that the union has its back against the wall and must fight or be destroyed.

Mere clearly than ever before in the history of the union rank and file miners realize that with the Lewis machine in control, the union cannot and will not fight.

The point-blank refusal of the coal operators, led by the Mellon-controlled Pittsburgh Coal Co., to have any dealings with the miners’ union when requested to attend a joint conference by Secretary of Labor Davis, has thrown a glaring light on the whole conflict, and made it impossible for the machine any longer to foster illusions as to a speedy and peaceable settlement, or to hide the fact that the coal war is a war of extermination.

“We have definitely and permanently severed all relations with that organization,” states the Pittsburgh Coal Company, in answer to the Davis telegram.

“We will not meet with representatives of the United Mine Workers of America with whom we have no contract,” declared the Ohio Coal Operators Association.

Actual Surrender

As soon as the announcement came that the outcome of the much-advertised November A.F. of L. Pittsburgh Emergency Conference was to be a delegation to call on President Coolidge, the men knew that the machine was making a gesture of surrender.

“We are waiting on the conference,” you heard all around the mining camps, before November 14. The conference came and went, and then as a picket at Harmarville (a mining town with a fighting reputation throughout the Allegheny Valley) put it:

“When the men saw what they done at the conference, they knew they got nothing more to wait for.”

Before the Emergency Conference thousands had really believed that with the very life of the union at stake Lewis would be forced to at last enter upon aggressive action in some form. In some camps, the men talked of the railroad brotherhoods being asked to stop hauling scab coal; in others they thought that a nation-wide strike of the miners would be called, linked up with a drive for organization of the unorganized. Many of the miners believed that official action would take the form of a general A.F. of L. assessment for relief, after the conference had ended, the men realized that exactly nothing was going to be done.

Coolidge as Spokesman

Coolidge’s answer to the delegation exactly the reply to be expected from the spokesman of the great steel and coal and railroad interests behind the campaign to break down the miners’ union. He declared “that there were too many miners.” He made it clear that he lined up a hundred per cent with the attempt of the Operators to drag down standards in Pennsylvania and Ohio to the level of the southern non-union fields.

“The President is informed,” said Coolidge’s statement, “that coal consumption has seriously decreased because of the expansion of the use of water power electricity by industrial, factories and of labor-saving devices, in industry generally. It will be difficult for the coal operators to sustain the present level of wages in view of that condition, he believes. He is informed that there is an abundant supply of soft-coal from the lower-priced labor mines of the south.”

Operators Advance

The sharpening of the coal operators’ attack in the last weeks can very largely be laid to the no-fight policy and impotent political maneuvering exhibited at the Emergency conference, and the disastrous pilgrimage to the White House that followed.

The companies were jubilant after Coolidge’s strike statement:

“This means that we are to be allowed to carry on this fight for the open shop to a finish,” said a representative of the Pittsburgh Terminal Coal Corporation, “without any action by the Federal government. We feel that this is a real victory for the principle that every American worker has a right to secure employment where and when he pleases and to work under any conditions he sees fit. (Pittsburgh Terminal has just cut wages for its scabs the fourth time since April 1)…The decision of the president upholds the right of private property by his tacit refusal to interfere in the eviction proceedings now being carried out against the members of the United Mine Workers who occupy company houses but refuse to accept employment on the company terms.”

Hamstringing Fighters

Throughout the course of the lock-out, every attempt on the part of the rank and file to meet the coal operators’ offensive with militant resistance in place of the spineless official policy of surrender that steadily increasing numbers of the strikers saw was bringing the union to die verge of ruin, has been crushed by the machine. In camp after camp, mass picketing, mass violation of injunctions, resistance to evictions, were frowned down, and suppressed. The international organizers planted throughout the strike area by the machine counselled submission beneath the savage blows dealt by the companies: “Don’t make any trouble,” was the slogan.

To take Harmarville again. When the company first brought in scabs last July, men who had scattered around neighboring towns for whatever jobs could be picked up on the roads or in the mills, hastened back to carry on the fight to keep the company from opening up their mine.

Men and women and children crowded out on the picket line—mass picketing—twenty-four hour picketing. Men were standing on the line two shifts straight, not to be away from the fight.

“Butch” James

Then “Butch” James of Illinois, a close personal friend of Lewis, was sent in as organizer. “No mass picketing,” he said. “We don’t want to violate the sheriff’s proclamation.” (The sheriff’s proclamation permits no more than two men together on the public highway).

“Keep your wives and children home,” decreed “Butch” James, “Don’t use the word ‘Scab’,” he told the pickets. “Don’t use abusive language, they might send in the state troopers.”

The troopers came in anyway, two weeks later, and not long after that, smashed in the heads of numerous Harmarville men and women and children at the Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting held at Cheswick a couple of miles away (making arrests that resulted in a first class frame-up case.)

The “Butch” James affair is no isolated incident. The same sort of thing happened at every militant mine and in not a few cases an angry rank and file drove the “organizers” out of town. Harmarville has four, including “Butch” James, to its credit.

The hundreds of resolutions sent in by local unions making militant demands on the union during the course of the lockout—organization of the unorganized fields, general strike, etc.—have been completely ignored by district and national officials.

The presence of miners from the unorganized fields among the scabs, experienced men who can get out the coal and are ten times as dangerous to the conduct of the strike as the unskilled professional strike-breaker elements, has made the question of organizing the unorganized an immediate issue of the first importance. The disastrous effects of Lewis’ betrayal of the splendid strike of 50,000 unorganized miners in the Connellsville coke region of Western Pennsylvania in 1922, and his consistent refusal to take action regarding the unorganized fields, are daily forced upon the attention of the striking miners on the picket line.

Sentiment for a general strike in all fields is definitely gaining in strength. A resolution sent out about a week ago by the Portage local, District No. 2, requesting joint action of all locals in a demand upon Lewis for a general strike as the only remedy in the present desperate situation, is typical of wide-spread, if not clearly formulated, sentiment among the miners. In camp after camp throughout District No. 2 the resolution was unanimously passed—”With a Shout,” as Rossiter miners put it.

Winter, wholesale eviction, the long-drawn, semi-starvation sapping their strength, the pain of being forced to see their children pale from lack of food and barefoot and in rags, is bringing the relief question to the fore among the miners today.

In 1924 Labor Herald was folded into Workers Monthly, an explicitly Party organ and in 1927 ‘Labor Unity’ became the organ of a now CP dominated TUEL. In 1929 and the turn towards Red Unions in the Third Period, TUEL was wound up and replaced by the Trade Union Unity League, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) and continued to publish Labor Unity until 1935. Labor Herald remains an important labor-orientated journal by revolutionaries in US left history and would be referenced by activists, along with TUEL, along after its heyday.

Link to a PDF: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labor-unity/v2n01-w20-feb-1928-TUUL-labor-unity.pdf