The Company Town (15 page)

By the end of 1920, though, economic hard times had clearly arrived, and few coal miners were employed full time during the following year. The union reached an organizational zenith with 500,000 members, but that fact disguised a chronic weakness, due in part to the ever greater introduction of labor-saving machinery such as the hand-loader. What's more, high wartime demand led to an expansion of bituminous mining that meant a glut of coal on the postwar market. CCF operators asked for givebacks and pay cuts even as the union demanded a thirty-hour week with the same pay. A UMWA plan called for “democratic management” of a nationalized coal industry, wages fixed by national collective bargaining, and labor representation in government backed by a labor party. Instead, 1922 saw a CCF lockout that lasted for five months, benefited the nonunion coal companies, and pushed unionized mines further toward mechanization. Hundreds of companies declared bankruptcy, and 200,000 miners abandoned coal mining for other work. By 1928, union membership was one-fifth its 1922 level.
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Things only got worse from there. The early '30s were a period of privation, impotent unions, and broken strikes marked by sectarian division. Falling prices for coal led to lower wages, short time, and unemployment.
A social worker in the Illinois coal country in 1931 found hundreds of children who hadn't had a balanced meal in two years, while a miner's lunch might consist of a sandwich of stale bread and lard. Incidences of disease, especially tuberculosis, rose. Meanwhile, the company towns fell into decay and decrepitude. Even though the vast majority of Appalachian men seemed to want a union, the UMWA existed only in scattered pockets.

Harlan County, Kentucky, was one of these. A 10 percent wage cut in 1931 prompted 11,000 miners to join up with the UMWA, vowing to “strike while we starve.” A gun battle broke out near the town of Evarts between strikers and machine-gun-toting deputies: Three deputies and one miner died. The governor sent in the National Guard, arrested union leaders, and escorted in strikebreakers, many of them black. When the UMWA bailed out, the Communist-led NMU entered the fray and drew visits to the area from such intellectuals as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Edmund Wilson. But that union did no better against coal-operator force and surveillance. Meetings were broken up, gunplay was frequent, and a number of people were charged with “criminal syndicalism,” the broad, antilabor legislation that was used to crush the IWW.

In West Virginia, the independent West Virginia Mine Workers Union (WVMWU) signed up as many as 23,000 miners by the end of 1931. Perhaps 60 percent of that state's miners had been UMWA members by 1919, but in the years following the 1921 Blair Mountain battle, that union had disintegrated. In mid-summer, 8,000 West Virginia miners followed the WVMWU out on strike. Brutal evictions followed, and a shortage of food doomed the strikers, whose effort collapsed after one month.
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Demands for wage cuts in Indiana and Ohio also led to violent confrontations and union defeats. Pennsylvania saw rioting and armed clashes in which three miners died, fifty-five were hospitalized, and more than 2,000 were gassed or injured. The NMU, behind most of the activity, could claim few accomplishments.
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Things turned around quickly after the June 1933 enactment of the National Industrial Recovery Act. The act created the National Recovery Administration, which called for industry-specific codes of fair representation to be hammered out between labor and trade groups. Section 7(a)
of the act said that all codes must provide that employees had a right to organize and bargain collectively via representatives of their own choosing. Moreover, the act stipulated that no employee or job applicant could be required as a condition of employment to join a company union. Many employers, particularly in the steel industry, reacted as though the law had endorsed company unions—so long as employees weren't “made” to join them—and the Bureau of Labor Statistics observed a great expansion in the number of company unions. But coal miners expressed an immediate and overwhelming preference for representation by the UMWA. On the day after the act's passage, 80 percent of Ohio miners had joined up. By mid-June, the formerly union-free Logan County, West Virginia, was completely organized. During the same period, eastern Kentucky's coalfields were likewise unanimous for the UMWA, and by the end of the month, there were 128,000 new members in Pennsylvania's bituminous area.

Union organizers expressed astonishment at how the miners were “flocking into the union by the thousands.” UMWA official John Brophy concluded that the miners had “moved into the union en masse . . . they organized themselves for all practical purposes.”

Events continued to develop with eye-popping dispatch. The CCF system had collapsed in the 1920s, leading to wide disparities in wage rates: Pay varied from $1.50 per day in parts of the South to $5 per day in Illinois. By the end of September 1933, a new bituminous agreement, along with a new bargaining structure, was in place. With the considerable arm-twisting of the federal government, the union and bituminous operators from Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and Tennessee agreed to wage rates of from $3.40 a day in the South to as high as $5.63 in the Northwest. The pact stipulated an eight-hour day, forty-hour week, a grievance procedure, automatic withholding of union dues from workers' pay, and rank-and-file election of checkweighmen. No boy younger than seventeen would be allowed to work in a mine, and it was forbidden to pay wages in scrip, to require workers to live in company housing, or to mandate that workers make purchases at the company store.

The agreement did not require miners to join the union, but they had pretty well seen to that matter on their own. As icing on the cake for
the UMWA, in one of the first labor board elections conducted under the act, workers at Colorado Fuel and Iron dumped their company union, the Industrial Representation Plan that dated from right after the Ludlow events, and chose the UMWA by a vote of 877 to 273. The company had made wage cuts of 15 percent in 1932 despite the protests of representation-plan officers, undercutting any notion that these reps had bargaining clout. Shortly after the 1933 election, CFI abandoned its plan and negotiated the first UMWA contract.
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By 1935, collective bargaining had become a way of life in the coalfields—with the exception of Harlan County, which remained an antiunion redoubt. The county was dominated by corporate giants including International Harvester, U.S. Steel, Peabody Coal, and Ford Motor Co., which liked Harlan's low-sulfur coal for producing auto-body sheet metal. Harlan was cursed with higher freight rates than its northern rivals, and that alone was enough to drive the operators to wage war on unionism. Equally significant, Kentucky was the sole remaining state to allow deputization of private mine guards: Both West Virginia and Pennsylvania had outlawed the practice by 1933. In effect, Harlan operators had a private army backed by local government to enforce their dictates. These deputies, many of whom were mine supervisors, and sheriffs were virulently antiunion in their attitudes. But for some, there were extra incentives to keep things as they were: Sheriff Theodore Roosevelt Middleton acquired five coal mines of his own during his 1934-1937 term; he was also joint owner of the company store at Varda, where annual profits were 170 percent. Deputies in Harlan County and elsewhere were paid on a “fee system”—$2 for an arrest, 25 cents for summoning a witness, and so forth—giving them an incentive to crack down on “lawbreakers.” The result was what a 1935 Kentucky state investigatory commission termed a “virtual reign of terror” directed at union organizers in Harlan, singling out Middleton for specific mention.

By the spring of 1935, bombings of union members' houses, shootings of organizers, and a generally unrestrained campaign of violence led miners to conclude that it wasn't safe to attempt organization in Harlan. Operators flagrantly violated Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in that year changed nothing. Foreshadowing the civil rights years, it took
the U.S. Department of Justice to bring the mining companies around: In 1937, it prosecuted sixty-nine coal operators for engaging in a conspiracy to violate federal labor law. Kentucky state police were sent to Harlan expressly to protect union organizers. In 1938, Kentucky abolished the private-deputy system, and 65 percent of the formerly terrorized Harlan miners quickly signed up with the UMWA. At long last, the union won contracts covering 6,000 miners at U.S. Coal and Coke and six other firms. Other Harlan operators tried one final ploy—company unions. The phenomenon that had reached its peak elsewhere in the United States during the 1920s resurfaced at twenty-seven Harlan companies in 1937. In fact, in labor board elections held that year, seven such company unions won recognition as certified bargaining agents over the UMWA.
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The years to come would see further union advances in wages and working conditions—along with more strike activity, including controversial clashes during World War II despite labor's no-strike pledge. But the coal company towns were passing from the national stage.

Several changes doomed the fortress/prison-style company town. New Deal labor legislation backed by the possibility of federal prosecution of flagrant scofflaws made widespread union organization possible. Key, too, was the end of the use of private deputies, upon whose depredations the operators had depended. Finally, the declining national demand for coal meant the number of employed coal miners fell from 15,864 in 1941 to 2,242 by 1961. Harlan County saw a mass exodus of onetime miners to Midwestern industrial cities. There would be further violent strikes in the 1960s and even in the 1980s.
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But the coal company town would play an ever-declining role in the drama.

Still, something like the coal company town lives on in the copper-mining territory of the American Southwest.

Perhaps the preeminent company in the region was for years Phelps Dodge Corp., now part of Freeport-McMoRan, the top U.S. copper producer in 2009. Originally a New York mercantile house created in the 1830s by two stern Calvinist families, Phelps Dodge long was guided by
the Golden Rule, in the words of company biographer Robert Glass Cleland. Phelps Dodge developed what it saw as model communities in Bisbee, Morenci, Ajo, and Douglas, Arizona, and it offered workers company-welfare provisions such as hospital care, pensions, and voluntary insurance plans. But neither early company president James Douglas nor his son Walter, who succeeded him in the post, looked at all kindly upon union organization. In 1917, when the WFM and the IWW began a recruiting drive in the Arizona mines, Walter Douglas ordered a roundup of 1,200 union members by local vigilantes and the Bisbee sheriff. The detainees were then loaded into railroad cattle cars, trucked off to the middle of the New Mexico desert, and abandoned.

The events hardly seemed appropriate in a country that had only recently entered World War I with the announced intention of making the world safe for democracy. President Woodrow Wilson ordered an investigation, conducted by a commission headed by no less than Felix Frankfurter, a future justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. But after hearing hundreds of hours of testimony about the events—and taking note of the U.S. military's de facto custodianship of the stranded and suffering workers—the commission issued only a tepid report that recommended arbitration of disputes. Phelps Dodge executives were later indicted on federal criminal charges, but a trial court dismissed the charges.

With the war's end, an oversupply of already mined copper led to a slump in demand, idled operations, and industry consolidation. As sales revived in the 1920s, Phelps Dodge absorbed the holdings of rival Arizona Co., claiming absolute control over the Morenci area. It built an elaborate company store—in time, the multi-location Phelps Dodge Mercantile Co. would generate income in its own right—the lavish Hotel Morenci, and the whites-only Morenci Club featuring a bowling alley, library, and gymnasium. Although sales slumped again in the 1930s, the company anticipated prosperous years to come by building new housing and schools and a $100,000 hospital.

Production revived with World War II. Open-pit work—involving the extraction of ore from a giant, tiered hole in the ground—had replaced underground mining in the 1930s. Basically, though, operations were the same: Thousands of pounds of rock were blasted loose and carted away, then crushed until fine, mixed with chemicals, and baked at
2,000 degrees to separate slag from copper. Mines and smelters in Morenci and Ajo ran full bore to meet wartime production demands, with a federal subsidy of $26 million to develop a new open-pit mine in Morenci. Uncle Sam's watchful eye also allowed a union-representation vote in 1942, won by the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, which, however, did not win its first contract with Phelps Dodge until 1946. (Skilled-crafts unions already represented a small number of employees.) The successful negotiations made the local union president, charismatic David Velasquez, something of a legend among his fellow miners, and he would hold office for the next fourteen years.