Macoupin County ILMINE UNION
RADICALISM ©1997-2003 Written and Contributed by
Victor Hicken. Transcribed by Judy York
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MINE
UNION RADICALISM IN MACOUPIN AND MONTGOMERY COUNTIES (IL)
by
Victor
Hicken
Even in the old implications of the word, the 1890's were not "gay." But it was true, specially in the cities, that the middle class enjoyed the almost yearly technological advances which America's prolific inventors were adding to the country's growing advantages. And, if one were willing and able, as well as necessarily brilliant, he or she could fulfill the dream of the standard Horatio Alger plot. It was proven time and time again that children of a middle- or even lower-class family could rise and become rich and successful. With those achievements, of course, came also the admiration and respect of society.
Like a great many aspects of life, the opportunities which America offered were like the proverbial coin of the realm; they had two sides. In the twenty-five years since the end of the Civil War, a laissez-faire society, untrammeled by government regulation, had allowed the rich to become exceedingly rich and the poor to become poorer. Hamlin Garland, a midwestern writer of the period, noted the growing disparity between life on the farm and life in the middle-class towns of the Great Plains. On the other hand, Jacob Riis, the Danish- American reformer, pointed his finger at the cities and graphically illustrated the terrible discrepancies between life in the ghettos and life among the more privileged.(1)
With respect to Hell's Kitchen in New York, to Murderers' Row in Chicago, and to the drudgery of the American farm, one could write with some assurance that these sides of the coin were not completely invisible. At least, Riis and Garland saw them, and so did dozens of other writers. If one were to target 1890 as a specific date, one might add that the same could not be said of those who worked the coal pits of America. The coal miner was there, and his numbers were in the tens of thousands and growing by the day. Almost more than anyone else, he represented the unseen American. No one wrote songs about him. He was less a part of American literature in 1890 than were the blacks of both the South and North. Gone from his mining-camp home before dawn and returning to it after dark, sometimes living in mining villages surrounded by barbed wire, his only comforts were those provided by the sanctity of the bedroom and the consolation found in a bottle.
These facts were true in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, where coal
mines had fueled the industrial revolution for years, and they
were increasingly true in Illinois where, by 1890, new pits were
being opened with increasing frequency. In that state, almost
everything was in a feverish state of flux. Even textbooks and
newspapers were encouraging the use of the phrase "Prairie
State" rather than "Sucker State." Chicago had
burned and was rebuilding, becoming what a future poet would call
the "city of big shoulders." The big shoulders belonged
to newly-arrived immigrants who worked in the steel mills or the
factories, and they worked so hard and so long each day that the
need of Chicago for more and more coal was an economic fact of
life. So did Germanic St. Louis, across the Mississippi River
from southern Illinois. Between the two cities ran railroads, and
they, in turn, crossed over the rich black coal fields of St.
Clair, Macoupin, Montgomery, and Christian counties - so rich,
indeed, that nearly 100 years after their first major economic
development, their contents are probably ninety-nine percent
intact.
Most of the coal produced in Illinois in 1890 came from three
areas of the state: the Spring Valley and Coal City area in the
northern half; the St. Clair County area near St. Louis; and that
part of Illinois known by tradition as "Little Egypt."
Williamson County mines had been opened as early as 1869, and by
1890 the county's coal production had reached 200,000 tons a year.(2)
This is not to say that there was no coal production elsewhere.
Indeed, there were some sixty or seventy two- and three-man
shallow pits near Colchester, in McDonough County; the coal there
was so close to the surface that dogs were used to pull the small
drays from the workings to the cave openings. There were also
small shafts near Gillespie, in Macoupin County. According to
early geological survey maps, most of these had closed operations
as early as 1880.
The fact is that coal deposits in Illinois have the subterranean
shape of a saucer, with the rim near the surface of the ground in
southern and western Illinois. The base of that saucer runs
through south central Illinois; hence the need for deeper shafts
in that area. Being compressed at a greater depth and probably
older, the coal there was of a slightly higher quality. The only
problem in the 1870's or 1880's was the lack of mechanized
equipment to bring the coal from the face of the seam to the
surface, a difficulty which found correction by the development
of more mechanized systems to produce the coal. By 1890, the
Ellsworth Coal Company was either sinking or considering mines in
the Mt. Olive and Staunton areas of Macoupin County. Soon
operations were extended by various concerns to Carlinville,
Litchfield, Hillsboro, Witt, Nokomis, and Coalton in both
Macoupin and Montgomery Counties.
The extent of the growth of coal production in those two counties
can be illustrated by a few figures. In 1906, for example, the
Shoal Creek Company sunk its Mine No. 1 at Panama, in Montgomery
County. It required eighty-seven workers in its initial year, 230
a year later, 375 in 1908, and 433 by 1910. Over eight-five
percent of its coal in 1910 was mined and brought to the surface
by machines.
In Macoupin County, the Inspector of Mines reported in 1910 that
there were twenty-two mines in operation, seventeen on which were
shipping coal to various industrial centers elsewhere. Four of
the shipping mines were in or around Virden, one was at Girard,
one was at Carlinville, one at Nilwood, one at Green Ridge, three
at Gillespie, two at Mt. Olive, and four near Staunton. It might
be added parenthetically that two other mines lay just across the
Madison County line from Staunton, and that most of the men who
worked in them actually lived in that Macoupin town. The total
coal production of all Macoupin mines in 1910 was 4,040,436 tons,
and all twenty-two mines employed a total of 4,681 men. Once
again, parenthetically, the inspector reported one revealing
statistic: of the total number of miners employed in the shafts,
some 150 boys were among them, although no age levels for this
group were given.(3)
Villages and small settlements became minor boom towns overnight.
Between Gillespie and Staunton pit villages appeared carrying the
names of Benld, Sawyerville, Eagerville, and Mt. Clare. The first
of these took its name from the ineptitude of an itinerant sign
painter who fell while attempting to paint the name of a mine
developer, Ben L. Dorsay, on the tipple. He was hurt and unable
to finish his work, and so, from that point on, the settlement
was known as Ben L. D., the first five letters of the mine
owner's name.
Working the deeper pits of Macoupin and Montgomery counties was
considerably different than the effort required in many of the
shallow mines in southern Illinois. The labor pool which fed
these new mines was principally immigrant, and the workers came
from every European country, including Norway, Sweden, and
Denmark. Italians and Russians flocked to Benld, the presence of
the latter being marked by the continuing presence of a quaintly
beautiful Orthodox church. Croatians, Serbians, Bohemians,
Ukrainians, Hungarians, Letts, Lithuanians, Germans, and British
also came. While not seeking to demean the hard working and
ambitious immigrants from other lands, it would be fair to say
that the more skilled deep- pit miners and, indeed, the most
activist in terms of the mine unions were those from Scotland,
Wales, England, and Ireland.
Consider the case of the Panama mines. Of the 1,500 people living
in that Montgomery County town in 1910, the predominant ethnic
group was Italian, with a score of other elements represented in
lesser numbers. Yet, with all of this ethnic variety, only one
name is remembered out of that hectic period, and that is John
Llewellyn Lewis, of Welsh heritage from Iowa. Those British who
came to work the mines around the turn of the century were hard-bitten,
acerbic, and cynical men who had already cut their teeth on the
emerging trade unionism of Britain. As one Scot remarked some
forty years after settling in Gillespie, "When I came to
America to work in the mines, I was determined never to tip my
cap to the man who owned the mine."(4) It is strange but
true that after all of the blood and the suffering of miners in
this country, the only great novel to which American miners might
relate is How Green Was My Valley, written by Richard Llewellyn.
It is a moving story about mining and mine unionism, not in the
United States but in Wales.
Early evidence of the militancy of the new immigrants to Macoupin
County was shown in the coal strike of 1894. Although the
bankrupt United Mine Workers accepted the offer of operators in
early June, miners of southeast Illinois simply refused to obey
the agreement. On nine different occasions the state militia was
sent to various parts of the region to quell disturbances. These
actions by the governor brought commendations from some
newspapers, particularly the Chicago Tribune. That paper argued
that, under the circumstances, perhaps the new and troublesome
immigrant workers might be speeded back to the lands of their
birth. The militia was especially needed in the Mt. Olive area of
Macoupin County, for there the miners had continuously interfered
with trains carrying coal from the nonunion fields of the south.
Some of this activity may have been inspired by a fascinating
character named Alexander Bradley. Sometimes claimed by Mt.
Olive, and later nicknamed "the General," Bradley was
an English born, nebulous character who flitted in and out of mine
issues for over forty years. Always flamboyantly dressed, he was
a quadrennial candidate for one office or another on the
Socialist ticket, and he played a part in one of the most violent
episodes in Illinois mining history.(5)
What Bradley and others saw in the mine fields of Illinois was a
kind of industrial feudalism supported by both the law and the
political establishment. The famous muckraker, Henry D. Lloyd
described the system as a "pustule of a disease spread
through the whole body." The average annual income of a
Macoupin or Montgomery County miner in 1897 was approximately $190.
For this he worked 179 ten-hour days each year. Out of this
princely sum the miner supplied his own tools and his own
transportation. This reason alone would account for the militant
willingness of Macoupin and Montgomery County miners to join the
United Mine Workers coal strike of 1897.(6)
Some six months later, in 1898, the operators settled on terms
which were considered as a victory for the union. But the ordeal
was not over. Led by operators who owned mines stretching along
the Chicago and Alton Railroad, a segment of management balked at
the new contract. Strongest among the protestors were the Chicago-Virden
Coal Company and the Pana Coal Company. The former was a power to
be reckoned with. Its mine at Virden was the largest single
producer in the state, hoisting 348,000 tons a year prior to the
1897 strike. Even when a national board returned findings in
favor of the miners, both the Virden and the Pana companies
argued that they simply would not accept the finings.
Through the early months of 1898, the situation at Virden and at
Pana went from bad to worse. The Pana company attempted to employ
nonunion white labor in an effort to work their mine, but
Christian county resistance was so great that the company quit
the effort. The same company, and possibly some agents of the
Chicago-Virden Company as well, then tried to recruit Chinese
labor in California. The results were fruitless. Finally, in
August, both companies resolved to import black labor from
Alabama. By promising conditions which might have astounded the
white strikers in Pana and Virden, agents soon rounded up a
trainload of black miners from the Birmingham region of that
state.
All along the route through southern Illinois, the strike
organizers of the United Mine Workers succeeded in boarding the
northbound train, and in warning the imported strikebreakers that
their lives might be in peril further north. Indeed, some shots
may have been fired along the way, for the guards riding shotgun
were forced to compel their passengers to lower the blinds and
not to show their faces under any circumstance. Despite all
attempts of the union, and even despite the warnings of governor
Tanner, who issued a statement on behalf of the union, the Pana
Company managed to sneak its train into Pana and to house their
strikebreakers behind a stockade near the struck mines.
The Chicago-Virden Company quickly followed suit, erecting a
stockade which, in aging photographs, tends to resemble something
Jim Bridger might have thrown up near the North Platte or on the
wide Missouri. The company went one step further, hiring fifty
professional gunfighters from Chicago and St. Louis. Fitted out
with shiny new Winchester rifles, these men were stationed about
the mine and even on the tipple in order to protect the train
which was about to arrive.
Of course, all of these preparations were in the way of a signal
to the striking miners and their supporters in Macoupin County.
Led by the ubiquitous General Bradley, hundreds of miners from
Gillespie, Benld, Staunton, and particularly Mt. Olive poured
into the Virden area. The train puffed into sight at the
appointed hour, but the engineer, blessed with more wisdom than
valor, puffed right out again in the direction of Springfield.
All of those men, vicious in their righteous indignation and
armed with weapons ranging from pitchforks to shotguns, seemed
too much of an obstacle.
Still the Chicago-Virden Company persisted despite the efforts of
various local authorities north of Virden who attempted to
dissuade the company from its goal. Sixty blacks were taken off
the train at Tower Hill, fourteen others at Minonk, and the train
was even shunted onto a sidetrack at Galesburg in order to thwart
the attempt to break the strike.
Finally, on October 13, the Chicago-Virden Company made its final
assault upon the besieged stockade. The train rolled southward
and finally into Virden, Where it was halted next to the fort.
Both the hired guards and the strikers opened fire at once and
the scene became, according to one observer, reminiscent of the
fighting at San Juan Hill some months earlier. When the engineer
once again opened his throttle and backed up in the direction of
Springfield, and when the smoke had cleared, it could be recorded
that the human sacrifice had been significant. Seven miners were
killed and between thirty and forty were wounded. Of the guards,
five were killed and four wounded. No injuries were incurred
among the blacks.
Governor Tanner quickly sent the militia into the area, with
orders to prevent violence and to thwart any further attempts to
bring in strikebreakers. What happened to the blacks? Most stayed
in Illinois, either settling in Springfield or moving up to
Chicago. As far as the miners were concerned, their victory was
both sweet and tragic. They now had the martyrs any movement had
to have, and one month later in Virden, the company finally
agreed to pay the higher wage scale. It was a victory for
militant unionism, although won at a high cost. A short time
later, a visitor to these same Illinois mine fields affected by
the strike was to note an absence of pet dogs and cats. The truth
was that there were none. They had all been eaten.(7)
The aftermath of what came to be known as the "Virden
Massacre" was an explosion of fact into myth. The murdered
"boys of Virden," as Mother Jones called them, seemed
to grow in number with each decade. Yet their martyrdom seemed
undeniable to most Macoupin County miners. A month after the
fight at Virden, a State Militia captain described the striking
miners at Virden as mostly "Slavonic" who were
impossible to "educate and elevate." He was partially
right in the sense that some of the miners were Slavic in
Picture: Mother Jones with Knights of Labor Leader Terence Powderly
descent, but the nationalities of four of the dead who came
from Mr. Olive is a story unto itself. Two had pioneer
backgrounds or were British (Long and Smith), and two were
Germans (Gitterle and Kaemerer). For some inexplicable reason,
all four were denied burial in the town's established cemeteries,
so their comrades were forced to buy an acre of land in which
they might be interred. Some twenty years later, Mary Harris
"Mother" Jones made a dedicatory speech for this Union
Cemetery, and in it she stated, "I hope it will be my
consolation when I pass away to feel I sleep under the clay with
those brave boys." Her wishes were eventually fulfilled, and
today she rests in Mt. Olive with the "boys of Virden."(8)
Perhaps it was as Mrs. Jones had intimated in her 1923 speech at
Mt. Olive: That the martyrdom of the Virden boys had created such
a militancy in what was now called District 12 of the United Mine
Workers that it would draw special attention from mine operators.
Or perhaps it was that the better working conditions in District
12 simply developed because big capital found it to be a
profitable area in which to mine coal. At any rate, the growth in
coal production and the numbers of mine sinkings after 1898 in
both Macoupin and Montgomery Counties were quite substantial. The
most significant of these were those mines developed by the
Superior Coal Company, a subsidiary of the Chicago and
Northwestern Railroad. Four major tipples were constructed at
Eagerville, Sawyerville, Mt. Clare, and at Wilsonville. The last,
Superior's No. 4, was partially a response of the World War I
demand for fuel. Hence the reason for naming the town Wilsonville.
Of the four mining villages, this last was the source of the most
labor trouble for the Superior Company. It was also a little
village which, as voting statistics show, harbored more political
radicals than the larger towns in the county.(9)
That big capital had discovered the possibilities for enormous
profits in coal in southern and central Illinois is shown by the
fact that Joseph Leiter and John "Bet-a-Million" Gates
could be numbered among the new investors. Leiter, a Chicagoan
and typical of the nouveau riche of his time, was famous not only
for his wealth but also for his wife, a woman whose tongue
sometimes belied her social status. Malapropisms abounded in her
vocabulary. She once told reporters that she planned to attend a
fancy masquerade bell dressed in the "garbage of a nun."
Entrepreneurs or not, such individuals as Gates and Leiter played
for high stakes, and their dealings were sometimes hidden behind
such interlocking directorates that union leaders were sometimes
forced to bargain in the chilly confines of some LaSalle Street
bank or in the Union Trust Bank at Pittsburgh. One small
Gillespie mine, "The Little Dog," was once owned by the
Lehmann Corporation, whose most famous public outcropping was
Herbert Lehmann, a New Dealer and one-time governor of New York.
Lehmann's liberal viewpoints did not serve to drastically alter
or improve the conditions of men who worked that mine.(10)
So rapid was the economic growth in both Macoupin and Montgomery
counties after 1900 that the McKinley enterprises, which were
based in the east, built a so-called "interurban railroad"
from Danville to Champaign and thence to St. Louis. The track for
what was jokingly called "the Toonerville trolley" ran
straight down the main street of Gillespie which, by the mid-twenties,
had become the largest town in the county. Over in Montgomery
County, small settlements were absorbed by bigger towns. The town
of Witt, for instance, grew so rapidly after 1900 that it overran
the nearby English settlement of Paisley.
All of the mining towns in the two counties grew rapidly, and all
seemed to develop characteristics derived from the ethnic
elements which predominated within them. Of course, some claims
fell into the realm of myth, but it was argued that the best
bootleg beer after 1925 came from Mt. Olive. The best wine and
pasta, it was said, came from Benld. Because scores of English
families settled in Witt, it was said that the best home cooked
candies came from that town. The best scones and tea cakes were
to be had in Gillespie. Seemingly unrelated to anything in the
way of ethnicity was the claim that the best baseball players
came from the Nokomis area.(11)
It was into this milieu of coal and ethnic expansion that, on
some day between April 4 and June 25, 1908, John Llewellyn Lewis
stepped. This was the same year in which John Mitchell, the
declining hero of the United Mine Workers Union, was to give his
last National Union report. Why did Lewis come to Montgomery
County? According to Dubovsky and Van Tine, Lewis's latest
biographers, he emigrated from Iowa to Panama, Illinois partially
because of the militant unionism which pervaded the atmosphere of
Montgomery and Macoupin counties. Saul Alinsky, in a adulative
biography written some years earlier, makes the same claim.(12)
Lewis's brothers as well as his father also moved to Panama, and
soon the family seemed to have seized control of the town. John
was elected president of the U.M.W. local, Thomas became the
police magistrate (some years later, he would be both the local
union president and the manager of Shoal Creek No. 1), Dennie
became financial secretary of the Panama local, and three others
were simply labor union activists.(13)
In the autumn of 1909, almost all of the male population of the
northern Illinois town of Cherry was wiped out in a terrible mine
disaster. Through the efforts of John Walker, then the leader of
District 12 (which included Illinois), John L. Lewis was given
the special task of lobbying for more stringent mine safety laws
in Springfield. In a sense, he never went back to Panama. Mine
safety laws were radically improved, probably due less to Lewis'
efforts than to the public hue and outcry over the Cherry
disaster. Whatever the reasons, the miners of District 12 took
the position that by being militant, by not backing down an inch,
they could annually improve their financial and working
conditions. Lewis road the tide, and by 1919, he had put himself
into a position which brought him the acting presidency of the
national union.(14)
Through the decade of the 1920's, the major problem for union
coal miners in northern fields was the tremendous growth in the
production of nonunion coal in Kentucky and Appalachia. With such
cheap coal as a weapon, northern producers sought to reduce gains
made previously among unionized miners by attempting to lower
wages in the northern mines. Although Lewis argued the principle
of "not one step backward," the reality of nonunion
coal production was something else. In 1928, just prior to the
onset of the Great Depression, affairs had reached such a sorry
state among mines operating under United Mine Workers contracts
that Lewis sent out a call of almost appalling desperation. Every
district for itself, he told his workers: each was free to make
its own contract.
There had been strikes during the 1920's in Illinois, but in
general conditions had been fairly good. Irving Bernstein, in his
History of the American Worker, 1920-1933, writes that local
papers in southern Illinois, and in Franklin and Williamson
counties in particular, had been filled with advertisements for
radios, coats, and even books. Whatever strikes had occurred (and
in District 12, there had never been any hesitancy about calling
them) had been relatively painless. Once in a while, District 12
miners had "wildcatted" strikes over such simple issues
that it appeared as if they really wanted to have a day off. But
1928 was something else indeed, and in the end, even District 12
was forced into a contract which lowered daily wages from $7.50
to $6.10 a day.
The touchiness of miners in District 12 did have tangible
effects, however. The pay reduction there was considerably less
than in other mining areas of the nation. Still, to the 50,000
miners in District 12, Lewis's willingness to submit to
reductions seemed tantamount to abject surrender, and this was
particularly true with respect to those who knew him best - the
miners of Macoupin County. The same could not be said for miners
in Montgomery County, however, for their situation was now
becoming shaded by other changes. The mines of Witt had fallen
into long closings, and those of Coalton and Nokomis apparently
had a limited future.
Among the Macoupin County miners, it was not uncommon to hear
Lewis now being referred to as a "crook," and there
were rumors that he lived in almost baronial splendor. The last
was not entirely true, but miners who took their families to
Springfield on the electric railroad almost always made a
pilgrimage by the Lewis home, a large sturdy structure which was
certainly beyond anything which they might ever own. Such
mutterings were increased when Lewis, as the president of the
United Mine Workers, got into a deadly quarrel with the president
of district 12, Frank Farrington. The latter had dared to
challenge Lewis's authority and his power as well, the result
being that Lewis unloaded on his enemy with such deadly precision
that no one could err in naming him the biggest boy in the block.
While the quarrel between Farrington and Lewis was at its height,
the former was persuaded to take a trip to Europe. Within days
after the departure of the ship, Lewis released his most deadly
missile. It was the revelation that Farrington, while president
of District 12, had also signed on with the Peabody Coal Company
as its "public relations expert" at an annual salary of
$25,000. Peabody was a dirty name to many Illinois miners, and
Farrington's deception was incredible in view of the fact that
District 12 miners had just seen their wages lowered in the
contract of 1928. (15)
When, in 1928, Lewis told his districts to pull in their wagons
and to defend themselves, it was only a hint of the misery to
come.
Picture: John L. Lewis, about
1940.
In the following year, with the onset of the Great
Depression, coal fields in general, with the exception of those
in central Illinois, became remnants of what they had been. The
economic malaise quickly metastasized into a broad cancer. In
Little Egypt, Sesser's three mines were closed, and so were
Benton's four. Johnson City soon had eight abandoned mines.
Within ten years, in the three counties of Franklin, Williamson,
and Saline, there would be a total of 109 abandoned mines.
The growth of nonunion coal had a certain effect on mines around
Witt and Hillsboro in Montgomery County, and this, plus the
ordinary militancy of miners in Macoupin County, heightened the
unrest of miners in those two counties over the seeming lack of
leadership in the United Mine Workers itself. After all, as has
been stressed before, if Lewis was known at all by the rank and
file of his union, it would be by the workers in Macoupin and
Montgomery Counties. While miners had taken wage decreases in
both 1928 and 1929, Lewis's salary had more than doubled. The
president now owned a prosperous bank, he traded successfully in
the market, and it was said of him that he was making more money
than smaller operators. Miners in Macoupin County especially
would have agreed with Lewis's most recent biographers that, by
1929 and 1930, he had become "very much a man of the
American 1920's."(16)
By March 1930, with the movement centering in Macoupin,
Montgomery, and Christian counties, District 12 was in revolt
against Lewis. An attempt was made to run the venerable John
Walker against Lewis, but this was quickly nipped in the bud when
Lewis preemptively ruled Walker constitutionally ineligible.
Lewis' opposition was a mixed bag of dedicated unionists and
radicals. One should not discount the latter, especially in
Macoupin County. In the election of 1920, for instance, there was
no Communist Party listed on Illinois ballots, but the Socialist
and Socialist-Labor candidates won 1,291 votes in that county.
Compared to a non-coal county such as Adams, the difference was
remarkable. Larger in population than Macoupin, Adams County gave
404 votes to both of the radical candidates.
Four years later, in 1924, with the Progressive party, Socialist-Labor
party, and Workers' Party (Communist) candidates on the ballots,
Macoupin County tallied 6,959 votes for the first, thirty-two for
the second, and seventy-seven for the last. Once again, this far
exceeded the Adams county votes for the candidates of those three
parties.
The Communist vote in Macoupin went up by fur in 1928, but in
1932 the results were more interesting. Norman Thomas received 1,567
votes, the Socialist-Labor candidate won fifty-one votes, and the
Communist candidate received 134 votes. The Lemke-O'Brien Union
Party ticket was to affect the 1936 election, drawing 950 votes
in Macoupin county, but a study of the Socialist party vote in
that election is revealing. There was no Communist candidate, and
one may assume that votes ordinarily going in that direction
would be cast for the venerable Norman Thomas. Thomas did well in
three areas in Macoupin: in Benld, in Gillespie, where he
received his largest support, and in one of the Dorchester
precincts. Dorchester itself is a little farming village, but it
does have one precinct which covers the Wilsonville area, where
Superior Mine No. 4 is located. There Thomas got forty votes
which, by calculation, amounts to almost three times the number
which the candidate received in five precincts of Carlineville,
the county seat.(17)
All of these factors--the Lewis-Farrington controversy; the basic
radicalism of Macoupin miners as opposed to Lewis, the "man
of the twenties"; the worsening conditions of the miners--would
have profound effects upon the dramatic episodes which were to
occur in 1932. In that year, the four-year contract between
District 12 miners and the operators was drawing to an end. By
March 31, almost all of the District 12 workers had left the pits
due to the failure to bring negotiations to a close. Finally, on
July 9, a new contract was announced, and although many miners
may have resigned to losing ground in terms of annual income, the
extent to which they were expected to give way was shocking. The
basic daily wage scale on the previous contract was $6.10; the
new contract was to lower this to $5.00. When the contract was
submitted to miners for their approval, they angrily turned it
down by a majority of more than two to one.
Within days a second proposal, which called for essentially the
same agreement, was again submitted to the miners. Lewis, by now
the international president of the U.M.W.A., ranged through the
state, although mostly in the fairly safe districts. He pleaded
for acceptance of the contract. The unfortunate and still highly
respected District 12 president, John H. Walker, was given the
onerous task of selling the agreement to the more militant miners.
His appearance in Gillespie was disastrous, and it nearly erupted
into personal violence against himself.
The meeting in that town was scheduled at an unused movie theater.
Hours before the appointed time, miners began to come into town
from outlying villages such as Eagerville, Mt. Clare,
Sawyerville, and Wilsonville. The more outspoken opponents to the
new contract occupied the front seats in the old building, and as
Walker began his attempt to sell the contract to the miners, one
by one they leaped to their feet. They would not go gently into
that good night as lackeys or minions who would sell their right
to a fair living. As the house rocked with applause from the
angry audience, the poorly constructed old movie house almost
seemed to self destruct. Chunks of plaster fell from the ceiling
upon those seated below; not small pieces drifting through
unmoving wisps of pipe smoke, but yard wide flat pieces which fell
noisily on both people and seats below. Walker, veteran to mine
militancy that he was, soon cut short his effort and quickly left
town.(18)
The vote upon the second contract took place on August 6. The
early pronouncements of Lewis' immediate subordinates indicated
that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the referendum had
carried in favor of the contract. Before any affirmation of the
tally sheets could be made, the news suddenly broke that all of
the sheets had been stolen. Evidence that the thieves had been
high officers in District 12 was open and clear--a crime
compounded by Lewis himself a few days later when he peremptorily
announced that, because the sheets had disappeared, he was
ordering miners to accept the terms of the new contract.
It was soon obvious that opposition to the skullduggery of the
leadership of District 12 was strongest in Macoupin County. There
in Benld, on August 14, rank and file miners held a meeting to
determine the action to be taken against mines elsewhere which
were in obeisance to Lewis's order. There was particular
bitterness against Christian county miners who were answering the
call of the Peabody Coal Company to resume work. The Benld
decision was that miners should proceed to the Taylorville area
and that they should picket working mines in that county. By
August 19 there were some 1,500 miners, most of them from
Macoupin county, en route to Taylorville. Their efforts were
quickly successful; the Christian County miners refused to cross
picket lines.
Temporarily successful in this effort, the attention of the
Macoupin County miners now turned to southern Illinois, where
miners of Franklin county had returned to work under the terms of
the new contract. In Little Egypt, conditions were of a much
different nature. Earlier picket lines had been dispersed by
questionable tactics on the part of county law authorities. One
picket had been murdered, and many of the workers in that area
were anxious to return to work lest their places of employment be
permanently closed.
Still, the union leaders in the Gillespie and Benld area made
plans for a huge picketing demonstration, announcing that no
miners would be armed, and that the parade of autos into southern
Illinois was to be well organized and peaceful. Some 10,000
miners left the Staunton area, the tunes of the local municipal
band ringing in their ears.
The circumstances of what soon came to be known as the "Battle
of Mulkeytown" seem clearly to have been a result of
collaboration between the sheriff of Franklin county, state
police who directed the caravan into an ambush, and militant
Lewis followers among the local miners. Hundreds of high school
boys, coal miners, and businessmen were deputized by the Franklin
county sheriff, as well as two physicians who were told to treat
only Franklin county people among the expected casualties.
When the head of the vast cavalcade reached U.S. Highway 51south
of DuQuoin, the state police shunted the leading cars eastward on
State Highway 14. When the leading cars crossed the Little Muddy
River, a short distance from the village of Mulkeytown, the
sheriff's deputies suddenly appeared ahead. Shots were fired, men
were beaten, cars were pushed over, and tires were punctured. It
was hardly a melee, much less a battle. There was no contest, for
only one side was armed. The great caravan turned around, and
headed northward. Five of the would-be picketers were casualties;
none of the sheriff's deputies had been wounded.(19)
With miners in southern Illinois working in the pits at the
reduced wages, and a crumbling situation in the Peabody mines in
Christian County, the militant miners now called a convention for
September 1, 1932. Meeting in Gillespie and in the old Colonial
Theater, which had shook at the rejection of John H. Walker's
midsummer plea to accept the new contract, the convention
recommended the organization of a new union to be called the
Progressive Miners of America. Its acting president, later to be
its regular president, was a working miner, Claude Pearcy of
Gillespie. How odd it would seem to some miners later when they
realized that Pearcy, a decent and intelligent man, had been born
in Lucas, Iowa, the birthplace of John L. Lewis, and that only
eight years separated them in age.(20)
While it may be true that, as some writers claim, the Progressive
Miners of America (later the Progressive Mine Workers of America)
were made up of pure militants, Communists, Musteites, Ku Klux
Klanners, opportunists, and worse, whatever can be said in this
respect can be repeated in turn for their opponents, the United
Mine Workers. The 1930's, at least the years following the
establishment of a second mine union, were filled with violence
wherever and whenever the two unions came into conflict over
control. While this was not so much true of Montgomery County
because its coal mining days were temporarily ended, or in
Macoupin County, in which almost everyone was a Progressive, it
was true in southern Illinois and in Christian County. The
Progressives (called "Proggies" by the United Mine
Workers) did bargain into a slightly better contract, which added
both advantages and woes to the new union. Operators, such as
Peabody in Christian County, managed to obtain state militia
protection from picketing, and simply refused to consider the
more costly Progressive contract. In southern Illinois, whenever
miners were taken with the "Progressive disease," they
were often summarily fired.
Men died on both sides. Strikers were shot by national guardsmen,
fights between scores of men were everyday occurrences in 1933
and 1934, and even the members of the Progressive Mine Workers
Women's' Auxiliary were assaulted in Franklin County. This last
organization, headed by Agnes Burns Wieck of Belleville, was no
less militant in its activities than the union itself.(21)
A major problem of the Progressives was in obtaining recognition
by the National Labor Relations Board, over which Lewis exercised
so much influence. It was a particularly damaging situation, for
any disputes involving discrimination against miners with
Progressive affiliations had no hearing. President Pearcy of the
Progressives attempted to rid the union of its red-tainted
officers, in one instance firing the editor of the union
newspaper, Gerry Allard. Lewis' stranglehold on the Department of
Labor and his heavy contributions to the Democratic Party delayed
National Labor Relations Board considerations of Progressive
claims until midsummer of 1937. The recognition of the P.M.W.A.
by the Board came after President Roosevelt's second inauguration
and may have had some relationship to the quarrel which was soon
to take place between the President and Lewis.
Though the issue of radical militancy had died along with the
closing coal mines of Montgomery County, it remained a vital
factor in yearly developments in the 1930's in Macoupin county.
In 1937, over what seems to have been a slight grievance in
Superior Mine No. 4 in Wilsonville, miners there refused to come
topside at the close of the day's operations. It was the first so-called
sit down strike to be conducted in a coal mine, and it lasted
very nearly a week.(22)
And the union itself continued to have troubles. In 1939, two of
its organizers were suspended on the charges of having proselyted
for causes and principles adverse to the aims and aspirations of
the union as a whole. Even at this date, some forty-one years
later, it is dangerous to state just why the two men were
punished. One may suspect at some risk that the two individuals
were advocating principles so far to the left that even union
officials could not support them.(23)
With virtually all of the old mines of Macoupin and Montgomery
closed in 1980, one can now summarize the contributions of the
two counties in terms of radical unionism and workers' militancy.
There was the violence in the Mt. Olive coal field in the early
1890's and the Virden-Pana battle of 1898. John L. Lewis emerged
in Montgomery County after 1908. He rose to leadership of the
United Mine Workers and, with his friend Allan Haywood, once of
Witt in Montgomery County, later organized the Committee of
Industrial Organization in the 1930's. There was the peculiar
"General" Bradley of Mt. Olive, and the famous "Mother"
Jones who would be buried there. The latter not only helped to
organize the International Workers of the World, the I.W.W. or
the "wobblies," but she had some kind of a mysterious
hand in the workings of the Mexican Revolution in 1915. And for
Mother Jones' connoisseurs (she seems to have been rediscovered
of late), there is even a radical feminist magazine published
today in San Francisco. Called simply Mother Jones, its recent
Christmas issue carried an artist's illustration of Mother Jones
in a Santa Claus suit, with the notion that the leading article
inside was entitled "Happy Hell Raising." Then there
was the violence of the anti-Lewis movement and the organization
of the Progressive Mine Workers of America. Forty-eight years
after its founding, the union still exists, although it would be
difficult to enumerate its membership.
Through it all, was there anything in the way of contradiction,
anything in the way of anomaly? John L. Lewis came to work in
Panama in 1908. One year earlier, Louis Kenneth Eilers was born
in Gillespie. The first became a great union leader, the second
the president of the Eastman-Kodak Company. Allan Haywood
emigrated from England to Witt in Montgomery County, though his
stay there was brief. Haywood eventually became a high official
in the C.I.O. and in the United Automobile Workers of America.
Leslie Berry Worthington was also born in England. He was brought
to Witt by his family at about the same time Haywood arrived
there from what was called the "old country."
Worthington, like Eilers, had a long career in the business
world, eventually becoming the president of U.S. Steel. Were they
all examples of the way that was in the free-wheeling America of
seventy years ago? Or were their successes, all of them, the
results of the electric social climate of the coal fields of
Macoupin and Montgomery counties?(24)
NOTES
(1)Garland's dissection of farm life is found in his Main-Travelled
Roads (1891). Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives (1890), a
powerful indictment of social disparity in New York City
(2)John Keiser, Building for the Centuries: Illinois, 1865 to
1898 (Urbana: Univ. Of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 12-13. Many of
the early St. Clair County miners were active in the National
Progressive Union of Miners and Mine Laborers, an affiliation of
the Knights of Labor. The original charter for Local Union No.
644, District 6 (Hillsboro, Ill.) was, for many years, displayed
on the wall of Room 508, Ridgely Bank Building, Springfield, Ill.
See Dallas M. Young, "A History of the Progressive Miners of
America, 1932-1940," Diss. University of Illinois 1942, p.9.
(3)The Area News (Gillespie, Illinois) 22 Aug. 1980, section 2, p.
1, and Melvyn Dubovsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A
Biography (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Club,
1977), p. 21.
(4)My own recollections. As to the importance of the British in
the American labor movement, consider Sam Gompers, a London-born
Jew and the leader of the American Federation of Labor for
decades; Philip Murray, a Scot and important labor leader in the
1930's; John Mitchell, American born of a Scottish mother, and
early leader of the United Mine Workers of America; Allan
Haywood, an Englishman and 1930s' leader of the C.I.O.; and John
Brophy, Lancashire-born coal union leader in the West Virginia
fields.
(5)Keiser, Building for the Centuries, pp. 246-47. See also: John
Keiser, "The Union Miners Cemetery at Mt. Olive, Illinois--A
Spirit-Thread of Labor History," Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society, 62 (1969), 229-66. Keiser gives a fine
portrait of Bradley, who was born in England in 1866, brought to
Collinsville in 1873 by his family, and later settled in Mt.
Olive.
(6)Victor Hicken, "The Virden and Pana Mine Wars of 1898,"
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 52 (1959), 264-66.
The quote by Lloyd is from his book, A Strike of Millionaires
against Miners (Chicago: n.p., 1890), p. 10.
(7)Hicken, "The Virden and Pana Mine Wars," pp. 265-78;
also Keiser, "The Union Miners Cemetery at Mt. Olive,
Illinois, pp. 243-50.
(8)Ibid, p. 251. Dale Fetherling, Mother Jones: The Miners' Angel
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1974), p. 16.
(9)The Area News, section 2, p. 1. Also, tally sheets from the
1936 election, copy forwarded by Philip Brown, Macoupin County
Clerk. The 1936 selection, the only one close to the 1931
depression for which tally sheets are still available in the
County Clerk's Office, shows forty-seven Socialist and Socialist-Labor
votes for Wilsonville, Carlinville, the county seat, had only
fourteen in the same categories. There was no Communist
presidential candidate listed for Illinois in 1936.
(10)McAlister Coleman, Men and Coal (New York: Arno and The New
York Times, 1969), p. 76. In so far as working conditions in the
coal mines were concerned, it should be remembered that the
official figure for deaths from pit accidents since 1900 is 102,968.
Some 3,242 miners died in 1907 alone. These figures do not
include deaths from slow but relentless black lung disease which,
in 1975, was accounting for between 4,000 and 5,000 deaths among
old miners. See the Chicago Tribune, 12 Mar. 1980, p. 10.
(11)Nokomis produced two baseball Hall of Famers: Charles "Red"
Rushing of the Yankees, and Jim Bottomley of the Cardinals.
Rushing lost part of a foot while working as a miner but it did
not hinder him from winning 273 games from 1924 to 1947.
(12)Dubovsky and Van Tine, p. 20. Saul Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An
Unauthorized Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1949), p.
21. Alinsky's glosses over almost everything in Lewis's life
which might have been ethically questionable.
(13)Dubovsky and Van Tine, pp. 56-57.
(14)Irving Bernstein, A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933:
The Lean Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 362-74.
15)Ibid., pp. 360-69, and Coleman, p. 138. I also draw upon my
own memory for some of the impressions Macoupin County miners had
of John L. Lewis.
(16)Bernstein, pp. 362-65; Coleman, pp. 142-43. As for Lewis's
1920's financial dealings, see Dubovsky and Van Tine, p. 150.
(17)Most of these figures come from the Illinois Blue Book, an
annual publication of the State of Illinois concerning the state.
Phil Brown, County Clerk, Macoupin County gave me a copy of the
1936 vote tallies. It is interesting to note that Jennie Lee, the
wife of British Labor Socialist Aneurin Bevan, made several
visits to Gillespie during the 1930's. Not only was it the Scots
settlement which drew her there, but the radical coloration of
the mining population as well. It might be noted here that in
1976 there were seventy-four Macoupin County votes for the
Communist candidate, five for the Socialist-Labor, and seven for
the Socialist. Adams County, by comparison, tallied twenty-five
Communist, eight Socialist-Labor, and twelve Socialist votes.
(18)Bernstein, pp. 370-77. I was present in the old Colonial
Theater when Walker spoke.
(19)The events of summer, 1932, are described in Dallas Young's
Ph.D. dissertation, pp. 49-95; Bernstein, pp. 370-77; Dubovsky
and Van Tine, pp. 163-77; and Coleman, pp. 140- 42.
(20)Young, p. 113. I saw Mr. Pearcy often. I also attended school
with his children.
(21)Ibid., p. 117. Through the summers of 1932 and 1933 there
were countless rallies and picnics throughout the area in support
of the Progressive cause. The "women's auxiliary" was
always present. I have in my memorabilia a clipping which
describes a rally on the farm of Bill Hicken at Witt. The article
ends: "Every one was tired and weary but well pleased at
having been present to take part in such an enjoyable outing."
(22)"Sit Down Strike Continues," St. Louis Star-Times,
25 May 1937, p. 1.
(23)Young, p. 184, gives no hint as to why the two men were
suspended. I have my own opinions, having been acquainted with
one of them. Dubovsky and Van Tine, p. 170, state that the
Progressives were an admixture of Communists and Musteites, Ku
Klux Klanners, opportunists, and pie-card artists. I have no idea
what a pie-card artist is, but the term Musteite was applied to
any radical who espoused the ideas taught at the Brookwood Labor
College in New York state.
(24)My parents knew the Haywood family well, I also knew the
families of Leslie Worthington and Louis Eilers.
Written permission to include: "I give Gloria Frazier permission to put my articles, "The Virden-Pana Mine Wars of 1898" and "Mine Union Radicalism in Macoupin and Montgomery Counties" in the Macoupin County Illinois USGenWeb Archives. Signed Victor Hicken, October 9, 1997."
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