Areviewoftwo Recent Films on Theclass War in the West Virginia Coal Fields

The Retrieval of Labour History in the United States: Areviewoftwo recent films on theclass war in the West Virginia coal fields Errol Black and Joe Dolecki IN A RECENT ARTICLE in Monthly Labour Review, Roy Rosenzweig observes that: Within the universities, the field of labour history it flourishing as never before. Hnt-nte scholarly books and articles issue forth regularly from the univerritypreaKf—Yet, as even an «systematic survey shows, popular presentations of labour history.«aie much more difficult to find. He goes on to suggest that this ghettoization, this failure to make labour history accessible to the people of the United States, is attributable to "...a general conspiracy of silence..." which is reflected in the limited coverage of labour history in the contents of popular history publications; the dearth of museums, or even exhibits in museums, which focus on the development of the labour movement and the great struggles of working people; the neglect and bias in the treatment of labour history and labour issues in the text books used in high schools; and the failure of Hollywood and the cinematographic popular arts to recognize the significant role which the labour movement and class conflict have played in shaping the character of American society. It is this latter issue of labour and the movies which is of interest to us here. Rosenzweig asks the question: "How many Hollywood movies have depicted great labour conflicts or the stories of labour leaders?" His answer The only two recent ones that I can think of are The Molly Magmres and Norma Roe, both made by the same director, Martin RitL" Norman Jewison's FJ.S.T. could be added to the list, but this addition would not alter Rosenzweig's point, which is that Hollywood has not shown much interest in making movies about labour issues, or, to be more precise, movies which probe and attempt to elucidate the nature of class relations and class conflict in American society. Renegade and independent film makers have attempted to redress mis lRoy Rosenzweig, "American labour history: a conspiracy of silence?*' Monthly Labor Review, (kaga& 1987). 51-2. Errol Black and Joe Dolecki, "The Retrieval of Labour History in the United States: A Review of two recent films on the class war in the West Virginia cod fields," LabourILt Travail, 24 (Ml 1989), 253-264. 254 LABOUR/LE TRAVAIL situation, as in, for example, Salt of the Earth (1953) and Harlan County, USA (1976), but these movies were denied access to the mass-distribution network of North American cinemas. (Harlan County. USA was shown on public broadcasting channels in the United States.) More recently, two films have been produced which deal with the story of the class wars in the coal fields of West Virginia in the early 1920s. One of these films, Even the Heavens Weep: The West Virginia Coal Wars, is a quasi-documentary, financed by the West Virginia Humanities Foundation, produced by Beth Nogay and directed by Danny L. McGuire. It was released and shown on the public broadcasting network in 1985. The second film is a commercial movie made by John Sayles (who has a solid reputation as a film maker based on his previous movies, Return of the Secaucus Seven, and The Brother From Another Planet) with the backing of "...Cinecom, a nontraditional company specializing in films that don't reach for the lowest common denominator. These films do precisely what Rosenzweig claims needs to be done: namely, they retrieve an important part of American labour history which has been all but obliterated from public conscious ness. However, before considering these films in detail, it may be useful first to situate developments in the West Virginia coal fields in the context of what was happening throughout the United States. As Gregory KeaJey has demonstrated, the years immediately following World War I marked the culmination of a a general revolt of labour which affected all of Europe and North America. This conflict was especially intense in the United States, with a general strike in Seattle in 1919, as well as bloody and protracted work stoppages which involved millions of workers and affected virtually every industry and community in the country. The workers involved in these confronta tions were seeking wage increases to offset the 14 per-cent decline in real wages experienced during World War I, an end to the brutal and inhumane conditions of their employment, and, in many instances, recognition of their unions. Their opponents, industrial capitalists and the ruling classes, were determined to prevent the spread of unionism and to preserve the "right" to exploit workers. In virtually every situation where it seemed that workers were gaining the upper hand, the state, often with the tacit endorsation of the American Federation of Labor (even in strikes, such as the great steel strike of 1919, which nominally were AFL strikes), intervened to ensure labour's defeat Part of the story of this era in American labour history is told by the data in Table 1. 2Vt Aufderheide, "Coal Wan," Mother Jones, (August/September 1987), 26. 'Gregory S. Keafey, "1919: The Canadian Labour Revok," Labour/Le Travail, 13 (1984), 11-44. accounts of this en in American labour history, see Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labour's Untold Story (New York 1955); Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Boston 1972). RETRIEVAL OF LABOUR HISTORY 255 TABLE 1 Union Members and Strikes in the United States, 1912-1926 Year Union Members Strikes Number As ft of Total 1914 2,687,000 1,204 253 21.0 1915 2,583,000 1,593 312 19.6 1916 2,773,000 3,789 721 19.0 1917 3,061,000 4,450 799 18.0 1918 3,467,000 3,353 584 17.4 1919 4,125,000 3,630 869 23.9 1920 5,048,000 3,411 622 18.2 1921 4,781,000 2,385 373 15.6 1922 4,027,000 1,112 208 18.7 1923 3,622,000 1,553 308 19.8 1924 3,536,000 1,249 244 19.5 1925 3,519,000 1,301 219 16.8 1926 3,502,000 1,035 206 19.9 Source: Bureau of the Census of the U.S. Department of Commerce, The Statistical History of United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, Conn. 1965), 98-99. Although these strikes occurred literally everywhere in the United States, the largest, longest and bloodiest confrontations were in the American coal fields, "... with sporadic strikes, national strikes, and armed battles running from 1919 into 1922. As Jeremy Brecher notes, mere was a major insurrection of Illinois miners in 1919 against both the mine owners and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), under the leadership of John L. Lewis. This insurgency led to a national strike of 425,000 miners on 1 November 1919. They were ordered back to work by the federal courts on 8 November, but defied both the courts and Lewis, remaining out for another month—until the intervention of President Wilson, who granted a 14 per-cent wage increase and provided for the establishment of an arbitration commission to settle other issues in dispute. There was widespread dissatisfaction with this outcome, and in 1920 coal production was disrupted by wildcat strikes in most coal-producing states. In 1920, the centre of the conflict shifted to West Virginia. Even the Heavens Weep skillfully combines archival material," commentary by historian David Corbin, by journalist and author Lon K. Savage {Thunder in the Mountains), and by Fred Barkley, professor of industrial relations at the West Virginia School of Graduate Studies, with the observations of contemporaries and their descendants to fashion a richly detailed and useful documentary of this conflict. Greener, StriJcel, 130. 256 LABOUR/LE TRAVAIL The film opens with a brief history of the growth of the coal fields in West Virginia and the rise of the UMWA. It then picks up the story of the conflict with the strikes at Cabin and Paint Creeks in 1912. and follows it through its climax in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. In brief, union organization came later to the West Virginia coal fields than to other coal-producing states because of the lack of familiarity on the part of workers with the nature and traditions of unionism, because of a geography which isolated miners in the mountain hollows where mines were located, and, most of all, because of the near-pathological opposition of the mine owners (particularly the owners of mines in the southern part of the state) to unions. Under these conditions, the power of the owners overthe miners was almost absolute. As Corbin relates, the coal bosses owned the houses the miners lived in; they built the school and the church, and they hired the teacher and the preacher, they paid the miners in company scrip and compelled them to buy at the company store; they ignored state safety laws — it was cheaper to replace the thousands of miners killed in slides and explosions than it was to adopt safety measures which might prevent their deaths. They also cheated the miners by short-weighing their tonnage, a practice called "cribbing." Finally, the mine owners controlled most communities in the vicinity of the mines, either directly or indirectly, through corruption of local governments and police forces. Miners who complained about these conditions were summarily dismissed, evicted from company housing, and driven away from the mines. By 1912, most of the northern fields were unionized. That year, however, 15,000 unionized miners at Paint and Cabin Creeks went on strike to back up their demands for union recognition, checkweighmen to prevent the miners from being shorted on tonnage, free assembly, the right to trade at any store in the area without punishment, the nine-hour day, and enforcement of state safety laws.

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