Historical Background: Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike 1912-13
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Historical Background: Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike 1912-13 By 1912 much of coal mining regions in the United States had been unionized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). In April 1912, the UMWA negotiated a new contract for the northern coal fields, and they then tried to negotiate a new contract with a pay raise for the southern ones as well. When the union miners on Paint Creek in Kanawha County went out on strike for the wage increase, they reached out to miners on Cabin Creek next door who were non-unionized and encouraged them to go out too. Cabin Creek miners had been restless facing some of the toughest mine guards, and they seized the day, made a list of demands that focused on a union check-weighman and end to the mine guard system. They were quickly evicted from their homes and those evicted set up a tent colony at Holly Grove. When they moved there, they certainly had no idea some would be there living in tents through that winter and stayed out for over a year. It was at this point that some miners, led by Frank Keeney and unable to get support from the UMWA for the miners on Cabin Creek, went to Charleston and got the support directly of Mary Harris, “Mother Jones.” A grandmotherly figure who could quote the Bible and curse like a sailor in the same sentence. The miners loved her and she loved them. She was unexpected by the gender and age norms of the time. In addition to Mother Jones, the miners also began to get support from the rapidly growing Socialist Party. The companies held strong and refused any demands and instead brought in more detectives to evict striking or sympathetic miners. These evictions were rough affairs. Mothers screaming, children crying, and armed men rummaging through tiny coal camp houses, throwing all belongings out into the street. There is even more than one reported instance of the mine guards evicting pregnant women, and in one instance they evicted a group of miners while they attended a funeral, and when they came out of church, they were faced with their belongings piled in a heap and across the road mine guards had a machine gun trained at the door of the church expecting trouble. The Paint Creek Cabin Creek strike eventually broke out into violence because the Holly Grove camp full of women and children that was on “free ground” was attacked one day. Used to their total power, some mine guards simply went up in the hills and wanted to terrorize the miners and their families and force them to leave so they fired down on the peaceful encampment, amazingly no one was killed. But the miners had been getting ready, ordering in cheap rifles and smuggling them up the valleys with help from free citizens up and down the valleys. They launched their own attack on the fortified mine guard base at Mucklow. Remarkably, during that hour long battle, no one was killed, but the war had begun. Over the next several months, more than fifty men met a violent end on Paint and Cabin Creek. The miners organized commando brigades like the “dirty eleven” led by men like Dan Chain, an African American miner with the nickname “Few Clothes Johnson.” They attacked mine guards, blew up coal tipples, tore up railway tracks and fought or spoke to strike breakers brought in by the company to convince them to join the strike. Many of these strike breakers were African Americans or recent immigrants, and miners who came from similar backgrounds (and often spoke the same languages). Rocco Spinelli and his wife, Nellie Bowles Spinelli, would meet incoming trains and convince dozens to join the strike. Governor William Glasscock finally got involved and declared martial law because the story was getting attention in the national press. Many organizers like the Spinellis and Few Clothes were imprisoned along with Mother Jones. Because the pickets were so successful, the owners eventually commissioned a train in Huntington, called the Bull Moose Special (so named because the ones who paid for it were Progressive Republican supporters of Teddy Roosevelts independent Bull Moose Party). This train was armored and armed with machine guns to bring in loads of strike breakers. But it also had another use, described here in an expert from the West Virginia Encyclopedia: The attack was triggered on February 7 when strikers from Holly Grove fired on a company ambulance and attacked the store at nearby Mucklow. Later that night, Kanawha County Sheriff Bonner Hill, Paint Creek coal operator Quinn Morton, a number of deputies, mine guards, and C&O Railway police boarded the Bull Moose Special armed with arrest warrants for unnamed persons. As the darkened train approached Holly Grove, two blasts from the engine’s whistle apparently signaled the beginning of machine gun and rifle fire from the Bull Moose Special into the tents of sleeping miners and their families. Several people were wounded, but only one striker, Cesco Estep, was killed. Estep was trying to get his son and pregnant wife to safety. In revenge, the enraged strikers attacked the mine guards’ camp at Mucklow two days later. By April the new governor of WV, Henry Hatfield, decided he would end the strike. He called the UMWA and owners to his office. Coal had only been trickling out the valley for a year at this point. The strike had claimed dozens of lives and millions of dollars’ worth of coal company property was destroyed. The owners were on their heels. But the miners, aided by solidarity strikers like the Italian anarchist miners from Boomer in Fayette county and the secret mountain gardens tended by miners’ wives and children, buoyed the resolve of a community living in fear, but also side by side in spite of their racial, ethnic, and linguistic differences. Governor Hatfield got the owners to agree to what came to be called the “Hatfield Contract”. It met almost none of the original demands. It did not end the mine guard system, and most importantly it did not recognize the union. It simply offered miners a return to work and the only real concession was that union miners would not be discriminated against. The UMWA officials in Charleston were forced to agree to this contract as well, and the governor gave them 36 hours to get back to work or he’d declare martial law. However, since the contract was not any part of what the rank and file members wanted, they launched a series of wildcat strikes over the next three months. With continued pressure, by July, they won their central demand: union recognition of most mines on Paint and Cabin Creeks. Disappointment with the old UMWA officials meant that a grassroots membership made of folks like Frank Keeney and Bill Blizzard, who had played key leadership roles in the strike, took over the District 17 offices in union elections. These were the same people who were to lead the march on Blair Mountain several years later. All of the miners and their families who participated in the strike on Paint and Cabin Creeks, through their experiences of suffering, living in tents, and facing violence and sacrifice, developed a deep-seated sense of solidarity and allegiance to the union, one that would play a crucial role in their willingness to take up arms to support their union brothers and sisters in the still un- unionized regions a decade later. Although part of the coalfields had won union recognition, these areas were relatively calm during WWI. However, the claims that during the war the US was “making the world safe for democracy” rankled many in counties like Logan, Mingo, and McDowell where the old system of mine guards remained. Questions: Historical Background: Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike 1912-13 1. Why might the unionized Paint Creek miners have encouraged the non-union Cabin Creek miners to strike with them? 2. Why was Mother Jones an unusual ally? 3. Answer in paragraph form: How did the coal companies react to the strike? Use examples to support your answer. 4. Answer in paragraph form: How did the miners fight back against the violence? Use examples to support your answer. 5.What was the Bull Moose Special? 6. What was the Hatfield Contract? Was it what the miners wanted? Historical Background: Matewan and Blair Mountain While the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike had won union recognition for miners in much of Kanawha County; Logan, Mingo, and McDowell counties were still un-unionized in spite of similar difficult working and living conditions. During WWI, things were relatively quiet in the coal fields, however, after the war ended Southern WV, like much of the country, saw dramatic increases in labor strife. This conflict was due largely to large numbers of soldiers returning from the war in search of work and fears that the economy was slowing following wartime production. In this context of heightened labor conflict, the UMWA tried to extend its reach into previously un-unionized counties like Mingo. In response to this organizing drive, on May 19, 1920, a dozen heavily armed men from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency arrived in Matewan, WV to evict miners from company housing because they had joined the UMWA. The evictions included driving a woman and her children from home at gunpoint and throwing their belongings into the rain. The detectives who carried out this work probably assumed that their reign of “terror on the Tug” would continue much as it had during previous decades of company rule.