John L. Lewis and the Mine Workers

Thirty years ago this defiant war cry rang through the sere valleys of eastern Kentucky as coal diggers and their wives and children used guns, clubs, stones, and dynamite to defend the United Mine Workers of America against the coal operators and their allies, the company-owned upholders of the law. Today, in valleys rendered even more somber by the decline of the coal industry, many of these same miners have taken up guns and dynamite again, but this time it is to fight off the union they once fought to build.

The despair that marches across the gray, gutted Kentucky hills, leaving its footprints in blood, economic privation, and the threat of civil war, is an extreme expression of the troubles that afflict the UMWA; troubles that raise ominous questions for other basic labor organizations and for society in a period when technological innovation is smashing established industrial patterns with such speed that Secretary of Labor Wirtz suggests history ought to be arrested for reckless driving.

The miners under the leadership of John L. Lewis did all the things most of us applaud as enlightened, forward-looking, statesmanlike, socially minded — pick your own adjective to connote union cooperativeness in fostering industrial efficiency and cutting costs to the consumer. This was not the depressingly familiar story of a union fighting a rear-guard action against progress by insisting on the retention of men long after all need for their services had evaporated, or by otherwise frustrating employer efforts to achieve increased productivity.

The Lewis approach was precisely the reverse of this foot-dragging technique. He put all the energy, ingenuity, and even ruthlessness he had formerly applied to conducting epic strikes for higher wages and more generous welfare benefits into the perfection of new instruments for speeding the mechanization of the mines, assuring continuity of supply for the electric utilities and other big burners of coal, and expanding markets for coal in its war of survival against the competitive onsurge of oil and natural gas. Without this altered focus of union policy, it is doubtful that there would be any coal industry left today, or any jobs for coal miners.

Yet the human cost of the shift has been so staggering that few other unions, surveying the desperate men in the rotting communities in the coal-rich hollows of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Kentucky, are likely to be inspired to go and do likewise when their employers appeal to them for comparable cooperation in installing automated equipment.

For the UMWA the fruits of cooperation have been almost as equivocal as they have been for its members. Its welfare fund still takes in $10 million a month in royalties; its welfare reserves come to more than $100 million; and it has another $100 million in its own treasury, most of it invested in coal companies, coal-carrying railroads, coalburning utilities, and other enterprises. But the incubus of need among the jobless in the coalfields is monumental.

The pioneer UMWA welfare and retirement fund, which has distributed more than $1.5 billion in benefits to miners and their families since its establishment just after World War II, has had to scale down its pension payments from $100 a month to $75, and also to impose much tighter eligibility rules for medical and hospital care. Now it is preparing to close four of its ten hospitals, the proudest of all the union’s contributions to better health protection in regions in which the absence of decent medical facilities was once a national disgrace.

The volume of nonunion coal is creeping up. It represents more than one quarter of the national total, and in the embattled zones of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, it is closer to half. This erosion in union strength is doubly disturbing because mechanization is continuing to gnaw away at the industry’s manpower requirements, and thus at the union’s membership potential. In the soft-coal fields, where 700,000 men worked after World War I and 500,000 after World War II, not many more than 150,000 are needed now to produce all the coal the country consumes.

How successfully the union will sustain the squeeze, no one is sure. The upheavals in Kentucky and Tennessee and the sporadic mutterings in other distressed areas come as the UMWA goes under new management for the second time in three years. W. A. “Tony” Boyle, a longtime Lewis lieutenant little known by anyone else, moved into the union presidency when Thomas Kennedy died in January. Boyle wears the protective mantle of Lewis’ sponsorship, but the patriarch is eighty-three and his health has been too erratic to provide any assurance of sustained activity in support of his protégé. So long as Lewis is around, of course, there will be only one top man in the organization; he remains the Dalai Lama in the union hierarchy. The question is, what will happen to the structure when its massive main prop is removed?

Interestingly, the most acute worries on this score exist among the major coal producers. Fifteen years ago they would have welcomed the inner stresses in the union as an opportunity to move for wage cuts, or even to engineer a largescale union-busting campaign. Now the heads of the principal coal companies have no desire to capitalize on the vast pool of unemployed miners or the tensions in the union for fear that they will re-create the conditions of industrial chaos which almost killed coal as a competitive fuel a little over a decade ago.

The coal operators, whom Lewis used to assail as '’the most corpulent of our native fat cats,” have no hesitancy these days in acclaiming him as the industry’s savior. What distresses them at least as much as it does anyone in the union is the prospect that the very policies that meant salvation for the industry will ultimately spell destruction for the union. “Perhaps in the end the United Mine Workers will become nothing but an investment trust,” is the lament of one of Lewis’ most ardent admirers on the management side.

If such anxieties exist in the union high command, they are carefully repressed. Lewis himself still serves as chairman of the National Coal Policy Conference, a post in which he succeeded George H. Love, chairman of the Consolidated Coal Company, largest of the commercial coal producers. The conference is a unique combination of labor and management in all the industries that have a substantial stake in coal (mining, manufacture of mine machinery, railroads, and utilities) to “speak with a common voice in the interest of coal, and thereby in the public interest of the nation.” The industrial participants in the conference have a combined capital of $32 billion.

This alliance, now engaged in a feverish fight at the White House and on Capitol Hill to curb imports of low-cost residual oil from Latin America, is expressive of a philosophy that has impelled the union toward ever closer partnership with the giants on coal’s corporate front. The costs of mine mechanization have grown so enormous that the union has done everything in its power to encourage the pooling of companies into larger and larger aggregations of capital. Far from opposing mergers, it has exhibited so much antipathy to the continuance in operation of unstable small producers that one of its most vexing problems now is to repel charges that it conspires with the industrial titans to freeze the marginal mines out of business.

THE UMWA’s headaches are of extra moment because the Lewis union and the Lewis image played such a pivotal role in the organization of all the mass-production industries and in establishing the pattern for collective bargaining in the New Deal-Fair Deal periods. The miners poured $7.5 million of their own money into the old CIO and the unions it spawned in steel, automobiles, textiles, maritime, rubber, glass, electrical manufacturing, and other bastions of the open shop. The core of the organizing staff came out of the UMWA, and the visible symbol of the whole drive to install industrial democracy in the billion-dollar corporations was Lewis himself.

There was majesty in the man, a majesty he has not lost even today. The imperiousness that made it impossible for him to take second place to anyone, from the President of the United States down, long ago estranged him from the mainstream of American labor. But no one who remembers the days of his glory can be oblivious to the imprint he and his miners have made on the fabric of unionism.

His indomitability in the face of the mighty made him the ideal spokesman for the army of coal-daubed warriors who backed him so unswervingly in his jousts with the operators, the White House, Congress, the courts, and all the outraged instruments of public opinion. The miner is a special breed, inured to working deep underground with death as his constant companion and disdainful of the lesser mortals who toil in the sunlight above his Stygian abode. His view of the rest of the world is as black as the coal he digs.

“The public does not understand, and I think never will,” Lewis was wont to say in the years of his torment, “that almost spiritual fealty that exists between men who go down into the dangers of the mines and work together — that fealty of understanding and brotherhood that exists in our calling to a more profound degree than in any other industry. The public does not know that a man who works in a coal mine is not afraid of anything except his God; that he is not afraid of injunctions, or politicians, or threats, or denunciations, or verbal castigations, or slander — that he does not fear death.”

Lewis’ strength was his ability to give magniloquent expression to the sense of isolation of men working in an industry that was a mortician’s paradise — men who had lain, as he did, in a tunnel with shirts pulled over their heads, faces buried in muck, and the roar of a mine explosion signaling the imminence of doom. Even with the improvements that have taken place in mine safety, the accident toll remains appalling. Last year 289 men were killed in the mines, and the fatality frequency rate was among the worst since the war.

IN SPITE of all these hazards, however, the miner is never sadder than when he becomes an exminer, all hope for another mine job gone. No industrial worker finds it harder to readjust. This is a difficulty that goes beyond the acquisition of new skills and the search for new fields of employment. It entails building a new life in a new world, the very world the miner has contemned and shut out through all his years underground.

His father and his father’s father have been miners. He lives in a mine patch, in which all his neighbors are miners. His talk is of the mines: of the days when the companies owned everything, including the miners, and exercised their ownership with brutal disregard for human values; of the changes the union has brought; of the arcane pleasures, the serenity, the inner strength a man finds in Mother Earth’s bosom. Uproot him, and he is afflicted by a strangeness, even terror, he never knew when he elbowed death aside in the mine.

That is why there is a special dimension to the human tragedies inflicted by mass unemployment in the coal states. Visit the anthracite fields of northeast Pennsylvania, where the number of mine jobs has shrunk from 170,000 to fewer than 10,000, and talk to a miner who has not worked in four years. “This valley is dead, but the woman is working in a cigar factory, and I had enough put by so we could dig into it when the two kids needed clothes for school or there was a doctor’s bill to pay.”

Travel to the bituminous fields in southwest Pennsylvania, and the story is no more cheerful. Three miners stand ankle-deep in “red dog,” a mixture of slate and ash and mine waste, and discuss their future now that the mine has closed for good. Two are old enough to qualify for pensions. The other is still short of forty, but he has already resigned himself to failure in finding a job outside coal. “I’m just waiting,” he confides, “till I can get lucky like these two fellows and draw my old age.”

In Charleston, West Virginia, an unemployed coal-cutting machine operator, forced out of the pits ten years ago at the age of twenty-nine, describes the losing fight for decent subsistence he and his family of six have been waging ever since. He switched to work in a Bluefield lumberyard at less than half his pay as a mine worker. His new job went up in smoke when the yard caught fire, and he has been taking work on a catch-ascatch-can basis ever since, while his wife undergoes one costly operation after another for a ruptured spinal disc and relatives care for their children. “They’ll be work; they’s got to be,” he says in a tone that is half threat, half prayer. “You’ll see a lot more robbing and stealing if they ain’t.”

Hopelessness grips even the youngsters. Many, recognizing that the mines offered no security, left the coal towns before the 1959—1960 recession to seek employment in the steel mills of Pittsburgh, Youngstown, or Cleveland, or in the Detroit auto factories. But the combined impact of the business slump, automation, and their low seniority standing speedily shook them out of their newfound careers. Now they are back, still barely of voting age, vegetating with their parents in the defeat that grips whole sections of West Virginia. The slow pace of job stimulation by such Kennedycreated agencies as the Area Redevelopment Administration has done nothing to lift them out of their despondency.

In Perry County, Kentucky, one family in every three is “on commodities.” In somber silence the displaced persons of the mines queue up at the Hazard railroad siding and hold out their empty sacks for their government dole of surplus cornmeal, beans, canned meat, and butter. It is here in eastern Kentucky that the frustrations of the miners have found their most violent expression.

Roving bands of pickets, disowned by the UMWA, make sporadic forays across the mountain ridges. Their aim is to force a shutdown of the small mines — “dog holes,” the miners call them — that are operating at wages far short of the union’s basic scale of $24.25 a day and that pay no royalties into the union welfare fund. Starvation is the spur that impels lifetime members of the union to work in these mines at halfscale. And starvation stirs the bitterness that drives their brother unionists to burn mine tipples and wreck trucks in defiance of union orders. Union leaders have no kind words either for those who work in the nonunion pits or for the self-anointed battlers who defend the union scale. They feel both are equally hurtful to the union’s reputation for responsibility.

THESE conditions of near civil war are an ironic by-product of Lewis’ effort to stabilize and civilize industrial relations in the coalfields. Even in the years when he was conducting long national strikes, he preached the necessity for making the mines more efficient through mechanization as the key both to the industry’s competitive survival and to the raising of labor standards.

“The American coal operators never would have mechanized their mines unless they had been compelled to do so by the organization of the coal miners,” he declared more than a decade ago. “The UMWA holds that labor is entitled to a participation in the increased productivity due to mechanization. We decided the question of displacement of workers by mechanization years ago. We decided it is better to have a half a million men working in the industry at good wages and high standards of living than it is to have a million working in the industry in poverty and degradation.”

One result of this policy is that the American miner produces seven times as much coal in a day as do the miners of Western Europe or the Soviet Union. The union wage rate here is more than triple the highest rates abroad, yet coal can be sold at one third the price that must be charged in other coal-producing countries. Indeed, most of our trade partners in the Common Market and other overseas industrial nations have found the delivered price of our coal so much lower than their own that they have established rigid import quotas and other exclusionist devices to protect their product in their own markets.

It is incontestable that the low prices made possible by mechanization have kept the industry alive. Without them, coal would have lost the customer that has become its mainstay and its one real hope for future expansion. This is the electrical utility industry, which now burns nearly 200 million tons of soft coal a year. Its consumption has nearly tripled since V-J Day, and it now accounts for almost half of all the coal used in the country.

What makes price so pivotal a consideration is that most big utilities are equipped to shift almost instantaneously from coal to oil or natural gas. Which fuel they use is determined by two factors, cheapness and assurance of uninterrupted supply. The accent on dependability of delivery to guarantee that there will be no break in power generation has been a potent element in persuading the UMWA and the major coal operators that peace makes more sense than strife in their relations.

By the time the last big conflict ended in 1950, after nine months in which the industry alternated between union-enforced three-day weeks and no-day weeks, several of the biggest utilities in the East and Middle West let it be known that they were prepared to write off coal permanently unless they could feel reasonably confident that coal would always be in their storage piles when they needed it. The flamboyant battles that culminated so often in government seizure of the mines, judicial no-strike orders, brownouts in the big cities, and legislative hysteria were ended. A new negotiating machinery was established, and labor-management cooperation was focused on expanding coal’s markets. The union even set up its own research and marketing department to consult with the industry on advertising, transportation policy, and other measures to spur both efficiency and sales.

To be meaningful, however, as an incentive to increased utility orders, the stability of coal production had to be hitched to price economy. The dividends of cooperation in this direction are reflected in the fact that the mine price of coal today is lower than it was in 1948, despite an increase of $10.20 in daily wages for the miners. A doubling of productivity in the last decade was chiefly responsible. Put in starker terms, one mechanized miner in 1960 could turn out as much coal as two could in 1950. The trend is still upward, with no real sign it will abate. Last year 15 million more tons of coal were mined than in 1961, with 3 million fewer man-hours of work.

A new pushbutton miner, already in use, can tunnel eight hundred feet into a coal seam and bring out more than a thousand tons of coal in one shift without a single man going underground. An operator at a remote-control panel in an air-conditioned cab outside the mine runs the machine via blips on a radar screen that tell him whether it is cutting coal or rock. Even this performance is puny by contrast with that oi a giant stripping machine installed by the Peabody Coal Company to provide coal for a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant at Paradise, Kentucky. Taller than a twenty-story building, this machine is capable of uncovering 14,000 tons of coal a day — more coal than a thousand men can dig in the average mechanized deep mine. Yet just one man is required at the controls as the mammoth scoop gobbles up a mountainside of fuel.

Enormous as the savings have been from the man-displacing machinery, the pressure is constantly on from the utilities for still lower prices. Residual fuel oil from the Caribbean is so plentiful and so cheap on the East Coast that such companies as Consolidated Edison in New York have served what amounts to an ultimatum on the coal producers to bring down their delivered cost or see their market drown in oil.

Railroads, which derive more of their revenue from hauling coal than from any three other commodities combined, have been cooperating by authorizing sharp cuts in freight rates on largevolume shipments. The coal industry hopes for even greater economies in delivery if Congress will go along with a recommendation by President Kennedy for approval of a pipeline to carry pulverized coal from West Virginia to the Eastern seaboard. Here, however, the railroads are fighting against the industry as avidly as they are seeking to aid it through lower rail delivery rates.

These developments in transportation do not eliminate the drive to reduce prices at the mine — a drive that is fostered by the steel mills as well as the utilities. Steel is coal’s only other big customer, even though its purchases have dropped by one third in the last five years. The railroads, which burned 130 million tons of coal a year in the war period, now use diesel oil almost exclusively. With price so crucial in retaining the markets coal now has and in expanding “coal by wire" the conversion of coal into electricity at energy centers in the mine fields and its transmission over high-voltage lines to distant cities— more mechanization and more concentration of output in big mines seem probable. In other words, more coal with still fewer men.

WHERE does all this lead, for coal and for the union? The industry’s prospects, after five lean years, seem brighter unless a fresh flood of residual oil washes away its utility sales. Coal will never climb back to the dominant position it held at the turn of the century, when it was the source of nine tenths of the country’s energy. But it is unlikely to suffer a shrinkage in the one quarter of energy it still supplies, and the tonnage should climb modestly each year back toward the 500-milliona-year mark the industry now regards as the promised land.

The outlook for the union is bleaker. It forces difficult policy decisions on Tony Boyle, its new president, as the day approaches when Lewis must relinquish the scepter. Tom Kennedy never had to make these decisions, because illness kept him from functioning on any sustained basis from the time he assumed the top post at the age of seventy-two until his death three years later.

Boyle is an enigma to his associates in the union and to the industry. The fifty-eight-year-old leader has bushy red eyebrows and a fiery oratorical manner, but neither his eyebrows nor his prose style match those of his predecessor. He is essentially an administrator, who for twelve years served as a headquarters assistant, rendered almost invisible by the aura that always surrounded Lewis. Boyle’s career started in the Montana mines, and this makes him an outsider in a union that has been dominated by the Appalachian districts since the Pennsylvania anthracite mines sank into virtual oblivion. Whether, once Lewis goes, a cabal of Appalachian district directors will undertake a palace revolution, no one can predict with certainty.

In the year and a half before the next convention, Boyle must shore up his hold on the throne by quelling the revolts in the border states, arresting the drift toward nonunion operation, and demonstrating his qualities as an independent leader. The question is how to do this. If Boyle seeks to make himself a hero by reopening the wage agreement for the first time since 1958 and pressing for higher wages or welfare payments, he courts disaster. The major producers, under the double pinch of utility demands for price cuts and the low-wage competition of nonunion mines, say they would have to meet any union call for highei labor costs with a counterdrive for reductions or outright abrogation of the contract. A good many might wind up operating nonunion.

The union wage is still among the highest in any major industry. It averages $3.15 an hour in direct wages, and fringe payments bring the total labor bill to $4.25 an hour— a rate higher than either auto or steel rates. In any event, the real concern in the mine regions is not a higher wage but greater assurance of employment — more jobs, not more money. This is the matter of most profound soul-searching in union ranks, because here again there is no good answer.

Lewis founded the welfare and retirement fund in the belief that it represented an adequate bulwark for the human casualties of mechanization. Its underlying premise was that “the care of the human element in industry should run inherently with the cost of production” and that a man was as essential as any other item in production costs. Today the fund, operating on a pay-as-you-go basis, is providing pensions for 66,500 retired miners. It gave $124 million in insurance, hospital, and pension benefits of all kinds to 181,000 people last year.

This is a titanic burden to impose on the work done by a unionized work force of fewer than 120,000 — a royalty tax of roughly $1000 a year for each working miner. The welfare fund does not begin to meet the needs of the coalfields; it does not even touch the needs of those orphaned from their pits by the onsurge of the machine. Yet, without mechanization the inadequacy would be infinitely more acute. The operator of the monster surface-mining machine at Paradise, Kentucky, for instance, would theoretically be the depositor of $5600 a day in the welfare fund for each day that his machine ran at capacity. The eleven tons a day mined by the average deep miner puts only $4.40 a day into the fund. And even that is mostly the result of the muscle-stretching help of machines. By the European standard of two tons of daily output, the fund would get only eighty cents for each man-day.

Whether Boyle will try to put the brakes on further mechanization is the industry’s chief anxiety. He has indicated some fear that the process of displacement has gone too far. This sentiment emerged with special force in the testimony he gave in hearings after thirty-seven miners had perished in a methane dust explosion at United States Steel’s big Robena mine in southwest Pennsylvania last December.

“This disaster,” Boyle declared, “has confirmed the belief that I have held for some time—that we may be mechanizing the coal industry past the point of safety. Concern for production should not outweigh the industry’s protection of the precious human lives in its custody.”

The operators do not quarrel with the thesis that lives should not be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency, but they are prepared to fight if it is translated into a general assault on further mechanization. They are convinced that the worst is over in terms of the squeeze-out of personnel through machines, a judgment that is not widely shared in the mine areas.

The explosive force in the coal states is not the dynamite the rebels carry to blow up the little wagon mines. It is the misery of wasted lives, of hunger, and of despair. “The people are not fighting the United Mine Workers,” says Michael F. Widman, Jr., a longtime Lewis aide. “They’re still wholeheartedly for the union. But we haven’t found a substitute for eating in this country, and when the mines close a man goes into business for himself, even if it means undercutting everything he helped to build.”

“Take a proud man who has spent all his life digging coal and tell him he must live on charity the rest of his life — that’s a terribly destructive thing,” is the comment of Widman’s assistant, Joseph P. Brennan, a Notre Dame graduate and son of a district president.

“What has happened in bituminous,” he warns, “will have to be multiplied by ten thousand for the whole sweep of the economy as automation takes hold. We must adjust socially to the technological changes that have taken place. The Industrial Revolution spawned the greatest prosperity the world has ever known; it also spawned the ‘isms.’ What will we have this time?”

This is the paramount question confronting our industrial society, and it finds its grimmest evocation in coal. The country, which reacted so viscerally to the long strikes in coal fifteen and twenty years ago, shows a remarkable indifference to the vastly greater waste of productive energy in the human junk piles of the Appalachian states. If America is to move with maximum speed toward the benefits technological innovation promises for a general lifting of living standards and for our maintaining a position of leadership in an increasingly industrialized world, there will have to be much more assertive evidence that we know how to deal with the problems that have arisen in coal.

To pretend that this is solely the challenge or the responsibility of the United Mine Workers or that all of it can be handled as a charge on the industry is hypocritical evasion. President Kennedy made West Virginia his special ward in the election campaign. He made the calamitous condition of its people graphic to the nation. Now two and a half years have passed, and it is questionable that we have even kept pace with the growth of need in this and all the other states in which tens of thousands of abandoned miners and their families are paying a grisly price for progress.