Never Justice, Never Peace: Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeks
360
Never Justice, Never Peace: Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeks
360Paperback(1st Edition)
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Overview
Savage and Ayers offer a narrative history of the strike that weaves together threads about organizer Mother Jones, the United Mine Workers union, politicians, coal companies, and Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency guards with the experiences of everyday men and women. The result is a compelling and in-depth treatment that brings to light an unjustly neglected—and notably violent—chapter of labor history. Introduced by historian Lou Martin, Never Justice, Never Peace provides an accessible glimpse into the lives and personalities of many participants in this critical struggle.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781946684370 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | West Virginia University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/29/2018 |
| Series: | WEST VIRGINIA & APPALACHIA |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Ginny Savage Ayers, daughter of Lon Savage, has worked for many years in scientific research and teaching. She currently resides in Maryville, Tennessee, where she is involved in several environmental and social causes.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
INTO THE FIGHT
She peered through her grimy window as the train pulled in. Despite the sun's early rays that slanted across the glass, she could see across the station platform to the broad Kanawha River and the city on the other side. A new office building — constructed since she was last here — rose twelve stories at the river's edge, all brown brick and windows, and behind it a jumble of hotels, stores, and office buildings, and behind all that the backdrop of the mountains. Charleston was prospering. Even the train station, rising three stories by the bridge, was new.
She rose from her seat, white haired and grandmotherly, gathered her belongings in a black shawl, and moved down the aisle. It had been a long trip. She was in Butte, Montana, when she read about the problems in the local newspaper — "Miners Strike, Fight in West Virginia" was the headline — and it was enough to change her plans. "I will go into the fight," she said to herself with characteristic drama, "and make it cost that company something before I get through." She cut short her work for the Southern Pacific machinists, canceled her speeches in San Francisco, and took the train east. She got off once, in Girard, Kansas, to see her old friend millionaire Socialist editor Julian Wayland, but when he wasn't home, she got back on the train and came the rest of the way, watching the country flash by her window and arriving on the ninth of June.
It was on one such train trip that a minister had sat down opposite her and mistaken her for, as he told of it later, "a meek and mild old woman from New England who had come out to visit her lawyer or doctor son in the Middle West." He had paid her treacly compliments, helped fix her window, and said something nice about the scenery they were passing. Her answer had been so foul mouthed that he had collapsed in surprise into the seat opposite her. "A man of my profession can't repeat what Mother Jones said to me," he later said.
Now, in Charleston, she descended from the train, looking quite like the meek and mild old woman the minister had mistaken her for: in a black silk dress that reached the floor, white fichu at her throat, small bonnet on her head, lined face crowned by ringlets of white curly hair, blue-gray eyes behind rimless glasses. Most women had abandoned such Victorian modesty in favor of the latest European fashions: all the better for this woman, who understood so well the importance of her image. She moved confidently, even swiftly. She didn't look eighty, the age she generally was giving out these days; in fact, research into her baptismal records has established 1837 as her birth year. At various times, she had quoted several different years of her birth; if she had been born May 1, 1830, as she had often told people, she was eighty-two in that summer of 1912. But Ronnie Gilbert, the distinguished folk singer and one of Mother Jones's admirers, accepts the ambiguity with understanding: "An old gray-haired woman might just as well be eighty-two as seventy-five and be seven years more impressive."
Taxi drivers approached her, and she shooed them away. She would walk. It was only across the bridge and a few blocks into the city — a mile or two at the most. She walked far greater distances routinely.
A steel stairway led upward two floors through the building and put her out on the bridge. She set out across it, a big bridge for the day, two-laned, the wood surface hard and thick, forty feet above the water. From the west side of the bridge, she could see the business district and the cobblestoned levee that sloped steeply from Kanawha Street to the water's edge. She remembered it from her last visit, watching as stern-wheeled steamboats disgorged passengers and freight. Beyond the top of the levee she could see Capitol Street threading its way back through the buildings to the Victorian state capitol four blocks away. Big black automobiles chugged noisily among the horses and trolleys, another sign of change since her last visit to the city.
From the bridge's middle, high above the blue-green water of the Kanawha, she looked eastward, out over the white-columned riverfront homes of Charleston's doctors and lawyers, bankers and coal operators — the "bloodsuckers," she called them. Beyond, the river curved and disappeared into the hills and trees toward Paint Creek, where the coal miners lived — her destination.
Mother Jones regarded West Virginia with feelings of devotion as well as scorn. She had been here before — the first time in 1897, with Debs and Gompers to unionize the coal mines. She caused trouble right from the start, and when John Mitchell, leader of the United Mine Workers at the time, came a little later he found her in jail. She got out — she always did — and she walked the hollows and railroads of the mining districts, visited the miners' cabins, walked even down into the mines to the darkness of the coal face, spoke to miners wherever they would listen. She sat on a rock near the pit mouth of one mine and urged the men to come forward: "Has any one ever told you, my children, about the lives you are living here ... ?" Quietly, eloquently, she reasoned with them, and they came, first one by one, then in groups, attracted by her words, her flair, her intelligence, her commitment, by the phenomenon of an old woman even being there. They surrounded her, and one rushed forward, crying, "Don't you go tell us that 'ere's Mother Jones. That's Jesus Christ come down on earth again, and saying he's an old woman so he can come here and talk to us poor devils."
After that, she came again and again. Violence did not stop her. Once, as she made a speech in the New River district to the southeast, someone started shooting. She fled, and her friend Al Lavinder carried her piggyback across a creek as they made their escape. Another time, after a bloody gunfight between miners and mine guards, she tore strips from her petticoat to bandage a miner's wound. When she told the miners at the Pinnickkinnick mines near Parkersburg to lay down their tools and strike, police arrested her, and she created havoc in a courtroom when she called the judge a scab. The judge, refusing to give in to her demand to be put in jail along with the men, lectured her for behavior "entirely unworthy of a good woman" and counseled her to stay at home and pursue the life "the Allwise Being intended her sex to pursue."
She knew the coal miners, understood them; they were her boys. She led them in Colorado and Pennsylvania and Illinois too, and she led their wives, beating spoons against pans, against a militia detachment in Arnot, Pennsylvania. She had always worked with laboring people anywhere — textile workers in Alabama, shirtwaist makers in Philadelphia, brewery workers in Milwaukee — but coal miners, and especially West Virginia's coal miners, had a special place in her heart. She knew how they lived and how they died: in falling roofs of mines, in explosions, in gas fires and asphyxiations, and occasionally in fights with mine guards. "Medieval West Virginia," she had called it in a speech in Indianapolis. "I shall consider it an honor if when you write my epitaph upon my tombstone you say 'Died fighting their battles in West Virginia.'"
She made her way to the Fleetwood Hotel. It was where she had stayed last time, a block from the capitol, across Capitol Street from the United Mine Workers headquarters, near city hall and stores. It had a restaurant and modest prices. She registered, "M. Jones," and went to her fourth-floor room.
She was in the Fleetwood long enough to wash, grab a breakfast, and head back to the station. There was no time to waste. At mid-morning — despite having traveled for the better part of a week — she caught the local for Paint Creek. That's where her boys were.
She left from the same C&O station, moving east, the broad Kanawha rolling by on her left, mountains whizzing by the window on the right in successive overhangs and hollows. The conductor and brakeman recognized her, filled her in on recent events. And then a surprise: Tom Cairns, district president of the United Mine Workers, was on the train. Bright, young, handsome, Cairns greeted her and they chatted; he hadn't even known that she was in West Virginia. He was on his way to a mass meeting at Holly Grove, near Mucklow, and invited Mother Jones to come along — according to her autobiography (Cairns later denied any responsibility for her appearing before and speaking to the miners).
They talked about the strike. The contract had expired March 31. Negotiations between the Kanawha Coal Operators Association and the miners had been going on for the previous ten days. The miners' demands included a pay raise of two and one-half cents per ton and union recognition with dues checkoff from miners' wages. When the operators refused, claiming they barely made a profit with the existing contract, the miners made a final offer to accept the current pay scale, as long as they got the checkoff. When this was also refused, the miners tidied up their work areas and walked out, on April 19. Before long, however, many operators agreed to the miners' conditions and most of the Kanawha mines were open by early May. But the Paint Creek operators stood firm, refusing to sign. Soon afterward these operators, fearing violence and destruction as tensions continued to rise, brought in guards from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency — West Virginia's answer to the Pinkertons — to protect their property. This is where things stood now.
The train stopped every few minutes: Marmet, Chelyan, Cabin Creek Junction, East Bank, Crown Hill, Hansford — dirty little riverside coal towns — and finally the little town of Pratt, where Paint Creek flows into the Kanawha and the Paint Creek railroad joins the main line. It was named for Charles Pratt, longtime president of Standard Oil who had come down from New York back in the nineties and purchased about twenty-five thousand acres in the area. Mother Jones and Cairns got off their local train to board a still smaller one: the Paint Creek "up" train. She tells of her arrival on the creek in her autobiography:
The train stopped at Paint Creek Junction and I got off. There were a lot of gunmen, armed to the teeth, lolling about. Everything was still and no one would know of the bloody war that was raging in those silent hills, except for the sight of those guns and the strange, terrified look on everyone's face.
I stood for a moment looking up at the everlasting hills when suddenly a little boy ran screaming up to me, crying, "Oh Mother Jones! Mother Jones! Did you come to stay with us?" He was crying and rubbing his eyes with his dirty little fist.
"Yes, my lad, I've come to stay," said I.
Unlike many renditions of events in her autobiography, and despite its histrionic tone, that report was probably close to the truth. The war raging in those hills was, indeed, a silent one most of the time. And Paint Creek guards were, indeed, numerous and heavily armed, often displaying their Winchesters prominently, and they certainly made a point of being at the train stations along the creek to check out new arrivals. But the little boy (who, the autobiography relates, takes his shirt off to show her how the guards had beaten him until his shoulders were black and blue) could be a work of her imagination, along with her report of "women and children who were being shot with poisoned bullets."
Soon the little "up" train moved out of the depot. As it turned up the hollow, mountains rose abruptly a thousand feet on each side, green walls rolling away, sometimes steeply, sometimes softly. A rutted road ran by the track and creek. In places the mountains crowded in so close there was barely room for the creek, and the railroad ran on a shelf cut from the mountainsides, while the road ran in the creek and horses pulled wagons through the water. Where the hollow widened, passengers looked out on coke ovens and board-and-battened cabins, johnny houses, patches of corn and vegetables, occasional sheds or pig pens or a grazing cow or mule, and "Private Property" signs everywhere. Charles Pratt's sons now owned the land and leased it to the coal operators. The mines and buildings — including the miners' cabins — belonged to the operators. Just about the only public land in Paint Creek was the road, and in places it was under water. Here, with ownership in neither the land nor their homes, is where the miners worked and raised their families.
Paint Creek was thirty miles of mountain stream, tumbling and rippling northward through some of West Virginia's wildest mountains, cutting with its branches scores of miles of narrow, twisting ravines, in which were jammed an almost endless chain of miners' cabins and coke ovens, and some fifteen actual mines. A thousand coal miners worked here, and they and five thousand others — their wives and children and the usual service people — made their homes here, in a dozen villages called "camps": Wacomah, Standard, Tomsburg, Burnwell, Keeferton, Kingston, and Mahan. A more remote community would be difficult to find in the country, yet the residents were international: half were from abroad — especially eastern Europe and Italy. Another quarter were blacks, ex-slaves or their children, who had migrated from the South. And the rest were native whites, most born and raised in these Appalachian coalfields.
As the train rocked along slowly, it passed several tents. Striking miners, and their wives and children, were beginning to move into tents, provided by the UMWA, as the operators ordered them from their company-owned homes. Three miles up the creek, Mother Jones and Cairns got off at the village of Mucklow, one of Paint Creek's larger towns. Nestled at the base of steep, tree-covered hills, it boasted two dirt roads, a church, lodges for the Red Men and Knights of Pythias, a company store that also housed the post office, and twin tipples, huge black structures where freshly mined coal was washed and sorted and dumped into waiting railcars. At either end of the company store were a bunkhouse and a clubhouse for the Baldwin- Felts guards. A line of almost identical, one-story wooden miners' cabins squatted along the base of the mountain, their front porches pointing at the railroad tracks.
Word of her arrival spread quickly. Delighted, miners and their families hurried up and crowded around, talking excitedly. The famous Mother Jones was here.
CHAPTER 2AS HATRED MOUNTED
They were big strapping men who came shouldering up, greeting her like a beloved aunt. But she had known many when they were ten- and twelve- year-old trapper boys, opening mine doors to funnel air into the shafts. There were newcomers, too, honored to meet this fabled character of American mining lore: mountaineers from other Appalachian states, blacks from the South, experienced miners from the Midwest, and recently arrived immigrants, barely speaking English. All were her boys, their children her children, their families her family. They helped her, some said, make up for the loss of her own husband and four children in the yellow fever epidemic so many years before.
There were family men like Newt Gump, friendly, soft hearted, uneducated, who signed his name with an "X." There was redheaded Al Lavinder, who gave Mother Jones a big hug. Now a father of six boys, he told her he couldn't carry her across creeks any more, as he had done in their escape from the New River shooting; Baldwin-Felts mine guards had thrown him off a train and hurt his back. There were young men like the handsome John Seachrist, another redhead with long, curly hair and a solid build, intelligent, and a Paint Creek native. There were toughened, hardened Socialists like Brandt Scott, one of the many men who had been crushed in the mines and now walked along the creeks on a peg leg; he had been working since then as a check weighman. There were blacks like Dan "Few Clothes" Chain, a huge man, every inch the fighter. They said "Few Clothes" had shot Brownsville, Texas, off the map in 1906 when he was in the Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment (colored). There were men with strong convictions, like Frank Nance, an Oklahoman who talked of standing up for his rights. And finally there were the immigrants like the Sevillas — gentle Italians not long off the boat, sent to West Virginia from the New York wharves.
Mother Jones listened attentively to the miners, their wives and children, and they had a lot to tell her about what had gone on in Paint Creek. Operators were evicting strikers from their company-owned homes and recruiting replacements on Ellis Island and in the Midwest. The union had brought in tents, and miners and their families were moving into them. Baldwin-Felts guards were arriving in large numbers, shipped up from their headquarters in Bluefield. They were the worst, the miners said: big, husky men in dark coats and wide-brimmed hats who swaggered along the streets and roads, brandishing guns in the name of law and order, pushing the strikers around, watching them in their homes, on the trains, everywhere, arresting them or beating them up for slight transgressions.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Never Justice, Never Peace"
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