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"United Mine Workers of America History."
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Mother Jones, the Miners' Angel
For half a century Mother Jones took up the workingman's cause without question and fought his battles without compromise. Dale Fetherling's biography for the first time gives her full story, with eloquence and sympathetic understanding.
eBook
The Court-Martial of Mother Jones
In March 1913, labor agitator Mary Harris \"Mother\" Jones and forty-seven other civilians were tried by a military court on charges of murder and conspiracy to murder -- charges stemming from violence that erupted during the long coal miners' strike in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek areas of Kanawha County, West Virginia. Immediately after the trial, some of the convicted defendants received conditional pardons, but Mother Jones and eleven others remained in custody until early May.
This arrest and conviction came in the latter years of Mother Jones's long career as a labor agitator. Eighty-one and feisty as ever, she was able to focus national attention on the miners' cause and on the governor's tactics for handling the dispute. Over the course of seven months, more than two hundred civilians were tried by courts-martial. Only during the Civil War and Reconstruction had the courts been used so extensively against private citizens, and the trial raised a number of civil rights issues.
The national outcry over Mother Jones's imprisonment led the United States Senate to appoint a subcommittee to examine mining conditions in West Virginia -- the first Senate subcommittee ever appointed to investigate a labor controversy. Public sentiment eventually forced a release of the prisoners and brought about a settlement of the strike. In the face of this overwhelmingly adverse publicity, the governor suppressed publication of the trial transcript, and it was long thought to have been destroyed.
Edward M. Steel Jr., an authority on Mother Jones, uncovered the trial proceedings while searching for Jones's manuscripts amid private papers at the West Virginia and Regional Collection. This volume makes available for the first time the transcript of this landmark case in labor and legal history, including an introduction that provides background on the issues involved.
eBook
Mother Jones
A life touched by tragedy and deprivation--childhood in her native Ireland ending with the potato famine, immigration to Canada and then to the United States, marriage followed by the deaths of her husband and four children from yellow fever, and the destruction of her dressmaking business in the great Chicago fire of 1871--forged the stalwart labor organizer Mary Harris Mother Jones into a force to be reckoned with.
Radicalized in a brutal era of repeated violence against hard-working men and women, Mother Jones crisscrossed the country to demand higher wages and safer working conditions. Her activism in support of American workers began after the age of sixty. The grandmotherly persona she projected won the hearts, and her stirring rhetoric the minds, of working people. She made herself into a national symbol of resistance to tyranny. Sometimes exaggerating her own experiences, she fought for justice in mines, factories, and workshops across the nation. For her troubles she was condemned as the most dangerous woman in America.
At her death in 1930 at the age of ninety-three, thousands paid tribute at a Washington, D.C., memorial service, and again at her burial in the only union-owned cemetery in America in the small mining town of Mount Olive, Illinois. As noted in The New York Times , the Rev. W. R. McGuire, who conducted her burial, said, Wealthy coal operators and capitalists throughout the United States are breathing a sigh of relief while toil-worn men and women are weeping tears of bitter grief.
The courage of Mother Jones is notorious and admired to this day. Cordery effectively recounts her story in this accessible biography, bringing to life an amazing woman and explaining the dramatic times through which she lived and to which she contributed so much.
eBook
From Redstone to Ludlow
The most comprehensive study of John Cleveland Osgood to date, From Redstone to Ludlow covers events from 1892, when Osgood and his associates organized the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, to 1917, when Osgood signed a contract with the United Mine Workers of America, marking the end of his long history of battling the union. Called the Fuel King of the West, Osgood was the leading coal baron in the western mountain region and the most prominent spokesperson for the coal industry for over three decades. During this time, his anti-union policies made him the UMWA's most formidable foe in its effort to organize the Colorado coalfields. From Redstone to Ludlow depicts the bipolarity of his approach to the threat of unionism. The \"Redstone experiment,\" a model industrial village designed to improve the lives of workers through social programs, showed Osgood's efforts to attain his anti-union goals through compassion. Conversely, the Ludlow tent colony and the events that transpired there, marked by armed gunmen and machine guns paid for by Osgood, illustrate his willingness to resort to violence and intimidation for the same purpose. A leading participant in the transformation of the West, Osgood helped to shape the character of the Gilded Age. Today, the beautiful village of Redstone and a granite memorial at Ludlow are reminders of Osgood's complex role in the clash between labor and management during the most violent industrial struggle in American history.
eBook
Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?
Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about \"American exceptionalism\" is untenable.
Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar.
Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.
eBook
Black Lung
In the definitive history of a twentieth-century public health disaster, Alan Derickson recounts how, for decades after methods of prevention were known, hundreds of thousands of American miners suffered and died from black lung, a respiratory illness caused by the inhalation of coal mine dust. The combined failure of government, medicine, and industry to halt the spread of this disease-and even to acknowledge its existence-resulted in a national tragedy, the effects of which are still being felt.
The book begins in the late nineteenth century, when the disorders brought on by exposure to coal mine dust were first identified as components of a debilitating and distinctive illness. For several decades thereafter, coal miners' dust disease was accepted, in both lay and professional circles, as a major industrial disease. Derickson describes how after the turn of the century medical professionals and industry representatives worked to discredit and supplant knowledge about black lung, with such success that this disease ceased to be recognized. Many authorities maintained that breathing coal mine dust was actually beneficial to health.
Derickson shows that activists ultimately forced society to overcome its complacency about this deadly and preventable disease. He chronicles the growth of an unprecedented movement-from the turn-of-the-century miners' union, to the social medicine activists in the mid-twentieth century, and the black lung insurgents of the late sixties-which eventually won landmark protections and compensation with the enactment of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act in 1969. An extraordinary work of scholarship,Black Lungexposes the enormous human cost of producing the energy source responsible for making the United States the world's preeminent industrial nation.
eBook
Neither So Low nor So Short: Wages and Heights in Bourbon Spanish America from an International Comparative Perspective
This paper offers new quantitative evidence on living standards in Bourbon America through a pioneering study of both wages and heights. Wages were not low, nor were heights short, by the international standards of the period. The living standards of Spanish Americans thus compare favourably with those of other regions of the world, including Europe. As in many parts of the West, one can observe a trend towards the deterioration of real wages in Spanish America at the end of the period. Our findings suggest that the ‘Great Divergence’ in living standards between Spanish America and the developed Western countries might have taken place mainly after independence and that currently available GDP per capita estimates might be too low. Este artículo ofrece nueva información cuantitativa sobre los niveles de vida en la América borbónica mediante el estudio de salarios y estaturas. Ni los salarios ni las estaturas eran bajas en términos comparativos internancinales, Europa incluida. Como en muchas partes del mundo occidental, los salarios reales tendieron a deteriorarse al final del período estudiado. Nuestros resultados sugieren que la ‘Gran Divergencia’ en niveles de vida entre los países occidentales desarrollados podría haber ocurrido principlamente después de la independencia y que los PIB per capita disponibles podrían estar infraestimados. Este artigo oferece novas evidencias quantitativas acerca dos níveis de qualidade de vida na América bourbônica a partir de um estudo pioneiro que abrange salários e estaturas. Pelos padrões internacionais da época, salários não eram baixos, tampouco as estaturas das pessoas. Os padrões de vida de hispano-americanos podem portanto ser comparados de maneira favorável a outras regiões do mundo, incluindo a Europa. Assim como em várias regiões do ocidente, pode-se observar uma tendência em direção à redução dos salários reais na América espanhola no final do período. Nossas conclusões sugerem que a ‘Grande Divergência’ nos padrões de vida entre a América espanhola e os países desenvolvidos ocidentais pode ter ocorrido principalmente após a independência e que as atuais estimativas de PIB per capita podem ser demasiado baixas.
Journal Article
Union Reform and Labor Law: Miners For Democracy and the Use of the Landrum-Griffin Act
In 1970, Miners For Democracy [MFD], a rank-and-file reform group within the United Mine Workers of America [UMWA], filed suit under the Landrum-Griffin Act to overturn the 1969 UMWA presidential election on grounds of fraud, intimidation, and corruption. Dissatisfied with the government’s prosecution of the case, MFD lawyers filed suit to gain intervenor status in the courtroom.
Trbovich v. United Mine Workers of America
allowed MFD lawyers to join the prosecution and help win the case, setting an important precedent. The election rules resulting from the
Trbovich
case created conditions for a fair campaign and an honest count. MFD won the election supervised by the Department of Labor, providing an important case study of the impact of the LMRDA.
Journal Article