I would just as soon forget about Hazard, Kentucky, a desire I share with a number of its unemployed residents, the large U.S. coal companies, the United Mine Workers of America, and the Federal Government. I went there in late March for a large national magazine on an assignment that did not, for innumerable and irrelevant reasons, work out. I was there for four days—rather longer than most visiting journalists, sociology students, or candidates for elective office usually stay before issuing authoritative reports on the place (twenty-four hours is par for this course)—and I have not been so happy to leave a strange town since the time I departed from Montgomery, Alabama after being set upon by Confederate patriots following a White Citizens’ Council meeting.
The effect of automation on the coal industry is not the only burden that has come to rest on the weary, stripped hills of Hazard and the surrounding countryside, but it is the latest and most basic of the problems that have earned the whole Appalachian region the title of “the nation’s number one depressed area.” Appalachia—which Thomas B. Morgan described as our own “underdeveloped country” in an excellent brief account of the place in Look last winter—is an 80,000-square mile mountain region stretching south and west from Virginia through Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and into the upper tips of Georgia and Alabama. Long geographically landlocked by the mountains and poor roads, and largely known to the outside world as the home of colorful mountaineers or hillbillies, Appalachia is more its own place than a part of the states through which it extends. Hazard and surrounding Perry County (both of which are named after Oliver Hazard Perry, and not, as some imaginative journalists have written, after the “hazards” of coal-mining) present neither its worst nor best face, but are representative of the region.
Hazard became the center of attention in Appalachia’s troubles because of a wildcat strike of coal-miners that erupted throughout the Appalachian fields at the end of summer in 1962. In most places the strike—which was discouraged by the United Mine Workers, the union to which the majority of the men belonged—petered out, but in four or five counties of eastern Kentucky, the strikers managed to keep going, sent out “roving pickets” in automobiles to shut down mines, and called weekly meetings in Hazard that are still being held. What has since become known as “the Hazard strike” drew special attention because of its accompanying violence, which of course was perpetrated by those now nationally famous “extremists on both sides” who are having such a field day in our moderate land. Both striking miners and coal operators—as well as people known to be supporting one side or the other—have been victims of arson, beatings, and shootings, and have had their homes, cars, and equipment dynamited. By December of last year there had been fifty such acts of violence, after which officials stopped counting.
Unemployment is ordinarily a dull subject, but violence titillates everyone, and I imagine it was this aspect of the Hazard situation that drew so many of us reporters—like vultures circling in on the wounded town—to what had previously been an unknown place. By the time I arrived, Hazard had been visited by representatives of such assorted media as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, Life, Tass, Newsweek, FM station WBAI of New York, a West German documentary film crew (later rumored to be really East German), and something called Progressive Labor, which published a special issue largely devoted to the “class struggle” in Hazard. There had also been several people posing as representatives of these and other media, including a man claiming to be from Newsweek who preceded a man who really was from Newsweek, and a girl who preceded me claiming to be from the magazine I had been sent by. When I reached Hazard, confusion was at a maximum and hospitality at a minimum. (The mountain region is not noted for its hospitality in the best of times, and is regarded as something of a foreign province even by other Kentuckians. In Louisville the night before, I was told by a reporter about a friend of his who had got lost driving in the mountains. When he asked a native what road went to the next town, he was asked in turn, “What business is it of yours?”)
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The first thing I did after registering at Hazard’s Grand Hotel on Main Street (“a phone in every room”), was to call Fred Luigart, a reporter and Hazard resident who is Eastern Kentucky Bureau Chief for the Louisville Courier-Journal. The first thing he did, with apologies, was call the New York office of the magazine that had sent me to make sure I really was the person I said I was. Luigart is a young man in his mid-thirties who came to this region after college and the Army precisely because most other people were leaving it. The lure was not a hermit’s life, but the challenge of an old frontier that needed youth and energy. Determined to stick with it, he has refused assignments elsewhere and has covered the touchy and tangled story of the current troubles with a meticulous fairness to all concerned. The last time I talked with him was via long distance to check some facts, and he was then concerned with the latest plague to affect this Job among towns—a flood that had made tens of thousands homeless through eastern Kentucky and had filled his own basement with five feet of water. I expressed my far-off New Yorkish concern and he said, “Don’t worry about us” with such vehemence that I went back, properly, to worrying about my own story.
After satisfying himself that I “checked out,” Luigart performed the essential service of taking me around to the leading local officials and participants in the battle and personally vouching for my credentials. Hurrying along behind his brisk pace as we went from stores to offices to homes through a rainfall that made the drab town even grayer and muddier, I felt rather like a U.N. mediator must feel when he comes to some remote troubled land whose warring factions have long since grown disillusioned with the aid of outsiders.
Late in the afternoon we tracked down Berman Gibson, the principal leader of the strike, and though he was glad to see me—for the strikers, unlike the owners, want all the outside publicity they can get—he, too, was suspicious because I had met the town business, police, and civic leaders, the hostile “other side” in the battle. “Oh yes,” he burst out later in redfaced indignation, “you see them folks on Main Street, they’ll wine ye and dine ye and show ye a good time.” He hadn’t of course considered the fact that just as he knew I had been talking with them, they knew I was talking with him and his troops, and were not about to wine and dine me—in some cases weren’t even about to talk to me. (At one point during my stay, a businessman noted some mud on my shoes as a sign of my having consorted with the strikers.) Going back and forth from the town to the union hall where the strikers had their headquarters, or from union hall to offices or homes of business people, was nearly as tense a business as going back and forth between Negro and white communities in Alabama or Mississippi during a racial crisis. (You give the address, the cab driver makes that slow turn of the neck to look you over, perhaps spits his comment out the window, and grinds his gears in a way that suggests he would like to be grinding you.)
That evening was the weekly meeting of the strikers at the union hall (the local, made up of retired UMW men, was still allowing the strikers to use their hall, but later, in April, town officials discovered a “fire hazard” and the strikers had to be turned out). The union hall was a building as barren as the brown hills seen through its windows, and decorated mainly with a large glowering portrait of John L. Lewis. The strike was in its sixth month by then and everyone was tired, including Gibson, who pounded the table as he had so many times before and shouted against the injustice of “the coal operators, keeping the poor people down—them with two Cadillacs in their driveway and kids here going without any shoooooes!”
Yet it hadn’t been a lack of shoes or the money to buy them that originally triggered the strike. Wages had been falling steadily in the area and there were fewer jobs, but these conditions seemed inevitable in Appalachia’s sick coal industry, and the miners had not protested against them. What, then, caused the strike? The best answer I could find to that question was in the story of Riley Hicks, a sixty-year old coal-miner, who came up after the meeting to talk to me about what had been going on. Like many of the men of this region, Hicks has lived and worked as a miner here all his life. Even though he was getting only $10 and $12 a day, instead of the union scale of $24.25, he did not quit his job. But in August of 1962 he was one of some 4,000 miners in the Appalachian fields, most of them older men, who without warning received a letter from the United Mine Workers Welfare and Retirement Fund informing them that the “hospital card” which entitled them and their families to free medical treatment would no longer be valid after September 1, 1962. The letter explained that these medical benefits were being taken away from the men because their employers were not paying into the welfare fund the royalty of 40 cents for every ton of coal produced, as provided by the union contract. Riley Hicks went to his boss of thirteen years, six months, and three days, and when the boss said he couldn’t pay the royalty and still stay in business, Hicks walked off the job. So did hundreds of others like him in Eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, and, finally, West Virginia.
More followed a few months later when the union announced that it was not only taking hospital benefits away from its members, but their hospitals as well. In 1955 the UMW Welfare Fund had built ten modern, superbly staffed and equipped hospitals in the Appalachian coal region where adequate medical facilities had not previously been available. Last fall, after cancelling the hospital cards of so many of its members in the area, the union announced that not enough members were eligible for treatment any longer to justify the operation of all the hospitals. The union gave notice that it was offering for sale four of the hospitals in eastern Kentucky, including the one at Hazard, and would have to close them down if they were not purchased by July 1, 1963. (The Presbyterian church led efforts to raise funds for purchasing the hospitals, and just before the July 1 deadline a grant from the federal Area Redevelopment Association and an appropriation from the Kentucky state legislature guaranteed the continued operation of the four hospitals for at least another year. The union is completely out of the picture now, and the hospitals will be administered by a non-partisan “Appalachian Hospital Association.”)
I later read in “A Brief History of the UMWA,” published by the union, that “America’s coal miners will tell you that if John L. Lewis never had won another benefit for them he would be remembered with greatest affection for his winning of this Welfare Fund.” Will he now be best remembered for his retraction of it, and the abandonment of the hospitals that serviced it?
The Fund and hospitals were not only a matter of security to the miners but a matter of pride—created out of their own sweat to adorn the barren landscape. The emotions of many of the men about “their” hospitals were voiced by “Preacher Bill” Bailey, one of several lay ministers among the striking miners, who rolled up his sleeves and shouted to the weekly meeting at the union hall: “I helped build that hospital in Hazard, and now I can’t even go there and get a pill!”
But most of the strikers are reluctant to blame the union for taking back these blessings so briefly bestowed. The UMW, after all, once brought these men the only benefits they have known in a lifetime of grueling work, and even though the union says that it cannot support their strike, their loyalty is still in most cases unshakable. “We can’t blame the union for this,” Gibson told the strike meeting as he so often had before. “It’s our fault for letting this happen, letting these operators get away without paying royalty or scale,” and the men called back, “That’s right, our fault!”
It is almost as if they saw the strike and the sacrifice attendant upon it as an atonement for their sins, a gesture to propitiate the distant union god, so that he might finally smile upon them and grant their plea, which is, as Gibson puts it to answering applause, “to get the union back like it once was.” Yet it is hardly the fault of these men that union contracts were not enforced and that the operators were able to slide out from under them as times got worse. In many cases the men knew that payment of scale and royalty by these small fringe operators would mean closing down and the end of their jobs, and they preferred working for low, non-union wages to not working at all.
Who, then, can be blamed for this mess? Prevailing opinion in Hazard was most aptly summed up by Rader “Preacher” Smith, another miner-minister, who told a visiting reporter that “some kinda something has gone wrong here that the men haven’t got a fair deal from someplace.”
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The real forces behind the upheaval in the Appalachian coal fields are vast, complex, and locally invisible; but invisible dragons cannot be slain and men in crisis must go forth against some tangible enemy. How can a working man fight automation? In the first crisis of the Industrial Revolution, the weavers smashed the looms; but the looms in this case—the new machines that can mine hundreds of tons of coal in a day—are not to be found in Hazard. One of the main reasons the coal industry is sick in this region is that the seams of coal in the Appalachian fields are generally too thin to be mined by the huge new machines that are operating in Western Kentucky and the northern coal fields. So in the absence of machines to blow up, the men are blowing up—and in turn being blown up by—their fellow citizens. And in the absence of the real villains, villainous roles have been assigned by each of the two “sides”: the ones who have jobs and the ones who don’t.
The warlike rhetoric from each of the sides, flavored with the Biblical imagery of a God-fearing region, is as bitter as any that ever accompanied the old family feuds for which these mountains are famous. “Oh, I’ve lived in many a town,” Berman Gibson says, pacing the platform in the meeting hall, “but I’ve never seen one as bad as this. The way this thing is, I’d like to see fire and brimstone rain down on Hazard and wipe it all out.” The women gasp and say, “Oh no!” as if they feared that his word might release the fury then and there, and he says, “Oh yes, my house with it, yessir, my house too!” Nor is the bitterness limited to the miners. A successful local businessman told me that a bunch of troublemakers had caused all the trouble and that “There’ll have to be some funerals and fires before this thing is settled.”
But the funerals of a few “troublemakers”—whether they are rich or poor—will hardly bring relief from the problems plaguing this region. When one of the miners, who is personally aware of the sentiments of some of the enemy camp (his home was dynamited), assured a meeting of the strikers that “They can’t kill us all, there’s too many of us,” they chanted back their “Amens” and “Yessirs” with confidence. “Us” doesn’t include only the strikers, whose numbers dwindle and rise as some go back to work to make enough to lay off again; nor does it mean only the miners of this region whose working conditions and pay have grown steadily worse. It means all these plus the many more able-bodied men left in the area who either cannot find work at all or who must work for pay that doesn’t suffice to keep them and their families in food and shoes. The strike, with its drama and violence, became an outlet for and a means of protest against the bitter frustrations that have been building up here for a decade. In fact, a few of the men who have joined the strikers and their erratic picket lines are not even miners, and never have been. They are men who have long been out of work, some of them high-school dropouts who took all their savings and pinched their way to Detroit or Chicago, where as “hillbillies” they got into trouble in the strange urban slums and then returned more broke and hopeless than before.
Each of the men who gathered those long afternoons at the union hall to sit and talk and boil coffee on the potbellied stove had his own story to tell, and most of them were eager to tell it to anyone who wanted to listen. In general they tended to be older men, but there were some young ones, like Manuel Stidhan, who at thirty-three had been to Detroit but came back because this was home. “I’ve worked in these mines around here for $4 a day,” he told me, “and that wasn’t 1930, brother, that was 1961. You hear these fellas talk about the ‘old days,’ but I want to tell you the old days are back.” One man known as “Hoss,” toothless and in his late fifties, had left his job when the strike first began, and when I asked why, he paused for a moment and then said frankly: “Well, I tell you boy, I’ve worked in these mines all my life, and to tell you the truth, I was tired.” Another miner who had a wife and three children showed me his last paycheck stubs for $10 a day: “It’s tooth ‘n’ toenail just gettin’ by on that, and without the hospital card you can’t make it.” He said he’d worked in Utah for a while on a farm and “I dunno why I ever come back to this dry old mountain. Way things is, I’d like to get me in one of them jets and go, far as it’d take me outa here—anywhere.”
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Though not by jet, a million people with similar sentiments have left Appalachia since 1950, twelve thousand of them (out of a 1950 total of 46,500) from Hazard’s Perry County. It is sometimes said here that “Them with get up and go, got up and went.” Those who have stayed behind are mostly the older men, many of them men with no other skills but “swingin’ a pick and slingin’ a shovel”—skills for which there is constantly less demand and less pay. In eastern Kentucky the number of workers employed in coal-mining—the area’s main industry—has dropped from 57,000 in 1950 to 25,000.
The only alternative to “funerals and fires” their more affluent fellow citizens seem to have found so far is the hope that more of the miners will decide to leave. Mrs. Martha Nolan, the business manager and unofficial “spokesman” of the Hazard Herald, a woman sincere in her prejudices, who was born in these mountains and is dedicated to them by her own lights, expressed a widely held sentiment in the business community when she said of the strikers: “These people are like a cancer on us. I believe a great many of these fellas are on the picket line because of their unskills for other jobs. They’ve picked up the torch for jobs that just aren’t here.”
While Mrs. Nolan sat in the small front office of the Herald discussing the local “cancer” with me, a man came in to announce that “the Walters boys were dynamited last night.” The Walters boys, I was told, are two brothers who own several of the hundreds of small truck mines that are now the principal type of operation in the Hazard coal fields. Eager to see what a local battleground looked like, and where the “coal kings” lived, I accepted Mrs. Nolan’s invitation to go see the damage.
The Walters lived a few miles out of town just off the main road in small-frame one-story houses that could hardly be described as the grand homes of wealthy business tycoons. The brothers are fairly typical of the operators in these fields today; they are sons of a retired member of the UMW and former miners themselves who scraped a little money together after the war and “went into the mining business.” There were no Cadillacs in the driveway. A small creek strewn with garbage ran in front of the house, and a muddy path served as a side-walk. A workman was putting new glass in a broken window and hunks and splinters of shattered glass sparkled in the yard. Mrs. Nolan knocked at the door of one of the houses and it was partially opened by a young woman wearing slacks and a sweater who held her arm protectively around the shoulders of a small boy. The woman, Mrs. Luke Walters, explained that the house of her brother-in-law, Mark Walters, next door, had suffered the most damage. The blast had shattered the glass in the window of the room where Mr. and Mrs. Walters were sleeping, and only a drawn Venetian blind had saved them from injury. Mrs. Nolan expressed her sympathy, and Mrs. Walters nodded. “It’s gettin’ so you’re scared just to go to bed at night,” she said.
I didn’t sleep too well myself in my room at the Grand Hotel that night. The sense of crisis was heightened by the casual presence of more guns than I have ever seen outside of a military installation. The state of Kentucky outlaws the possession of a “concealed deadly weapon,” but it is legal to have guns that are not concealed, and in the homes both of owners and miners, guns were lying everywhere—on coffee tables and on the tops of television sets—as well as on the seats of cars. The local clergyman seemed to be right: this conflict was “pure war.”
It is, however, a peculiarly American war. The New York Times has reported that in Hazard “the class struggle is a reality,” to which I would add that it is also an illusion. One of the incidental tragedies of the situation in Hazard is that a complex upheaval whose origins lie outside the region should have been interpreted in the “class-struggle” terms of which the Times speaks, in an attempt, perhaps, to make it more comprehensible and more familiar—a re-enactment of the battles of the 30’s when the poor miners were rising up against the rich mine owners. The wrong people are being fought here for the wrong reasons, and perhaps even for the wrong goals. After my brief time in Hazard, talking with people of diverse views, I came away with the impression that the stakes in this battle that seemed more vital—and certainly more emotionally charged—than the issues of medical care, dignity, and opportunity could be summed up in two words: cars and money.
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I haven’t heard so much talk about cars since my high-school days. The miners “accuse” the businessmen of driving Cadillacs, and the businessmen “accuse” the miners of driving Chevrolets. The night I attended the strikers’ meeting, one of the men got up to announce that his little girl had been razzed in school because her father had a new Chevrolet. The other kids had said (repeating what they had heard their parents say) that someone was paying the men to strike by giving them new cars. The Chewy-owning striker explained for the record that he had paid for his new car himself, out of his social security money, and that not one penny had come from “outsiders.”
The Cadillacs of the wealthy are one of Berman Gibson’s oratorical standbys (they never fail to draw a powerful response), and other workers—not only strikers—constantly parrot the theme. When a taxi driver took me to the home of a local banker, he said: “I’m not sure which house is his—you know, these big fellas move all the time—but I’ll recognize his Cadillac” (pronounced with venom). Several New Yorkers who were down there on their own visits and talked to me after I returned had picked up the “car charge” and cited the possession of Cadillacs—“some of ’em have two in the driveway,” they echoed Gibson, “we saw ’em!”—as proof of the evil profiteering of the local businessmen. But these same observers, I would guess, would scarcely cite the possession of Cadillacs by Harlem Negroes as a sign of evil profiteering. I had the dismal feeling that if revolution ever came to Hazard it would only mean, to paraphrase Yeats, that a beggar in a Cadillac would change places with a beggar in a Chevvy.
As for money, nowhere else, including literary cocktail parties, have I heard more talk about it than I did in Hazard. Everyone accuses everyone else of having too much and complains of not having enough—this is as true of the businessmen as the workers, for the businessmen seem to resent the unemployed getting money and food from the government and buying Chevrolets as much as the unemployed resent the businessmen getting profits and buying Cadillacs. A Hazard taxi driver told me that “Every man has two chances in his life to get rich. I missed my first one when people were makin’ so much here during the war they didn’t want to see it end and I had to be off fightin.’ But I’ve got one more chance, and I’ve already got me fifty dollars saved up to buy what’ll get me rich.” I asked him what it was and he said, “It’s something called a ‘Spanish Rod.’ You know, the kind you take out in the hills, that tells you where gold is.” He turned around, eyes gleaming, and announced without a trace of irony: “There’s gold out there in them hills.”
The cars of the workers do not really mean they are riding high on the easy streets of the Welfare State; they buy their cars, like the TV sets that most of them have (even in homes where the children go without shoes), on the installment plan. It almost seems that the major social advance since the 30’s lies in the fact that the poor man today has more to be dispossessed of when he goes broke; whereas he only used to lose his furniture, his stove, and his refrigerator, now they take his car and TV set away from him too.
So the poverty in Hazard is not, on the whole, of the starving kind. It is, however, of the bare-existence kind that offers meal and beans and flour and not much hope: a gray new frontier of malaise and weary stagnation. Nor is the wealth that exists in Hazard of the ostentatious sort; the gap is not between mansions and shacks (as I was told by some of the New York visitors there who seem to think that a two-story home is a mark of vast riches) but between middle-class suburban-type houses and small, modest ones. These small houses are often flimsy in structure (especially back in the hills) but most of them are a far cry from the unpainted dirt-floor shacks that are commonly found in the rural areas of Alabama and Mississippi.
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This, then, was the general picture I got during my stay in Hazard. But there are also things to be learned from looking at some of the principal people, local and national, who have been caught up in the conflict and who have a special interest in the course it will take. Here are seven of them:
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Ed Johnson is a former mine operator who is not, strictly speaking, involved in the current battle (except as an expert partisan observer) because he was blown out of business in a dark-of-night attack on his mine equipment during a strike in 1959 when he was operating non-union. None of the three men I telephoned who are currently operating mines in the Hazard field would talk to me, but Johnson, who is sidelined anyway and no longer has to fear calling attention to himself, reluctantly agreed to a meeting. He told me at the start that he didn’t think anyone was interested in his side of things, and indicated his estimate of my own intentions by periodically flipping through a Sunday sports section during our conversation and occasionally reading aloud the local high school basketball results.
We talked in Johnson’s office in the now defunct Bluegrass Mining Company, where he sat at his desk below a newspaper clipping pasted to the wall with a headline reading: “Failure Rate for Business at High Level.” He said that his family had been in the mining business in Hazard since 1917 and that he himself had operated coal mines for thirty years until “in the mid 50’s we couldn’t pay royalty and scale and all our mines went out of business.”
The basic problem in the coal fields, he told me, was that “wages have gone up and prices have gone down” since the end of World War II, but this was only one of the troubles. Competition from gas and fuel oils, conversion of railroads from coal to diesel engines, and the sharp drop in the use of coal for domestic heating have hurt the coal business everywhere. The answer for the big companies has been cheaper and higher productivity through the use of automated equipment, but since such equipment is unsuitable for most of the small-seamed Appalachian mines, the big companies that had long been operating there moved out. And, as they moved out, local former miners and small businessmen—who, as Johnson put it, “got a few dollars together and a few pieces of equipment and went out and dug themselves a hole in the ground”—began to move in.
These “dogholes,” sometimes operated by four or five men who “gang” together to work the mine and divide up what they make at the end of the week, are one of the main types of small “truck mines” that now do practically all the mining that is still being done in the Appalachian fields. The coal from these mines has to be loaded on trucks and shipped to a railroad ramp for loading in cars, which adds to the expense, and they can hardly compete with the big automated mines to the north and west. Yet all are under the same industry-wide contract agreement forged by the UMW after the war. While many of these truck mines originally signed up under the union contract, few could pay the contract wages or royalty for long. By 1961, 70—80 per cent of the truck mines in Kentucky were failing to pay a cent of the 40¢-a-ton royalty into the union Welfare Fund. The union officials admit that at least half the truck mines in eastern Kentucky would have to shut down if forced to comply with the contract. “Most of these small operators,” Johnson told me, “are just hanging on by the skin of their teeth. They’ve got an investment in it and can’t get out.”
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John L. Lewis lives in Washington now, but his presence still looms across the coal fields of eastern Kentucky where he organized the miners in the bloody battles of the 30’s. Portraits of him hang like household idols in countless miners’ homes, and many of the miners’ sons are called “John L.” His power is felt not only through the decisions of the past that changed the course of the coal industry, but even now, for though president emeritus and officially retired, he still wields a strong hand in union policy.
John L. does not sympathize with the plight of the marginal truck mine operators who can’t afford to pay union scale and royalty payments. As he said a few years ago: “I cannot sorrow for those pallid, underfed, ill-nourished operators of small mines who can’t keep up with the economic procession. They can’t live under the rule of competition as it now exists in this free enterprise nation. . . .”
But defending free enterprise against these “pallid” operators has become a difficult mission for the union. In January of 1958 the UMW Welfare Fund brought suit against one such small operator, the Phillips Brothers Coal Company of Tennessee, for unpaid back royalties due the Fund. But the “pallid” operator in this case sued back, charging that the UMW was conspiring with large coal operators to drive the small mines out of business. In the course of the trial, it was learned that the UMW had become a stockholder in some of the nation’s biggest coal companies, as well as related businesses such as a railroad and a steamship company that haul coal. The union was found guilty of violating the Sherman anti-trust act by conspiring with large coal companies to monopolize the soft coal industry, and the Phillips Brothers Company was awarded $325,000. The case is being appealed by the union, but now other small operators are suing on similar grounds.
Caught between the union and the small operators are the thousands of miners whose problems don’t seem to be anyone’s concern but their own. While the union takes full credit for bringing about automation in the coal fields—“American coal operators would never have mechanized their mines unless compelled to do so,” Lewis has declared—it does not take responsibility for the effect of automation on the tens of thousands of its members who have been put out of work. Lewis has explained that the union decided “it’s better to have half a million men working in the industry at good wages, high standards of living, than it is to have a million men working in the industry in poverty and degradation.” This is a noble goal, but its estimates have already been far outrun. Today not half a million men are working in the coal industry in the U.S., but only 160,000—and many of them, like those in the Appalachian fields, are back to the conditions of “poverty and degradation” that had once supposedly been eliminated by the Union’s enlightened policy.
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Harley Caldwell lives in Hazard with his wife on a UMW pension that was cut, as they all were several years ago, from $100 to $75 a month. Caldwell is a proud, straight-backed man who was born in Perry County, worked thirty-five years in the mines, and married and raised three children here. The children are grown and gone to distant states, and the Caldwells live quietly in a small immaculate house, saving a little out of their pension to indulge once a year in a fishing trip. When the trouble began last August, Caldwell was one of a number of retired miners who contributed what money they could from their pensions to help the strikers, wrote away to men in other locals to ask for help, and collected food and clothing for the families of the men who had left their jobs.
Caldwell does not blame the union for the current problems, any more than do most of these men, who credit what little they have from a life of hard labor to the UMW. “If it wasn’t for the unions” Caldwell told me, “I couldn’t have built myself a small house and educated my family. When I started in the mines I loaded coal for 22¢ a ton—you had to load ten ton of coal to make $2.20 a day. Out of that you had to buy your own powder to shoot the coal and your own carbide and lamp. When the union first came in we got a 15 per cent over-all raise with the contracts and fringe benefits, and it kept going up till the scale is $24.25 a day now.”
He explained that his own local, which is made up now of retired men, “is sympathetic with the pickets as long as they’re lawful. We gave them moral and financial support and we still do.” But Caldwell differs with some of the strike leaders, for he feels that any money coming in ought to go “for food, not for lawyers’ fees.” As one of the fund-raisers for the strikers, he has been contacted by people in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia offering help, and though grateful for it, he feels that “some of these people who have come in here are using the miners for guinea pigs, as scapegoats for their own ends. I won’t accept anything unless I know where it comes from. I have to be thoroughly convinced of that first—I wouldn’t suck an egg to find out whether it was rotten.”
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Milton Rosen lives in New York City, where he edits a monthly called Progressive Labor. I don’t know whether or not he has actually been to Hazard, but he has written to the editors of the Hazard Herald offering to come to Hazard and “debate publicly—in front of the miners—your alleged pro-labor record.” Mr. Rosen’s angry letter was in answer to a story in the Herald called “Communism Comes to Kentucky,” in which it was alleged that “Reds” had moved into Hazard to aid the striking miners. Mr. Rosen was incensed at this charge because representatives of the Progressive Labor Movement had been in Hazard to help the strikers, and Progressive Labor had put out an issue which had been distributed there to explain the true meaning of the strike to the unsophisticated townspeople. As Mr. Rosen explained in his letter to the editors of what he called “Your rag,” “The coal kings have provoked the strike. . . .” He was angered by the “hypocrisy” of the Herald, assured them that Progressive Labor was not trying to mislead the strikers, and was disgusted with the charge that Communists had come to Kentucky.
Where, indeed, did the editors of the Herald get such an idea? Perhaps it was from reading the January, 1963 issue of Progressive Labor—the one that was distributed in Hazard—for inside, on a page called “PL Action,” was a reprint of a story from the University of North Carolina’s Daily Tarheel which attributed the following direct quote to Mr. Rosen in a speech before the “New Left Club” in Chapel Hill:
‘We American Communists are few in number and the stakes are high,’ said Rosen, ‘but if we are to take advantage of the state of discontent and the injustices in the U.S., we must press the socialistic movement at all costs. We must maintain the outlook of smashing the ruling party.’
The intrusion of an element so identified into the already greatly confused Hazard mess is unfortunate, for it enables the enemies of the strike to call the whole thing a “Communist plot,” an interpretation as erroneous, albeit as convenient, as Progressive Labor’s view of the troubles as a class war precipitated by the local “coal kings.” It has also created factions among the miners themselves—who of course don’t want to be called “Reds”—at a time when they need all the cooperation and mutual trust they can muster. I heard the miners discuss this issue at their meeting, and most of them had some trouble even pronouncing the word “Communist.” It came out something like “Commus.” One angry man said: “Hell no, we’re not any Commuses, we’re not smart enough!”—a statement which brought gasps and cries of “No, don’t say that” from the women. Most of them have learned their lessons well enough to refuse help from the Reds—but how are they to know who is who and what is what in the sudden inundation of parties, organizations, publications, and committees with their strange and confusing names?
By the time I arrived in Hazard, the town had already been visited by representatives of Progressive Labor; the Young People’s Socialist League; the Socialist Party (one YPSL complained that an SP man had been sent to make sure that the YPSL people would come back with the right political interpretation of the situation) ; several New York union locals; various student groups from various colleges; and a couple of actors from the Living Theatre. In New York, the General Strike for Peace, an anti-bomb group, had held a rally for the striking miners of Hazard at the Living Theatre, featuring a showing of Eisenstein’s movie Strike. A young lady activist who had been to Hazard explained that it wasn’t “quite” like the film.
The term “coal mine” elicits in the breast of the average liberal the same thrill that the word “Polaris” brings to the contemporary right-winger, and Hazard has accordingly given many liberals a nostalgic cause and a chance to get out the guitar and sing about the miners again. (Progressive Labor has reprinted some of the words of a 30’s song, “Which Side Are You On?” written about the struggle in Harlan County, which contains such timely lyrics as: “You are either a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair.”) Yet in spite of their illusions, and in spite of the confusion they have brought, all the groups mentioned above also brought food and clothes and money to the Hazard miners: and who else came to this far-off province to offer them any help?
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Berman Gibson had never been outside Appalachia until by default and determination he became the principal leader of this protest. Now he has spoken at Cornell University, attended a Teamsters’ square dance in Brooklyn, and generally expanded his cultural horizons. His blunt and angry speech-making has won food and clothing and money from political groups as well as from sympathetic locals of the Teamsters, Steelworkers, and Longshoremen. He has somehow held the thing together, maintaining his leadership over the “moderates” who want to give food and clothing to everyone who needs it instead of just strikers, as well as over the “radicals” who want to bring in Jimmy Hoffa instead of waiting any longer for the ghost of John L. Lewis to appear.
Gibson is a big man with slightly protruding upper teeth and an expanding waistline, a man whose rages are brief and quickly change to smiles and back-slapping. He faces several dangers as leader of the strike: one is that he or his home will be blown up, and another is that he will be dressed up in blue jeans and a miner’s cap and paraded through colleges and rallies to the tune of guitars and forgotten songs, a kind of living relic to be patted and admired and misrepresented.
Gibson comes not so much out of the mines as out of the transient underside of American life that is so seldom written or talked about and so often experienced. He has moved from town to town in the Appalachians, working as a farmer, a miner, and a truck driver; his last job was driving an ice-cream truck for the Dixie Bell dairy in Hazard. In some places Gibson has got into “labor trouble,” as in Carr Creek when his house was shot at during a strike, and his son, a star basketball player, used to drive home from games with an axe on the front seat of the car beside him for protection—a bit of Americana that surely deserves preservation. But towns wanted the Gibsons because of the son’s ability at basketball, and his performance on the court for Hazard High School made the name Gibson well-loved by all. Then he went off to college (the University of Kentucky having given him a scholarship) and the Gibson name became known in a different way as his father kept attending the strikers’ meetings, where he talked loud and angrily and found that men would listen. Gibson’s daughter, a high-school cheerleader, comes to the meetings and cheers for her father on the platform just as she does for her brother on the basketball court.
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Dewey Daniel is president of the People’s Bank in Hazard and served as state Republican chairman for Kentucky when John Sherman Cooper ran for the Senate. He is obviously a man who moves with ease in the great world beyond the mountains, but his cosmopolitanism seems hardly to have tainted his social views, which are mostly reminiscent of Dead Souls. When I talked with him, Mr. Daniel seemed amazed by the fact that after a CBS-TV program on Hazard (which he felt was distorted) people throughout the country sent food and money and clothes to the poor. It especially chagrined him that a Hollywood studio had sent in a plane-load of toys at Christmas. “Can you imagine,” he asked, “giving toys to those mountain kids?”
Mr. Daniel has helped raise money to save a small charity hospital in the town which may also close (its load was very heavy, for the union hospital did not take charity patients), but like most of the town businessmen, he appeared unconcerned about the probable loss of the large, modern Miners’ Hospital. “If they built too expensive a hospital, that’s their problem. This town was here before the hospital was, and it will be here after it goes.”
Mr. Daniel was the only Hazard businessman who talked with me openly and pleasantly, for he was obviously indifferent to what I would later report. “I don’t care what you say about me,” he remarked with a smile, knowing that no comment I could make would shake his place in the world, which is president of the bank in Hazard. I left him with a certain admiration, in spite of myself.
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Lee Crutchfield, befitting his station as president of the local Chamber of Commerce and Cadillac-Chevrolet dealer of Hazard, is a businessman more in the modern manner. Unlike Mr. Daniel, he was disturbed by the bad “image” Hazard had been getting in the press, and he assured me that the story had been blown up out of all proportion. Sitting in his office below a picture of President Kennedy, Crutchfield spoke with measured control and a fixed smile. “You can find anything here you look for, Mister Reporter—the worst squalor or the finest luxury.” He insisted that not even the local “labor trouble” was unusual—his own sales, for instance, had been “about average.” As for the shootings, burnings, and dynamitings: “Why, the same thing happens right off Broadway. Besides, these dynamitings haven’t destroyed a single percentage point of productive capacity. It’s pretty normal for the course.” Smiling firmly, Mr. Crutch-field assured me that Hazard was “just an average American community.”
He may be right about that, more than most of us would like to think.
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The epilogue to this story is set in Washington, that remote command post where our leaders deliberate upon the Big Picture. There the great international headquarters of the unions sit in grand testimony to the triumph of the working man, while inside, staffs of researchers produce statistics showing the benefits won in the years before the headquarters were built, and other researchers worry about such current problems as the use of leisure time. (After leaving Hazard, I attended an AFL-CIO conference in New York on leisure time where nothing was said about the kind of problems I had seen in Kentucky, but where it was suggested that labor contribute to the President’s cultural “renaissance.”) There seem to be no working men in Washington, only reporters, researchers, and congressmen—a circumstance which no doubt gives to the high-level work of the labor leaders a sense of reality that might otherwise be lacking.
At the offices of the United Mine Workers’ Journal I was greeted by a man who did not wish to be identified by name but only as a “Union Spokesman.” The Union Spokesman said that “under present conditions” he saw no way for the union to back the striking miners in Hazard. I asked if there was any way for the union to reconsider its decision to close the hospitals; after all, even though the UMW Fund was losing money in that particular area it was profiting in other places. (The UMW Welfare and Retirement Fund comes to more than $100 million, and the union has another $100 million in its own treasury.) “We are not,” the Spokesman answered, “in the hospital business.” I then asked him if the union had undertaken any kind of job retraining program for those of its members who had been put out of work by its own proud policy of bringing automation to the coal fields. “No,” said the Spokesman, “we believe that is the function of the Federal Government.”
Over at the “Federal Government,” the replies were more elaborate. The Kennedy administration’s answer to the problem represented by Hazard is a new branch of the Department of Commerce called the Area Redevelopment Administration. I met with two ARA spokesmen in an office decorated with a wall map of the nation on which the depressed areas were colored in red. The red part seemed to extend over what I would judge to be close to “a third of a nation,” and of course took in all of Appalachia. I asked one of the spokesman if he had ever been to Hazard. “God no,” he replied, “those places depress me.” However, a second spokesman said that he had recently been near Hazard along with the head of the agency on a visit to Paintsville, Kentucky—but first he sketched in the Big Picture.
The ARA, in the hope of creating new jobs, makes grants and loans to businesses in depressed areas, and also carries on a program of job retraining. As of last spring, a total of 18,000 men throughout the entire nation had been retrained under the program. An indication of the local impact can be seen from the fact that in Kentucky, where 65,800 were unemployed at the time, the ARA had spent $4.3 million in grants and loans to businesses which will create (eventually) an estimated 1,225 jobs, and had retrained 2,000 workers for new jobs. Of the 2,000 workers thus retrained in Kentucky, 1,000 had been unable to find the new jobs they had been retrained for. In Perry County, where 14.2 per cent of the work force was unemployed that month—roughly two and one half times the national average—the ARA had created no new jobs and provided job retraining for exactly forty-five people. The ARA officials seemed pleased with their program, though as one of them noted, “I couldn’t say in good conscience we have made a dent in the problem. The main effect so far has been psychological.” A non-psychological estimate of the effects was made by Fred Luigart, who after spending several hours questioning the ARA officials in Paintsville, was entirely confirmed in his earlier judgment of their work: “You can quote me as saying that the Kennedy program in eastern Kentucky is a total failure.”
The most interesting thing I learned on my visit to the ARA office was that the agency is very hopeful about the future of one of our fastest growing industries: tourism. One of the spokesmen told me that in five years, tourism would be a bigger industry in the U.S. than agriculture. “You see,” he explained, “we really are an affluent society, and if only the affluent people will take their vacations in the depressed areas, things will get spread around.” As it happens, several businessmen I had met in Hazard also had this idea, and in anticipation of the first modern highway that will soon be cut through the eastern Kentucky Mountains, they had already formed a corporation to build luxury motels and other such lures around the town. The corporation is called “The Magic Mountain.”
You ought to see those old deserted coal mines in the Spring. . . .
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