COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933
Draper, Theodore
In all of American labor history, there have been five national labor organizations —the Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor, Industrial Workers of the World, Trade Union Unity...
...A "very sharp issue" soon bedeviled the strikers—should Negroes eat in the same soup kitchens or sit at the same tables with the white miners...
...They will fight, with or without our leadership...
...Myerscough went over the side of the mountain down a trail, chased by bullets...
...P. Frankfeld, ibid., July 3, 1930, p. 4 (no organizer...
...7 S. Mingulin, the Communist, June 1930, p. 512...
...For two days in November, Dreiser and the others interrogated witnesses who told sickening stories of outrage and despair...
...Yet spontaneous strikes were erupting all through the hard-coal region...
...5a This letter was sent to the Secretariat in New York from Chattanooga, Tenn., dated October 28, 1931...
...39 While the strike was going strong, miners in the thousands signed up in the union and spilled over into the party...
...THEODORE DRAPER tionary unions, the American Communists carried it out loyally...
...78 Students, clergymen, and liberals organized other pilgrimages to Harlan and Bell counties...
...Charles Croix, New Masses, May 1932, pp...
...As soon as the strike started, Borich related, "hundreds of committees came in from various mines asking if there was enough relief, and if the Union was able to give enough relief, the mines were able to come out on strike, but, if not, they stated they would wait until relief came in...
...Youth Strike Conference in Pineville...
...Hardly knowing one mine union from another, the miners felt leaderless and betrayed...
...4 Jim Grace also managed to escape, though badly hurt...
...Again the Americans resisted, but in the end, the Profintern ordered them to prepare the way for a new mine union...
...7 The trouble with this approach was that the Harlan miners were fundamentalist in religion, and starvation was unlikely to make unbelievers of them...
...The most notable case of the expulsion of a Communist— that of William F. Dunne—had occurred in 1923, and there were no significant expulsions in 1928 or 1929...
...135-37...
...cit., p. 232...
...But, it argued, the workers could not be revolutionized unless they were convinced that the Communists knew how to conduct a strike successfully...
...Their lives were primitive, their religion fundamentalist...
...It was brought about by the West Virginia Mine Workers Union, recently formed by Frank Keeney, one of Lewis's old enemies...
...A careful student estimatedthat the 1930 membership, officially reported as 2,532,261, was probably less than 2 million (Lewis L. Lorwin, The American Federation of Labor [Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1933], p. 303...
...An ILD organizer, Jessie Wakefield, 23 years of age, was thrown into jail for five weeks...
...Throughout the nineteen-twenties, John L. Lewis was too busy beating off rivals in the union to fight off employers in the industry.20 The party itself, however, had a relatively weak base at this time in the mining field...
...They were forced 62 Borich's unpublished report was made to the Politburo on January 28, 1932...
...But the union couldn't get any place in this depression—I'm done with the organization— the men won't stick...
...16 The Communist, October 1930, p. 887...
...Without victories, even partial ones, they were incapable of holding workers together beyond the heat of the battle...
...It was part of a file on the Harlan strike which I found in the private papers of Harry M. Wicks, then district organizer in Chattanooga...
...cit., p. 185...
...They agreed that the objective conditions were most favorable and that the masses of workers were being revolutionized...
...In its initial stages, it depended on a few, weak party units in the mine fields...
...On May 4, heavily armed deputies and gun-bearing miners fought one of the bloodiest battles of the Depression...
...After the presidential election of 1924, the TUEL was reduced to little more than its hard core of Communist trade unionists and retained a significant influence in only two or three fields...
...But Lozovsky was not satisfied...
...When it was formed, the Communists' hopes for a successful revolutionary trade-union federation rested on it more than on any other of their new unions...
...But they also knew that their organizations lagged far behind...
...This one was considered a step forward because it had resulted from prior planning and organization...
...68 Another outside observer was convinced that the strike was broken "less by guns and whips than by the rock-ribbed fundamentalism of the miners" °9 Inevitably, the "Negro question" also arose...
...Taub and Cowley later testified in Conditions in Coal Fields in Harlan and Bell Counties, Kentucky, op...
...56 VThe Communists were caught in a cruel dilemma...
...63 Their names, some of them obviously pseudonyms, were given in the Daily Worker, January 5, 1932, pp...
...In ten years, its membership had gone down from about 4 million to less than half...
...A representative of the American Civil Liberties Union was jailed...
...In large part, the TUUL was called on to fill a vacuum, not to displace the AFL...
...Daybreak," he continued, "found me soaked to the skin with rain and mud, my clothes by this time torn almost to shreds and I did not know where in hell I was...
...There was, to be sure, an upsurge but it was not very revolutionary, and most of it took place after the "third period" was given up in favor of the Popular Front...
...The TUEL be came the Profintern's American affiliate, and Foster became the American Communists' top leader in the trade-union field...
...As the Depression deepened, new opportunities for organization arose...
...The Communists could never go back to Harlan...
...1, 3. John Harvey, Vincent Kamenovich, and Clarina Michaelson represented the NMU, others the Daily Worker (Vern Smith), ILD, and WIR...
...86 Tom Johnson, Daily Worker, March 9, 1931, p. 4. COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933 Communism the issue instead of abysmally low wages and abominable working conditions...
...Whatever the result, they were given credit for invading the most fearsome enemy territory and putting up a good, hard fight before surrendering to overpowering forces of evil...
...The number of miners was reported in Labor Unity, June 6, 1931, p.1...
...He would never have affiliated with the National Miners Union and the Communist party if he had known what their teachings were, and he indignantly condemned them for misleading him and his friends "as I fully believe in God and the United States...
...The attitude was most clearly expressed by Lozovsky himself as late as 1932: "But that we want to break up the reformist trade unions, that we want to weaken them, that we want to explode their discipline, that we want to wrest them from the workers, that we want to explode the trade union apparatus and to destroy it—of that there cannot be the slightest doubt...
...40 Since all the union organizers were Communists, who made no secret of it, joining the union was often the first step toward joining the party...
...8-13...
...One gets the impression that he increasingly wanted to forget about it...
...89 Even where the miners continued to rebel against the UMW, the NMU did not benefit...
...10 R.I.L.U...
...But the strike itself was a calamity...
...Yet the UMW, not the NMU, was leading these strikes...
...A hand-propelled railroad car with two deputy sheriffs approached, and as they stepped out of the way, one of the deputies shot Simms in the abdomen...
...In the inevitable selfcriticism, he gave nine reasons why the strike should not have been called, mainly to the effect that unemployed, blacklisted workers could not carry out a strike inside the mines...
...Why was the Communist mine union so disappointing...
...I'm through with unions...
...Pretending that they were arranging for a gathering of tobacco growers, they rented a small hall in the center of town...
...In 1958, after his death, Mrs...
...11 Professor Philip S. Foner has written: "Following expulsion from the AFL unions, the left-wing forces advanced their own program outside the Federation through the Trade Union Unity League, organized in 1928...
...In a few days, 10,000 miners were out...
...Fortunately, Wagenknecht was able to talk them out of trouble...
...cit., pp...
...On the other hand, Harlan was still another case of trying to do too much with too little...
...The official pamphlet of the Workers International Relief on the strike, written by a Daily Worker reporter, extolled it in grandiose terms—"builds immense solidarity movements in all cities and industrial centers...
...52 The ILD took up the defense of the 34 miners charged with murder...
...no resurrection of the dead...
...Magazine, February 1932, p. 245...
...In order to form the TUUL, the Communists had to break with the rest of the COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933 The Communist hope of destroying the AFL was not as quixotic as it may seem today because the AFL had been doing such a good job destroying itself...
...The name of Wagenknecht's committee was stretched to include another state—the Pennsylvania-Ohio-West Virginia-Kentucky Striking Miners' Relief...
...3 Joel Seidman, Communism in the United States —A Bibliography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969...
...The other leagues and groups were "only skeletons of what they should be...
...7 But this did not mean that the Communists were instructed to give up working, wherever possible, inside the AFL...
...In mining at least, the TUEL was still a force to be reckoned with...
...47 As often happened in these circumstances, a spontaneous flare-up of unfed, fed-up workers went looking for leadership...
...It was truly, as the Politburo said it was, "the largest strike struggle ever conducted under the leadership of the Party...
...As long as the "third period" prevailed, the American Communists were deeply disturbed and puzzled by the failure of their trade unions to do better...
...Tom Johnson, ibid., September 25, 1930, NMU's top leadership was shaken up in mid1930...
...Their leaders set themselves obstinately against the industrial unionism which the newer, rising industries demanded...
...II O my six months after they had been told to do so, the American Communists set up the National Miners' Union on September 9-10, 1928...
...q 100 From the program of the TUUL: "It supports the revolutionary political struggles and the political organizations of the working class, theCommunist Party" and (under the heading of "The New Trade Union Center") "The new TradeUnion Unity League has as its main task the organizing of the unorganized workers into industrial unions, independent of the A.F...
...15 By reducing themselves almost entirely to skilled workers, Foster maintained, the old unions had made themselves "incapable of organizing the broad masses of workers and defending their interests...
...An elementary sense of self-preservation cautioned them that, if it was necessary to strike at all, it was best to do so under less provocative and vulnerable auspices...
...After some wavering, the Communists decided to support the PMA nominally but to attack its leadership politically...
...This plan was turned over to the party "fraction" in the National Miners Union, which proceeded to work up a similar two months' plan of action for the union...
...The striking miners were systematically blacklisted, terrorized by hired gunmen, starved into submission...
...9 In effect, Communists in the AFL were expected to work for the AFL's destruction and to pick up the pieces for the TUUL...
...44 Foster, Pages from a Worker's Life (New York: International Publishers, 1939), p. 182...
...Bill Dunne and Jack Johnstone went in and out...
...They believed either in supporting the IWW or in forming a new industrial union including the IWW...
...89 Tom Johnson, Daily Worker, May 28, 1932, p. 4. sO The fullest discussion of the Communist position vis-a-vis the Progressive Miners of America is in S. Willner, "The Lessons of the Illinois Miners' Strike," the Communist, November 1932, pp...
...As they drove on, Jim Grace said: "This ain't the road to Harlan...
...In February 1931, a 10 percent wage cut brought the 45 "Lessons of the Strike Struggles in the U.S.A.: Resolution of the E.C.C.I.," the Communist, May 1932, pp...
...According to Borich, no more than 2 percent of the Kentucky miners were Negroes, and about 350-400 Negro miners went out on strike...
...37-38, italics in original...
...They managed to get 675 delegates to come to the founding convention, of whom 120 were arrested by the Pittsburgh police who forced the meeting to move to East Pittsburgh, two hours away...
...They said we should give them what we can to eat at home and we should eat in the kitchen...
...55 Bad as conditions had been in the Pittsburgh area, they were far worse in Kentucky...
...86 That the traitorous, moribund UMW of John L. Lewis should show signs of revival in 1932 caught the NMU's faithful totally by surprise...
...Frank Borich, the NMU secretary, later revealed that 85 percent of the miners had returned to work while the strike leadership was talking of a "second offensive...
...Production fell from 970 to 383 million net tons in the same years...
...The AFL union also succeeded in getting agreements in one of the West Virginia mine fields...
...THE TUUL was an outgrowth of the Trade Union Educational League...
...2 A recent 1 I have omitted the early National Trades' Union which lasted less than three years, August 1834 to May 1837...
...Recruiting went on for both at once, first into the union, then more selectively from the union into the party...
...The local press was full of inflammatory threats against outside "agitators" who, as one paper 73 Morris, op...
...In others, such as food and lumber, only a tiny portion of the labor force was organized...
...The union itself was rechristened the Mine, Oil and Smelter Workers Industrial Union, but the party leadership, which had not been consulted in advance, disapproved, and the old name was soon restored...
...It published an article by a Communist who gave the impression that the NMU had succeeded in organizing the miners not only of Harlan County but "of all Kentucky and Tennessee" —after the Harlan strike itself was a lost 79 Rob Hall, Conditions in Coal Fields in Harlan and Bell Counties, Kentucky, op...
...Foster attended the first Profintern con gress as an "observer...
...But the way things are now you wouldn't lose much...
...In practice, the Communists had too few forces to work in both the TUUL and AFL, and the latter was invariably sacrificed as long as the Communists still hoped to make a success of the TUUL...
...It was an NMU, not a miners' strike...
...These three were the only full-fledged national unions in existence by the time the Trade Union Educational League was officially transformed into the Trade Union Unity League at a convention in Cleveland, Ohio, August 31—September 2, 1929...
...He chose to use the American trade unions as the opening wedge of the new policy...
...100-105...
...After all this, Harry Hirsh Simms was all of 19 years old.85 The circumstances in Harlan were so adverse that whatever the Communists did there seems somewhat incredible...
...The group was prevented from distributing food which it had brought along, but nothing could prevent it from making known to the world how law and order were observed in Bell County...
...42 By late June, however, the strike began to run down...
...The 18 John J. Watt, "Launching the National Miners Union," Labor Unity, October 1928, pp...
...cit., pp...
...95 In practice, this meant giving up the NMU and leaving the field to the UMW...
...In any case, the AFL was anathema to them...
...The Communists themselves later admitted that it had been a mistake...
...Local meetings," he complained, "become kind of social gatherings where old friends meet to chew over and rehash internal problems and squabbles of every phase of the revolutionary movement...
...17 The Trade Union Unity League, op...
...I went out down here last year, now every time I go to get a job they think I'm an agitator and won't take me on...
...calism and his AFL orientation made him unacceptable to the early Communists who were fervent "dual unionists...
...Of only one can it be said that not a single book, dissertation or article, scholarly or otherwise, has ever been devoted to it...
...as The veteran Tom Myerscough told what it was like to be an NMU organizer in Kentucky...
...In August, she and Dan Brooks wrote back happily to the Daily Worker: "They [the Harlan miners] never heard of the Communist Party before this struggle and looked for friends of the working man...
...Our Party is composed almost exclusively of the black-listed, foreign-born miners...
...On May 25, the day after the NMU conference in Pittsburgh ended, the Carnegie Coal Co...
...to win strikes or to gain concessions for the workers who followed them...
...cit., pp...
...On the morning after this conference, February 10, 1932, Simms and a local section organizer, Green Lawson, were walking along a railroad track on their way to a meeting...
...This support brought down the special wrath of the Communists who especially resented Edmund Wilson's view that the new union was "a spontaneous native labor movement with trained native left-wing leadership," on which the future of the country, he implied, might depend 32 The Communists made an effort 30 Resolution adopted at the National Executive Board meeting, November 27-29, 1930, in Labor Unity, December 6, 1930, P. 2, and December 13, 1930, p. 2. sl The TUUL's role in this strike may be followed in Labor Unity, April 4, 11, and 18, 1931...
...This was the famous "toothpick incident...
...If the trouble was not in the objective conditions and not in the masses of workers, they told themselves, it must be in themselves...
...The situation was so bad, he reported, that some party members feared with some justification that the NMU was in danger of being "wiped out...
...But the strike could not be spread through the NMU, which had few functioning mine locals in the area...
...This study judged them to be the "deathblow" to the NMU in Kentucky and "far more effective in smashing the union than the National Guard ever could have been...
...Veterans of Gastonia, Lawrence, and the recently terminated PennsylvaniaOhio-West Virginia strike slipped into the Harlan towns for another round of class struggle...
...Councils existed in only a few of the largest cities...
...380 THEODORE DRAPER Harlan miners to the point of taking the advice of their minstrel and midwife, Aunt Molly Jackson: All a-going round from place to place bumming for a little food to eat, Listen, my friends and comrades, please take a friend's advice, Don't put out no more of your labor, till you get a living price...
...Unfortunately, the Harlan delegation arrived at ten thirty that night, long after meetings usually began in Knoxville...
...Some of the leading local union members were sent North for training, and they came back with tales of Communist godlessness and belief in equality for Negroes that made the best anti-Communist propaganda...
...21-24...
...To popularize the plan, union conventions were held in Ohio on May 17 and in Pennsylvania on May 23-24...
...It was signed by T. J. [Tom Johnson], then in the Organization Department at Communist headquarters in New York [Wicks Papers...
...87 One explanation for the NMU's absence in east Ohio in 1932 was the belief of its members that "it was not possible for the United Mine Workers of America to lead a strike in that 85 Frank Borich, "What's Happening in Ohio— and Why," ibid., May 1932, pp...
...They are agin' God and I am agin' them...
...48 After a few days, the Harlan story dropped out of the paper again...
...6 A fascist enemy hardly deserved anything better...
...Harriet D. Hudson, The Progressive Mine Workers of America: A Study of Rival Unionism [Urbana: University of Illinois, 1952], p. 27...
...At its height, it was claimed, the strike encompassed over 40,000 miners in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and northern West Virginia...
...For a more typical attack on the PMA leadership as tainted with Musteism, see Bill Gebert, Labor Unity, January 1933, pp...
...With a real base, he contended, "we could have organized three times as large a strike...
...21 In practice, the party members in the new union were the only ones on whom it could count...
...The workers went back, if at all, unconditionally...
...At the end of a year of furious, if ill-fated, struggles, the NMU was, for all practical purposes, finished...
...It's atop the Big Mountain on the road to Appalachia...
...12 The hardest hit unions were those in the most mechanized and mass-production industries...
...The Pittsburgh District Committee then formulated a "Two Months' Plan of Work," which called for concentrating on the mining fields of Pennsylvania and Ohio...
...Meanwhile, the Communists had one coal strike all to themselves...
...For an effort of such magnitude, it figures relatively briefly in the voluminous writings of its general secretary, William Z. Foster, and no other former leader has written about it at all...
...The student delegation was sponThe committee was made up of Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Lester Cohen, Samuel Ornitz, Bruce Crawford, Melvin P. Levy, Charles Rumford Walker, and Adelaide Walker...
...This entire issue was devoted to the miners' strike...
...The TUEL functioned essentially as a propa ganda organization to consolidate Commu nist influence and win converts in the exist ing trade-union movement...
...I am agin' the Reds...
...The mine companies promptly began to discharge union members...
...Glusman gave the assumed name as "Gilbert Harris," but letters in the Wicks Papers were signed "Harris Gilbert...
...Most miners agreed with those who T° Borich report to the Politburo, January 28, 1932, p. 5. 71 Jack Stachel, the Communist, June 1932, pp...
...The principle was, as one party recruiter put it, that "a Communist, a member of a Communist Party is first and foremost a Communist, no matter what work he is engaged in...
...Ten years later, however, in American Trade Unionism (New York: International), he devoted bibliography on "Communism in the United States" does not record a single item dealing retrospectively with the TUUL or any of its unions.s The studied neglect of this subject might itself be studied...
...cit., p. 232, refers to Dan Slinger as head of the Harlan dele gation...
...They certainly wantedto organize the unorganized and to battle forthose already organized—but to supplant theAFL, not merely to gain influence in it...
...COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933 the existing base was able to cope with...
...9-12...
...Hundreds, then thousands, signed up...
...But this is an apologetical, party-line "official" history that deals very superficially with the TUUL phase of the union to which it devotes only about one-sixth of its pages...
...Just before this conference was held, the Profintern changed its line...
...Indirectly, then, the NMU was partly responsible for the first signs of recovery on the part of its most detested rival because the coal operators and government considered the UMW the lesser evil...
...Without a strike, it would become extremely difficult "to reestablish confidence in the union...
...ac The Communists showed that it was possible to launch strikes or to jump on the bandwagon of spontaneous strikes...
...They were led by an insurgent "Progressive" group in the UMW...
...44 By the same reasoning, it might have been argued, the strike was at least three times as large as 43 Willner, op...
...They vastly preferred making s5 This paragraph is based mainly on Preval Glusman, "Harry Simms—A Young Revolutionist," Daily Worker, May 8, 1934, p. 5. Simms was first described as an NMU youth organizer, but waslater identified as a YCL organizer, too (ibid., February 11 and 13, 1932, p. 1...
...Foster himself spent five months in the area...
...As it was interpreted by Stalin, it came to mean the collapse of "capitalist stabilization" or the recovery that had set in after World War I and the imminence of a new revolutionary wave or, as he put it, "the eve of a new revolutionary upsurge...
...The defeat, Foster later admitted, had "dealt the N.M.U...
...They did not prove that they knew how to end a strike successfully or get anything out of it for themselves or anyone else...
...The Communists owed their opportunity in this field to John Lewis's ruthless treatment of his opponents in the United Mine Workers of America...
...Membership in the United Mine Workers dropped from 450,000 to 150,000...
...Its 9T Daily Worker, October 13, 1930, p. 2. 98 Labor Unity, August 20, 1930, p. 9. 99 From Bryan to Stalin, op...
...42 Resolution of the Politburo, Daily Worker, August 3, 1931, p. 4. willing to deal with the union...
...20-27, and the Student Review, May 1932, pp...
...Stachel made the same point (in the Communist, June 1932, p. 529...
...In the next two years, he went from unit organizer to the District Training School to YCL district organizer in Connecticut...
...Later that year, he volunteered for the dangerous Southern assignment and was shifted to Chattanooga, Tenn., as district organizer...
...Not until August 8, after 12 bitter, vicious weeks, was the strike officially brought to a close...
...Is Being Built During the Strike," Party Organizer, August 1931, p. 6. from mine to mine and from state to state...
...In his new post, he was known as "Harris Gilbert...
...cause...
...Sometimes the miners struck first and called in the NMU, which sometimes tried to catch up with strikes, but "extreme lack of capable forces and organization" frustrated it repeatedly...
...Again they invested their main hopes in their miners' union...
...Nevertheless, the NMU had succeeded on September 14 in holding a conference in Lexington, Kentucky, to which 125 delegates came from southeastern Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia...
...the reformist unions...
...The writer complained: "Difficulty in the miners understanding our policy of talking organization for strike and when they are ready to strike see no concrete steps taken to prepare for strike and cessation of all work...
...With Jim Grace, a local union contact, he was taken for an unwanted ride...
...86 Tom Johnson, "The Fight Against Sectarianism in the National Miners Union," The Communist, August 1932, pp...
...Vacillating party members were berated for betraying a lack of faith in "the growing radicalization and revolutionizing of the masses in the U.S.A...
...14 The unorganized were so much more numerous than the organized, and the AFL made so little effort to organize the unorganized, that there was plenty of room for a "dual union," even if the AFL was not destroyed in the process...
...There were only 3 Negroes there and they all spoke against the Negroes and the whites eating in the same kitchen, and they spoke on the following grounds: that in the South there is a law which does not permit Negroes and whites to mix together in social affairs, and that the coal operators and armed forces will use this as a pretense to smash the strike, and we should not give them this opportunity...
...6 The Trade Union Unity League: Its Program, Structure, Methods and History (New York: Trade Union Unity League, 1930), p. 17...
...39 Foster, Daily Worker, September 7, 1931, p. 4. 378 THEODORE DRAPER the workers, unless a mass Party is established...
...After this defeat the NMU forces in Illinois gradually liquidated its skeleton locals and supported the growing opposition movement in the UMWA...
...Organizers were in such short supply that he was not replaced for two months...
...This ill-advised, poorly organized strike killed the NMU in Illinois, and greatly undermined the yearslong strong CP and TUUL influence in these coal fields," Foster recalled...
...S. Woytinsky, Labor in the United States [Washington, D.C.: Committee on Social Science Research Council, 1938], p. 18...
...70 It is fair to say that only the Communists in that period, in the heat of battle, would have taken such a firm stand on this issue...
...The latter was the union's key official.18 Two more new unions soon followed...
...57 between August 7 and December 28, 1931...
...In all of American labor history, there have been five national labor organizations —the Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor, Industrial Workers of the World, Trade Union Unity League, Congress of Industrial Organizations—or six if we count the merged AFL-CIO...
...They could do little for them in Kentucky but much for them elsewhere...
...Without large-scale relief, no strike in this period could hope to go on for long...
...In April 1930, it called for a general strike, this time in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, to start on September 1. But no organizer was sent in for months, and as the date neared, the union quietly forgot about it...
...In March 1932, the NMU took stock at its third national convention...
...F. Borich, ibid., July 10, 1930, p. 4 (frustration...
...85-95, 215-52...
...in the East is surely an important sign of a shift in the balance of power between coal capitalistsand the old-line labor politicians" (p...
...2 Foster dealt at greatest length with the TUUL in his 1937 book, From Bryan to Stalin (New York: International Publishers, 1937), pp...
...Nevertheless, grim experience soon taught mine workers that they were looking for the maximum trouble by striking under Communist leadership...
...COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933 out-25,000 anthracite workers of whom 15,000 were holding out in eastern Ohio and West Virginia, and some 50,000 in Illinois...
...The workers, he gloated, were leaving the AFL by hundreds of thousands, opening "a glorious opportunity for revolutionary trade unionism...
...36 The strikers marched from mine to mine for miles around, shutting down one after another...
...5 The plenum compromised by telling the American Communists to form new mine locals without leaving the UMW...
...1, 3. The conference was reported in the issues of December 15 and 17, 1931, pp...
...And they blamed themselves masochistically...
...Three weeks before the conference, the first NMU organizer, Dan Slinger, who used the name "Dan Brooks," appeared in Harlan County.60 The strikers were so fed up with the UMW that he had little trouble convincing the local union, in a secret meeting, to send 25 delegates to the Pittsburgh conference...
...529-30...
...After leaving high school, he was briefly employed as an office worker and in a textile mill...
...72 When promises such as these were not fulfilled, the propaganda backfired...
...Too late, the party recognized that it should have ended much sooner.43 In the end, no one benefited...
...COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933 Its first strike call was issued in the Illinois mine region in December 1929, over a year after the union was formed...
...It voted to strike, and a picket line was formed at the mine on the morning of the 26th...
...This time the Communists were not a factor...
...The two main weaknesses, he found, were "a tendency, under the fierce attacks from its main enemies, to develop its union programs upon a too advanced revolutionary basis and to identify the organizations too closely with the Communist Party" and the "beginning of a tendency in the direction of dual unionism, the traditional weakness of the American left wing...
...These workers here have relied on your religion for bread and butter, and now they are starving and you ask these workers to believe in religion...
...a William Z. Foster, the Communist, October 1930, p. 885...
...By the spring of 1930, eight industrial leagues were initiatedrailroad, auto, metal and steel, food and packing, marine, shoe and leather, lumber and agriculture...
...72 Harry Gannes, Kentucky Miners Fight (New York: Workers International Relief, 1932), pp...
...After being searched no fewer than six times between nine o'clock Friday night at Neon, Ky., where we were arrested and about 4 o'clock Saturday morning on top of a big mountain near Larue, Va., where we were taken from the car and again `looked over' to make sure we had no arms, Jim Grace and I were `invited' to fight by three heavily armed Harlan County thugs to whom we had been turned over by the thugs of Letcher County," he related...
...The report recommended a strike: "As far as the willingness of the miners to fight is concerned, I might add here that there is no question about that...
...On the one hand, they wanted to maintain and to expand their influence among the Kentucky miners who were desperate enough to want another strike...
...23 William Z. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, op...
...The January 1931 meeting of the NMU's National Board was reported in Labor Unity, January 24, 1931, p. 2. COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933 377 poorly or not at all...
...We did not convince the miners that this was a strike against terror and starvation, but it simply was a strike called by the NMU and therefore it would take care of them as soon as they joined the strike...
...Nobody has any use for the UMW after seeing how they've done us in [in] Harlan," one of them said...
...The top union leaders were also party leaders...
...Whatever they may be called, these "tendencies" could not be challenged while the TUUL was still going strong without questioning its raison d'être...
...In January, Borich complained that some of the leading organizers were burned out, asking for leaves of absence or staying home 91 Mine strikes abounded in almost every mine field in the latter half of the year, but the Communists took credit for only one in New Mexico and Utah.92 In western Pennsylvania, where they had conducted the greatest strike in their history two years before, 75,000 miners went out again...
...Stalin's pronouncement came at the end of 1927 and amounted to a theoretical signal for a "Left turn" in tactics...
...Waldo Frank and Allan Taub, an ILD lawyer picked up at the same time, were severely beaten...
...29 The TUUL hit bottom in the last half of 1930...
...He seemed to be an unorthodox syndicalist who perversely believed in working inside the AFL...
...74 Nevertheless, the Communists found ways to break through this crude, bloodstained system of repression...
...Ruth Wicks permitted me to examine his desk, which had been left untouched, and to take all the material in it of interest to me...
...Nevertheless, this strike was an astonishingly impressive achievement, far beyond anything John L. Lewis's much larger UMW was able to claim at the time...
...In such basic industries as iron and steel, food packing, automobiles, rubber products, chemicals and electrical products, unionism was virtually nonexistent...
...The breaking point for most miners came when the Pittsburgh Terminal Coal Company signed a contract with the United Mine Workers on June 23...
...There is almost nothing true in this version...
...Arrested during the March 6, 1930, demonstration of unemployed in Waterbury, Conn., he spent six months in jail...
...When she went into his room one night, toothpicks were placed against his door...
...128-130...
...When the strike took place, he said, "there were approximately twenty Party members in the entire field, themselves not organized into the Union, who were scattered and were not functioning as a Party unit in any respect, and this was during the period of preparation...
...19-20...
...61 The call appeared in the Daily Worker, December 2, 1931, pp...
...The UMW decided to give up the strike and get out of Harlan again...
...56 Tom Johnson, Daily Worker, March 9-11, 1932...
...832-35...
...And this historyof the absurd comes from the author of four vol umes on the American labor movement, the lastof which, fortunately, stops in 1917...
...He succeeded in setting up a few, small YCL units and even in holding the Kentucky 64 Pages from a Worker's Life, op...
...It filled almost 12 mimeographed pages...
...cit., p. 203...
...It was, as its first president, John J. Watt, put it, "a convention for which there was no money, a convention literally of starving men...
...386 THEODORE DRAPER our part...
...62-67...
...384 THEODORE DRAPER to call the meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee, some distance from the strike area...
...The latter was formed by Foster in November 1920 before he decided to join forces with the Communists...
...It sent in about 25 organizers from other districts, making it difficult for the latter to carry on their own strikes.ss The TUUL's high command hurried to the scene...
...Keeney was backed by a small group of "Musteite" organizers from the Brookwood Labor College...
...93 Borich himself was deported in October.94 By the end of the year, a party—not a union— conference of mine organizers decided that the unexpected growth of the UMW made it imperative to "work for the unity of the miners into one militant united miners' union...
...In 1926, the Communists supported a "Save the Union Committee," which put up John Brophy, a Progressive, to oppose Lewis for the UMW's presidency...
...early in 1933 (History of the Communist Party of the United States, op...
...A recruiting campaign had once brought as many as 1,500 miners into the party, but no more than 300 or 400 remained in it by the time the NMU was formed...
...26 By the end of 1930, however, only one league was promoted to the status of a union, the Marine Workers, instead of six as planned27 By midyear, Foster expressed alarm that a campaign for 50,000 new members by June 30 had brought in no more than 7,000.28 At about the same time, a Moscow watchdog of the American party described the plight of the TUUL as "exceedingly tragic...
...The strike, he decided, should have been called off in the very first days as soon as it was seen that it was "in reality no strike except for the unemployed blacklisted miners...
...66 When the Communists first came, the miners knew so little about them that they did not distinguish them from any other union organizers, except that they seemed to fight harder and longer...
...cit., pp...
...8° Finally, in May, a Senatorial subcommittee conducted hearings on conditions in the coal fields of Harlan and Bell counties and gave members of these delegations an opportunity to tell their stories in the nation's capital...
...Simms bled for hours near the tracks before he was taken to a hospital, where he died the next evening...
...A maximum of 30 local relief kitchens were no match for the hunger of an estimated 120,000 miners, women and children in direst need...
...A confidential report to the party's Secretariat in New York in September 1931 gave some idea of what the Communist organizers on the spot were up against...
...Foster, Borich, and Wagenknecht rushed down to set up a new strike leadership...
...A special "top committee," made up of local and outside Communist leaders, took charge of the entire operation...
...In practice, there was nothing more difficult for a revolutionary movement to do than to achieve these two objectives simultaneously...
...For Jim Grace, it was safer to go North and get relief work in New York...
...Frank Borich, "How the Present Miners Strike Was Prepared," Party Organizer, August 1931, pp...
...THEODORE DRAPER not in existence as far as the strikers are concerned," one organizer grieved...
...After Harlan, the NMU seemed exhausted, incapable of further challenging its hated rival, the UMW...
...In September 1932, the Progressive Miners of America arose to challenge the UMW in Illinois...
...In one of his late works, Lenin had maintained that trade unions were necessary to enable the Communists "to convince the backward elements, to be able to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them by artificial and childishly 'Leftwing' slogans...
...In its origins, then, the TUEL represented a repudiation of dual unionism, not because Foster believed in the AFL's craft-union policy but because he considered it necessary and possible to take over the AFL and convert it into an instrument of revolutionary syndicalism...
...The Progressives and Communists made common cause against Lewis and called a "National Save the Miners Union Conference" on April 1, 1928...
...Referring to mass arrests carried out the previous month, the report advised that "everything collapsed for a time...
...cit., pp...
...they would have felt politically naked without it...
...The TUUL's program stated: "The fascist AFL is the enemy of the working class...
...VII W hat went wrong...
...374 1929, a majority of American workers were not skilled craftsmen, and a substantial minority were neither native-born nor white...
...The balance sheet was almost entirely negative...
...At the Second Congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1920, the two main American delegates, Louis C. Fraina (later known as Lewis Corey) and John Reed came under intense pressure to drop their dual-union predilection and to fight the AFL bureaucracy from within...
...But the Communist-Farmer-Labor split in July 1923 hit back at the TUEL, which had been largely responsible for making the alliance possible...
...Browder, Daily Worker, July 14, 1931, p. 4; Resolution of the Politburo, ibid., August 15, 1931, p. 4; Resolution of the ECCI, the Communist, May 1932, p. 409...
...cit., p. 387...
...The Communists were grimly determined to learn from their setbacks and mistakes...
...This strike ended so disastrously that their mine union never recovered from it...
...BO S. Wiliner, the Communist, November 1932, p. 1044...
...The Daily Worker might be mailed and sold legally in the United States, but in Harlan County mere possession of a copy was enough to be held and convicted on the all-purpose charge of "criminal syndicalism...
...Browder, ibid., August 1931, p. 685...
...cit., pp...
...Slinger was taken out of Harlan because he supported the Harlan miners, who wanted to set an early, definite date for a strike call...
...The American delegates were so horrified at the idea that, as Lozovsky put it, "they argued furiously, they argued foaming at the mouth, they accused me of schism...
...that the first thing to be considered is the building of the Party...
...The UMW was not prepared for the open warfare that inevitably followed...
...49 Ibid., June 12, 1931, P. 1. 50 Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, op...
...Where the TUUL leaders did not think that they had enough strength to set up unions, they formed "leagues" as an interim, preparatory stage...
...84 Nathaniel Honig, "Miners Discuss their Problems," Labor Unity, April 1932, pp...
...The fourth great strike in 1931 took place in Harlan and surrounding counties in Kentucky...
...The AFL contained no more than one-third of all skilled workers, and few of the semiskilled and unskilled...
...Since one of the three organizers first sent to Harlan had represented the International Labor Defense and had been one of the first jailed for "criminal syndicalism," the ILD was too well-known as a Communist auxiliary to serve as vehicle for investigating conditions in the Kentucky mine fields...
...Dreiser came to Kentucky with an unidentified, attractive young woman...
...Senate, 72nd Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932...
...Not even the Communists, who invested so much hope, toil, and trouble in it, have seen fit to give it a fitting commemoration...
...They caused a lot of trouble through here...
...Elsie Reed Mitchell, John Henry Hammond, Jr., Liston M. Oak, Quincy Howe, A. M. Max, and Harold Hickerson...
...The meeting was held at only one mine in Atlasburg on May 25...
...COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933 advocated editorially, should be deported, "made to face a firing squad," or "be much safer in a pine box six feet under ground...
...76 The committee's 74 The two journalists were Bruce Crawford, editor and publisher of Crawford's Weekly of Norton, Virginia, and Boris Israel of the Federated Press...
...Jack Johnstone, the TUUL's national organizer, later charged that the NMU had "depended solely upon the miners responding to the strike call...
...THEODORE DRAPER nothing in fact except submission to repeated raids upon miners' homes, searches, seizures, shootings, etc...
...A serious study made some time later by an investigator who had worked with the American Friends Service Committee, which had provided relief for miners' children, found that denunciations by Donaldson and others sent North for training had done more than anything else to hurt the Communist cause...
...It was later disclosed that the union had distributed the strike leaflet after calling the strike and had never set up a single strike committee...
...This small, beleaguered group of outsiders expected to lead a strike of 20,000 miners...
...It succeeded in gaining considerable influence and numerous 372 converts in 1922-23 during the Communist alliance with the Farmer-Labor movement...
...13 Leo Wolman and Gustav Peck, "Labor Groupsin the Social Structure," in Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), pp...
...Bowen," identified in a later letter of October 31, 1931, as Clara Holden [Wicks Papers...
...The Communists provided the sparks that sufficed to set them off...
...industries most heavily represented at this convention were mining, steel and metal, and needle trades.19 For the mine workers, the depression of the nineteen-thirties was only a continuation of the depression of the nineteen-twenties...
...They were entrenched mainly in the smaller shops and hand industries of the preindustrial era...
...A Negro, William Boyce, was named vice-president, and a veteran Communist organizer, Pat Toohey, secretary-treasurer...
...The local Communist miners had little faith in the strike, and it would not have gone very far if it had been left up to them...
...392 very program had committed it to the closest possible identification with the Communist party and the goal of dual unionism?°° Any wavering from these built-in principles met with lashing scorn and retribution from Moscow...
...No unpleasantness with unhousebroken Americans disturbed the founding congress of the Red International of Labor Unions, better known as the "Profintern," a contraction of the Russian form of the name, in July 1921...
...It reported that its four national unions had suffered "serious declines in membership...
...In January 1931, this plan was adopted by the NMU's top leadership, which largely duplicated the party fraction...
...A Communist mine strike was an all-or-nothing gamble...
...Browder, the Communist, August 1931, p. 686 (criticism...
...In March, about 20,000 anthracite miners walked out in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania...
...Dan Brooks" is the name used by Charles Rumford Walker in Harlan Miners Speak, op...
...They got men out and tore up the mines...
...13-14...
...I've had plenty of the union...
...cit., p. 17...
...The choice fell on a nearby UMW official who was not enthusiastic about the prospect...
...82 The New Republic was far more evenhanded, though it also tended to exaggerate the headway made by the NMU.88 As a result, the Communists benefited enormously from the publicity given to the Harlan strike, even though they admitted to themselves that they should not have called it in the first place...
...The author was then Professor of Economics, Fisk University...
...528-32...
...If the boss knew you wanted a union, he'd fire you right away...
...Cowley also gave his version of the events in the New Republic, March 2, 1932, pp...
...The blacklisted miners had assured the NMU organizers that the working miners were sure to come out on strike, and most of the pressure had come from the former...
...62 On January 4, the NMU headquarters in Pineville, Ky., were raided and nine of the outside organizers—five of them womenseized...
...On this point, however, the Communists were adamant...
...When his wife found him, she recalled, "his face and eyes were swollen 63 Ibid., September 1, 1931, p. 1. 54 Ibid., October 3, 1931, p. 4. 382 and black and blue...
...This did not prevent John L. Lewis's machine from also attacking the PMA as Communist with the slogan, "Down with the Reds...
...According to the Comintern's Russian expert on American affairs, the TUUL's task was "to destroy the American Federation of Labor, the most reliable support of American imperialism...
...organizes workers' children's camps where children of the unemployed and of strikers are taken care of without charge...
...64 One young Communist was less lucky...
...N But the Communists were not yet finished in mining...
...In March, about 80 students, mainly from New York, were turned back near the Kentucky border, some of them roughed up in the act.79 In May, two non-Communist groups followed --one for the American Civil Liberties Union, headed by Arthur Garfield Hays, which was also turned back, and another made up of four ministers, headed by Professor Reinhold Niebuhr, who succeeded in spending two days in the Pineville area...
...After the line changed and the Popular Front came in, Foster permitted himself the luxury of examining the TUUL's record a little more critically...
...5a But other Communist leaders in the region held back...
...141-43...
...When they were found undisturbed the next morning, they became evidence for his indictment on a charge of adultery...
...25 Meanwhile, the TUUL as a whole was not doing much better...
...The union structure was too flimsy and its membership too amorphous to lean on before the NMU was tested in at least one strike...
...Ironically, some operators also indicated a willingness to accept the Communist union's demands, but the party held out for a general agreement and refused to permit local settlements...
...S8 Even more galling, the NMU had opened the way for the UMW in east Ohio...
...231...
...89 What Foster could not admit publicly was that without these two "tendencies," there would have been no TUUL...
...It concluded: "Long live the Communist Party...
...As this strike began to run down, however, they decided to call the representatives from all important coal fields to confer in Pittsburgh on July 15...
...Gross neglect" characterized the work p. 4 (strike ignored...
...At the beginning of the depression, 70 percent of the AFL's membership was concentrated in only five fields—transportation, building, printing, public service, and theaters...
...61 The strike never had a chance...
...All unions were fought bitterly in those days...
...Instead, it was dragged out futilely until the end of March and merely increased the number of blacklisted miners...
...The strikers counted on getting relief and, when they were disappointed, drifted away...
...I have often speculated," Foster later reflected, "on the tragic consequences that might have ensued had that Knoxville police official been less responsive to Wagenknecht's persuasive tongue...
...It was a coldblooded murder for which the killer was never brought to trial...
...He was crazy as a loon...
...Between 1929 and 1931, the average annual income of miners declined 45 percent...
...81 The New York Times carried six references to the Kentucky mine situation between January 1 and May 15, 1931...
...The NMU, with about 100 dues-paying members in the Pennsylvania district, was not much better off...
...Getting publicity in Harlan County was almost as hard and dangerous as waging strikes...
...By July, some Communist organizers were willing to admit that the strike was going down, but the party leadership continued to insist that it was still advancing...
...Footnotes here are given only for material not already cited in my book...
...1, 3. Borich's report to the party's top leaders would have confirmed the Communists' unkindest critics in their suspicions of how irresponsibly some of the Communists' most dramatic strikes were called...
...The preparations for this strike show how the party and union worked together...
...of L." ("Lenin and the American Working-Class Movement," New World Review, Winter 1970, p. 130, note...
...All the kitchens but one closed in the last few weeks, the one operating is operating on credit...
...36 Jack Johnstone, "How the N.M.U...
...so This letter, dated November 5, 1931, was addressed to Harry Jackson, Jim Allen, Dan Slinger, Clara Holden...
...And in 1952, he allotted no more than 4 out of 572 pages to the TUUL in his History of the Communist Party of the United States (New York: International...
...Two journalists were shot in the leg to discourage news sympathetic to the strikers from getting out...
...But once the strike showed how combustible it was, the top leadership took over...
...Reinforcements arrived during the fall, mainly from the auxiliaries, no more than a dozen in all...
...Darkness and a heavy rain enabled him to get away...
...Everybody is wanting to join the National Miners Union...
...A special correspondent reported in the Daily Worker: "Civil war is still raging here...
...The TUUL's secondincommand, Jack Stachel, recognized that "we were wrong in calling the strike when we did, with the preparations that we had carried through...
...Two months later, he called attention to the new wave of mine strikes that had recently broken 82 The first was Oakley Johnson, "Starvation and the `Reds' in Kentucky," the Nation, February 3, 1932, pp...
...At least four major coal strikes took place that year in widely separated fields and under exceedingly different auspices...
...In some fields, such as coal and textiles, the unions were as sick as their industries...
...This vast pool of unemployed and unemployables gave the mineowners a crushing advantage over the coal miners...
...When it won nothing, the NMU was left with unemployed and blacklisted miners...
...This excellent work lists 51 items under Trade Union Unity League, but none of them are studies of the TUUL or its unions...
...The party Secretariat in New York decided early in November that no final decision could be made there and that those in direct contact with the Harlan situation were expected to make it...
...Then after they got us all out and blacklisted, they left us flat...
...History, in a sense, took revenge on the Communists for being unfaithful to their own doctrine...
...The NMU and party lost ground in the same mine fields as quickly as they had gained it...
...Some miners were paid entirely in scrip and never saw money.46 This territory had been, for at least a decade, a union organizer's nightmare...
...One Communist organizer reflected: "The left wing of the American labor movement had never gained a foothold in these hills—the Communist Party was unknown and the Communist program undreamed of...
...Material success was not always possible, but "without a most serious struggle for the material outcome, there can be no prospect of political success in the strike" (italics in original) . 45 In this way, the Comintern tried to reconcile "revolutionization" and "material results" so that the former depended on the latter...
...We were not able to organize a solid strike in the Kentucky coal fields and then spread it to other southern coal fields as was expected at the time the strike was prepared...
...Unknown to the founding fathers of American Communism, the trade-union line of the Communist International had changed in favor of working within the AFL even before the TUEL was formed...
...The latter had to go into totally alien territory without the semblance of an organizational base...
...They fought it mercilessly in their own ranks as defeatist and fatalistic, unworthy of revolutionists...
...By left-wing movement...
...This strike dwindled by mid-April, and merely foreshadowed more serious trouble elsewhere 31 In July, another major strike of perhaps 20,000 miners took place in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia...
...cit., p. 18...
...Foster, ibid., July 1931, p. 596...
...After six or seven hours of discussion, they succeeded in convincing the miners that all of them, irrespective of color, should eat in the same kitchen...
...The Americans were just as unprepared for the new line as they had been at the beginning of the decade for the old one...
...Comrades," NMU Secretary Frank Borich began his confidential report on the course of the strike to the party's top leadership in New York, "it is obvious now that the expectations of the Party in connection with the Kentucky strike were not fulfilled...
...The copy in my possession is unsigned, but a later letter of October 31, 1931, identified the writer as Clara Holden who represented the ILD...
...Harlan's 44 mines accounted for almost one-third of all the coal produced in eastern Kentucky...
...48 Daily Worker, May 21, 1931, p. 3. miners.49 Meanwhile, the Communists were still preoccupied with their own coal strike in the Pittsburgh area...
...cit., p. 45, and the same name appears as co-author of an article in the Daily Worker, August 12, 1931, p. 4. 51 Daily Worker, July 17, 1931, p. 1. 52 Ibid., August 12, 1931, p. 4. COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933 The Daily Worker was filled with front-page headlines, such as: "Boss Gunmen Kill 2 More in Harlan, Ky...
...At the Comintern's Ninth Plenum in February 1928, he came out in favor of new, revolutionary unions instead of working in the old ones...
...This passage appeared in the first of Edmund Wilson's two articles on the West Virginia strike, to inject themselves into this strike, also without success...
...But they could not show that it was possible for them 93 B. Frank, Party Organizer, November 1933, p. 8. 94 Daily Worker, October 25, 1933, p. 1. 95 J. Stachel, ibid., December 21, 1933, pp...
...The possible exception is The Fur and Leather Workers Union, by Philip S. Foner (Newark: Norden Press, 1950...
...The official line did not rule out a strike but insisted that more adequate organizational preparations were necessary to avoid another Illinois debacle...
...The money-raising specialist, Alfred Wagenknecht, hastily formed a Miners Relief Committee...
...22 After a few days, the strike collapsed...
...77 Swanberg, op...
...In a few months, the Communists made up for years of neglect...
...16-17...
...17, 22...
...By overreaching itself, the party was again guilty of trying for a grandiose victory instead of being satisfied with a modest gain on which to build for the future...
...Foster later wrote them off as "a handful," Browder as "a mere shadow" of a union.34 Nevertheless, when the opportunity came, the Communists were set to take advantage of it...
...He came from a Jewish working-class family in Springfield, Mass., where he spent his first 17 years...
...Its formation had nothing to do with the expulsion of the "left-wing forces" from the AFL...
...s The Trade Union Unity League, op...
...But under no circumstances would we enter blindly into such a venture—because venture it surely would be...
...This is a situation certainly new in our history where workers demand a mass strike and we hold them back for weeks waiting for center 57 This letter, dated September 18, 1931, was sent from the nearest Communist headquarters in Chattanooga, Tenn...
...Then J. Louis Engdahl, head of the International Labor Defense, went down to Harlan to offer its aid to the indicted 47 Harlan Miners Speak (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), p. vii...
...When we consider the fact that the conference itself had to be organized secretly because of the terror, and that the men who attended knew they were risking their lives, we can get some idea of the determination that pervades the miners and their willingness to put up a fight," the Secretariat was informed...
...The population of 64,500 came from the purest, old, white American stock, long isolated from changes in the rest of the country...
...59-82, 233-34...
...83 From an editorial in the issue of August 5, 1931: "The rapid growth of the militant N.M.U...
...They arrived in Pineville the day Harry Simms was shot, were arrested that same evening, forced into cars and taken for a ride of about 20 miles to the Cumberland Gap at the KentuckyTennessee border, where they were put out at the top of a mountain in the dead of night...
...It is, therefore, utterly misleading to suggest that the TUUL was formed by"left-wing forces" rather than by the Communists alone...
...Slinger's group was sternly told that "they must not play with general strike slogans and with dates...
...Glusman stated that Simms went to Chattanooga from Connecticut...
...3536...
...He was the first to apply Stalin's augury of the new period to his own field...
...313-48...
...When one Communist organizer was asked in court, "Do you believe in any form of religion...
...87 Malcolm Ross, Machine Age in the Hills (New York: Macmillan, 1933), pp...
...He specifically struck at the "Save the Union" slogan as "meaningless" and demanded the formation of new American miners' unions...
...From then on the strike was virtually leaderless because it depended almost entirely on outside direction...
...101 "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (New York: International Publishers, 1934), pp...
...With one possible exception, not a single book, dissertation or article has ever been devoted to any of its constituent unions.' Total oblivion for over 35 years has been the peculiar fate of the Trade Union Unity League...
...They were insistently exhorted "to bring the face of the party forward" and to count no union campaign a success that did not bring in party members and failed to increase the party's influence...
...By May 1921, however, the American Communists fell into line and officially adopted the Comintern's position against leaving the existing unions...
...THEODORE DRAPER sored by the National Student League, another newly formed auxiliary...
...35 Borich, op...
...All were writers of one kind or another...
...Theyadopted the latter course only after they wereready to give up the TUUL...
...The liberal weeklies began to take an interest in the strike only after the Communists had taken it over...
...73 VI Yet, in one respect, the Communists did something for the miners that no one else had ever done...
...no Jesus...
...THEODORE DRAPER sky, knew how to take a hint...
...Thirty-four union members eventually faced charges of murder...
...Traditional trade unionism had held that a depression was the worst time to strike and organize...
...In March, the miners' cup of misery and desperation overflowed...
...Borich claimed a turnout of approximately 10,000, of whom about 4,000 were blacklisted, on January 1. Other figures were much lower, with a much higher percentage of unemployed and blacklisted...
...The union and the party could not have a conflict of interests, according to the party line, because the union could not be built successfully without building the party...
...Mine companies, courts, police and military, local, state, and national officials combined forces against them...
...37-61...
...My intention here is to tell the story, at least in its main lines, of the National Miners Union...
...and 62 in 1932...
...4s This paragraph is based mainly on testimony in "Conditions in Coal Fields in Harlan and Bell Counties, Kentucky," Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Manufactures, U.S...
...1029-47...
...In 1931, Harlan mines averaged only three days a week, and take-home pay of $4 or $5 a week was not uncommon...
...Foster, Daily Worker, September 7, 1931, p. 4. In From Bryan to Stalin, Foster called the strike "a deadly blow" to the NMU (p...
...John Dos Passos gave an account of the trip in the New Republic, December 2, 1931, pp...
...Yet all would have been forgiven if the revolutionary upsurge had taken place as promised in the United States...
...As a result, fewer miners were needed, and those who worked were paid less...
...As many as 10,000 workers allegedly answered it, but they were confined to two or three localities, and the strike never spread throughout the state...
...This copy is unsigned, but later correspondence indicated that it was written by Jim [James S.] Allen, then editor of the Southern Worker, who played a leading role in working out Harlan strategy [Wicks Papers...
...Thus it was not impossible to make a theoretical case for the new line...
...The number of members in the Ohio mine fields was even smaller...
...Lozovsky's First Speech," the Communist International, vol...
...They're a fixin' to kill us...
...The NMU had anticipated the birth of the Trade Union Unity League by about a year, and now it anticipated the death of the TUUL by at least a year...
...John L. Lewis's UMW was quiescent and craven during the worst of the Depression, but it was able to survive and in the end to benefit most from the Communists' exertions...
...s° Yet pressure for a strike continued to build up...
...The three Communists later learned that the Kentucky miners had brought guns to shoot their way out if the police tried to arrest them...
...When he found where he was, he was picked up by the "law" in Virginia, handcuffed, taken to a doctor who told him the good news that none of his bones were broken, and ordered to "scram...
...First prepare a minimum of organizational machinery and then, if there was any possibility of launching a fight, we would issue the general strike call, and even set a date...
...It sternly insisted that the main object was "the revolutionization of the striking workers," not the simple winning of "material results" as set forth in the strike demands, or even the strengthening of the party organization...
...37-38), but the Nation itself preferred to drop the subject without clearing up the confusion...
...87 Honig, op...
...80 Hays and Niebuhr testified in Conditions in Coal Fields in Harlan and Bell Counties, Kentucky, op...
...He had seen Communists "with great applause give honor to Soviet Russia" and had heard them teach that "there is no God...
...A report of the Lexington meeting appeared in the Daily Worker of September 15, 1931, p. 2. to take action...
...all there is for anybody is what they get in this world...
...They were unable or unwilling to end strikes quickly, and long strikes demanded relief funds which they did not prepare in advance and which were far beyond their capacity to raise in the course of the strike...
...There was not a single functioning party unit in the entire state of Kentucky...
...cit., p. 278...
...Others received threatening notes...
...21 J. Stachel, the Communist, May 1929, p. 244...
...The biggest mistake, Borich thought, was the lack of effort to build the party...
...Caroline Drew, the relief worker at Gastonia, came to organize NMU women's auxiliaries in Harlan...
...37 Whatever planning and organization this strike may have had were still very limited and inadequate...
...Of the 527,563 bituminous miners in 1930, over 200,000 were considered "surplus...
...4, no...
...The attacks were far more in evidence than the support so In 1933, the Communists gave up all pretense that they had a functioning miners' union...
...30 III B ut 1931 was a different kind of year...
...They decided to call a mass meeting to consider the possibility of a strike...
...Field organizers in closest touch with the various union committees were given detailed instructions how to recruit for the party and train new party members.41 Those who wanted to get ahead in the union soon learned that it was advisable to join the party...
...He attributed it primarily to the lack of a "real Party base" before the strike...
...This role was taken over by the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, a new auxiliary formed in mid-1931...
...89 Ross, op...
...To all appearances, then, the AFL was a hopelessly bankrupt, moribund organization...
...The trouble, as Borich explained it, was endemic to Communist auxiliaries...
...of L." (The Trade Union Unity League, op...
...The Communist reply took the form of three articles by Bill Dunne in the Daily Worker, July 18, 20, and 21, 1931...
...17 Another message at the end of October 1931 showed how difficult the decision was...
...8 This secondary task was interpreted by Foster to mean that it was necessary to subordinate the work of the organized Communist groups in the "reformist unions" to the build-up of the revolutionary unions for the purpose of "drawing these trade union workers under the ideological leadership of the TUUL, and, as speedily as practicable, into mass affiliation with it...
...In the original Leninist doctrine, the Communist party and the trade union movement were supposed to be clearly differentiated...
...At its second convention in July of that year, Freeman Thompson came in as president and Frank Borich as secretary...
...When the NMU wanted a youth organizer in Harlan the following year, the union asked for him, and "Harris Gilbert" became "Harry Simms," doubling as organizer for both the YCL and NMU...
...To their surprise, the miners learned that Communists did not believe in God...
...A coal operators' representative claimed that "not over 6 men in the county stopped working," and he may have been right (Conditions in Coal Fields in Harlan and Bell Counties, Kentucky, op...
...75 The sixty-year-old Dreiser courageously led a group of eight, including another well-known novelist, John Dos Passos, into the explosively hostile territory of Pineville, the seat of neighboring Bell County, and Harlan itself...
...According to the theory of the "third period," however, these admonitions had been rendered obsolete...
...After gaining a nominal foothold in Kentucky during World War I, the UMW had been driven out by 1921...
...The Communists scoffed at the prevailing view and deliberately defied past experience...
...I'm in sympathy with them but I don't expect to stay with them any more...
...Practically no campaign was carried on outside of the convention call and maybe distributing some copies of the Daily Worker...
...It issued a statement of policy calling on all miners to "break completely with the Lewis machine," pledging a "fight to the last to remove every obstacle to build an organization to comprise the whole of the rank and file coal miners," and proclaiming as its eventual aim the "complete emancipation from capitalist exploitation...
...they wore two hats and put on one or the other as circumstances dictated...
...In the end, destitute, desperate miners paid most for the Communists' "mistakes...
...In the face of such a phalanx of powerful and implacable enemies, it was more surprising that the Communist organizers were able to fight so hard for as long as they did than that they were unable to win...
...97 Freeman Thompson, national president of the NMU, was the Communist candidate for senator from Illinois.98 No one needed to pin the Communist label on the TUUL unions...
...This message warned: "Center will have to make immediate decision...
...They blamed their organizational methods, their sectarianism, their opportunism, their lack of trained forces, their personal shortcomings...
...They were allergic to compromises, and employers were usually determined not to compromise with them...
...It was able to get as its chairman the famous novelist Theodore Dreiser, then a recent convert to Communism as a solution "for the difficulties of the world, and particularly those in America...
...8r, Another Communist organizer estimated that close to 100,000 miners were striking by the summer of 1932—all under UMW leadership...
...The union, however, encouraged the miners by sending its vice-president, Philip Murray, the future president of the CIO, to Harlan to make an appeal for membership...
...If capitalism was collapsing and the revolutionary upsurge was imminent or at least inevitable, as the doctrine of the third period assured them, they could even tell themselves that the political correctness and ultimate success of the TUUL and its constituent unions seemed assured...
...30-31...
...67-70, and Wilson in the New Masses, April 1932, p. 7. Besides Frank, Wilson, and Cowley, the group was made up of Mary Heaton Vorse, Polly Boyden, Benjamin Lieder, Dr...
...The Communist press did not take an interest in Harlan until the end of May, three weeks after the shoot-out in Evarts...
...Despite the Communists' best efforts, the relief work was pitifully inadequate...
...The units to which they belonged functioned New Republic, July 8, 1931, P. 199...
...Nat Honig, Labor Unity, April 1932, p. 19...
...It was beset by both the UMW, which denounced the action as an "outlaw" strike, and by the Communists who sent in organizers in a vain effort to take it over...
...The AFL is in a period of senility," an American Communist confidently asserted...
...13 In effect, the AFL had settled down to protect the special interests of preponderantly native-born, white, skilled, craft workers...
...Now they say to hell with friends for votes, give us the Communist Party...
...At the Profintem's own Fourth Congress the following month, he renewed the attack...
...For months, the press was full of Harlan as it had never been before...
...The sick industry bred a sick union...
...Generations of isolation [have] made the miners highly individualistic with highly developed racial and social prejudices...
...For the original strike call and response, see Labor Unity, December 24, 1929, p. 1, and January 4, 1930, p. 1. Lozovsky denounced the conduct of the Illinois strike at the Profintern's Fifth Congress, International Press Correspondence, September 11, 1930, p. 894...
...The head of the Profintern, S. A. Lozov 4 I have told much of this background story in American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960...
...Wilson later omitted all but the first five words in the version that appears in The American Earthquake (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), p. 321...
...Another article extolling the strike was published three months after it had been officially called off...
...After a temporary rise in 1926, owing to the British general strike, earnings fell precipitously...
...Its industrial form of organization would enable it to take in all sections of the working class— blacks, women, youth, skilled, unskilled, native, foreign...
...101 For this reason, he had argued, it was incumbent on Communists to work in "reactionary" trade unions rather than in their own "revolutionary" unions...
...In principle, then, the TUUL and AFL were to be locked in deadly conflict...
...If the miners were not enough for a good story, Dreiser helped by getting himself indicted on a charge of adultery.77 In February 1932, while the Communist phase of the strike was still going on, Waldo Frank led a group of 12, mainly writers, including Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley, into the strike area...
...A successful strike hinged on sufficient strike relief, and little was as yet coming into the Harlan area from the outside...
...Dreiser was such an impressive figure that even the Harlan sheriff and prosecuting attorney submitted to questioning...
...5i1 Three weeks later, the UMW phase of the strike was finished, and the NMU took over what was left of the Harlan strike...
...THEODORE DRAPER 376 in the AFL...
...While building the new unions was its main task, the TUUL was also told to organize "the revolutionary workers within 5 "A...
...He was the Young Communist League organizer Harry Simms, who had started out in life as Harry Hirsh...
...24 As a result of this letdown, the 22 Johnstone, Daily Worker, September 1, 1930, p. 4; Stachel, the Communist, March 1931, p. 209...
...302...
...Pe The testimony appears in Harlan Miners Speak...
...The New York Times, for example, carried only six stories dealing with the Kentucky miners in the UMW or pre-Communist phase of the struggle...
...It resorted, therefore, to the more elementary tactic of "marches...
...What hurt most was the strike in the eastern Ohio-West Virginia region, which the NMU had had all to itself the year before...
...The party claimed its share of the membership spoils, in the words of the district organizer, on the ground that: "The strike cannot be considered a victory for 37 Foster, Daily Worker, September 7, 1931, p. 4. The breakdown of the local party machinery was vividly described by F. Borich, Party Organizer, May 1931, pp...
...The drop was especially sharp in the key Pittsburgh area where the mine membership had fallen from 700-800 to no more than 200...
...At the very outset, according to Foster, these units "collapsed...
...First the party leadership decided to concentrate on four districts, one of which was District 5 with headquarters in Pittsburgh...
...390 field...
...Stachel, ibid., June 1932, p. 533...
...The strike, moreover, was unusually violent even for mine strikes...
...There were at most 75 party members in the mine fields of western Pennsylvania and no more than 25 in eastern Ohio and West Virginia...
...In the mining district our Party as a Party is 88 Stachel, Labor Unity, October 1932, p. 14...
...The hall-keeper became suspicious and called the police...
...The latter were told, however, to hold a "truly representative" conference in the strike area to make the final decision.E° A conference was held 58 Letter of October 28, 1931, from Pineville, Ky., signed by "S...
...Nevertheless, a delegation of Harlan miners had agreed that "70-80% of the miners demand a state-wide strike in the immediate future...
...The Pittsburgh district of the party was weaker than ever...
...But the TUUL was not viewed by its founders as a `dual union,' but simply a means of advancing the program of organizing the unorganized and battling for those already organized until the progressive forces once again gained influence in the A.F...
...The death toll of the Battle of Evarts, as it was called, came to three deputies and one miner...
...It criticized the lack of preparation for the strike, the weakness of the local organizations, the inability to score a "material success" in the outcome of the strike, the tendency of the strike leadership to go ahead without consulting the mass of strikers, the inadequacy of outside help, and the failure to order a retreat in time...
...More than 10,000 went out on strike and shut down the mines...
...The TUUL was decidedly viewed by itsfounders as a "dual union...
...4 One of these fields was mining...
...Reduced to their hard core of Communists, the NMU's locals were behaving like party units under another name...
...One such mine union statement endorsed and wholeheartedly supported "the election platform of the only working class party, the Communist Party...
...For decades, the Kentucky miners had suffered the most appalling poverty and degradation with hardly any attention paid to them...
...Whatever their initial misgivings, once the decision was made in Moscow to set up new, revolu 14 Of the 25,997,530 wage earners in 1930, 6,503,062 were classified as skilled, 6,940,324 as semiskilled, 8,286,962 as unskilled, and 4,266,956 as service workers (W...
...cit., pp...
...Both his syndi no more than 8 out of 373 pages to the TUUL in a book specifically concerned with trade unionism...
...The party's auxiliaries, especially the International Labor Defense and Workers International Relief, moved in...
...James Wechsler, Revolt on the Campus (New York: Covici-Friede, 1935), pp...
...Relief Need Greater...
...gives medical aid to workers injured at demonstrations...
...cit., p. 184...
...There ain't no use in the world for the poor men to fight the men who have the money...
...The strike, Borich said, was able to spread for a week, then lost its momentum...
...If any COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933 391 proof were needed of the union's allegiance to the party, the union was sure to provide it during election campaigns...
...697-704...
...a fatal blow...
...The American Civil Liberties representative was Arnold Johnson...
...For all their fortitude and determination, they had nothing concrete to show for their efforts...
...Without being able to ride an ever-rising, irresistible revolutionary wave, the TUUL had to depend on the straining, sweating, and plodding of its own organizers...
...The Communists proved that they could start a strike and get tens of thousands of workers behind them if they struck in the right place at the right time with all their forces...
...The TUUL was conceived as a classical "dual union" which aimed at making itself the only union by destroying and replacing the AFL...
...Borich related: We called a special meeting of 25 leading comrades to discuss this and I spoke for about an hour explaining in detail the position of the Party, and when I was through it was the Negro miners who were the first to speak against it...
...38 Party Organizer, August 1931, p. 25...
...According to Foster, the movement for unity among the miners started in the middle of 1933 (From Bryan to Stalin, op...
...Such a rapid expansion and extension of the strike, with the union's limited forces, was possible only because the miners were in such an explosive mood...
...A vaguely worded and even more loosely interpreted "criminal syndicalism" state law made it possible to arrest and hold almost anyone arbitrarily...
...He cited one mine employing about 450 miners—"they came out when we sent relief but went back when we could not give relief...
...The National Textile Workers Industrial Union was formed a few days later, September 22-23, 1928, and the Needle Trades Workers' Industrial Union on January 1, 1929...
...The NMU attracted unemployed, blacklisted miners who were no longer in a position to shut down the mines...
...Not that the NMU was needed to stir up the coal miners in 1931...
...Weary and confused, thousands of miners began to drift back to work...
...Much can be learned about the whole TUUL, therefore, from the fate of its miners' union...
...the second was J. C. Byars, Jr., "Harlan County: Act of God," ibid., June 15, 1932, p. 673...
...The number of commercial mines declined from 9,331 in 1923 to 5,642 in 1931...
...His short political career showed how unlikely were some of the roads that led to the Kentucky mine fields...
...The one thing they could not blame was the party line...
...In both the Wilkes-Barre and Kanawha strikes, the Communists conducted unsuccessful raiding operations, directed equally and indiscriminately against John L. Lewis and against Lewis's opposition...
...there was no functioning Party, no meetings of miners' locals, 55 Harlan Miners Speak, op...
...In fact, the NMU was playing an "insignificant role" and was suffering from "an almost complete isolation...
...Borich admitted that the union was now made up mainly of unemployed and blacklisted miners...
...216 81...
...This convention took the final step and decided on a strike throughout eastern Kentucky on January 1, 1932...
...12 The AFL reported a membership of 4,078,740 in 1920, its high point...
...In the event, the strike was another one of the Depression's elemental outbursts which owed far more to the miners' base conditions than to the condition of the party's base...
...A subsequent letter by Tess Huff protested that the NMU was no longer in Harlan (ibid., July 13, 1932, pp...
...Now the NMU was down nationally to a dues-paying membership of less than 500, who were unable to support 18 fulltime union officials, none of them receiving regular wages and many of them going hungry regularly...
...As far as I can make out, the change in leadership was not immediately reported and was first mentioned incidentally by Borich, Daily Worker, August 20, 1930, p. 4. 26 Labor Unity, April 12, 1930, p. 4. 27 Ibid., May 3, 1930, p. 1. 28 Ibid., June 25, 1930, p. 1. 29 S. Mingulin, the Communist, June 1930, p. 510...
...When he came back from his training course in Chicago, he issued a statement about what he had learned...
...He traced the trouble back to the mistakes made in the Pennsylvania-Ohio-West Virginia strike the year before...
...25 Daily Worker, July 30, 1930, p. 1 (change of name...
...Fraina was largely persuaded, but Reed came home unrepentant...
...Thanks largely to them, Harlan County became a byword for industrial oppression...
...The Communists themselves exacerbated this problem by identifying their unions so closely with the party...
...10 Yet even this seemingly unmistakable phase of Communist trade-union history is now being rewritten...
...After finding refuge in a nearby town, he painfully scribbled a report to headquarters...
...78 Frank and Taub told their experiences at a Senatorial hearing (Harlan Miners Speak, op...
...The land was so poor and barren that mining was almost the only way a man could make a living there...
...On the eve of the strike, the local Communists regarded its chances pessimistically...
...cit., pp...
...17 The field was free of the AFL in most of the key, basic industries anyway...
...In this curious way, the Communists came to Kentucky...
...It was much more likely to get revolutionization without material results or material results without revolutionization...
...The TUUL was organized in 1929, not 1928...
...388 hearings were reported from coast to coast and brought Harlan County to the consciousness of millions who had never heard of it before...
...75 W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Scribner's, 1965), p. 370...
...Once it had lost, it could never go back to the same mine fields...
...The Communists were much better at getting publicity for the miners and, incidentally, for themselves than at anything else...
...In the Communist press, the party and the union took credit for the strike interchangeably...
...But the mineowners, the local newspapers, the churches, and the courts saw to it that this state of ignorance did not last...
...Having rid themselves of the UMW, the coal operators were in no mood to put up with the more terrible Communists...
...The Nation was especially one-sided in its treatment...
...For about a month, the walkout in Pennsylvania seemed to leap 34 Carl Price, Daily Worker, July 6, 1931, p. 4; S. Willner, the Communist, January 1932, pp...
...The miners worked and lived in a state of industrial peonage—company houses, company stores, company-dominated schools, churches, police, politics, and courts...
...24 Daily Worker, April 30, 1930, p. 4 (strike call...
...The Profintern's change of line was an early phase of what came to be known as the "third period...
...95-96, 104...
...This mine strike was considered important enough for the Comintern's attention...
...But it devoted about 120 stories to the subject after the Communists became part of it...
...Most of the publicity came after the Communists had arrived on the scene and, therefore, unavoidably mentioned them or the NMU in connection with the events...
...183-85...
...This would indicate that the Communists virtually gave up the NMU months before this conference...
...Communist organizers could go into these mine fields once but not twice...
...I'm glad I'm able to," he concluded, "also that I'll still be able to do more for the NMU and the working class generally alive, than I would otherwise, for if they would have managed to plug me over that mountain, they'd never have been able to find me to hold a Red funeral...
...Relief cut down to practically nothing," it stated...
...According to a Communist organizer, an NMU leaflet in one eastern Ohio mine had brought out the workers, the NMU had heedlessly left the area, the UMW had moved in, the strike had spread to the entire mine field, and the UMW had found itself leading thousands of miners in the former NMU territory...
...The union had concentrated on signing up blacklisted miners who were not actually organized after they had signed application cards and who were mainly interested in obtaining relief...
...23 In effect, the NMU had as yet barely begun to threaten the coal operators or Lewis's UMW...
...cit., p. 20...
...Borich added slyly: "We did not say they must eat at the same table, and this was a manoeuvre on 88 Homer Lawrence Morris, The Plight of the Bituminous Coal Miner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934), pp...
...Indeed, the NMU was a forerunner of the TUUL, and it is impossible to understand one without the other...
...On the other hand, the party leadership in New York and the NMU leadership in Pittsburgh had burned their fingers with so many mine strikes that they were afraid to gamble on another one in the most unpropitious circumstances...
...announced a wage cut to take effect on June 1. The delegates to the convention, who had not yet dispersed, and the Section Committee met immediately...
...sl F. Borich, Daily Worker, February 7, 1933, p. 4. 92 "The Strike Waves in the Mines," Labor Unity, October 1933, pp...
...He stayed in Mos cow for three and a half months, and during this time the deal that made him a Com munist was consummated...
...cit., p. 272), and still later he claimed that the Communists "joined forces with the miners in their drive to re-establish the U.M.W.A...
...cit., p. 4. This article curiously gives the dates as April instead of May...
...By mid-August, Keeney's strike gave out for lack of funds and food, much to the Communists' satisfaction...
...15 Sam Darcy, International Press Correspondence, August 28, 1930, p. 835...
...19 Labor Unity, September 14, 1929, pp...
...COMMUNISTS AND MINERS 1928-1933 on November 27, 1931, but it postponed the issue by calling a district convention of the National Miners Union in Pineville, Ky., on December 13...
...17 (1929), p. 658...
...Apart from the mine operators' fearful, unyielding opposition, their greatest problem was the miners themselves...
...Stachel, the Communist, June 1932, pp...
...The body was taken to New York and lay in state for a day at the Communist headquarters...
...The latter brought together 175 delegates whose presence in Pittsburgh proved to be most propitious 33 Despite these strenuous efforts, the outlook was not auspicious...
...This mine was shut down that same day and two more owned by the same company the next day...
...The TUUL decided to base itself on the unskilled and semiskilled who were said to be "the decisive factors in modern industry...
...The document also raised the interesting question of what the main object of a Communist-led strike was...
...No more than 1,000 miners went out in all three 35 It was later pointed out with some pride that this was not a "spontaneous" strike of which the NMU assumed command after the strike began, as had happened in previous strikes...
...It was the death knell of the National Miners Union...
...16 If the Communists were right, therefore, the AFL was doomed by irresistible historical forces...
...Their stories and the other details in this paragraph may be found in Harlan Miners Speak, op...
...1-34, 155-56...
...For several hours, I was just lost that's all...
...the first time in four years, the company was 40 Carl Price, ibid., July 6, 1931, P. 4. 41 A. Markoff, "Building the Party in the Mine Strike Area," Party Organizer, August 1931, pp...
...They had been accustomed to think of the UMW as a strike-breaking agency and of its officials as serving no other purpose than "to outscab the scabs...
...Brophy claimed the victory, but Lewis counted the votes—and promptly expelled Brophy from the union...
...she replied: "I believe in the religion of the workers...
...The NMU soon tried again...
...Fourteen district councils were also set up on a geographic basis, the largest in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland...
...He told a doleful story of how little real preparation had gone into the strike...
...it is invaluable for an insight into the way the party treated such a strike from within...
...But the most brutal terror was reserved for the Communist unions...
...One of them was Findley Donaldson, the NMU's local chairman, an active member of the Holiness Church, who liked to boast that he had read the Bible through at least 20 times...
...said: "The unions have made conditions in Harlan County a whole lot worse than they were...
...He met some Communists, read their literature, and joined the tiny YCL in Springfield in 1928...
...They were too few, and they tried to do too much...
...71 One of the most costly mistakes, made again and again, was the tendency to oversell what the Communists and their auxiliaries could do for the strikers...
...38, 43-44...
...the story in the February 13, 1932, issue said that he went to Birmingham, Alabama, andthen to Kentucky...
...402-10...
...In a single town, Wildwood, one striker was killed and 11 were seriously wounded...
...Once they were driven out, the Communists could never return...
...cit., p. 303...
...VOTE COMMUNIST...
...He sadly noted that the support mobilized from the outside among miners and workers in general had been "quite inadequate...
...63 Two others were able to get away but had to move out of the strike zone to stay out of jail...
...2 and 4. 20 Most of the data in this paragraph comes from Homer Lawrence Morris, The Plight of the Bituminous Coal Miner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934), pp...
...After 1920, the AFL had gone into a steady, paralyzing decline...
...cit., pp...
Vol. 19 • April 1972 • No. 2
