The Miners: Men Without Work
Swados, Harvey
The miners have been called in the past the backbone of the American labor movement. Never yet broken in to the abject life of the workers in the industrial cities, they have still a...
...When unemployment insurance runs out, the miners will be eligible to go on DPA (Department of Public Assistance...
...then, after two layoffs and six months of parttime operation, there came a day which none of the miners had really believed could really come, even though there had been signs, hints, warnings...
...In school, although most of these people are older and no longer have small children...
...What does this matter of safety have to do with unemployment...
...Michael for a moment and consider the problem of coal nationally...
...and about what his relations will be with his fellow-workers, whom he will not fish with, fight with, or drink with, but will see merely as anonymous black faces below the earth and anonymous white faces on the suburbanbound highways above the earth...
...Here, in addition to over sixty acres of wooded recreation and picnic grounds and a boccie court, they have a big screened-in run that they built them selves to hold more than 500 baby pheasants which they acquired from the state conservation authorities and will release for hunting when they are grown...
...The railroads, once major consumers of coal, have now practically converted to diesels...
...They will continue to eat mollygrub, the federal government food surplus parcels so weighted with rice that, as one man remarks wryly, "You can get slant-eyed from eating so much of it...
...So the women go out to work in the new factories at minimum wages and the men stay home, running the washing machines and the vacuum cleaners, doing the shopping and the dusting, often babysitting, occasionally cooking and scrubbing...
...But by the unemployed miners...
...The pressures come from a wide range of sources, indicating an extensive and thoroughly prepared campaign...
...in 1930 8.3 per cent was mechanically cleaned, in I956 61 per cent...
...In this peculiarly American form of free enterprise one man can have as many as 92 mines on his property, with each mine being picked at by from two to four men scattered along the worked-out mountainside...
...St...
...Looking for work, moved away, trying their luck elsewhere...
...Meanwhile, unemployment insurance is running out...
...I don't know how they'll get along...
...True, facts are mixed with foolishness, as in current efforts to beat the drums not only for heat pumps and coal by wire, but also for electric automobiles and coal-fired home furnaces...
...Well, maybe...
...The slate roof sags, and the men use the machine to swiftly hoist a timber hydraulically into place before they press on...
...He insists on playing his role as a man even if he cannot do his work as a man, and one can only guess as to whether his wife loves him any less than do those women whose husbands have taken to drowsing in front of the TV after they have finished the dishes and await their wives' return from the factory...
...and they all stick together against owners, outsides and union bureaucrats...
...But the loss of fraternity, solidarity, and the comradeship of courageous accomplishment— these are all too precious and rare in the moral landscape of America, and if we allow their transmitters to rot and fade we commit an act even more criminal than the spoliation of the physical landscape for personal gain...
...that does not mean that it never will be...
...As for the men in District 2 who are still working, with the exception of the captive mines, working hard to stockpile metallurgical coal in expectation of a steel strike, they are averaging three days a week, and glad to have jobs, with the prospect of occasionally picking up a fourth or fifth day of work...
...the men point to the million-dollar addition to the high school plant now going up with only seven miners among the construction crew, and they claim that it is impossible to get such a job without "politics...
...They will have to sign over their property to the State of Pennsylvania, and give up their insurance, but they will be allowed to keep their cars —as long as they demonstrate that they are using them to look for work...
...But even with a six per cent increase in tonnage nationally, men are being laid off everywhere...
...Several Senators have had telephone calls from John L. Lewis Lewis' theme is that Strauss, as Secretary of...
...Then you ask for one of them by name, in this town where it is obvious that everyone knows everyone else, and you get the reply, "Oh, he'll be along any minute...
...A lot...
...WHAT ELSE DOES A MAN Do besides keep house and rock, and hang around the saloon, after he has been out of work for fourteen months...
...When it became apparent that the mine was not going to reopen, the men signed up for unemployment insurance and their wives began to look for work...
...The oratory is as pungent as the food...
...Commerce, would be helpful to the coal interests...
...One long-time critic of the Lewis leadership in Washington is particularly bitter in his condemnation of the failure of the UMW (which he estimates at little more than 160,000 actual members) to take positive measures to protect the interests of the unemployed...
...Not as long as I've got a rifle and two shotguns at home, they'll never go hungry...
...and they also like to come home with deer, pheasant and sometimes even bear...
...You women," the toastmaster is fondly remembered as having said to the wives last Christmas, "went and voted for Eisenhower...
...Lithuanian slugs it out with Ukrainian...
...Lawrence Seaway, the economic development of atomic energy, and the mechanization of competing fuel industries...
...Michael may be as close to the truth as anyone when he observes that the men were so stunned by the closing of the mine that they are still in a state of shock, and unable to face the reality that they may never again be able to work at their chosen trade...
...He answers laconically, his face already black and preoccupied as he squirts chewing tobacco...
...It is electricity (in addition to steel, stationary at about 100 million tons) that is expected to take up the slack...
...One of them shouts, "How far to go...
...The truth is that no one really does know...
...Michael is a company town (of the Berwind-White Coal Mining Co...
...So what chance do I stand...
...Lewis's propagandizing for technical progress seems to stop short when it comes to projects like the St...
...How long would it have taken the men, without the machine...
...With the production of energy from mineral fuels and water power already doubled in the last twenty years, it is now forecast that coal production will have to increase by 50 per cent to meet the expanded energy demands of 1975...
...SEVERAL INFERENCES seem inescapable...
...Michael...
...According to the United Mine Workers' contracts, a miner must have worked for twenty years out of the last thirty in order to be eligible for a $100 a month pension at the age of sixty...
...One or two places where he could have had work as a carpenter, he couldn't get a journeyman's card in the union...
...Those men who have given up looking, or are working sporadically here and there, now and then, put in a lot of time hunting and fishing in the neighborhood...
...The saloons are still going in St...
...For another, the inexorable development of mechanization has not yet come to a halt, even though it is true that it is nearing the saturation point: mechanical mining machines which can mine up to eight tons of coal per minute, and other new equipment, now cut about 85 per cent of all underground coal production...
...It's also a cheap place to live...
...The town barber, a horn-rimmed young man in a starched white shirt who is on the school board and looks startingly middle-class in a community that is overwhelmingly working class, stares at his cigar and muses over his beer at the Legion beer...
...These are the men, digging away in the dogholes, as they are called, who are not covered by mine safety regulations, and whom you may read about from time to time in little newspaper items, either in connection with the odd and complicated Harlan County strike, or with the all too frequent cave-ins (last spring an entire family of nine men was entombed in a doghole...
...Second, that Mr...
...I know it's a wild goose chase...
...You heard them curse the old parties—they are looking and waiting for new leadership, and it doesn't seem to be forthcoming...
...Yet if there were some leadership . . . Right now the officers of at least ten locals would come out for nationalization of the mines...
...A visitor walks in and asks why so many men are being laid off in the district...
...It's one thing to be a good fellow when you have it—it's a little different when you have no job...
...He attributes this in part to the fact that 90 per cent of the union's executive board are appointees, in part to the fact that the delegates who attend the union's quadrennial conventions are working miners, with no substantial grievances if they are getting from three to five days' work a week, and with the laid-off and the pensioners unrepresented...
...There you follow its course as it is cleaned, washed, sorted, through the towers high above the ground, and there too it seems impossible that the attack on the bowels of the earth will ever stop...
...Others say the same, but it does not look as though it will come to that...
...in effect, this critic observes, the UMW is being subsidized in areas like western Pennsylvania by the garment unions, with their lower wage rates...
...Pole battles with Welshman...
...They will do it, an old militant of the area believes, because they will have no alternative...
...now the roar of the machine drowns out the little telltale sounds, and they must watch even more carefully...
...These men too have been existing on unemployment insurance and government surplus food...
...when we speak of coal nowadays, for all ordinary purposes we are speaking of bituminous...
...Here danger begins...
...They don't come in here, so we don't get any complaints at the office...
...Michael: it is a very practical way for miners' sons to get a college education and so move on and out into another world...
...SOME OF THE MINERS have managed to get jobs elsewhere...
...In order to hazard some sort of guess as to what lies in store for these hundreds of Americans, and for many more thousands like them, from Illinois to West Virginia, we shall have to leave St...
...Hampered by the fact that their skills—and even more than their easily-acquired skills, such intangible assets as courage, fortitude, esprit de corps and insouciance in the face of continuous danger— are not readily transferable to other trades, they have been absorbed only in lower-paying jobs...
...The first item to stop moving at the general store was dog food...
...But surely we must think hard about what values of the declining generation will be transferred to a young man who will go into the mines not because it is as thrilling or challenging as going to sea or riveting a skyscraper, but simply because it is a job that, although dirty and tiresome, has a good wage scale and a better pension plan...
...The fact is simply that with three days of work the operators take out all the coal they can sell: which is one more reason for the cutbacks...
...Michael are proud—of the fact that they take out the finest coal in the country...
...And as a result not only of slumps but of competition from gas (whose production has increased 365 per cent in the last 15 years) and fuel oils, coal production has receded from a peak of over 600 million tons in 1947 to less than 500 million tons...
...The number was gradually reduced to 400...
...In 1922," the president of the local says, "I lived through the winter in a tent on top of that hill with my family...
...you can taste the silicosis in the air as the thick particles parch your nasal passages and clog your lungs...
...The dust too was a by-product of mechanization, a result of the automatic miners chewing away furiously hundreds of feet under the earth, and the company informed the committee that there was no point in investing the large sum that would be necessary to abate the nuisance, since it was already losing money on every carload of coal being taken from Maryland #1...
...In 1930 10 per cent of coal production was mechanically loaded, in 1956 85.4 per cent...
...Committees were set up—as they have been, hopefully, sometimes pathetically, in similarly depressed areas in Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois and Michigan—to see what could be done about bringing in new businesses that could provide employment...
...The dust, too, that used to rise all the hundreds of feet to the surface and rain down on the streets of St...
...There are variations...
...There is an even more compelling economic reason for the unemployed miners of St...
...Thus if you are forty-eight years old and have worked in the mines for thirty years, you are not going to receive any pension at all unless you can get in two more years before you reach the age of sixty...
...Today the old boathouse then used by wealthy summer residents from Johnstown and Pittsburgh stands high and dry on the St...
...It is truly ironic that a substantial proportion of these men, who pride themselves on their ability to live with danger, to work hard, fight hard, drink hard, love hard, are now learning housework and taking over the woman's role in the family...
...What about the men who aren't working...
...They will cash in their policies and turn over their property in return for the dole and the opportunity to go on as they are now, waiting and hoping, some waiting for the pension, others just for their social security...
...Naturally their productivity is terribly low, as low as two tons per man, and since they are at the mercy of the brokers to whom they must sell for whatever they can get, they very often wind up with a couple of dollars for a day's dangerous and backbreaking work...
...For one thing, the development of alternative sources of energy has not ended...
...Michael hillside—now a weatherbeaten saloon, it is one of the four hangouts for the miners of St...
...Later on we shall return to the larger issues of increased productivity resulting from mechanization and concomitant shifts in fuel usage...
...and by now nearly nine tenths of all mined coal is mechanically cut...
...Three shifts...
...But then the summer was over, fill-in jobs elsewhere in the area did not seem to be available, and the company took out its expensive automatic equipment and moved some of it down to Maryland Shaft #2, half a dozen miles away at Wilmore...
...And it is borne in upon you that these men are subsisting on unemployment insurance checks, that this is a community where practically all of the able-bodied men have been out of work for many months...
...Six hundred and fifty of these men were working at Maryland #1 when the company started to mechanize...
...It is also campaigning for revision of mine safety regulations—which at present apply only to operations employing at least fifteen miners—so that they will include all working miners, even those in the most marginal strip mines...
...There are rebellions too...
...On the same visit, actual working members in anthracite were estimated at 30-40,000, and in bituminous at around 300,000 full and part time miners...
...If the UMW is successful, the dogholes will have to be certified by inspectors before they can be worked...
...It would seem a logical inference that those mines which for one reason or another are not susceptible of economic mechanization will have to give way to those that are...
...All too soon thereafter the mine closed down, and the dust stopped sifting through the streets...
...Because they were unfortunate enough to be stuck in uneconomic low-seam mines which do not adapt to mechanization as well as the mines of District 5 or West Virginia...
...Michael, they brag about their narrow escapes, and about their friends' past heroism, as well as about the quality of their coal and the quantity of it they have taken from the mine...
...Lewis has more or less decided to cut his losses, concentrate on consolidating the solid gains of a steadily shrinking membership—while maintaining the facade of an enormous organization —and trust to time and mortality to resolve once and for all the problem of the unemployed workers in the coal fields, and so erase them from the agenda of the union and from the public conscience as well...
...Indeed, the visitor to the Mine Workers' somber and dignified headquarters in Washington is bombarded by the union's research men with data and statistics arrayed to buttress what is obviously the John L. Lewis line: mechanization benefits the miner, and new uses for electric power will vastly increase the need for coal in the years ahead...
...Today's sign-up day...
...One miner says, "I've been going from town to town, city to city, every place within a hundred miles of here, looking for work...
...In a way it is as if unemployed steelworkers or auto workers were to club together to turn out steel or automobiles in competition with the big corporations...
...This is a very special kind of life, and a miner knows what he is missing when he tries his luck in the cities or the suburbs...
...I used to spend between forty and fifty dollars every two weeks in the saloons," says one miner...
...What then...
...One would have to be a professional optimist (or a union official) to think so...
...Maybe it's not a nice thing to say, but it's how I feel...
...Michael that a civic committee was formed to cope with it...
...I don't really know...
...It is as American as any town you could want, by any standards you could name...
...How long will it take to break through those twenty feet into the next chamber...
...Even now, with the checks running out, they are apathetic, and willing to go on DPA...
...At the last convention, a delegate who arose to discuss the plight of the unemployed and to suggest that perhaps the shorter work-week might be explored as one way to spread the work among the membership, was very coolly received by his fellow-delegates, and then was verbally torn to pieces by a buckshot charge of oratory from John L. Lewis himself...
...Everything was covered with it, and we got worried, not just about silicosis down in the mines, but about what it was going to do to all of us right out on the streets...
...The miners of this area are as fanatical a lot of fishermen as you will find anywhere in the United States...
...Back on...
...About forty-five minutes...
...It would seem axiomatic that the future of the miner is tied up with the future of the whole economy, and that any progress for the labor movement—as for the rest of us—will have to come through political action...
...Michael, who are proud of the tragic story of the area, just as they are proud of the tragic history of their calling...
...A few have gotten into the steel mills, but not many...
...Michael have gone home...
...Not only is seniority meaningless in an aging industry...
...At that point the miners and their families began to face up to the reality of their prospects, and habits began to change...
...Finally, with extreme reluctance, there comes an estimate of perhaps 50,000 men...
...Naturally mine families are reluctant to trade in all this—in addition to fish and game and the produce of all the farms that checkerboard the mining country—for the inflation of the metropolis and the suburb...
...As these lines are written, most of the miners of St...
...What happened was terribly simple...
...and whether it is a testimonial for a local hero, or a blowout with the $100 the company gives when the mine operates for a year without a fatal accident (not too often, unfortunately), a sheep is roasted, a pig is spitted, the liquor flows, and, as one miner who has the scars to prove it says, "You get twenty-six miners together and you have twenty-seven fights...
...The men who work at Wilmore, in Maryland Shaft #2, are friends and neighbors of the St...
...His aides are anxious to demonstrate that the union has gone along wholeheartedly with mechanization...
...The UMW vision of a new coal miner, mobile, no longer tied to the company town, living in a suburb and driving forty miles to work in a mechanized mine where he will be a technician operating a piece of machinery—this may not only be the ultimate reality, it may already be corning to pass...
...they rent for from $9 to $14.25 a month...
...Some must fall by the wayside as others progress...
...Both figures bear no relation to those released by the U. S. Bureau of Mines or by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and would seem to be based less on reality than on the growing need to prevent the UMW from being tabbed as numerically a secondor third-class union...
...The Sportsmen's Club is one more social center that is their very own, in addition to the Legion Hall and the Workers' Educational & Social Club, down the street from each other and from the St...
...It is not practically relevant whether the closing was a result of there being too much coal or too many men...
...Roof falls have been many and serious in this particular mine...
...The Washington headquarters is at pains to point out that the UMW is cooperating with "area development organizations" wherever they are being set up by local businessmen and chambers of commerce in the hope of attracting new industry (including, presumably, more garment factories) to blighted areas...
...Formerly they could hear the roof starting to give so that they could quickly install timber props or run for safety...
...My family will never go hungry," another man says...
...But probably not...
...My father was out for eighteen months and we had nothing to live on, nothing...
...Once again, there is the story of efforts to attract new industry, with its usually turning out to be light industry, employing women...
...You come alongside the mechanical miner, and you rest on your knees, watching the great continuous mining machine chewing its way into the coal seam with a remorseless roar...
...Well, now you've all got jobs...
...When these lines are read, the checks will have stopped...
...The increasing roar of heavy machinery tells you that you have arrived at the mechanical loader, and you move on crabwise, the glow of your lamp picking a path through the thick cloud of coal dust as you squat forward onyour haunches...
...I bear no resentment to the miners who don't come in any more to have me cut their hair...
...about seventeen winding miles from St...
...It is only when the visitor asks for a figure on the number of coal miners out of work as a result of mechanization and competition of other fuels that silence suddenly descends...
...Where are the teen-agers...
...You travel for perhaps a mile, then get off at the end of the line and plod along in a bent-necked stoop until you come to an extensible belt conveyor...
...More than one of our boys has gone off to Pittsburgh or Cleveland and come back because he couldn't stand those cement lawns...
...Michael, you can fight with your friends...
...With labor displacement in the coal industry greater per 1,000 employed than in any other industry, no program has yet been proposed for the vegetating displaced miners...
...Down in the mine, the men clamber aboard the hooked-together cars pulled by electric locomotives, and clatter off to their separate work centers, starting down the main heading and then cutting off on the various spurs that dart away into the darkness like so many veins...
...Michael have banded together and purchased (with money borrowed from their local union) the huge old home of the former mine superintendent, on a bluff overlooking the valley, and have christened it "The Sportsmen's Club...
...A while after that, the shopkeeper himself gave up and locked his doors forever...
...The price of progress...
...household heating, formerly fueled with the coalstoked furnace, has lately converted so largely to gas or oil that anthracite mining—confined to three Pennsylvania counties—is all but moribund...
...The miners have been called in the past the backbone of the American labor movement...
...Most of the big social events are held in the Legion Hall, which is decorated with blowup photographs of the local boys—all with Slavic or Croatian names—who have played football at the great state universities, some of them in the Rose Bowl...
...The mine shut down...
...Michael's Hotel, the Workers' Educational & Social Club, the American Legion Hall, and the old boathouse, but many of the whisky drinkers have switched to beer, many of the beer drinkers have switched to Squirt, and even more do not show up at all nowadays in the saloons...
...and the answer comes back: "Twenty feet...
...Since the mines are on their land, a good many of them have gone back to digging on their own, trying to pull out enough leftover coal to eke out a living...
...It's a good place to live...
...Those who came from other communities and only boarded in St...
...The office of District 2 of the UMW, which includes the miners of St...
...Probably not...
...This may be why there is not much travel agency business for Caribbean cruises...
...But no, the visitor insists, that is not what he meant—it is rather the men of working age in the union who are not now working...
...The conversation is shifted to the 65,000 men on pension...
...ONE WOULD THINK, as one gets closer to the workers themselves than Washington, D. C., that there would be a greater awareness of their problems and a deeper searching for possible answers...
...I'm too old...
...A few more have gotten construction work and jobs with the State Highway Department, but again not many...
...I am not disillusioned," the old radical insists...
...In the meantime, they wonder about the meantime...
...Michael if Maryland #1 were to reopen, even those few who have gotten good-paying jobs elsewhere (a man with seniority is allowed up to three weeks to re-apply for his job...
...It has taken over an old mansion in the better part of town and it is staffed by Lewis appointees...
...The committee was disbanded...
...Michael not wanting to leave the industry or the community...
...Now there are in the area a scattering of small garment factories, brassieres, shirts, shirtwaists, children's wear, all employing not men but women to bend over their sewing machines...
...At St...
...Where are the children...
...Then what is the answer...
...Certainly Mr...
...As the mines were worked out, or were proved unsuitable for mechanized operation, the operators pulled out and turned the land, and the mines, back to the men from whom they had leased it and who had often been working for them...
...You are at the face of the mine...
...Here in St...
...Practically everyone, they say, would come rushing back to St...
...It doesn't take much of an excuse to throw a party either...
...IT WOULD BE UNFAIR, however, to assume that the UMW is doing nothing at all for the welfare of its unemployed members...
...One thing is sure, no one can charge Mr...
...It's a cruel world...
...EVEN RECOGNITION of their problems does not seem to be forthcoming...
...Seriously, here we all know each other, we're clannish, we stick together, we help each other out...
...For now let us stay with the men...
...When you consider too that water and sewage are provided directly from the mine's pumps at a nominal price, as is 25 cycle electricity (even with the mine shut down), you can understand why $25 a day is a first-class wage for a miner in a company town, even if the mine only has orders enough to run three or four days a week...
...The barber of St...
...I was used to not recognizing my husband, to say nothing of the other men who'd come out of the mine and wave to me," says one miner's wife...
...In its own way, however, it is a tourist attraction, or would be, if tourists could ever find their way to it over the winding, rutted, poorly-marked roads that tie it to all the other little mining communities of the region: for it was here thousands drowned in the Johnstown Flood...
...He stares down into his glass of draught beer, and then looks up defiantly...
...The impression is strong that the men have packed away their humor and lightheartedness with their street clothes...
...Once again there is great enthusiasm expressed for electric power, the increasing amounts of coal it will demand, and the great proved reserves of coal—estimated at 1,900 years' worth—waiting to be dug...
...The ones that did come to the Western Pennsylvania area were those that could benefit not only from tax rebates, low rents, cheap utilities, and other enticements, but also from a substantial pool of people hungry for work—almost any kind of work at almost any kind of wage...
...Early in the morning, as the sun is just coming up over the nearby hills, they straggle into the big grimy locker room and strip to the skin, depositing their street clothing in wire baskets which they then haul to the high ceiling and secure with long double chains...
...the surface the dirty coal rises in smoking carloads to the tipple...
...I can tell you one thing: we'll never go back to 1922 again...
...The miners of St...
...After the dog food gathered dust, it was the bottled baby food in the little glass jars that stayed on the shelves...
...But these are for the most part younger women...
...IT WAS ONLY A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO that the coal dust problem was so bad in St...
...Michael, is a thousand times thicker from the slashing machine than it used to be when the men attacked the seam themselves...
...In a big city, you have to pick a fight with a stranger...
...It is hard to believe that somehow, some time during the next dozen years you will not be able to get in two more years in the mines to qualify for the pension...
...You can't live, much less support a family on that sum, but when it is added to social security, savings and life insurance, it can make the difference between a comfortable old age and a miserable one...
...And they wonder whether they will ever do it again...
...They wait patiently for the elevator that will take them down to the other world...
...UNTIL YOU GO DOWN THE PIT, it is difficult to sense how much mining can mean to a man, or how strange and unlikely it can seem that you are not going to work when others near you are working...
...But the coal dust got so bad that it lay over the town like a pall...
...The development has been truly fantastic, as extreme perhaps as in any other industry...
...Lewis has not recently been devoting himself as passionately to pressing the case of the displaced miners as he has to furthering such concerns of the operators as aiding the career of one of the most conservative and sanctimonious men in public life: "Senators of long service," observed Marquis Childs in a recent syndicated newspaper column, "are saying they have never experienced such pressures as are being applied to bring about the confirmation of Admiral Lewis L. Strauss as Secretary of Commerce...
...While output per man per day has almost doubled in that decade (from 6.26 tons per day in 1948 to 11.3 tons per day in 1958), the number of men employed in the mines has been more than halved, from 441,631 to 218,600...
...And what is to become of these men...
...Nevertheless the figures pour forth from the Research and Marketing Department of the UMW...
...it is hard for a woman in her fifties to keep up with the production pace in a factory, and a number of them have had to give it up and reluctantly rejoin their husbands on the rockers or the porch steps...
...There are a lot of these borderline men, desperately hanging on—much more desperately than the younger men who have seen their pension hopes go glimmering and who are ready to sell out and move away, even though they discover that their possessions too have become as worthless as their retirement plans, with their 25 cycle electric stoves and television sets quite unsaleable in a community which may never again use the mine's power lines...
...But the men at Wilmore are still working, proud—as the miners of St...
...My own boy is thirty-two, or maybe thirty-three, with three kids of his own, and he can't find work...
...Michael Hotel...
...A number of the miners are now working, often for a third or less than what they used to earn, as orderlies in hospitals and institutions, and as janitors and stockmen in big stores...
...But I am very tired...
...Here you hitch a ride, stretching flat on your belly on the rattling leather belt-line...
...In this world without light and without women, the men are quick, daring, decisive...
...Some wives hire themselves out as cleaning women to middle-class homes in other towns while their husbands serve as cleaning women at home...
...We're not in touch with them...
...We need hardly be surprised that the National Coal Association is both proud of its adventure in mechanization and enthusiastic about the prospects for coal...
...Working, many of them—which is a story in itself...
...They stroll the narrow, shabby streets, chat at the corners, lean against the peeling pillars of the town saloon, the St...
...Lewis with being soft on feather-bedding...
...Michael men...
...There are others, which have to be understood if the men and their problems are to be fully understood...
...Most of the miners have been used to seasonal operations, working winters and taking off summers, and for quite a long time they assumed that this was to be just another layoff...
...Some have tried to relocate—at least one man has been back and forth to California twice tracking down rumors of steady employment there—only to return to home grounds when jobs haven't materialized...
...Seniority leading up to pension eligibility, however, cannot be transferred from one company to another, or even from one mine of a company to another, unless there is such a shortage of miners that you can move onto a panel and directly into another mine without going to the bottom of the list...
...And of course there are quite a few men safely past fifty, who have the twenty years under their belts, and now have nothing to worry about beyond surviving and supporting their families in one way or another for the next decade, until they reach pension age...
...Just the same, I keep trying—it keeps me occupied...
...There is only the monstrous machine, and a handful of men...
...One husband sits in the saloon waiting for his wife to finish her shift and come after him at midnight, which she does, standing in the doorway in her pedal-pushers, her arms folded, smiling tiredly but firmly until he shoves back his chair, finishes his beer, and walks her home...
...Now I never go any more...
...Mining is something that gets in a man's blood, and a coal mine is a man's world in a way that a department store or a mental hospital can never be...
...Michael have six more checks (of about $30) coming to them...
...First, that the union's estimated figure on unemployment, about which it seems to prefer not to speak, is very likely as deflated as its membership figure is inflated...
...They are a delay and a serious annoyance to the supervision, a challenge to the men, who must crawl about the too-low passages like dwarves or hunchbacks, shoring up the timbers and building cribs to protect the right of way...
...In an area which we have not discussed so far, the coal mining country of Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee, the operators had leased the land in which they drilled their mines from local people who had owned it for generations...
...The football scholarship is not a joke in St...
...Does this mean that more men will be needed to mine coal, or even that most of the currently unemployed miners will be put back to work...
...And Mr...
...Atomic power may not be presently economic...
...How can a man who has been a part of it, who still lives within sight, sound and smell of the consuming drama, believe that he will not again be permitted to be an actor in it...
...And what will happen to the men, who will at least be prevented from taking so many chances in hacking away at the only thing they know how to do...
...I guess if I'd been out of work as long as they have, I'd ask my wife to cut my hair too...
...Over at the Workers' Educational & Social Club (also refurbished and enlarged with a loan from the union local) there are, in addition to the bar and the miniature bowling alleys, a meeting hall, kitchens, a library, and a parlor where those miners are laid out who choose to die and be buried without the consolation—or interference—of organizedreligion...
...The company houses, put up during the depression, are comfortable and have pleasant yards, even if their plumbing is simple and the roads around them are sooty and potholed...
...With leadership, many more of the 184 locals certainly would...
...Where are the women...
...You bend forward to cry into the superintendent's ear...
...After the last check," says one of the younger men, "comes the revolution...
...at any rate they seem brooding and thoughtful as they foregather in their dark necktoankle working outfits, adjusting the lamps on their helmets and the big batteries that power them from the wide belts at their waists...
...MICHAEL, PENNSYLVANIA It is a strange thing to come to a town and find it full of grown men...
...IN THE SALOONS, the saying goes, the miners love more women than they ever did above ground, and dig more coal than they ever did below ground...
...FOR THE PAST DECADE the coal miner has been squeezed from two directions: by mechanization and by the introduction of increasingly popular substitute fuels...
...Michael, is located in the county seat of Ebensburg, Pa...
...Only a romantic fool, and an ignorant one at that, would bewail the loss of blackbreaking, tortuous, dangerous, poisonous, drudgery, and its replacement by impersonally effective machinery...
...Michael Hotel & Restaurant, and they look more like movie actors than real human beings, because something is wrong...
...And what will happen when the unemployment insurance runs out...
...they have worked together in the past, and they still hunt and fish together...
...But it does seem a trifle unusual—particularly in a period of mass unemployment in the industry—that the United Mine Workers should refuse to yield precedence to the operators in their eagerness to welcome the man-displacing machine and their Rotarian optimism about coal's future...
...Never yet broken in to the abject life of the workers in the industrial cities, they have still a tradition of resistance and a habit of joint action.— EDMUND WILSON, "Frank Keeney's Coal Diggers" ST...
...tucked into one of the many folds of the mountains of Western Pennsylvania...
...This is not the least of the ties that bind these jobless men to their home place...
...But the menfolk are practically all out of work, and have been ever since the 24th of April, 1958, when Maryland Shaft #1 closed down...
...What matters is what is happening to the people...
...it points with justified indignation to the fact that these little operations are by far the most dangerous, with only two per cent of coal production accounting for 25 per cent of all fatalities in the industry...
...Their strange senseless heroism in the year 1959 can perhaps be seen as analogous to the bravery of soldiers dying in a war which cannot possibly benefit them, their families, or their heirs—to say nothing of the entire social order of which they are a part...
Vol. 6 • September 1959 • No. 4
