Getting the Shaft
Bethell, Thomas N.
Getting the Shaft Today's miners battle the same enemy their grandfathers did the press release by Thomas N. Bethel! Here's a quick current-events quiz: Recently the United Mine Workers (UMW)...
...If you chose a), you didn't follow the news coverage of the strike...
...By attacking and dissolving berg continues his classic analysis of the parties'' must reading for the press ethics scholar and for the legislators serve their constituents in personal the popular mythology of the small entrepreneur and decline...
...Lee's mission, he said, was to fix that...
...What matters is that shots were exchanged, men on both sides were killed, the Guard commander called in reinforcements, and a day-long battle ensued during which Guardsmen repeatedly fired upon the tents, many of which were still occupied by the miners' families...
...Pay was not an issue...
...Facing a storm of criticism—muckrakers rushing into print, demonstrators marching outside his New York headquarters, Wilson ordering a federal investigation, Congress announcing hearings—Rockefeller called in Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a young man on his way to becoming a legend as the most adroit of the new breed of corporate public relations men...
...And the news stories were right—as far as they went...
...He ghostwrote letters for Governor Ammons to send to President Wilson, and articles for Lamont Montgomery Bowers to send to sympathetic magazines...
...Devi Elliott, ournal of MaJournasl s Harvard University $$ 11 99.95 cc lloth $10.95 paper Media Ethics Press $12.95 paper Cambridge, MA 02138...
...Up to this point, Ludlow might not seem markedly different from other bloody confrontations between capital and labor that had been erupting periodically ever since the first days of the Industrial Revolution...
...You didn't choose c) by any chance, did you...
...Why did the miners strike...
...Wrong answer...
...They also died in mine fires and explosions...
...Bowers confidently told his principals that the strike would be short-lived...
...Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America's Bloody Coal Industry, Priscilla Long...
...The settlement allows Pittston to buy its way out of the funds with a one-time lump-sum payment of $10 million...
...The miners soon began stockpiling weapons and retaliating in kind, so Bowers bought some machine guns for his guards...
...If you chose b), you were paying attention...
...Instead they gave their right-hand man on the scene, Lamont Montgomery Bowers, authority to settle things as he saw fit...
...JoJhn Kennoeth Galb raith the nation's history...
...He even orchestrated a meeting between Rockefeller and Mother Jones, the firebrand union organizer, who emerged to tell reporters that in her newly revised opinion Rockefeller was "a much misunderstood young man...
...The strike turned bitter, of course, and before it was over Pittston had reportedly spent more than $20 million on security—almost three times its annual payment to the health and retirement funds...
...This important book popular and banal rhetoric date through the 1988 election—Martin WattenThat makes [this book] shows how modern to undoubted reality...
...Safety precautions were deliberately ignored...
...Publicity is a Mother Fighting continued through the night and for many days thereafter, and the death toll climbed to 46—most of the later deaths were mine guards killed by avenging miners—before President Wilson sent in federal troops on May 1 to restore order...
...Tents moments CFI brought in trainloads of strikebreakers and assembled a small army of gun-toting mine guards and company-paid sheriff's deputies to protect them...
...But it's must reading if you want to understand the legacy of mistrust that still haunts the coalfields...
...The cost of tools and blasting powder came out of a miner's pay, and he had to buy his family's food and clothing at the company's store...
...Paragon House, $24.95...
...Not many people would want to live in the environs of Ludlow, but throughout the winter of 1913-1914 more than a thousand miners and their families did live there—and lived in tents, because they had been evicted from nearby coal camps...
...True, the scenery shifts: big draglines strip the western coal now, the company towns are gone, the pay is good, fewer miners die needlessly on the job...
...And when they walked out, he had their families evicted from the company's camps...
...Lee covered all the bases...
...Rockefeller told Lee he felt "much misunderstood...
...The camps were owned by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, which also controlled just about everything else in those parts—the coal, the railroad, the schools, the stores, the sheriffs, and the deputies...
...He underestimated the strikers—and their wives, who played key roles in organizing and administering the tent colonies, making sure no one froze or starved, walking the picket lines, teaching school, organizing social events, and keeping morale up...
...Ivy Lee managed to convert an industrial war into a market-research exercise...
...The strike leaders never really knew what hit them...
...This book* provides some clues...
...He could, of course, have set an example by first trimming his own $600,000-per-year-plus-perks salary, but he didn't...
...journalist as well...Through simple historical reflection, ways...[It is] a most valuable work," the supposed retreat of big business, that is precisely what this book does, and with a lucid display of „A An excelllent elxamin ation of an important and lamentable development in Thompson debunks the myth that there is some relevant connection between personal morality —Kenneth T. Palmer, Perspective $$1 2 .95 paper evidence that no one can escape...
...He identified different "audiences" and targeted propaganda at each: miners' wives (pamphlets about the joys of living in company-built homes and healthy union-free coal camps...
...Thomas N. Bethell is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and a former research director for the United Mine Workers...
...But many of the guardsmen were mine guards and deputies who merely changed uniforms...
...Fair questions...
...After a series of skirmishes, including one in which three mine guards and a strikebreaker were killed, Governor Elias Ammons called out the Colorado National Guard, ostensibly to restore peace...
...Bust the unions, in other words, but do it with a smile—using company unions to give workers just enough of a voice to minimize the risk of serious trouble...
...Ivy Lee's damage control after Ludlow was remarkable, but more important in the long run was his vision of how to keep unions at bay...
...It did...
...Choose one: a) they wanted more money...
...But Ludlow now brought to the world of industrial conflict a new idea: public relations...
...Some tents caught fire, and at nightfall, according to the National Guard's own investigative report, "men and soldiers swarmed into the colony and deliberately assisted the conflagration by spreading the fire from tent to tent . . . beyond a doubt it was seen to intentionally that the fire should destroy the whole of the colony...
...It also killed two women and 11 children, who had been hiding from the gunfire in a pit under one of the tents...
...Miner details Ludlow is indeed little more than a footnote now, a flyspeck on the map of Colorado, down near the New Mexico border...
...But the gap between reality and imagery still exits...
...After all the deductions had been totted up, a miner did well to take home $5 a week...
...How could the average coal miner of today possibly know or care about something that happened in 1914...
...Indeed, when the miners finally balked in September 1913 and demanded changes—including recognition of the UMW as their bargaining agent—the Rockefellers did not respond...
...and other specific subgroups (e.g., personalized letters to every clergyman in Colorado...
...The UMW fought resourcefully, running expensive newspaper and TV ads and organizing demonstrations on Wall Street and at Pittston's headquarters in Connecticut...
...For several years the miners who dug the coal to make the Rockefellers' steel had protested against their conditions of employment, without effect...
...Where the Sun Never Shines is by no means a firstclass work of history...
...Pittston's link to Ludlow may seem tenuous, but it's there if you look...
...the company got most of the changes in work rules it had sought...
...40-year-old John D. Jr...
...The company declined to spend money on ventilating fans, so miners choked on coal dust and became incapacitated by pneumoconiosis while still young...
...But in the end the winner was the ghost of Ivy Lee...
...Preposterous, you say...
...The conflict exploded on the morning of Monday April 20, 1914...
...Anyway, how could a long-forgotten footnote to American history have any bearing on a current economic dispute...
...From the surrounding hillsides, snipers preyed on picketing miners...
...b) they were trying to protect job security and health-and-retirement benefits...
...No credit...
...Spin control...
...He made the flinty Bowers sound like a lifelong Rotarian...
...The Rockefellers salted away that much every minute, but if the disparity caused them discomfort they kept it to themselves...
...To Bowers, a hard-boiled New Yorker extravagantly proud of his toughness, that meant refusing to discuss any of the miners' demands...
...Here's a quick current-events quiz: Recently the United Mine Workers (UMW) signed a contract with Pittston Coal after a bitter strike lasting nearly a year...
...The guards taunted the strikers and, when they could get them alone or in small groups, beat them up...
...Miners were not paid for "dead work"—timbering, drilling, cleaning up—but only for the weight of the coal actually produced, and they were cheated at the company's scales...
...Employers Large and Small Charles Brown, Jay Hamilton, and James Medoff "There is nothing more inconvenient and more useful than the book that Political Ethics and Public Office Dennis F. Thompson "[Thompson's] arguments distill the best of classical political and moral theory into a form that can be applied to public office in The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952-1988 Martin Wattenberg II n this new e dition — The Personal Vote Constituency Service and Electoral Independence Bruce Cain, John Fere(ohn, and . Morris Fiorina takes the reader through bringing the book up-to- a democratic society...
...He created photo opportunities for John D. Jr., bringing him to Colorado, dressing him in workman's garb, taking him through a coal mine, and arranging for a miner's child to be dandled on the plutocratic knee while shutters clicked...
...Pittston's chairman, Paul Douglas (son of the late senator from Illinois who ironically was an early champion of the UMW health program), seeking to shave a few bucks off the price of coal in order to accommodate some tough Japanese buyers, turned to the most logical place: labor costs...
...c) they remembered the Ludlow Massacre of 1914...
...was becoming known for his philanthropy but was still preoccupied in those days with accumulating as well as dispensing his wealth...
...If you did, give yourself extra credit for understanding something important about why coal miners still go out on strike in an era when nearly everyone else seems to think that strikes don't work...
...CFI in turn was controlled by the Rockefellers...
...Charles Peters, Washington Monthly and public decisionmaking...
...He also mailed an assortment of "objective" information to designated opinion leaders nationwide, with the assistance of luminaries such as President Eliot of Harvard (a Rockefeller Foundation trustee)—generally with no indication of the actual source...
...Mine wars ever since have been fought not only with bullets but with press releases, and they have been won and lost in the media as well as on the merits...
...He urged Rockefeller to adopt a plan that would anticipate and minimally address miners' grievances: "Such provision would not only take the wind out of the union's sails, but would appeal, I am confident, to the soundest public opinion...
...News stories did say the miners were striking because Pittston was demanding the contractual right to shift production from union to nonunion mines and was refusing to contribute to multi-employer funds that provide health insurance and pension benefits to retired UMW miners...
...the voters of Colorado (advertisements, planted stories, and pamphlets about all the good things CFI had done for the state and all the dreadful things unions were doing elsewhere...
...Nobody has ever determined who fired the first shot, and it hardly matters anymore...
...CFI operated a big steel mill at Pueblo, and most of the economic activity of Southern Colorado was dedicated to meeting CFI's needs...
Vol. 22 • April 1990 • No. 3
