From Crusade to Collusion: A Story of Union Decay

...His role is symbolized in his statement following the 1968 Farmington disaster, in which 78 miners perished from a blast in a mine that had been allowed to ignore citations for hundreds of safety violations...

...But there was something squalid and unappetizing about the fellow that stifled even staged adulation...

...and instead of humanizing the work underground, the new machines filled the miners’ lungs with minute particles of dust that assaulted life more than the rigors and brutalities of old...

...Brit Hume...

...In contrast to John L.,” writes Hume, “whose bushy eyebrows and bulldog jowls were familiar to every miner in the country, Boyle was an obscure figure who had worked in the boss’ shadow...

...in his last years, as his thoughts turned inward, he must have pondered well the meaning of Ecclesiastes and Job...

...Just who hired the assassins is not yet publicly known, but union involvement at some level has been indicated...

...By 1970, growing numbers of miners felt as abandoned, alone, and hopeless as ever they did in the dark days before the mighty trumpet of John L. Lewis was heard in Appalachia: I shall speak in your name, not in the feeble whisper of a spokesman for mendicants asking for alms, but in the thunderous roar of the captain of a mighty host demanding the justice to which free men are entitled...

...the type of man who normally attains political power places the holding of his job above either lives or the profits of others...

...He speaks with a forced fury, but in non sequiturs, so that the effect is mystification rather than alarm...

...but he did not speak publicly against them...

...Despite the Mines I draw several uncareful lessons from this careful book: the type of man who normally attains economic power chooses money above the lives of others whenever the two are in conflict...

...then its existence is recognized for study purposes only, no regulation allowed...

...So it did in Coal...

...Grossman, $7.95...

...Death and the Mines,* an authoritative, absorbing, narrative by Brit Hume, tells the story of the miner and his exploiters in a style befitting that subject- terse, disciplined, yet charged with excitement...

...Terrified in the moment of explosion below, they resolutely grope through the dark in search of a lost comrade...

...Perhaps his uncharacteristic silence stemmed from fathomless frustration at the revenges of a fate that thwarts the best intentions and punishes short cuts...

...When the old man finally stepped down, the anvils arose and pranced about, aping the master in those superficialities within their reach, demanding turns upon his chair, his prerequisites, the fealty paid him, and the preservation of his dictatorial tradition...

...President-Tony-the one and only Tony Boyle-it is good to be with you...

...Salaries of $40,000 are paid to secondechelon functionaries...

...Worst of all, his autocracy and the pulverizing strength of his personality had stunted the men around him, leaving the union without effective leadership when he retired...

...He settled for: “Mr...

...The founder of union pensions and free medical care had become notorious for its ingenuity in finding loopholes through which to welsh on them...

...the hope of its adversaries lies in delay-until an investigation is concluded, or a commission has reported, or a court case has been decided-any pretext for delay that will restore the status quo ante...

...He had initiated the fateful collaboration with the owners, to save the failing coal industry from the ruinous competition of oil and gas, and he did save it...

...But faced with the reality of Boyle, even Humphrey seemed suddenly baffled in the search for superlatives...

...After that, a stalemate until 195 1, when the West Frankfort catastrophe (1 19 killed) enabled Lewis to browbeat Congress into a bill which, while relatively unobtrusive, at least purported to be a regulatory bill, thus placing the struggle on a new plateau...

...At first glance, Boyle seems too steeped in buffoonery to be sinister...

...This time, in addition to historical momentum and a confused enemy, the reform forces had on their side skilled legislative technicians and publicists of formidable demagogic talents...

...He was a diminutive man with sandy hair that had receded exactly halfway back on his head, and a penchant for nattiness that ran to bright shirts and ties and a fresh rose in his lapel each morning...

...He had exalted unity above all as the only salvation of the miners in a world of hostile forces, and he lived to see his old slogans used to suppress militance rather than advance it...

...The Boyle regime is a caricature of Lewis’, yet many of its malpractices are imitations and adaptations of things done in the 50-year Lewis monarchy, things done in a primordial time, to meet overwhelming necessities, but done nonetheless, and now institutionalized...

...Hence, the 1907 mine explosion at Monongah, which killed 307 miners, finally brought the acceptance of the principle of federal legislation in respect to mining conditions, but delaying tactics held off that decision until 1910, when a relaxed climate made it possible to dilute the bill into a harmless advisory sop without any powers...

...And so it was decided that gaudier efforts yet must be made to spruce up his image...

...the suffocating miners, they said, were probably smoking too many cigarettes...

...To show himself a worthy successor to Lewis, Boyle takes to frowning and scowling on the public platform...

...He used to justify this double standard by paraphrasing an old English verse: When ye be an anvil, keep thee very still But when ye be a hammer, strike with all thy will...

...With the organization thus solidified, suppression of grumbling among the rank and file proceeds...

...Leadership had shriveled to that most dismal of all imposters-the Cult of the Personality without a personality Goon or Buffoon...

...Trumpet to Sweetheart The battle against safety regulation was only half the war...

...Hume describes a UMW that has come to see itself as a capitalist, an owner of banking interests, a lender of large sums to coal corporations, a participant in the heady stuff of stabilizing industry profits...

...He spends $1 17,000 of union funds on photographs of himself and his politburo, so that their unprepossessing likenesses darken every union office and hall...

...The man who presided over this degeneration, though not the originator of it, was the l l th president of the United Mine Workers-William Anthony “Tony” Boyle...

...The normal ruses of lobbyist bill-drafters and committee chairmen were exposed and circumvented, and strong safety and black-lung bills were passed...

...The hope for reform, then, always depends upon the forces of life being able to mobilize swiftly in the hour of disaster...

...James Boyd is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Given his policies, there would be need for malevolence, and Boyle would rise to the need...

...The one-time pacesetter in wages and benefits was now the laggard that had not achieved for its members such commonplaces as paid holidays, sick pay, injury pay, lavatories, or even free soap...

...In 1968, presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey was endorsed by the UMW and rushed to the union convention to pay homage to Boyle...

...To inject oomph into this appearance at the 1964 UMW convention, a foot-stomping, hour-long ovation was contrived, kept going by five bands, brought in at a cost of $400,000...

...The mere statistics shock, even in this time, when we are steeled to the human costs of industrial profits: 120,000 officially admitted deaths from mine accidents since 1839...

...Finally, the leader of the antis, “Jock” Yablonski, is slain, along with his wife and daughter...

...SecretaryTreasurer John Owens is permitted to run up a hotel bill of $68,000, which the union pays without a flicker...

...And many, many times the bosses passed the word, He’s a dangerous renegade...

...Even in his instant of public attention, when a strike vaguely threatens our convenience or a methane explosion traps him below, we are apt to see on our TV not the miner but his various undertakers from the company, the union and the Interior Department, or his benumbed, incoherent widow...

...Even the union, now locked in various collusions with the mine operators, refused to champion the miner...

...Miners are tough and durable...

...Properly orchestrated, this strategy can prevail for a hundred years and a million lives...

...This confusion of role risked two consequences: demoralization of the union apparatus and revolt among the workers...

...It would be rendered unfailingly at union happenings, and thousands of copies were distributed to union locals...

...The “malingerers” must be kept off the rolls, and so Coal designed a second campaign against the broken survivors of its first, a campaign that reached out to society at large...

...Yesterday’s dynamo among union organizations had decayed to a shell whose rolls carried as many paper locals as real ones...

...for decades much of it has been in force in *Death and the Mines...

...Here is a vivid recreation of the mine explosions, the fall of the United Mine Workers, the black-lung movement that suddenly ignited the coal fields, and the hapless but stirring rebellion of Joseph Yablonski and his Miners for Democracy...

...If benefits are granted, the industry is disadvantaged, for the higher the number of compensated employees from a particular industry, the higher must be its contribution to the fund...

...And when the last body is interred, the last promise broken, the tale ends, leaving the reader to formulate its lessons...

...But he found in the character of these hardhats something fine and responsive to justice that emboldened him and caused him to put aside caution and expand his crusade to the limit of his endurance...

...With what a sense of fall and loss then, do we read Hume’s masterful portrait of the UMW in recent years...

...Routinely, he found them to be men of a natural dignity, honesty, and cheerfulness that ill-use seemed unable to extinguish...

...He is reported to have said in private of Boyle and his men, “let them sink in their own slime...

...At conventions, real miners are dispensed with when possible, their places taken by bogus freeloaders on the Boyle payroll...

...The wrathful accuser of murder in the mines now joined management and government in calculated silence as the death and disability toll mounted...

...When miners do attend, and attempt to protest the official line, they are beaten up, silenced, and outvoted by rigged majorities...

...Poor, they often resist the bribes of Boyle’s men...

...Why not here...

...When, despite all, a large opposition vote is cast, the ballots are stolen or miscounted by the thousands...

...The press kept generally quiet about the whole thing, the disabilities and their non-compensation...

...The rowdy old bullyragger of management was now entwined in secret sweetheart arrangements whereby favored operators need not meet union scale or pay their levy to the welfare fund...

...Union hirelings were put to work composing “The Ballad of Tony Boyle” (to be sung to the tune of “The Foggy, Foggy Dew...

...But momentum is on the side of reform...

...The Prancing Anvils It is a kindness to the great when they do not live long enough to see the consequences of their famous victories...

...He had permitted the replacement of 300,000 of his miners by advanced machinery, in order to preserve and humanize such jobs as could be supported by a new coal economy, assuming that a growing economy would absorb most displaced miners and that his welfare fund could provide for the rest...

...Lawyers abounded who could be hired to confound the stammering miner about his claims...

...Hume shows us how the union hierarchy is kept in line...

...There followed another 17 years of daily deaths not spectacular enough to force action, until the Farmington disaster of 1968 (which killed only 78, but furnished a dramatic vigil lasting from Thanksgiving to Christmas) unleashed another flood of emotion and guilt...

...John L. Lewis was not to be so spared...

...but cooperation proved insidious, took roots and became a too-comfortable way of life in the union long after its justification had passed...

...and so, though they will connive against life for a century, in moments of uproar and accusation they become rattled inside and tend to temporarily flee the fort...

...Opposition candidates for union office are fired and slugged...

...Not so...

...But the Eisenhower recessions left the displaced miner no alternative, and impoverished the welfare fund so that it couldn’t carry the burden...

...In his hey-day, Lewis had been wont to anathematize his opponents with biblical allusions...

...life is cheap but safety costs money...

...That he might be bold, others were confined to timidity...

...a generation later a process begins by which the law is strengthened at one end but weakened at the other by nonenforcement...

...Exposed to the indecencies of life at its margin, many retain a kind of pride that is generally wounded when a union official asks them to falsify a ballot count or rig a meeting...

...State boards routinely turned the miners down for compensation payments...

...Hume portrays a vast industry organizing itself around this priority, persevering through decades, forming collusive alliances wherever needed to block or emasculate safety and health measures...

...In his eighties and failing, he lived long enough to see the degradation of his union, though the mists of age may have mercifully shrouded the realities...

...Because the expense would cut into profits...

...From Crusade to Collusion: A Story of Union Decay a review by James Boyd To most of us, nothing is more remote than the invisible coal miner, moiling away his murky life a thousand feet underground...

...To idealists of the old labor movement, the chosen methods of graft must seem the crowning shame-union men not only lying down with businessmen and congressmen, but imitating their practices...

...a current accident death toll that, despite the shrinkage of the mining force to about 100,000, runs at 150 deaths per year (1 5 were killed in the first 18 working days of 1972...

...Finally, Death and the Mines is a hopeful book for what it reveals about the durability of human decency...

...As Hume traveled the coal country he was continually impressed with the quality of the cast-off miners...

...Sick, they drag themselves gasping to the mine to save a day’s wage for their family...

...First, the existence of the subject atrocity is denied authoritatively for 50 years...

...In countries where honor is understood, such exposures as befell Senator Jennings Randolph and Congressman John Dent and the entire West Virginia Senate Conference Committee would have required suicides...

...the public at large passively accepts the choice of money above life and leaves its workings undisturbed until some particularly grisly application stirs it to brief protest...

...Lower-rung flunkeys are able to pocket as much as $2,000 for attending a convention, after having all their expenses paid...

...According to one mining authority, the Germans during World War 11-operating their mines with slaves, and under steady bombardmentmaintained a better safety record than U. S. mines do today...

...generally this means the politician will acquiesce in the value choices of the economic barons who are the proximate bestowers of his office, but in moments of public unrest, he will desert wealth to appease an aroused public-the ultimate bestowers of his job...

...Withal, Boyle never quite “took” with the rank and file...

...then, in a great landmark, a law is permitted that regulates only the least dangerous catastrophes...

...the big lie technique is used to flood the coal fields with vilification of Boyle critics...

...But with such an army waiting, others will come forward to lead...

...countries poorer than ours...

...Subversive rumors spread that he was not a miner at all in his youth in Montana, but a sheepherder...

...Back in the coal fields, protest meetings are broken up by goon squads...

...As long as we mine coal, there is always this inherent danger,” Boyle said, and lauded the company which owned the mine as “one of the best companies to work with as far as cooperation and safety are concerned...

...Relatives of officials are put on the union payroll at salaries three and four times a miner’s pay...

...A typical verse : When Tony was a young man, he went underground...

...He has been giving me advice and counsel for a long time...

...Perhaps this “catching on’’ was what killed him...

...a rate of lung damage from pneumoconiosis (black lung) that afflicts half of all career miners...

...The book’s value, however, is not in its statistics but in its portrayal of the scheming and collaboration it takes to maintain this steady production of corpses and cripples, uninterrupted by the march of science and civilization...

...The resident clergy diverted the miners with ecclesiastical specialtiessnakehandling and babbling in “tongues”-but had no brimstone for the mayhem and robbery daily practiced upon their parishioners...

...here statements of retraction sufficed...

...Yablonski, fearful of rejection by the downtrodden miners and retaliation by their mentor, began his reform campaign against Boyle ever so cautiously...

...The men of power are in some inner recess ashamed of, or at least uneasy about, their priorities, denying as they do that which we profess to believe as a people...

...Doctors could always be found to testify that there was no such thing as pneumoconiosis...

...Millions of dollars in such largesse are taken out of the hides of disease-wracked miners...

...They linger on, maimed or enfeebled, showing up at state offices for benefits they hear are due them under the workmen’s compensation law...

...We are now in another hiatus during which the lobbyists and the Department of Interior are at work sabotaging the legislation through weak enforcement...

...he must, like Lewis, become a figure of song and legend...

...Expense accounts are encouraged throughout the organization, and are not questioned at headquarters...

...If we see the miner at all, he is in extremis, the stupefied survivor just hauled up after days below, blinking against the light and gabbling revivalist hosannas...

...non-enforcement is bound to lead to still another tragedy and to another public reaction which will restrict still further the margin of maneuver for the owner, the union, the politicians, and the inspectors...

...Lewis had used violence, taught violence, to combat the violence of the companies and the paralyzing disunity of the miners, and now his example was used to justify the most pusillanimous acts...

...bribes are freely offered to disarm doubters...

...The pattern is familiar to students of the ways of capitalists and congressmen, but its operation is always fascinating...

...By the tens of thousands they survive the accidents and the lung diseases, in a fashion...

...Even the 10 union hospitals he had brought to the coal fields were, within 10 years, either shut down or in other hands...

...He worked at the miner’s trade...

...For ages the basic technology of mine safety has been known...

...A recent study shows that, per unit of work, the U. S. coal industry has a death rate three times higher than the Russian, four times higher than the English, and six times higher than the German...

...We are all the losers for this unacquain tance...

...Lifetime pensions are inaugurated for union officials after only IO years of service...

...a historic death toll from disease, incalculable but vastly greater than from accidents...

...I am mighty glad to rub shoulders with this fellow Tony Boyle...