Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship
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Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252097607 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2015 |
| Series: | Working Class in American History |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Fighting for Total Person Unionism
Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship
By Robert Bussel
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09760-7
CHAPTER 1
Coming Up the Hard Way
In reminiscing about their childhoods as coal miners' sons, neither Harold Gibbons nor Ernest Calloway could conjure up warm memories of their youths. Gibbons characterized his "early boyhood days" as the "bleakest of my life." Calloway recalled working alongside his father in "the dark, deep, dreary bowels" of a coal mine and chafing at the stifling boundaries of a "contained company town." His sense of constraint was accentuated by the rigid barriers of racial segregation. "As Negroes," Calloway later explained, "we had a fixed place in that world. There were many things beyond our reach and we lived our lives of quiet frustration and survived on small expectations." Although Harold Gibbons did not suffer the stigma of race, he shared Calloway's frustrations, understanding all too well the sources from which they sprang. Indeed, the two men held much in common, with their coal mining origins creating a visceral personal bond that cemented their subsequent political partnership.
* * *
Harold Joseph Gibbons was born April 10, 1910, in Archibald Patch, PA, a coal mining camp in the town of Taylor situated in the state's northeastern region. He was the youngest of twenty-three children sired by his father, Patrick Thomas Gibbons, who emigrated from Ireland to the United States in the early 1880s, and spread his progeny between two wives. The elder Gibbons was in his sixties when Harold was born, and his mother, Bridget Mulhern, was his father's second wife. Ernest Calloway was born a year earlier on January 1, 1909, in Heberton, WV, a tiny town in Fayette County located in the state's southeastern corner. Calloway's father, also named Ernest, was forty-two years old at the time of his birth, and his mother, Mary Hayes, was a fifteen-year-old orphan whom his father had married following the death of his first wife. In 1913, when Ernest was four, the family, which later grew to include a brother and sister, moved to Jenkins, KY, a newly created coal mining town in the Cumberland region's Big Sandy Valley.
Both Gibbons and Calloway's fathers were coal miners, and their experiences reflected the influential role the coal industry played in shaping post-Civil War America. In the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania where Patrick Gibbons mined coal, he joined other Irish and English immigrants who were among the first workers recruited to extract the hard substance prized for its long-burning capacity and affordability. Most anthracite miners lived in small towns known as "patches," which were tightly controlled by coal companies. In contrast to the bituminous coal mined by Ernest Calloway's father in West Virginia and Kentucky, anthracite veins were not nearly as level, and this irregular, unpredictable alignment beneath the earth's surface made anthracite mining more challenging and dangerous. The Glen Alden Coal Company, which owned the Archibald mine where Patrick Gibbons was employed, saw twenty-eight of its miners die in accidents between 1924 and 1927 as a result of roof collapses and explosions. In many coal patches this sense of danger was symbolized by the existence of "widow's rows," groups of homes where the wives of fallen miners struggled to subsist following the deaths of their husbands.
Employed in a chaotic industry subject to fluctuating demand, overproduction, and price volatility, anthracite miners often suffered from unsteady employment and frequently failed to earn incomes sufficient to support a basic standard of living. They also had a more differentiated set of job assignments than their counterparts in bituminous mining, leading to persistent conflict over the determination of wages and frequent accusations of favoritism and discrimination. As a result, according to historian Perry Blatz, "militancy never lay far beneath the surface," and since the mid-nineteenth century, an unrelenting atmosphere of antipathy between anthracite miners and coal operators led to decades of bitter disputes.
Ernest Calloway's paternal grandfather and great grandfather had been slaves in Bedford County, VA, located in the state's southwestern section where tobacco plantations cultivated the crop for one of the nation's largest regional markets. Calloway's father, whom he referred to as "Big Ernest," was born six years after the Civil War. When mining companies began to develop the rich Appalachian coal reserves, they found an insufficient labor force among West Virginia's mountaineers and turned to importing African Americans from adjacent states. This recruitment strategy led to the doubling of the black population in Fayette County, WV, the area where the senior Calloway had settled. By 1910, African American migrants comprised nearly 25 percent of the region's coal miners.
Seeking to sustain the farms they had acquired following the Civil War, many of these migrants became "miner-farmers," journeying back to Virginia to maintain their land even as they sought improved wages in the emerging Appalachian coal industry. Mining not only offered better pay but also promised less closely monitored work, a benefit that was doubtless welcomed by those who had worked as slave laborers in antebellum Virginia. Moreover, the rigid segregation reinforced by the enactment of Jim Crow laws elsewhere in the post-Civil War south was less prevalent in West Virginia, where African Americans found greater opportunities in employment and more freedom to participate in civic and political affairs. As one union organizer observed, the opportunity to exercise "true American citizenship," a concept that powerfully shaped Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway's ambitions for the union movement, became an important factor influencing black migration to West Virginia along with the material improvements offered by work in the coal fields.
West Virginia, however, was no nirvana for black coal miners. Company towns were more pervasive in West Virginia than elsewhere, and miners found virtually all aspects of their lives rigidly monitored by their employers. West Virginia's mines were among the most dangerous in the nation, and mine operators disregarded both safety and child labor laws with impunity. In both West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), founded in 1890, sought to organize miners, drawing on their shared experience of danger and exploitation to forge solidarity among the different ethnic and racial groups that comprised the coal industry's labor force. Following what came to be known as the "Great Strike" of 1902, anthracite miners benefited from President Theodore Roosevelt's unprecedented intervention, an action alerting coal operators that they could no longer count on automatic federal support for their implacable opposition to unionism. By the time of Harold Gibbons's birth, Pennsylvania anthracite miners were highly organized and had gained a grudging respect from the coal operators for their tenacity and militancy.
Miners in West Virginia were slower to organize than their Pennsylvania counterparts. They lacked the influential presence of class-conscious British, Irish, and Welsh miners who had applied their deep union experience and political acumen to launch organizing in the Pennsylvania coal fields. It also took time for UMWA organizers to recognize that miners in West Virginia had different priorities from miners in Pennsylvania, where the union had built its greatest strength. For West Virginia miners, their most significant demands were gaining union recognition and abolishing the utilization of private guards by mine operators. Accomplishing these goals would loosen the tight grip that the operators exercised over company towns and enable miners to exercise their full rights as citizens. Aided by the UMWA's growing recognition of these priorities, West Virginia miners began actively organizing during the first decade of the twentieth century. Although coal operators used a "judicious mixture" of different racial and ethnic groups in an attempt to undermine miner solidarity, the UMWA was able to achieve some level of interracial cooperation. Black miners, especially those from Virginia who were familiar with the Knights of Labor's organizing efforts in the late nineteenth century, proved particularly receptive to the union's message.
Shortly before Ernest Calloway was born, West Virginia coal miners engaged in fierce battles with mine owners and private guards recruited from the infamous Baldwin-Felts agency during the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strikes in 1912 and 1913. These strikes were the precursor of the virtual class war that would characterize coal labor relations in West Virginia for the next two decades. The brutality of the Baldwin-Felts guards provoked violent retaliation from the miners. Big Ernest Calloway, who his son later described as an "ex-farmer, ex-gambler, ex-gun toting unionist, and refugee from a West Virginia posse of mine guards," had apparently been a strong union man and was wounded by Baldwin-Felts operatives during these clashes. Seeking a more stable environment in which to raise his new family, in 1913, Big Ernest led a group of five African American families to seek work in the new mines that the Rockefeller-owned Consolidation Coal Company was opening in eastern Kentucky.
Jenkins, the town where the Calloways settled, had been created in 1911 by Consolidation Coal, which had bought over 100,000 acres of land in eastern Kentucky to develop for coal production. Named after a company director and well-financed by Consolidation, Jenkins had greater amenities than company towns dominated by smaller firms, at least for white miners. Without a trace of irony, the Jenkins Area Jaycees confirmed Consolidation's dominance of the town in a 1973 account of its history: "It has been said that the company brought the citizens of Jenkins into the world since they owned the only hospital, and it also escorted them out of this town since it owned the only funeral home."
Ernest Calloway's father quickly distinguished himself as a leading civic figure in Jenkins, helping establish the town's first black church and school and serving as a liaison among the blacks, Poles, Hungarians, and Italians who populated Consolidation Coal's labor force. He promptly employed these diplomatic skills, smoothing relations with mountain clans who resented newcomers and for a time attempted to force their departure. Big Ernest's status and his claims on citizenship and respectability were reinforced by a photograph that showed him hoisting the American flag at an outdoor event in Jenkins. He also continued to display his union loyalties, becoming the first secretary of the UMWA local in Jenkins and ensuring that miners were credited properly for their output. The elder Calloway eventually became a subcontractor, employing his own crew, and lived in the Cumberland Valley until his death in 1957. A group of "old mountaineers and coal miners" reportedly carried him to his grave, "affirming the esteem in which he was held by his fellow workers and neighbors."
Harold Gibbons's memories of growing up in a coal mining patch mirrored those of Ernest Calloway. The Gibbons home on Williams Street in Archibald Patch was located close to the mine, and he recalled "... hardly a day went by without an ambulance racing to the mine past the front of our house." Unionism was a "matter of course" in this environment. Several of Gibbons's brothers were union committeemen, and he described his father as a "union guy." "If you scabbed," Gibbons remembered, "it was never forgotten" in the close knit, intensely pro-union community in which he was raised.
Buoyed by an expanding economy, corporate efforts to stabilize production, and the emergence of a strong union presence, the anthracite industry enjoyed a "golden age" in the first two decades of the twentieth century that brought improved wages and working conditions to Pennsylvania miners. This prosperity faded, however, after demand for coal declined sharply following World War I. Harold Gibbons might have been thinking about this period when he recalled his father being out of work for long intervals during strikes. One story that he often repeated to interviewers was his memory of subsisting on potatoes during occasions when his father and brothers were withholding their labor: "Almost all we had to eat was potatoes ... they were the main course at breakfast, lunch, and dinner." These stark memories of deprivation remained with Gibbons, fueling his subsequent determination to improve the quality of working-class lives.
Patrick Gibbons died of work-related lung cancer when Harold was twelve. "That taught me that a labor union is the only protection a working man has," Gibbons told an interviewer. Elaborating on this theme, he explained to a New York Herald Tribune reporter in 1964, "I'm a union man because I came up the hard way." An early 1950s article on Gibbons in a Toledo, OH, Teamsters publication characterized the Pennsylvania coal patch where he was raised as a place where "the coal barons had hearts as black as their product and considered a miner's life cheaper than his tools."
This language underscored the outrage Gibbons felt toward the coal companies that had dominated his upbringing and consistently manifested their contempt for working-class lives. This powerful "sense of kind," as Calloway once described the consciousness of miners, was marked by the unwavering belief that the union was the one institution capable of averting their descent into total desperation. "Unquestionably," Calloway observed in his first published article in 1934, for miners and their families, "the Union is the only road to freedom." And, as he told members of the red caps' union whom he organized three years later, it was also "the only avenue of escape from the ravishing scourge of poverty."
Coal miners have received extensive attention from historians, who have highlighted their attachments to self-reliance and collective action, their persistent efforts to forge interethnic and interracial solidarity, and their fervent embrace of the UMWA as a kind of "secular church." Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway paid homage to this rich legacy, expressing pride in their fathers' coal mining roots and abiding union loyalties. Yet their recollections of growing up in coal mining patches were tinged with neither romance nor nostalgia. In addition to recurring images of poverty and deprivation, Gibbons was scarred by the experience of being one of two Irish Catholic families in a community dominated by Protestants. "They let us know we were different," he recalled. One especially searing memory of this difference was an occasion when young Harold was not invited to a Christmas church gathering attended by most of the town's children. He vividly remembered peering into a window where he could see other youngsters receiving presents while he remained empty-handed.
Echoing Gibbons's reference to the bleakness of his upbringing, Ernest Calloway's memories were equally unromantic. African Americans in Jenkins attended overcrowded and underfunded schools. Housing in Jenkins was segregated and inferior to that inhabited by whites. For all of his father's success within the union and his standing in the community, the younger Calloway could not escape the realization that law, custom, and ideology in Jenkins were all designed to uphold white privilege and supremacy.
For bright, ambitious youths like Calloway and Gibbons, the coal patch, ethnic and racial intolerance, and corporate domination converged in consigning them to what Calloway described as a "small, restricted, insignificant place" in the social order. These hidden and not so hidden injuries of class and racial oppression were the catalysts for Calloway and Gibbons's subsequent efforts to craft a "total person unionism" that would attempt to serve not only the economic but also the social and psychological needs of workers. Their deep commitments to a unionism that fostered interracial and interethnic solidarity were also formed as a result of their personal experiences with discrimination and their exposure to the UMWA, a union that had an admirable if imperfect record of attempting to organize across racial and ethnic lines.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fighting for Total Person Unionism by Robert Bussel. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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