Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields
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Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields
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Overview
His journey from the hardscrabble coalfields to the marbled halls of Congress has inspired generations of people in West Virginia and throughout the nation. From reading the stories of the Founding Fathers as a young boy by the light of a kerosene lamp to the swearing of an oath for more than a half-century to guard the US Constitution, Senator Byrd’s life is legendary.
Until his death on June 28, 2010, Byrd stood by his principles, earning the affection of the people of his home state and the respect of Americans from all walks of life. With his beloved Erma ever by his side, Robert C. Byrd never forgot his roots, harkening back to those early lessons that he learned as a child of the Appalachian coalfields.
This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Gaston Caperton, governor of West Virginia from 1989-1997.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781940425559 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | West Virginia University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 866 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Robert C. Byrd
Child of the Appalachian Coalfields
By Robert C. Byrd
West Virginia University Press
Copyright © 2015 West Virginia University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-940425-55-9
CHAPTER 1
CHILD OF THE APPALACHIAN COALFIELDS
The best use of life is to invest it in something which will outlast life.
William James
According to genealogical records, a William Sale came to America from England in the year 1657. Sale had been born in England in 1638, and was brought to Rappahannock County, Virginia, by one John Stevens, who had been granted land in that county. Two hundred and sixty years after the immigrant William Sale reached America in 1657, a direct descendant was born in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, on November 20, 1917, and given the name Cornelius Calvin Sale, Jr. The child had three older brothers — Clyde, William, and Reuben — and one sister, Jettie. The mother, Ada Kirby Sale, died on Armistice Eve, November 10, 1918, of influenza during the great epidemic.
A Mother's Wish
Before her death she asked her husband Cornelius to give the infant Calvin to one of his sisters, Vlurma Sale Byrd, and her husband, Titus Dalton Byrd, in the event of her failure to recover. Mr. and Mrs. Byrd were without children at the time, and, in accordance with the dying mother's wish, they adopted the child and took him to West Virginia when he was only two years old. Mr. Sale, who worked in a furniture shop, remained with the other children in North-Carolina. The Byrds gave the name Robert Carlyle to their adopted son, and moved with him to Bluefield, West Virginia.
I was that child. During my early years, I was raised to believe that Mr. and Mrs. Byrd were my parents, and, although they were poor, they gave me love and treated me as they would have treated their very own child. After living in Bluefield for a short time, we moved to Algonquin, West Virginia, a coal camp a few miles distant, where Mr. Byrd — whom I always called "Pap" and referred to as "my dad" — worked in the coal mine.
My future was before me. Of course, I had no way of knowing what was in that future, but West Virginia was destined to be my home and the state which I would serve in public office for more than fifty years. I was to become — in the words of Jay Rockefeller, my colleague and friend in later life — "the quintessential West Virginian." What was there about this state — a state that would become my permanent home — what was there about its history, its geography, its people, that would mold my outlook, my attitudes, my viewpoints? What was there in this rugged terrain with its windswept peaks; this untamed land of dense forests; this rough and wild-mountained matrix with swift-flowing rivers winding through deep gorges and meandering valleys? What was there in all of this rustic panorama of idyllic charm that would make me what I became, and shape me to what I am?
As I look back over the more than eighty years through which I have lived and become a part of the soil, as it were, of West Virginia, I have concluded that to understand West Virginians, one must first understand the history of West Virginia.
That history is a saga of conflict, a story of struggle. West Virginia is a place that few Americans know and even fewer understand. It is a place of unspeakable beauty, a place that has known terrible tragedy, a place whose past is imbrued with blood — the blood of the original Americans, and the blood of the white men and women who came over the Allegheny Mountains and who killed, and were killed by, the Indians. These men and women came seeking to build their homes in a wilderness where they could eke out a living by the sweat of their brow and the work of their hands, where they could rear their children and enjoy the fulfillment of their free and independent spirits. It is a story of a people who struggled for a sense of community, whose love of freedom and liberty was unquenchable. They were sturdy souls, for whom the unknowns of a vast and unexplored wilderness held no terrors too great for them to press on. It is a story that is distinctly American, and yet distinctly different from that of other parts of America.
It is a land whose sturdy mountain men would fight the Indians, the French, and, yes, their kinspeople, the British. They were men who would flock to the banner of the first great commander of American armies, George Washington. They later would shed their blood on both sides in the terrible war between the states. They would join in the struggle over union, in which one state was torn from another. It was to become the only state born out of a great civil war. This was wild, wonderful West Virginia!
The mountain people of West Virginia were hardworking, tough, clannish, and, while normally friendly, they generally looked upon strangers with suspicion. These early forebears who hewed the forests, spanned the rivers, fought the Indians, subdued the land, and wrested from the tenacious grip of nature the cleared hillsides on which to plant the crops to sustain them and their animals — these were men and women of mostly Anglo-Saxon stock.
When the steamboats and the railroads came, and when industry began to ply its way into the hills and winding hollows, workers came to the mountains of West Virginia from Continental Europe — Italians, Hungarians, Spaniards, Germans, Czechoslovakians, Greeks, Poles — and the British Isles. Many migrated from southern states, mostly Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Blacks came from the southern cotton fields. These were the hardy souls who built the railroads, drove tunnels through the mountains, and plied the rivers with rafts and flatboats to open the region to commerce with the outside world. They built the state and developed it mainly on the economy of coal. Their sons went off to fight in World War I and World War II. In the 1920s they fought in the mine wars.
It is a state whose rich resources have been largely owned and exploited by outside interests. Absentee owners, while living outside the state, wrested from the West Virginia earth the wealth that made them rich — rich from the toil and sweat and blood and tears of the people in the hill country who worked out their lives, all too often, for a pittance.
West Virginia is the story of a people who lived in isolation, whose wish was to be left alone and to be able to raise their families, to be at peace, and to worship the God of their fathers. It is the story of a people who would be misunderstood and all too frequently disparagingly portrayed as ignorant "hillbillies."
King Coal
This was the West Virginia to which I came. And it was a state in whose southern coal fields my formative years would be spent, a state in which coal reigned, because Coal was King! In The Conduct of Life Emerson wrote of its widespread sovereignty:
"We may well call it [coal] black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted."
For millions of centuries, the hills and mountains that cover so much of West Virginia slumbered in untouched solitude. The land was blessed with a great concentration of coal and other fossil fuels. From the beginnings of coal mining in the early 1800s, the economy, welfare, and political life of West Virginia had been increasingly dependent upon this "black gold," which underlay a great portion of the state. Coal, however, was not an overly important resource in West Virginia until after the Civil War, when the advent of the railroads made the coalfields accessible and brought thousands of Old World immigrants into the state to toil in the mines.
The coal miners' struggle for unionization was the culmination of decades of exploitation and oppression. It was fought for dignity, for political and social rights. The coal companies, largely owned by outside interests, exercised enormous social control over the miners.
The coal company "town" was a complete, authoritarian, autonomous system. In addition to owning and controlling all of the institutions in the town, the coal company's dominance in southern West Virginia included the company doctor who delivered the babies, the mines in which the children went to work, and the cemeteries where they eventually were buried. (I have helped to bury coal miners on those hills. It is an unforgettable experience — digging the graves and carrying the heavy metal caskets along the steep hillsides.)
Company rule also included the company police in the form of mine guards, who would toss the miners into the company jail — not into the county jail, but the company jail — or administer the company beating when the miners attempted to organize into a union. It was a complete rule, and it was often a ruthless rule. Consequently, when the miners went on strike for their union, they did so, not always for simple wage increases, but in many instances for their very dignity and freedom.
In the early days of the mining industry, a miner learned mining by experience. He would work with another miner or with his father until he felt confident enough to work at the coal face alone. The early miner performed all mining tasks himself, including laying the track for the coal car, loading the car, and setting the timbers that supported the mine roof.
In the days when my dad worked in the coal mines, the coal was dug and loaded with pick and shovel, by hand, and the miner's work area was referred to as his "place." If the coal miner did not clean up his place during the nine or ten or twelve hours of a workday, someone else might take his job. That meant that the miner had to shovel up all of the coal, the rock, the slate — whatever fell down when the dynamite went off — and load it into a mining car before going home. Many times the miner worked on his knees (and sometimes in water that had seeped through the mountain) loading the coal into the mining cars.
A miner hung a brass "check" on each car he loaded in order to get proper credit for the coal that he dug. My dad's check number, I recall, was 232. To each car of coal that he loaded, he attached his brass check with this number, so that when the coal was unloaded into the tipple and later into the railroad cars, he would get credit for having dug and loaded that carload of coal. In the mid-1920s, a miner would sometimes load more than ten tons of coal a day. Companies in those days would haul the coal to the surface, using mules or ponies, until small electric locomotives were introduced.
When the mine union came to the coal fields in the 1930s, one source of constant tension between miners and coal companies was the matter of fair payment to the miner for the coal that he had produced. "Short weighing," practiced by some unscrupulous companies to cheat the miners, occurred when the company weighman recorded a weight less than the actual amount of coal in the car. "Dockage" was an arbitrary reduction in payment for impurities such as slate and rock loaded into the coal car.
These practices became so commonplace that one of the first demands of the miners when the union was formed was for their own weighman to monitor the company weighman, because the miners felt that only with such a system would they be guaranteed a fair amount for the coal that they had so arduously dug and loaded.
Social Conditions in the Mining Towns
With the coming of large mining operations, coal mining camps were to be found all over the southern counties of West Virginia. Large mine-mouths gaped grimly from the hillsides. Gaunt tipples, miners' bathhouses (with separate facilities for "whites" and "colored"), and other buildings stared down upon the mining community itself from the steep, bleak slopes of the mountains. Railroads sent their sidings in many directions, and long lines of squat mine cars ran along the narrow-gauge tracks and disappeared around the curves of the hills.
When unionism invaded these peaceful valleys, it often made itself familiar through bloody scenes. To the miner, his employment in the mines was his only way of making a living, and if a considerable number of mines closed down, whole mining communities sat around idle. Many times in miners' homes, I have looked into family cupboards that contained only a little food, perhaps for a single meager meal. I have seen the haunted look in the eyes of men who did not know how they were going to provide for the immediate wants of their half-starved and ill-clothed children and wives.
As a boy, I lived at Stotesbury, West Virginia. It was a typical coal mining town, yet it was not a "town" in the ordinary sense. The place where the coal camp was built was the point at which coal seams had been opened, buildings had been erected, and machinery had been installed. The dwellings — many were little more than shacks — were clustered about the tipple and straggled along the bed of the creek. There always seemed to be a creek in those coal mining communities. These dwellings were occupied solely by the men who worked in the mines. Oh, there were some management personnel — the superintendent, the store manager, the company doctor and other company officials, and the principal of the nearby school — who lived in larger, more capacious houses. But other than these, the houses (almost all of which had only four rooms, no bath, and no running water) were occupied by miners and their families.
These communities were more often called "camps." The mining camp down the way from the Stotesbury mining camp was the Tams mining camp, and farther down the hollow was the mining camp at Helen, West Virginia. On the "upper end" of Stotesbury was the mining camp of McAlpin. White people lived at one end of each community, "colored" people at the other end. The two races attended separate schools.
When I was a boy, the surface privy, or "backhouse," was nearly everywhere in evidence and was a prevalent cause of soil and water pollution, and its contents usually washed toward the bed of the creek. There was a sidewalk here and there in the community. Some of the miners kept their houses neat and attractive and grew flower gardens. Some did not. It was a subservient existence — a civilization within a civilization.
No miner owned his own house. He could not acquire title to the property. No one owned a grocery store or a garage or a haberdashery. There was no Main Street of small independent businesses in the mining camp. There was no body of elected councilmen to vote on repairs for roads or sanitation problems. There was no family physician who built up a successful practice by competing with other physicians. The coal company owned all of the houses and rented them to the miners. It owned the company store, the poolroom, the movie theater, and it built the church. The company employed a physician and collected a small sum monthly from each miner to pay the company doctor. The coal company controlled life and most of the activities of the little community. It was responsible for the sanitation and sewage disposal. The company's ownership extended to the dirt roads that ran alongside the railroad tracks and through the middle of the mining camp or by the creek.
Semimonthly paydays occurred, and miners were given statements showing how much they owed the company or how much the company owed them. Among the items charged against the miners in this account were the indebtedness incurred at the company store and rent for the house. The miners heated their houses with coal bought from the company. They got it at a much cheaper price than other customers, but they, nevertheless, paid for their coal. For making purchases at the company store, the miners used scrip in the form of small metal tokens rounded like coins and stamped in various denominations. The company accepted this scrip in lieu of real money at the poolroom, the movie theater, the gas station, and the company store.
One might leave this mining community if he could get a job in another mining community. But he just moved from one mining community to another, and it was always the same. There was no escape from it, and its paternalism touched the miners' lives at every point. Any collective voice which rose among them was quickly smothered.
Coming of the Mine Union
From the cradle to the grave, the miners lived by the grace of the absentee coal owner, one of whose visible representatives was a conservator of the peace, who was often in the pay of the coal company. Almost every operation had its armed guard, in many instances, two or more guards. Mine guards were an institution all along the creeks in the nonunion sections of the state. As a rule, they were supplied by the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency of Roanoke, Virginia, and Bluefield, West Virginia.
On May 19, 1920, several Baldwin-Felts agents with guns came to Mingo County, in southern West Virginia, to evict Stone Mountain Coal Company employees who had become union members. An altercation arose between the Baldwin-Felts men and the persons — miners and others citizens — who were gathered around the little railroad station in Matewan. The mayor was shot to death, a battle ensued, and seven Baldwin-Felts men were shot dead, along with two union miners.
When the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) began organizing in southern West Virginia, mine owners would discharge men as rapidly as they joined the union; a spy system furnished the information in many instances. The discharged men were also evicted, often without advance notice, from company-owned houses.
County sheriffs and their deputies were often in the pay of the coal operators, and the state government in Charleston was clearly in alliance with the employers against the mine strikers. Scores of union men were jailed, and two union sympathizers, Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers, were actually shot dead by Baldwin-Felts detectives on the courthouse steps at Welch, in McDowell County, on August 1, 1921.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Robert C. Byrd by Robert C. Byrd. Copyright © 2015 West Virginia University Press. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
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