Abstract
Fifteen years ago, I joined a caravan of union supporters and students of labor who descended on a working-class community in Appalachia1. In 1989–1990, this community became a gathering place for thousands of coal miners and their supporters from around the world. Over 50,000 people visited Camp Solidarity during a year-long strike against the Pittston Coal Group. In a tent and trailer village established by striking miners and their allies in the Appalachian Mountains near Castlewood, Virginia, supporters gathered to give one another assistance, share information, and strategize. Some came to learn more about the strike and to see for themselves whether news reports concerning the struggle were accurate. Most came because they believed that the outcome of the strike against Pittston would determine the fate of labor unions—and laboring people—in the United States. Many union members and supporters, as well as labor commentators, were convinced that, should the coal miners fail, employers across the nation would use the Pittston Coal Group’s actions before and during the strike as a model for transforming their own relations with workers—ultimately bringing about the end of organized labor in the United States.
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Notes
I am indebted to Rick Fantasia for this concept and for his insight that “solidarity is created and expressed by the process of mutual association.” Fantasia argues that cultures of solidarity refer to “a cultural expression that arises within the wider culture, yet which is emergent in its embodiment of oppositional practices and meanings.” See his Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 17–22.
Here I draw on but do not entirely replicate Richard White’s concept of the middle ground. White’s middle ground is one where the competing interests of different cultural groups were negotiated through a complicated process of mutual misunderstanding that often masqueraded as cultural understanding. See The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Michael Forman, Nationalism and the International Labor Movement: The Idea of the Nation in Socialist and Anarchist Theory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 63.
See David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 334–365. See also Fredric Jameson, “Utopianism and Anti-Utopianism,” in The Jameson Reader, ed., Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell, 2000), originally published in Jameson, “The Antimonies of Postmodernity,” The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Jameson, “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” The Seeds of Time.
See Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Lnterviews with the New Left Review (London: New Left: Books, 1979), 286. Williams first introduced the concept of a “structure of feeling” in 1954. See his novel Border Country (1960; London: Hogarth Press, 1988).
Patrick Joyce, “The Historical Meanings of Work: An Introduction,” in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Coal production, thus, was elastic in the upswing but inelastic in the downswing. For a clear, concise, and insightful analysis of this peculiarity of coal production and its implications for labor relations, see David Brody, “Market Unionism in America: The Case of Coal,” in Ln Labor’s Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003), 45.
Male gender ideals were changing in this era from an emphasis on “manliness” to one on “masculinity,” but I use the term “masculinity” here in a more generic sense to denote constructions of male gender. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). On working-class masculinities in mining, see, e.g., Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); and Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Lmmigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Angela John, By the Sweat of their Brow: Women Workers in Victorian Coal Mines (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 20, 95 n. 60, 231.
Emil Zola, Germinal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Ethel Day Smith Interview, Marat Moore Collection, Series I, Box 1, Folder 10; and see Marat Moore, Women in the Mines: Stories of Life and Work (New York: Twayne, 1996), 27–31.
Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry (New York: Paragon, 1989), 243–245; H. Lee Scamehorn, Pioneer Steelmaker in the West: The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1872–1903 (Boulder, CO: Pruett, 1976), 169.
Howard Zinn, “The Ludlow Massacre,” in The Politics of History (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 83.
Proceedings, Special Convention of District Fifteen, United Mine Workers of America, Trinidad, Colorado, September 16, 1913, 16–21. Typewritten copy in Western History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library. Reprinted in Philip S. Foner, ed., Mother Jones Speaks: Collected Speeches and Writings (New York: Monad, 1983), 234–235. And see U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Mines and Mining, Conditions in the Coal Mines of Colorado, 2 vols. Pursuant to H.R 387. 63d Cong., 2d Sess., Washington, DC, 1914, 2: 2633; Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 269; Zinn, “Ludlow Massacre,” 86.
Sam Vigil Interview, Huerfano County History Project, Walsenburg Public Library, Walsenburg, Colorado, 1979; Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on the Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 104.
Zinn, “Ludlow Massacre,” 92–94; McAlister Coleman, Men and Coal (1943; New York: Arno, 1969), 86–87. One of the women and four of the children were hispanos from southern Colorado and northern New Mexico.
Graham Adams, Jr., Age of Industrial Violence, 1910–1915: The Activities and Findings of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 160; Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 294.
Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 3–4.
Robert Michael Smith, From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 24.
Fred Mooney, Struggle in the Coal Fields: The Autobiography of Fred Mooney, ed., J.W. Hess (Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1967); Foner, ed., Mother Jones Speaks, 339.
Matewan Collection, Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia; Lon Savage, Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–1921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 20; David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 201; Coleman, Men and Coal, 99.
Crandell A. Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 119.
John W. Hevener, Which Side Are You On: The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), xviii.
Philip Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker (New York: International, 1974), 194–196.
A number of historians have examined this strategy, as well as the role of the Communist Party in organizing Depression-era workers. See, e.g., Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion.
Camo Carols, adapted by Julie McCall, illustrated by Mike Konopacki (Washington, DC: Labor Heritage Foundation, 1989), 9.
Richard A. Brisbin, Jr., A Strike Like No Other Strike: Law & Resistance During the Pittston Coal Strike of 1989–1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
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© 2006 Jaclyn J. Gier and Laurie Mercier
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Guerin-Gonzales, C. (2006). From Ludlow to Camp Solidarity: Women, Men, and Cultures of Solidarity in U.S. Coal Communities, 1912–1990. In: Gier, J.J., Mercier, L. (eds) Mining Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73399-6_16
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