Oct. 12th: Mother Jones Is Still Calling Out Deadbeat Coal Barons (on Coal Miner's Day)

I hear Mother Jones calling. The deadbeat coal barons still need to be called out.

Today is Coal Miner's Day--or used to be: October 12th marks the day a small band of striking coal miners in southern Illinois called out Chicago coal barons and stood their ground at Virden in 1898. By the end of the day, seven miners lay dead, but the the strike-breaking barons had been stopped. For most historians, the defiance of union coal miners at the Virden Massacre marked the turning point in the labor movement, impacting the lives of untold thousands of laborers over the next century.

A century later, the coal barons are up to their same games--billionaire coal baron Chris Cline, in fact, named his 164-foot yacht, Mine Games.

Mother Jones, the miner's angel, may be gone, but Mother Jones magazine just called out International Coal Group--who gave us the Sago, WV tragedy--for 20,000 clean water violations.

And Illinois is now dealing with the billionaire coal king Cline, who recently praised Massey Energy's Don Blankenship for his "moral" convictions in one of the bloodiest years of coal mining, and on the 10th anniversary of the Martin County coal sludge disaster; in Ohio, Murray Energy's coal slurry leaks continue to wipe out aquatic life.

After removing thousands of indigenous people on Black Mesa, Arizona and around the nation, Peabody Energy has now set its sights on plundering Mongolia.

Amid mind-boggling strip-mining destruction in Wise County, Virginia, Dominion Resources is building a new coal-fired plant as a monument to yesterday. Check out this trailer from the forthcoming film documentary, The Electricity Fairy:

And three coal miners are still dying daily and needlessly from black lung disease. Faces of Coal meet Faces of Black Lung:

"WHEN MINING BEGAN,"noted a U.S. Coal Commission report in the 1920s, examining the conditions before the union movement in 1897, "it was upon a ruinously competitive basis. Profit was the sole object; the life and health of employees was of no moment. Men worked in water half-way up to their knees, in gas-filled rooms, in unventilated mines where the air was so foul that no man could work long without seriously impairing his health. There was no workmen's compensation law, accidents were frequent. . . The average daily wage of the miner was from $1.25 to $2.00."

Francis Peabody, the namesake of the world's largest coal company today, called it "survival of the fittest."

Miners not only lived and worked in deplorable conditions. They were subjected to the whims of the market, often out of work for the long summer months and forced to migrate for poorly paid day labor. Displaced and unorganized, the miners faced a situation of extreme vulnerability. They often lived in company-owned houses, held in debt, compelled to patronize company-owned shops, and were paid in a company script only valid at company businesses.

To address this miserable situation, the United Mine Workers of America called for a general strike across the nation in 1897. Founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1890, they counted less than four hundred members in Illinois. Little did the district leaders know that a flamboyant thirty-one-year-old miner in southern Illinois, a veteran of hunger marches on the nation's Capitol in Washington, DC, in 1894, would don a silk top hat, a Prince Albert topcoat, and an umbrella and declare himself "General" Alexander Bradley.

Bradley led marches from mine to mine in southern Illinois, in a crusade to unionize the workers. Thousands of miners swept across the coalfields, attentive to Bradley's spellbinding speeches and flashy attire, assisting in setting up a union vote. He forbade any violence. And the mines unionized. By the end of 1897, the union ranks grew from 400 to over 30,000. With the backing of the militant southern Illinois contingent, the United Mine Workers ironed out a deal with coal operators for an eight-hour day, a six-day week, and major concessions for better working conditions. And a 30 percent increase in wages.

Bradley's rank and file, though, and the United Mine Workers nationwide, were tested later that year. While the "General" and the UMWA had successfully bridged ethnic differences among various European and non-English-speaking miners, the Chicago-based company for a mine in Virden, Illinois, looked south of the Mason-Dixon Line for an old tactic of division. Recognizing that black aborers had been used in the mines in Alabama and Tennessee-- many in a decades-long scandal of convict labor, or rather, laborers who had been framed for minor offenses and sent to the coal prison labor camps--the Chicago company sent a recruiter to Birmingham, Alabama, to hire non-union black coal miners and break

Bradley's strike.

The black coal miners were mistakenly told that the regular miners had left their jobs to serve in the Spanish-American War. They boarded the trains. So did their armed escorts, Thiel Detective Service agents out of St. Louis.

The coal barons' intentions were clear; they planned to test the mettle of the striking union, and the resolve of the governor. In the coal company's mind, the lives of the strikebreakers were as expendable as the miners.

When the escorted strikebreakers arrived at an armed stockade set up near the train station in Virden around midday on October 12, 1898, a shootout erupted. It lasted ten minutes. The company gunmen overpowered the strikers with their modern Winchester rifles; the striking miners returned fire with shotguns and hunting rifles. Twelve men were killed; seven were miners, five were armed guards. Forty strikers were wounded. None of the black strike-breakers were wounded. The National Guard arrived several hours later. The governor's inaction was ultimately denounced across the country

At her request, the nation's coal miners buried Mother Jones at Mount Olive in the south-central Illinois coalfields--the burning ground of unionism--at the only Union Miners' Cemetery in the nation. It had been established after the Virden battle, when a Mount Olive church refused to inter the bodies of the seven strikers. A local coal miner raised the money to buy the plots, which soon spread across the fields; an arching gate declared it the terrain of union miners.

"When the last call comes for me to take my final rest," Mother Jones had written, "will the miners see that I get a resting place in the same clay that shelters the miners who gave up their lives on the hills of Virden, Illinois. . . They are responsible for Illinois being the best organized labor state in America. I hope it will be my consolation when I pass away to feel I sleep under the clay with those brave boys."

Alexander Bradley died in 1918 from black lung disease, having returned to the mines as a front loader. His role in building the United Mine Workers disappeared from most history texts. But the militant southern Illinois mine workers had become the most powerful vanguard in the union movement and churned out new generations of leaders.

And coal mining communities in southern Illinois today, under a new onslaught of coal barons like Cline, remember his legacy.