Illinois Coal Miners Fight for Democracy

COAL, PRESENT UNDER TWO-THIRDS OF ILLINOIS, helped to shape the state as an industrial powerhouse. Across the US, coal was linked to undemocratic company town systems of poverty, surveillance, and policing and to worker deaths. But Illinois coal miner communities were key sites of resistance to this tendency. Miners and their families used their union to fight for fuller democracy and labor rights.In the 1860s, immigrant miners concentrated in the Belleville region were inspired by the cause of eliminating slave labor to rethink the terms of wage labor as well. Miners enlisted in the Civil War in outsized numbers and connected that struggle to a parallel campaign for labor rights in the North. Their 1861 manifesto is one of the most breathtaking of Illinois’ early historical documents. They argued that two kinds of unions were necessary: “Come, then, and rally round the standard of union—the Union of States and the UNITY of Miners” and “unite for the emancipation of our labor, and the regeneration and elevation, physically, mentally and morally, of our species.” Without workers’ collective organization, “the insatiable maw of Capital would devour every vestige of Labor's rights.” Organizing and power, as they saw it, could only be accomplished by building knowledge, electing workers’ representatives, and building solidarity among workers by “obliterating all personal animosities and frivolous nationalities.” They went on strike for fair wages and organized petitions that passed the first state law to regulate mines in the nation: an “honest weights” bill that measured the actual weight of coal—because operators, they charged, cheated them of wages by underweighing their production. Illinois miners saw themselves as the vanguard for democracy for workers and they wanted a national union to bring uniform, safe conditions.1Illinois coal operators counter-organized at the local and state level. They brought the first law (1863) in the nation that prevented mass picketing at coal mines and other workplaces and blocked laws sought by miners. Miners marched and struck anyway, setting off a cascade of brutal conflicts in the decades that followed. Illinois coal operators were the first to enlist the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1866 as a mercenary force—the “guns of capital.” But Pinkerton advised that Illinois’ state militia was the better policing option. After 1874, Illinois spent more funds on military force to break strikes than any other state up through 1900. To counter the power of skilled miners and unionization, leading operators recruited more workers than needed; mechanized undercutting; and deployed “blasting against the solid,” which exploded the seams instead of undercutting, worsening deadly dust and danger. By 1894 Illinois coal operators and their railroad and financier partners had achieved the lowest price for coal in the nation through what one miner called “the pauperization” of miners’ communities across the state. Some sold coal below cost, making money on rent to miners and selling goods at company stores. To survive, miners’ wives and children stole the coal their husbands and fathers dug.2Illinois miners were radicalized by these experiences. In 1894, a state miners’ convention passed resolutions for nationalizing the coal fields, arguing that coal could be harnessed for labor rights and the public good. Another miners’ manifesto questioned why, “in this age of electricity and continual wonders,” they were poor, calling the system a fraud and for a general strike. After a series of organizing campaigns and mine wars that led to dozens of deaths over unionization from 1898 to 1910, the coalfields of Illinois became fully organized, as District 12 of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Illinois miners reversed the tendency of downward pressure on wages and partially controlled the implementation of machines and blasting. They eliminated company stores and began replacing them with food cooperatives. Black miners brought a civil rights amendment to district bargaining contracts that barred employers from hiring discrimination, a provision that preceded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by many decades. Miners became a leading force across the downstate, creating a cosmopolitan culture that spread unionism through numerous downstate communities. For instance, the former company town of Benld, Illinois, won the first teachers’ union contract in the nation. Or consider that it was miners that sought Illinois legislation for retirement pensions for all workers in 1919.3Illinois miners were a significant base for challenges to coal autocracy across the nation. Their dues and special funds paid for a larger proportion of the UMWA organizing drives in Colorado and West Virginia than any other district, and Illinois sent organizers there as well. But the long campaigns were lost through violence, with troops and state intervention on the side of the coal companies.4 This failure also allowed an autocrat, John L. Lewis, to climb to the top position in the UMWA. By 1929, Illinois was the main district still providing dues to the national office but the only district not controlled by him. Lewis sought to work with the largest operators such as Peabody to mechanize the mines, with the promise that while such corporate consolidation would reduce jobs, those who remained would be higher paid. Illinois miners rejected that solution and argued union democracy and a visionary plan to manage coal in the public and workers’ interest was a more just solution.After Lewis signed a contract against their will, Illinois miners revolted and formed an independent union in 1932. But Lewis and the UMWA fought back, bringing on another brutal mine war with dozens killed. Lewis prevailed as miners across the US self-organized in the wake of the economic collapse and New Deal intervention, which transformed the UMWA into the leading national union. Lewis established a more limited vision for miners’ role in the New Deal state, one that exchanged power and workers’ democracy for wages and limited benefits. This factored into the mass deaths in Centralia (1947) and West Frankfort (1951) mine explosions, for example. Still, remnants of the mine workers’ rebellious culture downstate were still legible in the late twentieth century, even as coal mining jobs faded. For example, southern Illinois teachers found support for their goal of collective bargaining laws from mining communities and their political representatives. and this helped to enact the strongest collective bargaining law for teachers in the nation.5