-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Mellon's Millions
Harvey O'Conner©1933
Blue Ribbon Books
New York, N.Y.
--[12]--
12
Miners and Machine Guns
SENATOR WHEELER'S committee looking into the coal and iron police system used
by the Mellons' Pittsburgh Coal Company and other corporations in western
Pennsylvania never established whether Richard B. Mellon really meant that
"you could not run a coal company without machine guns." Oliver K. Eaton,
counsel for the United Mine Workers, was asking the former chairman of
Pittsburgh Coal's board of directors for his concepts of labor relations.
Mr. Eaton: Mr. Mellon, in the board of directors' meetings has the matter of
the employment of the coal and iron police been brought up for discussion
before the board?
Mr. Mellon: In what way? We have had them, I know that.
Mr. Eaton: Well, you knew that they were being put into force and effect?
Mr. Mellon: Yes.
Mr. Eaton: Was the matter of the equipment for these men and what they were
to use brought up before the board?
Mr. Mellon: Well, that is the operating department. I never heard of it.
Mr. Eaton: You never heard of it?
Mr. Mellon: I know that they have them.
Mr. Eaton: You never heard of the question of machine guns being bought for
them?
Mr. Mellon: I never heard of that. They may have.
Mr. Eaton: Would you approve of them having machine
guns—
Mr. Mellon: Such as the police here have them?
Mr. Eaton: I beg your pardon.
Mr. Mellon: Such as the police have them?
Mr. Eaton: Well, would you approve of that?
Mr. Mellon: It is necessary. You could not run without them.
Mr. Eaton: You could not run a coal company without machine guns?
Mr. Mellon: No, I didn't say without machine guns.
Mr. Eaton: Well, I am asking you about machine guns
Mr. Mellon: Well, I don't know anything about machine guns. I don't know
whether we have them here.
Whether the machine guns were indispensable or not, the Pittsburgh Coal
Company's coal and iron police had them, along with ample stores of tear gas
bombs and other paraphernalia of industrial warfare, for use against
rebellious employees. In this the Smithfield Street bankers and
industrialists merely followed the fashion in industrial relations. On
occasions when its own private armies were unable to cope with the working
force, as in the Standard Steel Car Company strike at Butler, Pa., state
police were called in and those workers born in Tsarist Russia were not
surprised to see mounted troopers riding into their very homes, scattering
curses and terror among women and children. In fact, the state troopers were
dubbed "Cossacks" by strikers who had felt the impact of mace on skull.
Andrew Mellon's partner, Henry Clay Frick, was responsible for the victory of
the "American plan" of industrial relations in the country's basic industry.
In 1892, in a bitter, ruthless conflict, he destroyed the steel workers'
union at Homestead and decreed that henceforth steel should be non-union.
Thereafter steel and coal companies changed gradually from the employment of
casual armies of Pinkerton gunmen into the building of reliable private
regiments. Aided by the Pennsylvania Railroad and the anthracite coal
companies in eastern Pennsylvania, they strengthened the coal and iron police
law which clothed with the state's police power their privately paid guards.
Despite the best precautions of private police and an elaborate espionage
system that reached into every nook and cranny of the steel mills, machine
shops and workers' homes, industrial rebellions broke out sporadically.
Thousands of eastern and southern European workers would down tools in a
spontaneous, if forlorn, protest against the twelve-hour day or other
grievances. On such occasions, the regular labor unions being banned, they
readily joined organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World.. In
1913 such a revolt convulsed New Kensington, whose main industry was the
fabrication of ingot aluminum into sheets, utensils, wire, foil. Strikers'
wives rushed to the picket lines armed with blacksnake whips and lashed
strikebreakers. State troopers swept through the streets, dispersing
gatherings and smashing the picket lines. The strikers held on for six weeks
and then returned under promise of arbitration.
Two years later, in the dog days of 1915, a savage outbreak in the Aluminum
Company's mills in Massena, N. Y., added a fresh note to the sanguinary pages
of American labor history. With stagnant wages despite a sharp rise in the
cost of living, and grievances against the company's house rental policy, the
employee's staged a literal revolt. They captured department after
department, mill after mill in the immense works. Frightened officials ran
for their lives. By nightfall the strikers controlled every section of the
aluminum works and were throwing up a barricade in front of the main gate.
Sheriff Thaddeus P. Day of St. Lawrence County swore in a posse of Aluminum
officials, business men and clerks and proceeded to lay siege to the mills.
Behind their fortifications, the strikers elected a governing committee,
posted sentries, imposed discipline and waited for terms. In that they were
disappointed. Aluminum Company of America had nothing to compromise with
employees who had violated the rights of private property. Governor Whitman
rushed in two companies of militia.
The strikers, armed with odds and ends of weapons, lacked both munitions and
experience to withstand the shock of advancing troops. The militia swarmed
over the barricades and into the plant on August 1. The strikers resorted to
guerrilla warfare from vantage points about the buildings. The casualties
were never fully reported. A score of wounded were picked up from the
battlefield, but dozens of bleeding strikers were borne off by their comrades.
Another company of troops was rushed into Massena, which was Placed under
virtual martial law. Troopers patrolled the streets with loaded, bayoneted
rifles, seeking enemy sharpshooters. The strike leaders' homes were raided.
Joseph Solunski, a strike leader, died of abdominal wounds inflicted by
guardsmen.
Charles H. Moritz, general manager of the company's plants, terming the
strikers a "herd of malcontents," closed the Massena works and transferred
orders to other plants. The militia continued their search and lodged a
hundred workers in the little Massena jail. Moritz announced that
strikebreakers were being imported from Pittsburgh and Canada. Strikers'
ranks held firm, and losses to the Mellon company were estimated at $25,000 a
day. On August 5 state labor mediators settled the strike. Aluminum promised
a slight wage increase and settlement of rental grievances.
General Manager Moritz, to show his appreciation, gave each militia man a set
of aluminum cooking utensils. It was a gift -in the Mellon manner.
Unfortunately, news leaked out and a public clamor was raised. Major General
O'Ryan of the New York National Guard noted that "the charge is not
infrequently made that National Guard troops are used in labor controversies
in the interests of employers and against employees." Such a charge did not
need refutation, he added, but he ordered the return of the aluminum gifts.
Native New Yorkers refused to work in the aluminum "hot rooms" where electric
furnaces cooked the molten bath into which alumina dropped. Men fled to
escape the terrific heat. Unwilling to pay higher wages to keep the natives,
Aluminum imported French Canadian peasants in squads of 100 to 300. Charges
that Secretary Mellon's company was violating the contract labor law brought
shifting explanations at the U. S. Labor Department in Washington. Robe Carl
White, Assistant Secretary of Labor, admitted there had been some
importation. "Some aluminum company" had asked for a "few" laborers from
Canada, he explained. W. W. Husband, in charge of immigration matters, added
that Aluminum. could not obtain the kind of workers it wanted in the United
States and was obliged to import them.
In 1916 New Kensington was the scene of another strike. Aluminum workers
there, encouraged by the war orders, demanded the eight-hour day and
recognition of American Federation of Labor unions. Aluminum shifted its
orders to other plants and successfully fought off the eight-hour day. Its
workers returned after nearly three months.
Aluminum Company's labor policy was held responsible, inpart, by a
Congressional Committee for the bloody race riots at East St. Louis in 1917.
A strike Of 2,000 workers at the Aluminum Ore Company's plant, where bauxite
is reduced to alumina, was the prelude to the riots in which at least 25
Negroes and two whites were butchered and 310 Negro homes were burned to the
ground.
The cost of living was mounting when Aluminum Ore employees formed a union
and demanded higher wages and improved working conditions. The company
refused the demands and declined to meet a committee of its workers. Once the
strike was on, the Aluminum subsidiary and other East St. Louis employers
joined hastily to combat the growing strike wave. Agents were sent into the
lower Mississippi regions to recruit Negroes. Ten thousand responded to the
call. Aluminum Ore hired those it needed. Swarms of colored workers for whom
there were no jobs gathered in the streets in homesick huddles.
Inside the Aluminum Ore plant, the Negro strikebreakers found conditions as
unsatisfactory as the strikers had proclaimed. They asserted the company had
failed to carry out promises of a $2.40 wage and that they were obliged to
sleep on sacks in box cars kept within the works.
The white strikers were bitter, the colored strikebreakers were bitter, the
disillusioned thousands of imported Negroes who had found no jobs were
bitter. Every constituent of a race war was present.
On May 28, 1917, Negroes and whites battled on the streets of East St. Louis.
Scores were injured. That was child's play though to the scenes in the
fire-lit streets of the city on July 2. Thirty-five thousand armed whites
roamed the streets, seeking black prey. The bodies of Negroes were found in
the gutters, in the alleys. Many were hanged from telephone poles. Others
were thrown, their bodies bullet-ridden, into creeks. A Negro woman was
dragged from a street car by white girls and beaten nearly to death.
Fire-brands were tossed into shacks in the Black Belt and the fire threatened
to wipe out the downtown business section. The police seemed powerless.
Militia were rushed in, but they witnessed lynching Without interfering.
Testimony before the Congressional Committee revealed that E. M. Sorrels,
secretary of a moribund rifle club, had secretly removed thirty to forty
rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, property of the U. S.
Government, to the Aluminum Ore plant to arm company guards. Sorrels was
placed on Aluminum Ore's payroll at $175 a month.
Searching for the causes of such an outbreak, the committee pointed out that
the owners of Aluminum Ore and other East St. Louis firms which had joined in
importing Negroes "lived in other cities. They pocketed their dividends
without concern for their own workmen, black and white, who lived in hovels,
the victims of poverty, disease, long hours and incessant labor."
The strike, as usual in Mellon concerns, was lost. Leaders were blacklisted
and many had to leave East St. Louis with their families to seek employment
elsewhere. In the years following, unions occasionally sent members to the
Aluminum plant to find out whether union membership was still a bar to
employment. In no case was a known unionist employed. Skilled Aluminum
employees, according to the East St. Louis Central Trades and Labor Union,
received a maximum of 58 cents an hour in 1932, against the union scale for
similar work of 85 cents to $1.75. During the crisis the normal working force
of 4,000 was cut to 1,000. Those let out were not protected by unemployment
insurance. The Mellons' responsibility ends when the worker is discharged.
At the Mellon bauxite mines in Arkansas, the State Federation of Labor and
the Western Federation of Miners in 1916 helped workers form a local union
and gain, through striking, an increase from $1.75 a day to $2. The company
agreed not to discriminate against the union men. Next year the failure of
Aluminum's subsidiary to keep its promises provoked another strike. Mexicans
and Negroes were imported to break the revolt.
Since the World War Arkansas has yielded to British Guiana as a prime source
of bauxite. The ore can be mined in Guiana, shipped to New Orleans,
transferred to barges and unloaded at East St. Louis for less than the cost
of mining and shipping ore from near-by Arkansas. East Indians and Negroes
comprise the working force of Demerara Bauxite. Britain's crown colony has no
labor legislation and no inspection of hours of labor, wages or working
conditions. The bauxite mines sixty miles up the Demerara River are enclosed
in a sanitary cordon to keep out plague and pestilence, and only guests and
employees are permitted within the company's property.
In those out of the way spots on the continent where Aluminum found cheap
power, equally cheap reservoirs of labor were usually available, as in North
Carolina, Tennessee and Quebec. Workers at the Alcoa plant near Knoxville,
Tenn., received 25 cents an hour, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel,
whose inquiry was given national currency in the 1924 campaign by the
Democratic National Committee. Those who worked 56 hours each week received a
$2 bonus, and Sunday work brought the wage up to $16. The Committee pointed
out that the tariff on a dozen pieces of aluminum kitchen ware lacked only 80
cents of equaling an American aluminum worker's full 56-hour wage.
Andrew Mellon did not stoop to the dusty, often bloody, arena of labor
management. He maintained an Olympian aloofness from the miner wielding his
pick and shovel or the furnce[sic] man sweltering in the infernal heat of his
aluminum "hot rooms." Ten thousand workers merited his attention but not the
single individual. Ten thousand workers dug so many tons of coal, refined so
many pounds of aluminum a year. But the individual worker creating a family,
coping with life in a terribly strange and ruthless country, seeking his
useful niche in the American community—from him Andrew Mellon dwelt far
removed.
Mellon could find no fault with the almost universal twelvehour day in his
industries. Union Steel under Mellon sway operated day and night on the
two-shift system. So did Aluminum as late as 1929 in New Kensington. Crews
setting out at sun-up to sink "holes" for Gulf Oil were relieved at sun-down.
The twelve-hour day kept the myriads of "hunkies" who toiled in Mellon mills
out of brawls and brothels, his managers contended. The miserable Allegheny
and Monongahela river towns where they worked offered scant recreation. The
squalid, filthy dwelling places proved that the foreigners did not appreciate
anything better, visitors were told. Miners' housing was on a level with that
of Southern slaves, judge Mellon himself had remarked.
In a Mississippi plantation where he stopped he observed that the "Negro
lodges were set in two rows about equal distances apart and resembled miners'
dwellings at our coal mines." The constant flow of cheap liquor evidenced, so
the Mellon managers insisted, the depravity of their employees.
That working men should unite in attempts to disturb company rulings seemed
virtually blasphemous. To Andrew Mellon, inheriting his father's fierce
individualism, the scheme of things left no room for mutual aid. Wages might
for the moment be pushed above the market, but the iron economic law
operating serenely above human giddiness would duly press them down again.
The very effort of low-paid workers to violate natural law was constructive
conspiracy, hence illegal, as judge Mellon argued with liberal recourse to
citations regarding masters and servants.
At times, as when the Allies cried for American oil in 1917 and labor was
scarce, Mellon's Gulf Oil would yield to a mechanics' strike and recognize
the Port Arthur unions. But this meddling came to naught in the depression of
1920 and the unions were no more. Efforts to unionize the oil field workers
in 1929 were sturdily resisted. The men were forced to choose between the
union and their jobs.
Some unions were different. The Mellon-Stuart Construction Company could not
avoid dealing with the building trades unions. Around Pittsburgh they had a
virtual monopoly on skilled labor. The Mellons consented to treat with them
since they concerned themselves with purely craft problems. Besides, they
were almost impregnably intrenched, possessing the divine sanction of power.
Andrew Mellon himself was known to extend a favor to a union business agent.
But the other sort of union was intolerable the type that swept the steel
mills in 1919 under the leadership of William Z. Foster. Such unions
attracted the unskilled and the foreign-born. They could not create a labor
monopoly like the business unions of the skilled craftsmen because the supply
of unskilled workers was apparently inexhaustible. Such unions upheld a
social philosophy that called for ultimate ownership of industry by workers
and technicians, for overthrow of private property rights, for a drastic
overhauling of Government. As the crisis of 1929 wore on, such unions gained
wider following in Pittsburgh Coal Company mines, in Aluminum's company town
of New Kensington, in the Port Arthur refinery and elsewhere. Against them
were pitted the plant's spy system and private police force. If needed, the
troops marched in to demonstrate the virtue and power of property rights.
In keeping with the Mellon conception of workers as parts of the machine, the
employer was under no obligation to the employee whom he could no longer use.
When the crisis hit oil, in common with other industries in 1930, Gulf laid
off some 5,000 men. The workers in the oil fields, a sturdy, upstanding,
hardworking and hard-fighting tribe, cursed the company as the most heartless
in the Southwest and cited innumerable examples of family men cut off without
notice. Wages for those who remained were cut by 1932 to 60 per cent of the
1929 level.
At the Port Arthur refinery, largest in the world, unions were no longer
tolerated, except among the longshoremen. Mexicans and Negroes did the dirty
work at rates averaging around 25 cents an hour in good times. Their families
lived in company shacks renting for $7 a month: two rooms, a kerosene stove,
and water at central wash sheds. In the field the seven-day week was common.
Nearly all those employed at the "holes" worked the week through as did a
third of the pipe line employees and a fourth of the refinery workers.
Paternalistic schemes used in certain industries have never appealed to the
Mellons. Gulf Oil did make concessions to the precrisis swing toward newer
concepts by offering stock to employees on a partial payment plan. At
Christmas, 1928, the company set aside $18,000,000 in stock. Employees were
to pay two-thirds the $80 price, the company contributing $6,000,000. It was
a good buy, for Gulf was selling at 148. Next year it looked even better when
Gulf climbed to 209. After the stock market crash, many worker-stockholders
became panicky. Gulf reassured them that the drop was temporary, and backed
up its faith by offering to lend money to help them complete payments. In
June, 1932, they scanned the curb market to see their stock quoted at 25, and
to reflect on John Raskob's advice that "the way to wealth is to get into the
profit end of wealth production." For Gulf had passed its dividends.
A year after Gulf reassured its faltering employee-stockholders that the Wall
Street panic was a. passing flurry, the company apparently had changed its
opinion and ordered discontinuance of work by January 1, 1931, on its
$50,000,000 Gulfport project on Staten Island. "I can think of no greater
blow to President Hoover's committee to encourage temporary employment in
these trying times," said the chairman of a building trades delegation to
Mellon in Washington, "than to shut off work at the Gulfport plant when it is
known that Gulf Oil Corporation had set aside all the money it needs for
completion of the plant and can con-tinue the full program of construction."
Gulf, he pointed out, had net profits of $44,000,000 in 1929, and from 1924
to 1929 had made $182,000,000.
Three days later Chairman W. L. Mellon announced that work would continue.
Chairman Woods of the Hoover work committee publicly praised him and both
sides retired from the field of incipient battle covered with glory. Later it
was found imperative that work be discontinued.
In the handling of service station and tanker employees, Gulf was
unexceptional. Its station men worked eight to twelve hours a day for around
$75 a month, plus a small bonus on off and grease jobs. Its seamen on tankers
endured the hazard of riding with thousands of gallons of crude oil or
gasoline. Periodically a tanker blows up. The steel shell of the ship is
ripped as by a giant can-opener. The steel decks are laid back, folded back
al-most, from the top of the exploded tank. If the ship is partially loaded,
the flaming cargo pours out and the sea becomes a raging furnace.
Such was the holocaust when the S.S. Gulf of Venezuela blew up in Port Arthur
in 1926 with 85,000 barrels of gasoline in her tanks. Twenty-five sailors
were burned to death. The crew was asleep when the fatal spark ignited. Men
were hurled from their bunks into the blazing water, to drown if they stayed
under, to be burned if they floated. Some tried to get ashore by going hand
over hand down the steel wire mooring lines, but they were white hot and the
sailors dropped into, the burning water below.
Lyndora is a typical Mellon company town. It surrounds the black hulks of the
Standard Steel Car Company's mills, just outside the city limits of Butler,
Pennsylvania. Prudently the MelIons have never permitted Lyndora's
incorporation as a city or town, despite its teeming thousands.
Lyndora was built as a collection of flat-roofed, cellarless, clapboarded
structures, Painted in dull red, the cheapest color. These dreary tenements
line the town's cindered streets. Behind each tenement was its outhouse.
Up on the hill behind Lyndora, ten minutes? distance by sharp trot, lay
the barracks of Troop D, Pennsylvania State Constabulary. At the call of
company official or complaisant justice of the peace, the troopers came
cantering down the hill. In strikes they patrolled the streets in twos,
scattering all within reach with their maces. When the Slavs and "hunkies"
were too rebellious, the troopers' horses were trained to back up to the
tenement doors, kick them in, and then enter the rooms.
In the great steel strike of 1919, Troop D's attentions, were given solely to
Lyndora and its striking workers. Broken by troopers' terror, by hunger, and
by division between native and foreign-born labor, the strikers were whipped
back into Standard Steel Car's mills.
The Butler Chamber of Commerce, under Standard's domination, discouraged
other big corporations from settling there and bidding up the price of labor.
As mechanization sped on and the country's need for rolling stock declined,
Butler and Lyndora fell upon bad days. Wage cut followed wage cut. Part of
Standard's plant was sold to American Rolling Mills Company. In 1929 Standard
was absorbed by Pullman, the American Austin Automobile Company moving into
Standard's old automobile plant after agreeing not to pay more than 1 cent an
hour above the Mellon labor rate. Lyndora became a deserted village during
the crisis that followed 1929.
By 1925 hardly a vestige of unionism was left in any Mellon industry, save
coal and construction. In a broader sense that was also true of American
industry as a whole. Here and there were islands of unionism-the printing
trades, the skilled railroad workers—but basically the forces in control of
the country's biggest corporations had dispensed with any effort of their
employees to help control the machinery of production or to exercise a
dominant voice in working conditions. Ile undisputed sway of the business
classes in political life, typified by Secretary Mellon's leadership of the
Administration, was paralleled by their unchallenged dominance in industrial
affairs.
Union leaders charged that John D. Rockefeller, Andrew W. Mellon and Charles
M. Schwab conspired in 1925 to wreck the United Mine Workers, the last
powerful union in heavy industry. Critics might have replied that the union's
failure to organize West Virginia was the key to its downfall in Northern
fields. Winthrop D. Lane described the union's last effort to organize the
expanding Southern field under the title: Civil War in West Virginia.
A premature effort by Pittsburgh Coal to break with the union in 1922 was
thwarted, in part, by the fear of other operators in the Northern field that
defeat of the United Mine Workers might lead to the rise of a union under
Communist guidance. In 1925 the Mellon company broke with most of the
operators in the Northern fields, abrogated the contract it had signed the
year before with the United Mine Workers at Jacksonville, Florida, and
declared for so-called open shop operation with a $6 wage scale, against the
Jacksonville agreement's $7.50
Foreseeing perhaps the attacks Which would be leveled at the Mellons by the
unionists and their friends, Richard B. Mellon resigned as chairman of the
board of Pittsburgh Coal. W. G. Warden, Philadelphia capitalist and outspoken
enemy of unionism, succeeded him. So deeply was unionism engrained among
miners for two generations in the Pittsburgh field that a frontal attack on
them would be futile. The company therefore began closing its mines as soon
as the winter season was ended. By April 22, 1925, but twelve of fifty-four
mines were operating. By May 12 only two mines remained open. The company
settled down to war by attrition.
In August Pittsburgh Coal announced that "by request" it would reopen Banning
No. 2 mine, non-union. The union accepted the gauge of battle, and declared a
strike. Only thirty-six men., guarded by sixteen deputies and five state
troopers, applied for work on the opening day. By August 25, a hundred miners
were at work, against a normal force Of 400 to 500. The union charged they
were imported. Ile expected rush of hungry men back to work failed to
materialize.
Very well. If the miners insisted stubbornly on the union, Pittsburgh Coal
would furnish one, cut to its own specifications. E. S. McCullough, $1,000 a
month industrial relations expert of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, was
transferred to Pittsburgh Coal's payroll. Thereupon the Federated Miners
Association was organized. Its first convention was held shortly before
Christmas, attended by company officials and carefully chosen delegates. A
renegade from the West Virginia Federation of Labor was installed as
president.
The remaining operators of the Pittsburgh district followed the struggle with
mixed feelings. Some hoped that Pittsburgh Coal would break the union, others
feared that if the union were broken, the result would be more unbridled
competition than any yet witnessed. A few believed the coal diggers would
turn to radical leaders if the conservative union were destroyed. The
Pittsburgh Coal Producers Association disbanded, first sign of the increasing
demoralization in the operators' ranks.
Children became ragged. Wives gave up whatever little luxuries they had
boasted. The company began evicting families from its houses in the "patch."
The union erected barracks. Many miners weakened under the threat of
starvation.
Chairman Warden, reviewing the results of the first year of non-union
operation, was obliged to admit a loss of $1,286,000, against a profit of
$6,914,000 in 1923, "Adequate provision," he noted, "has been made for the
preservation of order, and will continue to be made." He borrowed from the
Pennsylvania Railroad its railroad police superintendent to organize a coal
and iron police force for Pittsburgh Coal. Union officers charged that
extraordinary expense for coal and iron police, deputies, machine guns,
ammunition and the company union had added materially to the million and a
quarter deficit. In 1926 the deficit crawled up to $2,175,000.
Miners in Pittsburgh Coal pits eagerly joined union men in the nation-wide
strike of 1927. The Mellon company's police reported the first arrests of the
strike. On May 1 they ordered the eviction of the Rev. William G. Nowell,
Methodist pastor at Montour Mine No. 4, and his wife and baby. He had
sympathized with the strikers and refused to take up the company's fight. He
had been seen at a union meeting and had been talking with men on the picket
line. The pastor explained that he was making a survey of company towns for a
master's thesis at the University of Pittsburgh. "This attempt to limit the
religious ministry and the religious freedom of the community is to my mind,"
he said, "not only opposed to our general standards of religious rights but
is absolutely opposed to the rights of the American citizen." He was
nevertheless evicted.
The company doubled its coal and iron police force, imported Negro
strikebreakers from the South and obtained a federal injunction against
picketing. The American Federation of Labor summoned a special convention in
Pittsburgh to spur efforts to provide strike relief. Congressman La Guardia,
visiting the strike area, denounced the brutalities of coal and iron police,
and asked for a Senate investigation. Secretary of Labor Davis urged
operators to meet with the union. "We will not meet the union's
representatives because we have nothing to discuss with them," announced Vice
President C. E. Lesher of Pittsburgh Coal.
The Mellon company added to its repertory not only a private union, but a
private labor paper, the National Labor Tribune, the "oldest and most
conservative trade union paper in the United States." The paper donated space
generously to discussion of the internal warfare within the United Mine
Workers, thus adding to demoralization among the hungry strikers.
The U. S. Senate, interested by charges that John D. Rockefeller of
Consolidation Coal in West Virginia, General W. W. Atterbury of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Mellons of Pittsburgh Coal were responsible
for hunger and radicalism of the "reddest kind" in the mine fields, empowered
a committee to visit the war front. Testimony given the Committee indicated
that Consolidation had been the first to break the Jacksonville agreement Of
1924, followed by Charles M. Schwab's Bethlehem Mines Corporation and
Pittsburgh Coal. President Lewis of the United Mine Workers declared that
Pittsburgh Coal miners had been "evicted from their homes and a reign of
terror and intimidation inaugurated that has excelled for brutality and
lawlessness any union-busting endeavor this nation has witnessed in recent
years."
The Senate Committee went to Pittsburgh in February, 1928, to behold
industrial warfare in the Mellon manner at first hand. Ile Senators were
defied when they asked Pittsburgh Coal to reveal its production costs, to
bring out the expense of breaking the union. Before the Committee passed
scores of miners and sympathizers, who recounted the details of beatings
inflicted on strikers by coal and iron policemen, of their usurpation of the
offices of the regularly constituted authorities, of homes invaded without
warrants, of automobiles stopped and searched on the public highways, of
miners' daughters, fourteen and fifteen years old, taken away to rooms rented
by the coal and iron police, where they were kept for days. At Pricedale the
Senators saw ragged children, barefoot in February.
They asked Richard B. Mellon, brother of the Secretary of the Treasury, and
chairman of Pittsburgh Coal's board between 1923 and 1925, to give his
interpretation of these events. Oliver K. Eaton, attorney for the United Mine
Workers, was questioning him about the Jacksonville agreement of 1924.
Mr. Eaton: Now, then, Mr. Mellon, this wage scale agreement for three years,
being entered into while you were chairman of the board, was a contract to
which you did not or from which you did not dissent?
Mr. Mellon: That is right. . . .
Mr. Eaton: . . . And then did you approve in August, 1925, the putting into
effect a wage scale which was less in amount than the one which your company
had agreed would exist for a period of three years?
Mr. Mellon.: Well, it was less or it would not have gone ahead. It had to be
less.
Mr. Eaton: That is hardly the question, Mr. Mellon. Let me put it to you
again. Probably you do not understand it. Did you approve personally the
putting into effect
Mr. Mellon: I never approved
Mr. Eaton: Let me finish.
Mr. Mellon: You asked me personally.
Mr. Eaton: Yes.
Mr. Mellon: I never approved anything personally. It was always in the
meetings of the board. The whole board was almost always there. You see I was
only chairman, and went over to meetings and came back. No consultations
personally. I do not think that I ever had any of the coal people come to me
about it.
Senator Wheeler: Yes, and when it came to opening it up on a non-union basis
Mr. Mellon (interposing): Open shop.
Senator Wheeler: Open shop, you voted for that?
Mr. Mellon: Yes.
Senator Wheeler: Yes.
Mr. Mellon: It is running along peacefully now.
Senator Wheeler: What is that?
Mr. Mellon: It is running along peacefully now, open shop.
Senator Wheeler: Running along peacefully now. Well, just what do you call
peacefully?
Mr. Mellon: Well, they are mining coal there.
Senator Wheeler: What?
Mr. Mellon: They are mining coal there and going along with the business.
Senator Wheeler: They are mining coal, but have you been out there yourself
and seen the conditions that exist out there?
Mr. Mellon: I am not in the operating department.
Mr. Eaton: Now if there is any moral obligation in connection with that, why
would you consent to violate this threeyear wage scale contract and require
these employees either to work for less money or quit work?
Mr. Mellon: Well, they would be getting something if they work. If they quit
work they would get nothing. . . .
Mr. Eaton: Then I take it that the company and the officers did not very
highly regard this written engagement to keep this wage scale contract in
effect for three years, did they?
Mr. Mellon: Well, I don't remember about what they did.
Mr. Eaton: Well, do you think that business can be run on a scale like that,
Mr. Mellon, and contracts disregarded, or don't you approve of it?
Mr. Mellon: Well, the legal opinions differ quite
Mr. Eaton: Well, I am not asking you about legal opinion, Mr. Mellon. The
committee and I are particularly interested in your personal opinion.
Mr. Mellon: Well, I have none.
Senator Wheeler: So you think that any time that one party to a contract can
not afford to go ahead with it that they can morally violate the contract, do
you? Is that your
Mr. Mellon: That is not my answer, Senator.
Senator Wheeler: What is that?
Mr. Mellon: That is yours. You are telling me that.
Senator Wheeler: Well, I am asking you just that.
Mr. Mellon: Well, I decline to answer it. I do not know anything about it.
Senator Wheeler: You do not know anything about it?
Mr. Mellon: That would come up in the coal company's business there. Other
contracts are different.
Mr. Eaton: Well, do you believe, Mr. Mellon, that employees have a right to
get together and jointly bargain with the employer?
Mr. Mellon: I am not going into that, because I do not understand it and I
have not been in the business.
Mr. Eaton: Well, let us suppose that they had gone together and bargained
collectively.
Mr. Mellon: Well, supposition won't do any good.
Mr. Eaton: Do you think the employee ought to keep his word with the employer?
Mr. Mellon: I don't know enough about it to tell you.
Senator Wheeler: You think those striking miners and their families have been
well taken care of?
Mr. Mellon: Yes, I think so from what they tell me.
Senator Wheeler: You have not seen any of them, have you?
Mr. Mellon: No; I did not go to see them. I would not be out there, way out
in the mines.
Mr Eaton: Well, Mr. Mellon, have you ever done any thing as a director to
alleviate this suffering or destitution?
Mr. Mellon: I do not go out feeding them or anything?
Mr. Eaton: Well, have you ever done anything else except feeding them to
alleviate this condition? Have you ever given it any thought?
Mr. Mellon: Do you mean give any money, or what?
Mr. Eaton: No; have you ever given the general situation any thought?
Mr. Mellon: Oh, yes, lots of thought.
In contrast with Banker Mellon, Chairman Warden was decisive in his replies
to Senator Wheeler. Asked if he approved Of collective bargaining, which
President Coolidge had declared to be a "fixed rule in American life," Warden
said "I do not. I prefer to deal directly with the men.)' A business 'firm
should be master of its own affairs. To Senator Gooding's inquiry if the
miner were not an interested party in the discussion of coal legislation, he
answered, "Oh, we'll take care of him."
Abrogation of the Jacksonville agreement he defended categorically. Company
counsel, he assured the Committee, had ruled there Were no legal obstacles to
that action. Senator Gooding reminded him that the Committee "has found
demoralized conditions in your camps. It seemed that there had been a
complete moral breakdown. It appeared that your police helped bring about
that degeneration." Warden admitted rapes and murders in the camps, but
declared that the company was cleaning up conditions as rapidly as it could.
Senator Couzens read into the proceedings a letter sent by Pittsburgh Coal to
its superintendents prior to the arrival of the Committee. "A United States
Senate investigation committee is now visiting the Pittsburgh district," the
letter read. "Keep your police in the background. Avoid all arrests. Instruct
our men to keep out of trouble. If the Committee desires to question any of
our employees, see that you present men you can trust and who can be depended
upon to give the right kind of answers. If you are examined by the Committee,
do not answer any questions you think might be harmful to our interests.
"The company will protect you. The company has mailed a spirited letter to
each individual employee. If you know of any unsatisfactory conditions in the
company camps or barracks, see that it is eliminated at once.
"PITTSBURGH COAL COMPANY."
Fannie Hurst, writer, told the Senators that families had been hungry for
thirty months in the western Pennsylvania coal fields. Attempts at
alleviation were like "touching iodine to a cancer."
When the Committee asked Governor Fisher of Pennsylvania, friend of the
Mellons, to appear before it, he replied that Ile was chief of a "sovereign
state," and did not have to heed Senatorial requests. The Senators wanted to
question him about state licenses for the coal and iron police.
After the Committee departed and life had returned to its normal ways, two
Pittsburgh Coal police seized John Barkoski, miner, and beat him to death in
a company police barracks. He was kicked and blackjacked. A poker was bent
double on his body. His, cars were twisted until they bled. After a company
doctor protested that he had been beaten enough, Lieutenant Walter J. Lyster
and Private Harold P. Watts continued their brutal orgy.
The coroner reported twelve lacerations of the scalp and head, neck
discolored and swollen, nose broken, both eyes blacked, bps swollen and
discolored, breast bone broken, both arms and legs swollen and discolored.
The district attorney described it as one of the "most brutal murders" he had
ever investigated.
By this time, ownership of the Pittsburgh newspapers had fallen into the
hands of "foreigners," Scripps-Howard, Paul Block and Hearst, and these
papers gave voice to the outraged public clamor for abolition of the coal and
iron police system. Forces friendly to the Mellons blocked repeal of the law,
but Gifford Pinchot, successor to Fisher in the Governor's chair in 1931
revoked the commissions of the private armies. Pittsburgh Coal and other
companies thereupon swore in their police as deputy sheriffs.
The slayers of John Barkoski, defended by Pittsburgh Coal attorneys, were
found guilty of manslaughter and given light sentences, in contrast to the
two- to six-year terms imposed on strikers found guilty of opposing coal and
iron police and deputy sheriffs. To Mrs. John Barkoski, the Pittsburgh Coal
Company gave $13,500. "The money doesn't mean anything to me," she said
bitterly. "We'd be all right if John was living."
As feared by many conservatives, the destruction of the United Mine Workers
cleared the field for the National Miners Union, a left wing organization.
Driven desperate by wages which sank gradually toward the Southern level,
miners in Pittsburgh Coal and other camps struck under Communist leadership
in 1931 The struggle was fought with the barbarity usual to such incidents in
the Pittsburgh district.
Pittsburgh Coal police and deputies, for example, shot down in cold blood
John Philipovich while he was standing on the porch of his store in Arnold
City. The store front was studded with bullets when his prostrate form was
removed. His offense had been renting the basement of his store as a relief
station for strikers. The private police, together with a Pittsburgh Coal
superintendent, were found guilty of murder in 1932.
After the 1931 strike, conditions in the western Pennsylvania coal towns sank
to appalling depths. In camps where men were working, charity organizations
found it necessary to eke out the meager wages with relief. Hundreds of
strikers, evicted, lived in pitiful tent colonies through the winter of
1931-32. Their kitchens closed for lack of soup meat and potatoes. Miners
roamed through the suburbs of Pittsburgh asking for bread.
Even so, the Pittsburgh Coal Company failed to profit. By January, 1932, its
preferred stock was 36 per cent in arrears on dividends and common stock
dividends were a matter of ancient history. In the meantime the Rockefeller
Consolidation Coal Company, which had opened the war on the miners' union in
1925, had gone into receivership.
By then the Mellons' interest in Koppers mines overshadowed even their
holdings in Pittsburgh Coal. The Koppers mines in West Virginia and Kentucky
repeated the drab story of highpriced company stores, of private law and
order, of ruthless eviction of discontented miners, of near-starvation wages
and of company "scrip" in lieu of cash payments, which resulted in the bloody
rebellion of Harlan and Bell county miners in 1931-32. However unprofitable
Pittsburgh Coal may have proved to its stockholders, Koppers easily made up
any deficiency in the Mellon purse by its fat earnings from low-paid Southern
mountaineer labor.
To the armies of the unemployed which trod the streets in 1931-33, Mellon
companies contributed their quota. Half of Aluminum's working force in New
Kensington, Pa., original seat of the industry, lacked jobs by 1932, and
those fortunate enough to be retained on the payroll worked two to four days
a week. Gulf Oil scrapped 5,000 in the Southwest. Although industrial leaders
had assured President Hoover that they would not cut wages, Aluminum joined
U. S. Steel in declaring a 10 per cent wage cut in October, 1931, followed by
another in June, 1932. The Koppers research staff was cut to the bone.
Despite the enormous reserves of Mellon corporations—$280,000,000 for Gulf
Oil, $85,000,000 for Aluminum, $50,000,000 for Koppers-little effort was made
to shield discharged employees from destitution. Their companies boasted no
unemployment insurance and claimed no responsibility for those who were cast
off. Communism found eager converts along the bedraggled streets of New
Kensington while the sons of Thomas Mellon clung doggedly to shibboleths
based on his pioneering days.
pps 207-226
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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