Kasama

Kasama is publishing a five part series on communist political work in the miners’ strike wave of the 1970s. We will be posting one piece a day over the next few days.

Ambush at Keystone:
Inside the Coalminers’ Great Gas Protest of 1974

Part 3: Injunctions & State Police

By Mike Ely

Over the first days of that week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the strike spread quickly. The newspapers soon reported that over 20,000 miners were out. The work stoppage pushed out of McDowell County into the surrounding areas, until much of southern West Virginia, the heart of the unionized coalfields, was affected.

Each night we gathered at the Welch bypass, to hear any rumors of mines or groups of scabs planning to return to work. And each night, we would send out squads of pickets to shut down the locals who would not stay out on their own.

The strike was, pretty obviously, a direct challenge to the Governor and state government. The walkouts were in direct violation of the national coal contract. The state’s economy was at a standstill.

The militancy of the miners even inspired other protests against the gas rationing. For example, in the tiny town of War, deep in the maze of western McDowell valleys, the mayor had (at gunpoint I heard) hijacked a gasoline tanker truck passing through town, and was Robin-Hood-like handing out free gas to residents.

So faced with all that, the machinery of law and repression started whirring and screeching. The court system started issuing injunctions against one union local after another, demanding that they go back to work, requiring them to show why they should not be held in contempt of court, and threatening a series of heavyhanded measures (including fines and possible jail for local officials). Every night you could turn on the TV for local news, and suddenly there came a long list of “public service announcements” announcing injunction against one set of miner after another ordering them to return back to work at the next available shift. Pickets were officially assumed to be conducting criminal activity – in contempt of court orders.The press denounced the strike as illegal (which was true) and said it was based on the raw threats from a small fringe (which I don’t believe was true).

There were heated debates within the state government and coal establishment about how to suppress the rebellion. I remember hearing about one exchange in the state capital, where some official demanded that the National Guard be called out against us. A voice of caution asked what percentage of the National Guard was coal miners. The report gave me a passing fantasy of the state’s tanks and soldiers “coming over” to us – since, obviously, the vast majority of the state’s National Guardsmen were also coal miners.

The United Mine Workers (UMW) apparatus at the national level joined in denouncing the wildcat and (I suspect) in some areas the mid-level officials played some role in encouraging scabbing or identifying ringleaders for the authorities.

And, then, as his main move, the Governor moved a small army of the West Virginia State Police into MacDowell County — to, essentially, impose a form of martial law on the southern part of the state. Their plan was simple: Several hundred State Police took over the Welch National Guard armory – as their base of operations. State Police were teamed up with state mine inspectors — so the cops could find the many, often-hidden mine entrances and back roads. And they then fanned out across the area to find our roving pickets, to identify the active miners, to serve them injunctions and arrest them.

In reality these State Police carried out a suspension of basic civil rights. Any time men gathered in public in groups of three or more they were subject to surveillance and searches by these roaming cops. License numbers were taken down, names were recorded, searches were conducted for weapons, and increasingly the brothers started to be arrested and taken into the Welch armory for interrogations.

The Fight Local by Local

All of these repressive measures, unfolding quickly over a week or more, had a sharp impact on the struggle. For one thing, each local was ordered by the UMWA leadership to hold meetings that first weekend and officially order their men back to work Sunday night.

The results of those meetings varied greatly, depending on the political complexion of the workforce and their local officials.

In the more militant locals, such meetings were a chance to consolidate the ranks behind the strike, hear out problems, identify waverers, and (at the same time) gain a bit of legal cover. When local officials at mines like Maitland or Capels “ordered” their men back to work, there was an obvious wink involved — since everyone knew these same men were organizing the now-statewide strike from behind the scenes.

At the more conservative mines, like Keystone where I worked, the local meeting was a very different affair. Keystone’s grey cinderblock union hall, a short distance from the mine, was packed inside and out with about 150 men. Some (not all) of our local mine committeemen were encouraging miners to go into work on any shift where pickets did not appear. At the meeting, some of the most outspoken among the committeemen openly attacked the “radicals” who “keep honest men from working.” They argued for obeying the law, upholding the contract and following the back-to-work orders of both the judges and the national Union officials. And after that opening, a debate erupted over whether it was simply too dangerous to scab while the rest of the county was still on strike. [11]

When I rose to defend the strike and its demands, it was (to say the least) quite controversial — since this anti-militant politics had had a tight hold on many of the older workers and the local union leadership. Some of this local’s officials (a little clique with their hands on the money) were determined not to let circles of militants gain a foothold. The argument got heated – and almost came to blows. Because so few others dared speak openly for the strike, it was hard for me to gauge where most of the workers actually stood.

In any case, after this wave of local union meetings, it became clearer which mines would require continuous picketing.

Clearly, this was a specific tactical plan by the authorities: They wanted the more conservative mines to force us to picket, and then they planned to unleash the state police to identify and persecute our hard-core activists — hoping to break the back of the movement. Once one or two mines were successfully back to work, it would have encouraged the more backward or financially desperate men to scab, and quickly ended the strike.

And, just as clearly, this created a real tension among the miners: the militants thought that everyone knew the strike was on — and so if there was still a need for us to run risks, it was only because of a few scab-hearted men, encouraged by corrupt union officials. They were increasingly frustrated and furious that they should risk jail every night just because some selfish cliques were determined to break the strike.

This frustration was focused at a few specific mines – like Gary #2 or Keystone #1 — larger mines that tended to have an older workforce, and more outspokenly conservative local leadership.

Imagining Communist Work

We had at that time a small circle of communist activists in southern West Virginia, sent there in 1972 by the Revolutionary Union, one of several national new communist organizations that had emerged from the radical movements fighting for Black Liberation and an end to the Vietnam War.

We didn’t have much to guide us. We were trying something relatively new.  For inspiration, we had Mao’s concepts like mass line. For theoretical detail we generally reached back to the earlier days of the communist movement.

The RU’s initial concept was to bring light into the struggles the workers were already waging. It was an idea lifted from an early passage by Lenin. “Light,” in the enlightenment language of the Russian revolution, meant revolutionary ideas and the socialist class consciousness. [12]

There was an aspect of “bringing in” consciousness from outside – the “light” of anti-racism, women’s liberation, internationalism, socialism and communist revolution that we had brought with us into the coalfields. And there was an aspect of “bringing out” the lessons that were supposedly there to extract within the workers’ own experience. As their struggles produced controversy and repression, victory or defeat — their experiences would (we assumed) leave them open to a process learning new, deeper, and rather radical political insights — especially about the “class nature of the state,” the possibility of finding allies among other strata of the people, the importance of a broader internationalist view of our class struggle, and ultimately, the question of how to actually end the constant outrages of capitalism…. meaning socialist revolution. [13]

In reality there proved to be rather significant differences over what we were doing – both between those of us on the ground in West Virginia, and between different factions within the RU’s leadership.

Gina and I had a view of winning over a section of the militant coalminers to the revolutionary movement that had arisen, mainly among Black people, over the course of the 1960s. I thought there might be a second wave of 1968-style radical upheaval – perhaps in the early 1980s. And I thought that if we did our organizing well, we might be able to bring much larger sections of workers into the mix over time – perhaps making an actual socialist revolution possible. This was consciously a concept of “building off a 1905 for a coming 1917.”

Looking back, I can now see that BT (who helped initiate our coalfield project) had a significantly different concept: He saw coalminers as already the “most advanced section of the working class.” He saw in the wave of early wildcats over Black Lung as proof of already-existing “class consciousness.”

BT thought the miners were playing a special, leading role in the working class as a whole (and would continue that in whatever came next). He sometimes hinted that there was something special about miners historically and internationally – a special consciousness rooted in their difficult conditions.

His conception pretty openly confused (or equated) the militant us-against-them trade union solidarity common among miners with an openness to revolutionary political views. And within the RU generally there was a related notion that the most active and militant workers were also naturally the most politically “advanced.” We assumed that the workers operating at the core of the wildcat strike picket movements were most likely to become active supporters and organizers of a coming revolutionary movement for socialism.

Any radical project among coal miners had to face some obvious questions: How stubborn would the religious and social conservatism of the workers turn out to be? Would their picket militancy help “eat up” religious fundamentalism and patriotism when exposed to our revolutionary politics?

And the original, somewhat naïve, assumption was problems could be, relatively quickly, brushed aside. There was explicitly in the RU, a saying that “taking Marxism-Leninism to the working class is bringing it home.” We were to discover that this home was well-stocked in other ideologies, and the workers were relatively attached to them. [13]

But that discovery, and those experiences, still lay ahead of us when, in 1974, we dove into this Gas Protest.

A Flyer: Controversy Inside and Out

The RU had chosen to disperse its few cadre widely across southern West Virginia. The nearest comrades were an hour-and-a-half drive from where we lived. I was the only comrade employed in the mines of McDowell county. So, day to day, Gina and I were very much on our own.

Since this Gas Protest was centered in “our” county, Gina and I had a special responsibility to develop ties within that picket movement. We were mainly just “learning the lay of the land” and identifying who we would be seeking out (after the strike ended.) Many of the strike leaders we met would be among the first circles involved in the Miners Right to Strike Committee that the RU would soon initiate.

At the same time, we were impatient to start injecting larger political lessons and ideas into this strike’s charged atmosphere. So Gina and I were excited when “the org” produced a leaflet within the first days of the strike. That seemed an ideal way to start acting as communists among the workers. It was the opening shot of our public work as a revolutionary organization – an announcement of presence and politics — with all the attention and controversy that this would eventually bring with it.

The leaflet (which I may have buried in my files somewhere) described the justice of this strike. It refuted various lies circulating in the local media. It then went into a lengthy discussion of lessons we workers could draw from what was happening – about the oil embargo, the use of courts by the capitalists, and so on.

I have to admit my heart sank a bit when I saw how wordy it was. Our communist movement was always long-winded, and its fetish for words would only get worse. The flyer’s language was also stilted. I remember complaining that the strange expression “money bags” was used to describe the capitalist class. BT explained to me (with some pride) that this sentence had been lifted whole from a letter by Lenin.

So, as you can hear, the leaflet was a bit primitive — mixing important arguments with mechanical imitation and dogmatism.

To be honest, my reaction to the flyer also had to do with the pull of being so deeply involved in this strike. Coal miners could read, but generally not well. Complex arguments about capitalism would limit the flyer’s audience and circulation — i.e. the very things that brought “light” into this struggle could make this leaflet less effective as an instrument for the strike itself. Now as always, there was a sharp tension between our work as communist revolutionaries and our work as enthusiastic activists of a particular struggle.

Still, it was exciting to have this first communist leaflet in our hands. It was something new and needed. How new it was came out in ways we never anticipated.

The Argument Against Explanations

Gina and I rolled up to one of the evening picket meetings which got smaller later as the week went on. We simply handed the leaflet to those standing around, saying it was something we had gotten from friends “up around Beckley” (which was true, if not the essential truth.)

Several people read the opening, nodded approvingly, and tucked a copy away in their back pockets. No, we protested, there were lots more here in our trunk. The idea was to hand them out as we picketed, so that more people could understand what the protest was over and why their own activism were needed.

We had come from a world of campus politics, and cold mornings selling the Black Panther and other revolutionary newspapers at factory gates in the Midwest. The idea of flyers was (to put it mildly) second nature. But this was a much less literate world, where speaking face to face was how things were done.

One miner suggested that we might have the Welch paper print the statement — which was much more possible than I understood. Others said that they knew people who would want this, and circulate this, and started taking bundles of the flyer out of our trunk.

But then came the real controversy. The crew from Capels arrived at the bypass, and they instantly had a real dislike of the whole idea of the flyers. It was not (as I might have expected) over the communist radicalism of our (read: Lenin’s) argument. It was over the very idea of telling workers what the strike was over.

Now, the vibe of the various crews was very different.

The Maitand men were, like their leader DD, very sober and considered. They came off as “established,” like family men, and had a bit of caution in the midst of leading this whole rather daring adventure.

The Gary #10 boys were younger and obviously wilder, and linked to wide circles of friends their age throughout the surrounding counties. Some of them would disappear for a day into nearby Wyoming or Mercer county and show up that night with ten or fifteen new pickets ready for action.

But the men from Capels were more like a biker gang — there’s no other way to say it. Over the course of the strike, I just got the vibe that there was something sleazy about them. Not the workers of that whole mine, of course — an older operation on the west side of Welch. But the crew that ran that union local had a thuggish feel.

The Capels crew was led by Peewee, a squint-eyed, rail-skinny guy, who had alternated between being a notorious drunk and a spirit-filled Holiness preacher. He was a hustler and eagerly promoted himself as “the leader” of this Gas Protest with almost daily statements to the local press (all while DD, Young Hatter and others preferred to lead from the shadows). And Peewee’s prominence wasn’t that great for this strike — since the man had a reputation.

In any case, the Capels crew was not interested in bringing flyers with them on any picket lines.

“Why in the world do we need to tell those men what the strike is over?” one of them said. “All they need to know is that there is a picket standing on the road, and a brother is asking them for help.”

I argued that in it was important to put forward strong arguments that people could take up and embrace. And then the argument got to core of the matter.

The Capels guy came back:

“What you don’t understand is this: most men, almost all of them, are scabs in their hearts, cowards and sucks. You can explain this strike to them all day long, but the only way they will stay out of work is if it’s clear that we will kick their ass if they crawl in. And if you start explaining this-and-that to them, they will just get the notion that they have some right to decide if they should strike or not, and that would end it all.”

So there were two approaches running strong in our picket movement. The guys from some mines were eager to use the nightly picket lines to explain what the strike was over — while those influenced by the “Capels line” were a bit more heavy-handed.

Fishing at Midnight

One evening, DD called me into the backseat of his car. He explained that his local had now been hit by injunctions, and that he (as local president) had issued a public back-to-work order. Everyone at the mine knew it was insincere, of course, but if no picket line appeared at his mine the court would take it as evidence that he was secretly leading his miners to stay out on strike.

In short, he needed me to go picket his mine, at least one shift change. I had started this strike as an outsider. And this was, finally, a sign of acceptance.

Another miner, Charlie, volunteered to go with me, and so we waited on that bridge at the usual time for the midnight shift. DD sat down the road, where he could watch but not be seen.

There was some real danger of arrest and jail. The state police were roaming the highways at night looking for pickets, and this mine sat just across the river from the main road. Because Charlie lived nearby, we wore bandanas to avoid identification., Charlie also carried a fishing pole. Lots of guys were doing that while picketing – so that, in case of arrest, they planned to later claim they were “just fishing.”

So there we stood, pretending to fish at midnight, wearing bandanas, on that one lane bridge, with only the river sounds as company.

Maitland was one of the more militant mines, and so none of the miners showed up for work. Only the pump men went in (who by mutual agreement keep the mine from flooding during strikes).

About half an hour after midnight, we got a bit tense when a lone car drove up on the bridge heading straight for us. Charlie leaned over the bridge railing, tending to his fishing line. I walked over to the car. Through the glass I saw the startled face of an old man. He was a bit drunk, He fumbled around, then cranked down his window – and, to my surprise, handed me a fistful of dollar bills. With my face wrapped in that handkerchief on that lonely road — he just assumed we were bandits trying to rob him, or perhaps jack his car. He was hoping his few bucks would satisfy us. Laughing I handed him back the money, and explained we were there to serve the people, not rob them. He waved and drove off.

When Charlie and I arrived to meet up with DD, he was sitting slumped low in his car with a wide brimmed hat pulled over most of his face. His voice was low, almost a whisper as he spoke, and as I slid into the back seat alongside him, I saw his hand was actually shaking. I was bewildered at his emotional state. DD was always so calm — a leader by virtue of judgment.

Thinking about it later, I put together the pressure he was under – and suddenly confronted, much more clearly, the issues of life and death unfolding around me. I knew the dangers we were under of course, and (as communists) we had a sense of responsibility to the people, both here and around the world. But, inexperienced and a bit intoxicated with the excitement, I had not yet learned to read that larger chessboard on which moves were being made.

The state police were hammering our pickets hard. Numbers of men were being held for trial. DD and the strike’s other main leaders was targeted with injunctions – threatened with jail by the police and judges. And there was no hint from Charleston that the Governor was about to bend. The state was slowly tightening its grip on us. And DD knew well what a defeat could mean, for the miners generally, for the men at his mine, and (I’m sure) for himself, his personal hopes and his family.

It was sobering, and reminded me sharply, again, that real lives and hopes were in the balance. Our enemy was not a some distant abstraction but a very active malevolent force aiming straight for the organized core of this movement.

Notes

[11] We had entered the mines shortly after a new reform union leadership, the Miners for Democracy (MFD) had overturned the murderous and corrupt union regime of Tony Boyle (1972). The new Union president Arnold Miller had been a genuine rank-and-file leader within the Black Lung movement but, to the great disappointment of the miners themselves, he would quickly be absorbed into the existing institutional structure of collective bargaining – and prove as hostile to militancy as the rest of the labor movement’s officialdom.

[12] This concept of “bringing light into the struggles the workers were already waging” was soon criticized within the RU and, I believe for good reason.

The problem was the formula’s fixation with the “struggles the workers were already waging.”

As my Gas Protest story reveals that is too narrow a framework and too limited a focus for revolutionary work. And in fact, many of the struggles that working people need to engage are rather different from the ones that they, themselves, will spontaneously start to wage. Clearly the miners were justified in launching this major movement of resistance. They were right to fight the injunctions and defend their right to strike – as repression grew over the 1970s.

But the goals of liberation also require that struggle be built around the racist mistreatment of Black and immigrant people, around unjust wars, around the brutality of police, the liberation of women, and the ugly social conservatism of traditional “family values.” Such necessary, more explicitly political struggles are essential means of developing broader revolutionary consciousness and organization among the people. And they often have to be creatively initiated by communists and more consciously radical people. They don’t arise simply by bringing “light” into “the struggles the workers were already waging.” Shortly after the 1974 strike, the RU’s circles in the coalfield started to develop a two-track approach – where we continued to work deeply in the circles of militants waging the wildcat strikes, and also started to, independently, initiate various politically radical campaigns and struggles, that allowed for much more explicitly revolutionary work among the people – and not just among the employed male coal miners.

[13] In the fall of 1972, as we were living out of sight, waiting to move down to West Virginia, Gina and I were instructed to study a passage known as B1, from Lenin’s 1895 notes for a draft party program).

“The Party’s activity must consist in promoting the workers’ class struggle. The Party’s task is not to concoct some fashionable means of helping the workers, but to join up with the workers’ movement, to bring light into it, to assist the workers in the struggle they themselves have already begun to wage. The Party’s task is to uphold the interests of the workers and to represent those of the entire working class movement…The program says that this assistance must consist, firstly, in developing the workers’ class-consciousness. We have already spoken of how the workers’ struggle against the employers becomes the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie…The workers’ class-consciousness means the workers’ understanding that the only way to improve their conditions and to achieve their emancipation is to conduct a struggle against the capitalist and factory-owner class created by the big factories.

“Further, the workers’ class-consciousness means their understanding that the interests of all the workers of any particular country are identical, that they all constitute one class, separate from all the other classes in society. Finally, the class-consciousness of the workers means the workers’ understanding that to achieve their aims they have to work to influence affairs of state, just as the landlords and the capitalists did, and are continuing to do now.

“Every strike concentrates all the attention and all the efforts of the workers on some particular aspect of the conditions under which the working class lives. Every strike gives rise to discussions about these conditions, helps the workers to appraise them, to understand what capitalist oppression consists in the particular case, and what means can be employed to combat this oppression. Every strike enriches the experience of the entire working class. If the strike is successful it shows them what a strong force working-class unity is, and impels others to make use of their comrades’ success. If it is not successful, it gives rise to discussions about the causes of the failure and to the search for better methods of struggle. This transition of the workers to the steadfast struggle for their vital needs, the fight for concessions, for improved living conditions, wages and working hours, now begun all over Russia, means that the Russian workers are making tremendous progress, and that is why the attention of the Social-Democratic Party and all class-conscious workers should be concentrated mainly on this struggle, on its promotion.”

[13] Linc and Me: On the Material Basis of Incorrect Ideas by Mike Ely, on the Kasama site. ]

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