SYNOPSIS
PHILIP MURRAY: Biographical Portrait of a Union Man
By P. Angelo
Copyright, l996
(The full text is available as an E-Book at: www.pjbooksonline.com )
This e-book biography of Philip Murray is meant for workers everywhere in the world to read.
To my knowledge, there is not a recorded life of Philip Murray in any library or bookstore. Among the world’s great labor leaders of the 20th century he is the forgotten man. But he should not be.
Murray is, in my opinion, the single most visionary labor leader of the 20th century, a labor leader who dedicated his life to institutionalizing and putting the finishing touches on trade unionism in America.
There are those labor scholars and historians who seem to think for one reason or another that no biography of Murray is needed. However, I believe that there are those who would like to know more about the man and feel that a biography of Murray is long overdue.
I offer this e-book for any and all to learn about Murray the man and labor leader and decide if he is worthy of the recognition that I am convinced he deserves.
Read the labor history of Murray’s time and his constant, driving, dramatic involvement in it. It is possible that if you are a worker you may wish that a man like Murray were still around today to speak for you. If you already know a thing or two about labor history and the struggles of union making in America, you may read about Philip Murray and his marked contributions to the successful organization of labor and be left to wonder why he has been all but ignored by history and those who remember the most public figures of those days but do not recall hearing anything about Murray.
P. Angelo
Chapter One
TALES OF THE DUNGEON: Boy Miner and his Union Come of Age—l886-l9l2
It seems a simple thing to write about a man who was among the pioneers to establish the organized labor movement in America and who went one great step further by institutionalizing trade unionism in this country so that by now it has gained its proper place among the other great institutions in our nation.
It seems a simple thing to do, write a life portrait and tribute to Philip Murray until one stops to think and ask: Why has nobody else done it among labor writers, scholars and historians?
The question is moot of course and has no merit until at least one biography of Murray turns up. Then the answer can be debated and determined by whether or not there’s any proof in the pudding as to why Murray has been orphaned and virtually shunned within the world of union literature.
Philip Murray was born May 25, l886 at 77 Baird’s Row in Blantyre, Scotland to Irish immigrant parents, William Murray and Rose Ann Layden Murray.
Blantyre, about six miles from Glasgow, is located in the District of Lanarkshire. It seems fitting that Murray, born into a fervent trade unionist family and who passed through the fiery trials and tribulations (that included much death and mayhem) of establishing the organized labor movement in America, would be born in a district the likes of Lanarkshire.
At Murray’s birth in l886, Blantyre claimed l5 of the biggest and most productive coalmines in Scotland and was numbered among the “mostly heavily industrial areas in the world.”
But also, Blantyre had the dubious distinction of being one of the major storm centers of trade unionism. It was there, in l8l7, that the first miners’ union was organized. The establishment of the union there was a desperate retaliatory measure by the miners against the powers that be in order to set straight the shameful history of that region. In l606, the Scottish Parliament passed an act where collieries and salters were declared to be necessary servants of ‘lairds’ of estates should they take work on any coal hole on the ‘laird’s’ property. Any miner (and his family) who did became by Scottish law a serf for life.
This shameful history of Murray’s birthplace (which he knew well because he was a studious boy who reportedly always had a book in his hand) seeped into his bones At all stages of his union career, he often raged with indignation when worker-repressive actions on the part of employers turned up in workplaces. Most especially in the ones that employed the workers for which he was personally and professionally responsible..
There would be no slave driving of workers on Murray’s workstation watch without something being said or done about it.
By the time Murray entered the mine at Blantyre at age ten (didn’t every boy in every family enter at that age?) he had already been a union ‘pro’ so to speak. When Philip was only six years old, his father, president of his local, took him to union meetings, at age seven during the brutal strike of ’93, Murray worked the soup kitchen and performed other chores like gathering whatever families could spare from their vegetable gardens to maintain strikers’ food supply.
Again, by the time he entered at ten he already knew the ropes, what to expect, what dangers on the inside to look for and what simple rules of courtesy to his fellow miners he was expected to follow such as thoroughly covering over bowel movements. Fathers and sons, beginning with the walk to work in the morning, usually in the darkness, forged the golden link in the chain of longstanding miners’ traditions.
Even where some fathers may have been loveless and showed little patience or concern for their sons, the partnership of work remained intact. Each depended on the other to achieve his daily quota or warn of impending dangers. It was a survival thing, a necessary alliance in a black hole where within an instant one’s life could be swallowed into a dark nothingness.
Usually where there are blood ties, fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, relatives working together in a dangerous place, the bond among them is bound to become fused. The familial dynamic that spread even to strangers in the miners’ workplace was, in most cases, the core of the miners’ communal life.
Philip Murray was a part of that community. He grew up in it, perpetuated it, protected it however he could: As a worker defending himself or his miner friends, as a checkweighman, union officer and national labor leader.
This communal cling that kept the spirit of mining communities alive, especially during times of strikes and of hardship, was why Murray often returned to his roots to the small mining towns where he had worked no matter how prominent and famous a labor leader he had become.
Murray seemed to need to return ‘home’ in order to draw energy from the places where he’d worked to give him perhaps a renewed sense of who he was and from where he came.
It was as if he needed to step back into the secure confines of a Robert Burns poem and become for a while the humble Scotsman living in his thatched abode awaiting destiny’s call.
The day before Christmas Eve, l902, Philip and his father William arrived in Irwin, Pennsylvania and were greeted by a shimmering white landscape of blowing and drifting snow.
Father and son walked through the snow to their destination three or four miles from Irwin to a town called, Madison. In Madison, both father and son boarded with the family of Pat Fagan whose family had already made the connections with Philip’s uncle and namesake. Boarding at the Fagan’s initiated a life long friendship with Pat Fagan. Two young men close in age, they worked together for the first time at the Arona Mine in Madison.
Motivated to get ahead in life, to make something of himself, Murray took a correspondence course. By working hard and filling three cars per day at a dollar a car in a short time he had earned the sixty dollar enrollment fee to qualify his entrance into the International Correspondence School, an l8 month course that he completed in six. In this course, Murray not only honed his natural math skills but also learned as much as he could about mining, labor relations and economics.
He studied nights and worked days. Being accountable to the requirements of the correspondence course did much to contribute to Murray’s later acumen as a United Mineworkers (UMW) Steelworkers Organizing Committee (SWOC) and United Steelworkers of America (USWA) negotiator. During those sessions he seemed always confident, ready to recite figures or pour over the fine details of proposals that the coal. operators and company presidents lay before him on the table which he hardly ever let pass unchallenged.
Studious Murray was but an excessive drone he was not. He was as good a ‘paddy’ storyteller as there was, a prankster who tied sleepers’ toes to bedposts in boarding houses and a soccer player who played the game (and coached his team) in a fiercely scrappy and competitive way.
A group picture taken during the year he arrived in Madison, shows the young seventeen year old Philip standing among mature middle-aged-looking men, staring out at the camera with a look of daring readiness on his face, telling all who would take notice that he was prepared for whatever challenge, physical or mental, that might be hurled against him.
You could almost say Murray snarled with animated life, energy, and purpose. When the stories and tall tales miners at gatherings liked to tell and tease one another went beyond the pale to the point when enough was enough, you could be sure it was Murray who would redirect the tone of the conversation and get on with the more serious business of speaking out against and dealing with the dirty tricks coal operators and their foremen pulled on miners. Foremost among the insidious tricks that Murray despised were false claims by foremen and weighmasters of bug dust in cars and arbitrary reduction of car poundage according to whatever specious estimate the weighmaster proclaimed. But worst of all, the short weighing of every third car, up to a quarter or half ton, which earned for companies thousands of dollars.
Needless to say, weighmasters were not a very trustworthy bunch in the eyes of Murray and so he was always the one to speak out for checkweighmen, a miner who was selected by his fellow miners and whose salary was paid by them to watchdog the weighmaster.
It is not surprising then that Murray’s frustration would come to a head at the Keystone mine where he and Charlie Dailey, the weighmaster, went at it when Murray had had enough of Dailey’s blatant dishonesty.
Down went Charlie Dailey with one blow from the fist of Murray after which, as Pat Fagan put it in an interview 60 years later, “The dogs of war were after him.”
A man named Tom Hickey who ran a saloon nearby in the town of Hermanie hid Murray, a mere boy of l8, in the cellar where crouching down there among the beer kegs Philip feared for his life.
It was a fear not unfounded for had company guard-thugs gotten wind of his hiding place, he would’ve been murdered in cold blood under the pretense that they had merely been defending themselves against a violent man who might’ve done them in first.
The miners at Keystone, 600 in all, went out in support of Murray but all ended up living in tents for four weeks and being starved into going back to work.
Among the tent dwellers were Murray’s father, his stepmother and eight or so stepbrothers and sisters, his new family created when at the age of two his mother Rose Ann died leaving his sister, Mary, four, and him motherless until not long after his father remarried a Scottish girl.
Needless to say when the air had cleared the local sheriff and his deputies ‘escorted’ Murray out of town. He was put on a train headed for Pittsburgh and was told to stay out of Westmoreland county ‘for good’.
It was the Charlie Dailey incident, Murray said in an interview years later, that determined in his mind what he wanted to do with his life.
His years of unwavering and productive service to the union put an exclamation mark on that statement.
From the Keystone mine fiasco and notoriety went Murray to Hazelkirk Mine #l, in Hazelkirk, PA, a small mining town near Monongahela City, a town on the far outskirts of Pittsburgh.
It was at Hazelkirk where Murray’s career as a union man began to take off. He was elected president of the UMW local at Hazelkirk and soon after was chosen in an election by the Hazelkirk miners to be their checkweighman. For the latter honor, Murray was “rewarded” by a jealous loser of that same checkweighman election by being bushwhacked by him under the cover of night, a beating that Murray did not take lying down. He went to the boarding house, summoned Pat Fagan and one or two other friends and returned the favor to the assailant (a big strapping man nearly twice Murray’s size) by giving him a good going over.
It would not do for Murray, now a respected leader among men, to play patsy to any bully who might come along.
As president of the Hazelkirk local Murray took up miner causes and respect for him grew in the ranks of his fellow miners. He talked up the necessity of organizing the non-union fields and making an all-out assault on the captive mines—non-union mines owned and operated by the corporations which due to their all-in-one vertical operations reduced production (coal transportation for one) and labor costs to the bare bone giving them a decided competitive edge over non-captive and unionized mines.
It was these non-union below scale wages that wrecked havoc on fair-minded unionized coal operators who could do little more than cut the labor workforce in their mines to compete or worse shut down their mines altogether.
Another problem that Murray found intolerable was the high rates of accidents in the mines (too many of them avoidable) and the virtual non-existence of workmen’s compensation for miners many of whom as victims of accidents brought more likely starvation to their families than sympathetic assistance from their operator-bosses.
In Hazelkirk, Murray had lived at the Red Onion Boarding House before moving in to board with his sister Mary, now Mrs. Jimmy Malone.
Was it by design that Mary persuaded her younger brother Philip to move in with her since there just happened to be a pretty girl, Elizabeth Lavery, l8, who lived next door?
The Lavery’s were no less a miner family than the Murrays, even more tragically so since Elizabeth’s father was killed in a mine explosion at the Vorhees mine when Elizabeth was only three years old, a devastating family event that brought on the early death of her mother forcing the issue of baby Elizabeth being raised by her eldest sister, Jane, one of nine Lavery sisters.
Elizabeth’s and Philip’s was a whirlwind courtship and their marriage at Resurrection Church in Mon City was a good place for Philip to begin his new life as a married man, a union that lasted 42 years up until Murray’s death.
It did not take Philip long to perceive that Elizabeth possessed the sterling hallmark qualities which set apart miners’ wives from all others: a fierce loyalty to their men and miners in general, a resistant, wary attitude toward their husbands’ employers and a stoic determination to ride out any storm, regardless of what the future might hold.
Who knew better than Elizabeth that the opinion of coal miners was true, that the loss of a mule in a mine accident caused a coal operator greater concern than the loss of a human life.
By l9l2 Murray had already become a seasoned UMW union officer and the United Mineworkers Union the nation’s first most inclusive industrial union. The union’s burgeoning membership numbers began to cause a mild panic among employer associations who began to form a virtual alphabet soup of organizations like the Citizen’s Industrial Association (CIA) and the National Council of Industrial Defense (NCID) to ward off the threat of a broad base of trade unionism infringing on the free-market forces operating within the American economy.
To the Manufacturers Association, the real villain in the piece was the unrestricted immigration that brought between l904 and l9l4 one million immigrants per year to American shores.
Needless to say a great oversupply of labor resulted in steel, the captive mines and railroads reducing wages to near slave labor rates.
The cry among all unions, not just the UMW, was Organize! Organize! Organize! Especially the immigrant workers. Fight big capital dollars with lowly workers but high union numbers!
Capitalists cared little that by paying low worker wages they were perhaps cutting their own throats by not boosting workers into what might become a dynamic consumerist society who could in great volume be buying their products. However, one could argue that corporations and industrial barons like Rockefeller could earn perhaps more on the interest accrued on the capital structure of their businesses alone than on what a large part of a worker consumerist society buying their product (which many were forced to do on meager wages anyway) might bring to their coffers.
To Murray, worker consumerism had become a near obsession with him. A man works to earn a decent enough wage to put food on his table, pictures on the walls of his house and rugs on the floor.
It’s called a living wage that will bring workers a decent standard of living. It would take no revolutionary uprising of workers to achieve this goal. Just collective bargaining agreements that would permit workers to gain their fair share.
Of course there’s nothing new here. The top labor leaders of the country were already saying this, Gompers, president of the AFL, in the vanguard.
But nobody in the top echelons of government nor among the powers that be within would listen.
It was like speaking into a dead microphone. Spokesmen of the powerless, like Murray, yearned to even hear a feedback squeal.
Leftist political and legal theorists like Laske, Brandeis and Frankfurter presented in their writings arguments that generally favored the rights of labor and the working class. These men of stature brought dignity and a bit of romance to the workers’ cause.
The studious Murray, unlike some labor leaders, did not feel threatened by labor and economic theorists. To the contrary he admired keenness of mind and intelligence.
The battle between labor and capital was a David and Goliath match up, and so far, at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, David was losing the battle. Badly.
So maybe a new strategy was needed. Obviously and of course. But what was that strategy to be?
It would take Murray at least thirty years more and World War II to find out.
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Sources for Chapter One: Tales of the Dungeon: Boy Miner and his Union Come of Age. 1886-l9l2
All the sources cited here in Chapter One and subsequent chapters were documented as endnotes in a longer manuscript version of this biography. They are all listed in this shorter version because most if not all of the resources cited at the end of chapters in this e-book were used in a more general and less detailed manner in context of this briefer biography.
Stories of Murray’s boyhood, accompanying his father to a union meeting at age six, helping work the soup kitchen at age seven and entering the mine at age ten, come essentially from an interview I had with Joe Murray, his wife Helen and their two children, Erin and Bethann. That interview took place at the Murray home in Pittsburgh, March 2, l996 and was followed up with several phone conversations during the writing of the biography and afterwards. Also, good background is given on Murray’s boyhood and younger days by John Chamberlain who interviewed Philip Murray from which interview came, “Philip Murray”, an article written by him which appeared in LIFE, February ll, l946. From the Chamberlain source, I believe, came the stories of Murray’s earlier and prime-labor-leader years that appear in newspaper articles (clipped and most of them undated) pasted in two or three scrapbooks among other papers and documents on Murray available at the Penn State Labor Archives. Also good background on the boyhood of Murray come from “Stories of Philip Murray”, Story numbers l, 2 and 3 found in the Murray File Box at the Penn State Labor Archives. Other sources used in this chapter: Joseph Frazier Wall, ANDREW CARNEGIE (Oxford, l970 & Pittsburgh, l979); John Anderson, COAL: A HISTORY OF THE COAL-MINING INDUSTRY IN SCOTLAND WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE CAMBUSLANG DISTRICT OF LANARKSHIRE, (Glasgow, no date), l0-ll. John Brophy, A MINER’S LIFE, (Madison & Milwaukee, l964), 37-4l. INTERVIEW WITH PAT FAGAN by Alice M. Hoffman, September 24, l968, Pittsburgh, Pa., Oral History Collection, Penn State Labor Archives, 9. Jaunita Diffay Tate, PHILIP MURRAY AS A LABOR LEADER, Dissertation (New York, l962), 9. Philip Taft, ORGANIZED LABOR IN AMERICAN HISTORY, (New York, l964), l65. “Philip Murray Will Never be Dead as Long as the Things He Built Live on,” STEEL LABOR (l952), l0. Price V. Fishback, “The Miners’ Work Environment: Safety and Company Towns in Early l900s,” THE UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA: A Model of Industrial Solidarity? John H.M. Laslett, Editor, (University Park, l996), 2l0. Samuel Eliot Morison, THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: l869 to the Death of John F. Kennedy, l963, (New York & Scarborough, Ontario, l972), l29. Harold M. Watkins, COAL AND MEN: An Economic and Social Study of the British & American Coalfields, (London, l934), 245-6. Paul M. Angle, BLOODY WILLIAMSON, (New York, l952), l33. Harold J. Ruttenberg Papers, Penn State Labor Archives.
Chapter Two
‘SAIRVING’ THE MINERS: Man on a Mission—l9l3-l9l6
On October l5, l9l4, the Democratic congress, under President Wilson, passed the Clayton Act that stipulated that labor was not a commodity or article of commerce and neither were unions “illegal combinations in restraint of trade.”
AFL president Samuel Gompers called the Clayton Act labor’s ‘Magna Carta’, a too enthusiastic perhaps guileless response to the legislation considering the minimal positive impact the law brought to labor.
Which is to say the Clayton Act was treated with disdain by the corporations and, worse, totally ignored in the courts.
But for up and coming union officers like Murray and many of the established ones, recalcitrant attitudes among corporate powers toward unions had become a fact of life. Through their influence those same powers saw to it that most judges, at all levels of the judiciary, ruled in their favor and damn be the law, any law that gave trade unionism the benefit of government support that could ultimately lead (in their mind) to the collapse of the free enterprise system.
It was in this labor-suppressed industrial environment that Murray earned his stripes as a union officer. These economic conditions, stacked against labor, would continue to exist for another 20 years.
But in the early days of union-making and within generally successful unions like the UMW, workers brought their own formidable weapon against their adversaries that kept trade unionism’s survival instincts alive: a fierce solidarity (within the union core at least) among union officers and the rank and file.
In many cases life long friendships among key union officers helped build the foundation of that solidarity. From the first day he set foot in America, Murray’s friendship with Pat Fagan began practically joined at the hip. Beginning with his becoming president of the UMW local at Hazelkirk (a local that sat in UMW District #5, Pittsburgh region), Murray befriended the president of District #5, Van Anberg Bittner (whom he will succeed as president of that district in l9l6) and the three men, Murray, Fagan and Van Bittner, will become a triumvirate of dedicated union men, bound to the same purpose-- organizing the unorganized and increasing by membership numbers union power—a goal they will achieve together not only in the UMW but also the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the United Steelworkers of America (USWA)
The loyalty among the three men throughout their personal and professional lives was mutual and unshakeable.
The biggest challenge within the UMW the three men faced (under the leadership of John L. Lewis of course) was sorting out the disorganized mess that was endemic to the bituminous coalfields. In Murray’s region alone there were more than 4000 coal companies competing with one another, union, non-union and captive mines. There were also fly-by-night maverick owners out to make a quick buck compounding the problem and creating fierce cutthroat competition spawning wage reductions, bankruptcies, and broken contracts. Needless to say all of the above contributed to the overproduction of coal that for the most part accumulated annually at 200 million tons over demand.
In l9l2 at a relatively young age, Murray, 26, was appointed to the UMW International Executive Board (IEB), a top-grade position that rewarded his worthiness but more importantly gave him the opportunity to put a face on big capital and come to know better the UMW’s organizational structure.
As an IEB member Murray gained access to information revealing to him that the US Steel Corporation, Consolidated Coal Company, the Pittsburgh Coal Company and subsidiaries of all three held the greater chunks of land in the coal industry. US Steel’s land holdings were in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Indiana and Illinois. Consolidated’s 340,000 acres were in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky. Pittsburgh Coal’s l65,000 acres were in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky. Those were the most controlling landholders in the region where, even still, coal seams were distributed among an estimated 4,000 various persons or companies.
On the union side he acquired first-hand experience of the coalfields and the indigenous features of their surroundings. Especially frustrating to him was the impenetrable captive mine fields whose operators (mostly custodians who answered to corporate board directors) yielded as little wages to miners as they possibly could.
These were only a few of the facts that the young Murray, who seemed to have a limitless curiosity for them, devoured. Not only did a natural curiosity and a penchant for learning drive his ambition, but he was also shrewd enough to know that in knowledge there was power. Arming himself with details about the corporations and the union gave him the advantage of firing it like scattershot at reluctant miners in coalfields who needed to be persuaded to join the union. But it was even more valuable to him at the negotiating table where he had to deal with representatives of the coal operators (and later steel companies) to reach collective bargaining agreements. Finally, the best use Murray made of the storehouse of information he carried around in his head was demonstrated in presentations he gave before House and Senate Hearing committees when dubitable union issues were being publicly debated or aired.
Wherever the forum and however violent the setting, Murray was never at a loss to present the facts, as he believed them to be, of the union’s side of the story.
Studious learner, who could never compile enough facts to arm him at the negotiating table, Murray indeed was, but a behind-the-desk pencil and paper man, no.
Dauntless organizer that he was, he took his own life into his hands by going into coalfields thick with the flak of violence as most in West Virginia were.
Murray, a devout man (about which we’ll get into later) carried about him a mantle of invincibility grounded no doubt in his faith that to him, daily, was a palpable thing. With that faith came fearlessness in the face of death and any man who disdains death in the presence of his enemies is a formidable opponent indeed.
Some marveled at his boldness. During one skirmish in West Virginia, miners raised the flag of rebellion against the state and took over telegraph lines, railroad junctions and signal houses. Murray stepped into the eye of that storm and urged the strikers to put down their squirrel guns. Instead they turned their guns on him and he had to hi-tail it out of there. During his getaway he nearly got killed when his car slipped on a muddy road and slid down the side of a mountain.
With maddening regularity, miners were killed by coal guards who were not even arrested let alone indicted and brought to trial. But anytime a mine guard happened to get killed, scores of miners were arrested and kept in jail for months merely on suspicion of murder.
The worst of the lot of the mining regions where murder, mayhem and cruel injustices were imposed on miners was the state of West Virginia where violence erupted in small mining towns having disarming bucolic names like Cabin Creek, Paint Creek and Holly Grove
In the latter named shots were fired into a tent colony killing one miner and a woman. Sixteen others were wounded in the wake of the violence after which, violating all state laws, the military commission arrested scores of strikers.
It came to a head in the spring of l920. A number of Mingo County operators locked out miners and brought in replacements causing all hell to break loose at Matewan. A gun battle ensued killing ten men including the mayor and two company guards who happened to be brothers. Striking families spent the winter of l92l in tent colonies and the West Virginia governor placed Mingo county under martial law. On July 3l, l92l, Sid Hatfield, the Matewan Chief of Police who survived the gunfire in l920 was ambushed and shot by a gang of company men. Three weeks later between five or six thousand men carrying high-powered rifles and pistols marched over the ridge of the mountain to Logan and Mingo counties and, as expected, gunfire broke out between Logan county coal operator guards--- reinforced by the West Virginia militia—and the marchers. The battle went on for over a week. The marchers’ opposition included company guard shooters, the West Virginia militia and a coterie of armed businessmen. As many as fifty men on both sides were killed when the marchers broke through the lines. The tide turned when federal troops arrived on the scene. Martial law continued in West Virginia until the strike was finally broken.
The slaughter at Mingo County in l92l cost the UMW dearly. In l920 UMW paid-up membership in Mingo county was nearly l00,000. By l929 the paid-ups fell to under l000. As a result, many of the fields in West Virginia eventually fell into the hands of the National Miners Union---a far more militant union than the UMW---organized in l928 under left-wing leadership.
Speaking on the subject of West Virginia as a young union leader and later as a mature and prominent one, Murray seemed to take as a personal affront the corporate and judicial outlawry that went on in that state.
When a company guard kills with deliberate intent a striking coalminer and is not even put in jail or brought to trial because, supposedly, he is merely protecting the property of his employer, or when striking and picketing miners are taken to magistrates (who represent the lowest level of civil law) and through specious so-called legal proceedings are put in jail by them, or when goliath corporations like US Steel might shoot union organizers (like Murray) on sight for merely setting foot on their property, it was enough for Murray to consider it his right in the eyes of God to spew righteous wrath upon the heads of the super rich owners of the coal properties in West Virginia who kept workers and unions there in a ‘pauperized’ state.
In Murray’s mind, West Virginia was Lanarkshire the district in Scotland where he was born and where the miners and their families as late as the l7th and l8th centuries were by law ‘beholden’ to the lairds upon whose estates they worked.
Were judges who imposed their will on workers and unions any worse than the lairds of Scotland who kept the miners who worked on their estates in peonage? Too often and especially in West Virginia, judges through their judge-made laws usurped what was supposed to be the legal rights of workers to join unions. How could these judges—most born with silver spoons in their mouths—possibly know how ordinary working men functioned as human beings? Could they even visualize where or how these workers lived, what their wives and children looked like and what (if anything) they ate for dinner? For that matter how would any judge anywhere in the country know those things?
In a perverse way it seemed that the prime standard judges applied to their legal behavior and decision-making involving working men was to keep their distance, remove themselves as far as possible from an understanding of their lives.
From his experiences as an IEB organizer in the captive mine fields of West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and Southwestern Pennsylvania, Murray will compile in his memory an anthology of stories that will create a dark spot in his heart. Throughout his union career he will call up these stories to remind his union adversaries why it is necessary for unions to exist. He will also give vivid and emotional accounts to his listeners at convention gatherings, executive board meetings and public forums of having witnessed children in mining towns eating out of garbage cans, or of having guns mounted atop captive mine compounds aimed at his heart, or of helplessly watching coal police evict striking miners from their homes, tromping inside miners’ houses from the mounts of their horses scaring small children nearly to death.
Being an international union officer and especially a field organizer during the first three decades of the century was for men like Murray who took their jobs seriously an unrelenting act of faith in the future of unions that bordered on madness. When one considers such a persistent giving over of oneself to the dangers involved and the failures more often than victories one had to face, one can’t help but look back on the history of those union times and marvel. To this day it seems an inexplicable feat of endurance that borders on mystery.
The offshoot of the death and violence in West Virginia was the establishment of the Committee on Education and Labor of the U.S. Senate in October, l92l. Murray spoke out loudly and clearly before the committee stating that basic freedoms of speech, assembly and movement were treated by the coal industry in West Virginia at best with derision, at worst contempt.
Obfuscating the issue of basic human rights of workers were the loosely applied insidious charges by their adversaries that all unions were made in the image of the International Workers of the World (IWW), an amalgam of radicals, anarchists and Bolsheviks whose sole purpose was to bring down institutions of government and seize control of them by the more ‘deserving’ and ‘dynamic’ working class.
Such demagogic charges against legitimate trade unionism in America galled Murray to the extreme since he himself was an immigrant who had only received his naturalization papers in l9l2, loved America calling the day he became a citizen the greatest day of his life.
To Murray a trade unionist was a trade unionist and an Anarchist, Communist or Socialist were all the same. There was no ‘class-struggle’ in the vocabulary or in the intentions of Murray who never doubted the high merits of the free-enterprise system and who would never think of trying to dismantle it or renounce it and operate outside its capitalistic framework.
At a symposium marking the 50th anniversary of SWOC and Philip Murray’s l00th birthday, one of the invited speakers labeled Murray a Fabian.
Murray was not a Fabian. However, as a union leader he did demonstrate in his actions a political eclectic, but in the end his trade unionism beliefs always transcended whatever he might have sampled from political, social or economic theory.
That’s not to say that Murray could not have lived easily with certain Fabian principles. As the Fabians, he rejected Marxist history and the idea that revolutionary events stirred up by the working classes could change its course; he could embrace the slow pace of achieving for workers the ultimate goal of receiving economic and social rewards due them with no less patience than the Roman general Fabius who held back his troops from battle and starved out his adversaries; lastly, he could accept a state that was neutral so long as it answered to democratic elections and consequent results.
The parts of Fabianism that Murray would not abide was the creation of a labor party and an unyielding national minimum wage to improve the ‘national stock’ since he believed in labor market forces, including industrial classification systems, no less than his adversaries believed in the economic principles of laissez-faire.
Besides all that, the Fabians tended to be elitist. The ideal British state of the future that they envisioned was one, as the authors of HAROLD LASKI. A LIFE ON THE LEFT put it, that was “managed and planned by technocratic, scientifically trained experts.” Where’s the merit in that? Murray would ask. In his mind, government officials elected by the people were to take the full responsibility for keeping the state moving toward the future. Let the scientists, technocrats and ‘experts’ who happen to be called into the government to contribute to its operation answer to them.
As to the debate about whether or not the poor were ignorant and unfit or ‘exploited and oppressed’ as the Fabians believed, Murray’s answer to that would be: They are neither; they are human beings.
And because in his mind it was a straight path to working within the free enterprise system to achieve fair share of the American economic pie for the workers he spoke for, he lost no time indulging in effete social or political disputations about class differences or the saintly ideal of the working man being the Salt of the Earth or any other such high-blown rhetoric of idealization.
He was hands-on always striving to meet for workers their simple needful demands like better wages, safer working conditions which he negotiated in the Voorhees mine the one where the explosion occurred that killed Elizabeth’s father and negotiating the right from coal operators to organize outside day men, employers operators claimed ‘didn’t count’.
Simple, needful one-thing-at-a-time accomplishments for miners such as these was what increased respect for Murray in the eyes of his fellow miners and catapulted him up in the ranks by l9l6 to becoming president of District #5, second (after Illinois) largest district in the UMW.
When Van Bittner took an appointment to the national union staff and resigned, Murray ran for the office as District #5 president and won.
By l9l6, having ten solid years of union activities and field organizing experience under his belt and through his IEB membership inside knowledge of the workings of the union, nobody but Tony Jones, the man whom he beat in the election, was surprised that Murray emerged the victor.
Jones, an Italian who changed his name, went around asking why Murray who had less time in and experience as a union officer beat him. The answer he got back was better to take a chance with the less experienced Murray who was honest spoke up for miners than the man (Jones) he defeated whose reputation for doing the same was questionable.
Lest it be presumed that by anglicizing his name, Jones unwittingly revealed a rather shallow motive of seeking a position of power for its own sake, at that time—among some segments of the rank and file—Italians were no less despised than blacks. It was a fact that the proportions of ethnic populations had not matched up in percentages with top echelon positions held in nearly all unions.
The electors’ faith in Murray did not go unrewarded. He was very soon as popular as he had always been among the miners and workers he represented because he never stopped trying to get the best deal for them.
John Brophy, president of District #2 (region east of District #5, Johnstown-Somerset area) wrote in his autobiography, A MINER’S LIFE that Murray had a solid reputation as a genuine, dedicated union man:
“Murray (was) not the type to raise a row, but was more likely to steer his way carefully through a mess, trying to get the best he could for the union without upsetting applecarts. He would not welcome arranging cozy settlements with coal operators in underhanded ways to give district presidents credit with their…membership…(because)…he knew he had to live with such machinations.”
Brophy goes on to say that considering all the turmoil in District #5, no better choice than Murray could have been made. Murray was a master at reconciling differences. “He had an easy, conciliatory manner and never pushed things to a showdown if they could be allowed to work themselves out gradually.”
Granted, it seems to this point in this life portrait of Murray that the narrative is skewing a bit too much toward sketching a man who had no faults and could do no wrong regardless of the decisions he made as a worker and union man.
Too good to be true is an appellation that suits no human creature and perhaps the most unlikeliest of them a union officer.
Murray was not ‘too good to be true’ but he was a genuinely good man. One of the main reasons was that he was a man of deep faith. Throughout the sixty-six years of his life, he never caved in to the many contradictory urges the world presents on a platter to persons in positions of power.
Again, Murray was a Catholic who attended Mass daily in whichever city he happened to be. This daily attendance at Mass both reinforced his faith and injected a fervor in him that kept him alive, daily, to seeing to the tasks of the union business at hand.
To most Irish Catholics of Murray’s time, the Mass and Catholic faith were no less a natural part of their daily lives as hard work from dawn to dusk. But also there to define and reinforce Philip’s faith and union mission was Pope Leo’s Revum Noveram, an Encyclical that sounded a universal call to the betterment of the working class. Every working man being equal in the eyes of God, cited the Encyclical, had rights and privileges to pursue economic opportunities and to secure his social and moral rights. This charge was held not only in the hands of the workers but employers and governments too who controlled the economic destiny of workingmen.
Murray relied on the canonical spirit of Revum Noveram as the foundation for many decisions he made as a labor leader. The Pope’s encyclical was treated by Murray as one of the most important books on his desk. It served to remind him daily of his obligation.
In his later years, this dedication to the betterment of worker’s lives brought him recognition and acclaim. He received several honorary doctoral degrees (one from Boston University to name only one), acknowledging his lifelong perseverance in pursuing the task of bringing better standards of living to workingmen.
Also, throughout his marriage to Elizabeth, as well as his love his faith established his fidelity and devotion to her. Never to anyone’s knowledge did Murray’s behavior even hint at succumbing to the temptations men of power face daily. In fact so vigilant was he in his marriage vows and fidelity to his faith that as a dutiful Catholic believer he even avoided the occasions of sin. He hired a very young David J. McDonald to be his personal secretary when he was elected vice president of the UMW and brought in his niece Mercedes to be h is secretary. Not until later, past his vulnerable-to-temptation years, did he bring in female office staff. These women who worked with him on a daily basis came to love him and serve him loyally.
On the home front, Elizabeth’s love and loyalty to him remained, throughout their marriage, beyond reproach. When it became apparent to the two that they would not be able to have children they adopted a two-year old boy from the Roselia Foundling Home in Pittsburgh and named him Joseph.
There’s a question that possibly Murray’s devout faith and Catholic beliefs caused some to criticize his union leadership as being too overbearing and dogmatic, especially regarding his methods of union governance. It has been said that while he openly seemed to accept ideas from his close advisors or district officers, he paid little heed to them if it meant disrupting the status quo or changing union policy. After life with John L. Lewis (more about him later), at a time when Murray’s power exceeded that of Lewis, Murray always had the final word on any subject involving union policy.
It was not because he carried the dogmatism of his faith to the workplace; but rather because he knew from his turbulent UMW union days that men of ambition who would be ‘king’ were always ready to take power—often for its own sake—presenting this idea or that one, or making this or that excuse. For eleven years, between l920 and l930, he and Lewis were hounded by such men which, had FDR not come along, might have completely destroyed the union.
Such challenges did not come to him by the time he became president of the CIO and USWA. By then Murray was certain that he had been ‘called’ as a labor leader. Anyone who second-guessed what he thought was best for the union incited in him the same response as a saint grouching at one who has interrupted his prayers.
So perhaps this immutable power that carried in his inner spiritual life is what makes it difficult to put a political label on Murray. Along with being a trade unionist, Murray was politically all these other things: A Catholic-reformist, a liberal-progressive and a neo-corporatist. Within any of the political rubrics one might place him, he worked the limits of their boundaries.
As a practicing Catholic, Murray could not have, as a labor leader, ignored the storm of Catholic reformism that took on a vital (if sometimes dubious) life within the American social, economic and industrial debate during the 20s, 30s and postwar 40s.
Amid the broader scope of the Progressive and Socialist movements, the Catholic reformist movement in the U.S. contributed resonant voices of its own. The voices ranged from the extreme corners of radical conservatism represented on the Left by the Reverend Charles Owen Rice and on the Right by Charles Coughlin, the controversial and contentious radio priest.
Monsignor John A. Ryan’s (and Catholic bishops’) l9l9 STATEMENT ON SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION that sought capitalist reform in the American economy was a work compatible with Murray’s beliefs. The STATEMENT stressed the value of workers as human beings and not mere commodities of their often too-greedy capitalist employers and urged that workers be paid wages enough to live properly and not in a state of terminal poverty.
On the other hand, Charles Coughlin’s populist zealotry and constant harangues against capital, organized labor and FDR’s New Deal got no endorsement from Murray. The Catholic Workers Movement founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin that took a personalist Francis of Assisi approach to tending to the poor through Houses of Hospitality was one among the new wave of Catholic reformist movements beginning in the 30s that Murray enthusiastically supported. One Catholic priest-reformist who in the city of Pittsburgh practically operated on Murray’s doorstep was Charles Owen Rice. Rice founded in Pittsburgh the Catholic Radical Alliance (CRE) and later a Pittsburgh chapter of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU). The latter organization rendered activist support by clergy (Rice, the most vociferous, in the vanguard) to the trade union movement and the former, CRE, a local Pittsburgh Hospitality House version of the Catholic Workers Movement in New York. Up until the postwar years, Murray for the most part maintained his distance from the publicly outspoken priest but in l948 and l949 he will take advantage of Rice’s anti-Communist zealotry and massive CP membership file and purge the Communists from the CIO so described in Chapter Fifteen of this e-book.
As a liberal-progressive, Murray tolerated left-wing activism as it suited the union’s purposes though he never signed on to their agendas; contrarily, he was as vocally patriotic and loyal to his country as any jingoistic conservative might be: In the face of an angry rank and file and militant factions in the UMWA and later the CIO unions, he insisted during both wars on maintaining the unions’ agreed-upon no-strike pledges. As a neo-corporatist, Murray’s desire to complement collective bargaining with tripartite government boards took him to the liberal edge. He permitted the state to set workers’ wage and entitlement policies, but at the same time yielded to a pluralist consensus that institutionalized the union hierarchy and required the rank and file to ‘lie down like good dogs’ since the union had a seat at the Corporatist Table and was working to accommodate their needs.
Of all the labor leaders of stature in the 20th century, perhaps Murray was the most beloved by unionists at all levels. But he could also be considered the most paternalistic. Ironically then, Murray imposed some of the same attitudes on the rank and file of his own union no less than the paternalistic attitudes ordained on the labor force at the turn of the century by the industrial giants whom he mostly despised.
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Sources for Chapter Two: ‘Sairving’ the Miners: Man on a Mission—l9l3-l9l6
COAL AND MEN, 30, 57 & l24, l62, l70, 2l5, l48 & 206-2ll. INTERVIEW WITH PAT FAGAN, 6, l5. Arthur E. Suffern, ORGANIZED RELATIONS AND INDUSTRIAL PRINCIPLES IN THE COAL INDUSTRY, (New York, l926), l5l-52. John Chamberlain, “Philip Murray,” LIFE MAGAZINE, 20 (l946), 78-90. ORGANIZED LABOR IN AMERICAN HISTORY, 243-44. “The Case of the West Virginia Coal Mine Workers.” Opening Statement of Philip Murray, VP of UMW before the Committee on Education and Labor of the U.S. Senate, October 2l, l92l, 5-6. A MINER’S LIFE, 23, 73-74; l36-37, l49-50. CERTIFICATE OF NATURALIZATION, Number 3ll994, September l8, l9l2, Murray Papers, Penn State Labor Archives. PROCEEDINGS OF THE 24th ANNUAL CONVENTION OF UMW DISTRICT 5 Held at Union Labor Temple, Webster Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, February l8-22, l9l3, 20-28. John H.M. Laslett, “A Model of Industrial Solidarity? Interpreting the UMWA’s First Hundred Years, l890-l990,” THE UNITED MINEWORKERS OF AMERICA, l7. The last pages of Chapter Two make up an essay based on my experience and general knowledge of Catholicism as it was in Murray’s time and the importance religion played in Murray’s life as reiterated in the opinions of nearly everyone who knew him, but especially as revealed in the interview with Joe Murray who told a story of his father rousting him out of bed early in the morning to attend Mass with him. Stories such as Joe’s and others that demonstrated Philip’s deep-seated faith which, lifelong, seemed to never waver.
CHAPTER THREE
WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH: New General and his ‘Trusted Lieutenant’ Take Command---l9l7-l92l
When the US entered the war, April 6, l9l7, throughout its duration 60,000 miners entered the military ranks.
That was one of the sacrifices the UMW made to show its support for America’s entry into the war. The UMW memberships’ patriotic response was in stark contradiction to a resolution put forth by District #2 in the l9l6 UMW convention stating that miners were against US involvement in the war. The grounds on which the resolution was based was that countries on both sides of the conflict were basically capitalistic rivals reaping profitable benefits at the cost of young lives being sacrificed on both sides of the ocean..
Not only had the UMW been well represented in the Great War by many of its members but it also demonstrated its support for the American doughboy by agreeing to abide by the Washington Agreement which outlawed strikes during the war..
As president of District #5, Murray urged compliance to the Washington Agreement that thrust him into a maelstrom of discontent within the union’s ranks especially among its militant members. The miners, said the vocal militants, were being locked into an agreement that would subject them to economic hardship because of the outrageously high prices for food and commodities and a runaway inflation that the government seemed unable to control.
In his own district, Murray had rewarded the compliant miners by negotiating a contract with operators that got them (what was then) a lucrative five dollar per day wage rate.
The inevitable rebellion against the Washington Agreement, which throughout the war the miners had only grudgingly accepted, came when at war’s end the administration kept the Washington Agreement in play, a decision contrary to what it had promised the miners. The UMW, led by an angry coterie of militants forced the issue of a strike set for November l, l9l9. The demands the UMW made on operators, some seeming unrealistic if not outrageous, included a 60% increases in wages, a five day week, six hour day, time and a half for overtime and double time for Sundays.
A Coal Commission met and on December l0th agreed to yield to the UMW a 27% increase in wages and that only on the condition that the penalty clause remain in place.
In the face of continuing inflation, swift postwar cutbacks, the lowering of wages and numerous mine closings, the rank and file was adamantly prepared to ignore the Bituminous Coal Commission’s recommendations and stay out until a more acceptable offer was made.
But when on behalf of the government an Indianapolis judge issued an injunction enjoining the union to cease and desist, acting UMW president John L. Lewis yielded and ordered the miners to return to work. Lewis justified his decision by telling the miners it was one thing to go against coal operators but, as good US citizens, a more honorable consideration to yield to the higher authority of the government.
The militants led by a fractious trio of present and former district presidents named Walker, Farrington and Howat, accused (in so many words) Lewis of being a cowardly ‘company’ man and a lackey for a government that would as soon crush the working class as yield even a crumb to it.
This action by Lewis (said his detractors) was insidious and cowardly in the face of the many strikes in industries across the country, especially the one in big steel. Consider the boost strikers across the country would’ve gotten had Lewis scoffed at and ignored the injunction, they argued.
However, what went unsaid by the UMW’s socialist faction, the militants who led the charge against Lewis, was that the steel strike was led by William Z. Foster, an avowed Communist who in his public outspoken ways was already fueling the flames of America’s self-proclaimed sentinels of the free enterprise system (namely big business and the National Association of Manufacturers) who were claiming that the strikes across the country were Bolshevik led, masterminded by a bunch of European immigrant factions of anarchistic and Red conspirators.
In the face of such fear-mongering propaganda that left an impression of dubious trust for unions in the eyes of the American public, Lewis’ decision to heed the injunction could not have been more felicitous. By doing so he reinforced in the public’s mind the idea that the UMW was a responsible union that could not be compared to the radical, irresponsible bunch at the IWW; he demonstrated a fearlessness in his decision-making that established his authority over the rabble-rousing socialist faction in the UMW; he also made it clear that if Foster by some magical hat trick were going to win the victory for the steelworkers it would not be because his power was compounded in a strike-partnered arrangement with the mineworkers’ union; he had calculated that thanks to his friends, Philip Murray, Tom Kennedy and Van Bittner along with the voting blocs each controlled in District 5, l and 2l, his election as president of the UMW (coming up in December l920) was practically assured. But perhaps the most important reason why Lewis did not disobey the injunction was because he dared not, as acting president, jeopardize his chances of winning that election by involving the union in a protracted and costly strike.
So in the end the tables were turned on the militants. The man who became the president of the UMW by a 60,000 vote margin in the December election a year later proved to be a man emboldened by a keen instinct for knowing how to manipulate the reins of power.
Nor could anyone argue with Lewis’ perception: Who else of such an opposite nature, temperament and personality, would have had the good sense to call upon Philip Murray, the quintessential soft-spoken but tough-minded conciliator, to be his choice as vice-president of the UMW so the two could stand side by side atop perhaps the most powerful union in the world?
The first meeting between Philip Murray and John L. Lewis if not apocryphal at least challenges the imagination.
It took place in l9l2 in the Old Labor Temple at the Webster Hall building in downtown Pittsburgh
As the story goes, previous to the meeting between him and Murray, Lewis (at the time an organizer for the AFL under Gompers who had been sent to help organize the Westinghouse plant) had made arrangements to meet Murray at the designated place but when Murray arrived Lewis was going at it with two brutish boilermakers (supposedly Westinghouse watchdogs) one of whom Lewis had already knocked down.
Murray asked if any of the combatants were named Lewis and Lewis answered ‘Yes, but I’m busy now, be with you in a minute.’
So the story goes.
No two men seemed more destined to become professionally partnered than Lewis and Murray. Physically speaking they were worlds apart in their differences. Lewis was a muscular barrel of a man. Into his middle years there was hardly an ounce of fat on him. His voice boomed when he spoke and sometimes growled which along with his bushy eyebrows and mane of black hair made one feel like he was in the presence of a lion, so overwhelming was his comportment.
Murray, on the other hand, was more slightly built, quieter and more controlled in his speech.
No less dissimilar were the two men in their temperaments, personalities and the personal values they embraced.
Lewis was vindictive toward those who opposed him, saw himself as a man of unquestioned authority and among his underlings would not abide disloyalty or disobedience. He possessed a personality that permitted him to move about with ease among the influential rich and powerful. He befriended persons holding high office in government, Herbert Hoover foremost among them, and felt generally at ease in all walks of company except, ironically, within close proximity of the rank and file of the union he led. Heading the list of Lewis’ personal ambitions was his near covetous need to possess power which he believed was necessary to add muscle to the authority he wielded often with impunity not only against his enemies but within the union and later the nation itself. For 40 years Lewis succeeded at being perhaps the country’s most powerful labor leader to the point of institutionalizing himself as an iconic figure in the 20th century movement for organized labor.
Contrarily, Murray was even-tempered, calm, unassuming, and socially and professionally ever ready to yield the limelight to Lewis or whoever in his coterie felt a greater need to bask in it than he.
On personal values, Lewis was no match to Murray. Murray’s whole behavioral spectrum, professional and otherwise, was grounded in humility whose foundation was spiritual in nature. Lewis possessed a moral rectitude, non-spiritual in nature but more situational and subject to the eclipsing shadows it may throw over his ego.
So then when did the two men link together in a mutually satisfying personal and professional partnership that lasted 20 years before differences struck like lightning between them and violently split asunder their friendship?
Differences aside, in the beginning what brought the two together was their singular purpose to create a more powerful union. Murray knew that Lewis was the man to lead the UMW, a union that by l9l8 had become complacent and suffered a vacuum of leadership. It would do the union a world of good, Murray firmly believed, if the man with the coal-seamed brows moved up and took hold of the highest reins of leadership.
Lewis could see the value of a man like Murray who would maintain equanimity at the top. Murray possessed traits of character and temperament that any top-echelon union leader could make good use of. Especially in the UMW where treacherous undercutting from within was becoming rampant and a battle for the union’s soul was being waged against the leadership by the militant socialist faction.
By the time of the l9l9 UMW convention (the one that Lewis presided over as acting president) and the friendship between the two by then had become bonded, Murray became Lewis’ point man in the l920 election campaign.
By that time a popular and trusted union officer, Murray had a broad base of friends throughout the UMW giving him important power-bloc connections that boosted Lewis’ chances of being elected.
The major task that Murray faced was persuading John Brophy and other less recalcitrant militants among the rank and file that the UMW desperately needed a president of Lewis’ formidable force, energy and aplomb to make up for the unproductive leadership of the departed former president, White, and the in-absentia present president, Frank Hayes (in whose capacity Lewis was acting) who was losing the battle to a debilitating alcoholism.
As Lewis’ campaign spokesman, perhaps the biggest challenge Murray faced was the mistrust for Lewis’s among not only his enemies but others in the union who questioned the dubious nature of his rise to the threshold of the UMW presidency.
In his ascension to the top, Lewis seemed to leave a counterfeit trail. His union career had not been as seamless as Murray’s. Lewis was born in l880 in Cleveland, Iowa. In l90l, he became an official at a union local. Apparently restless and dissatisfied with that position, he left Iowa and for five years roamed the west as a casual laborer working copper, silver, gold and coal mines in four states. When he returned to his hometown, he took a mine job and was elected a delegate to the national convention of the UMW. After marrying the daughter of a doctor in l907, he became serious about making a union career. He became president of a local mine union in Panama, Illinois and when in l9ll Gompers appointed him general field agent for the AFL, Lewis had gained access to workers and made contacts with unions (and operators) in the southwest, southeast and northern corners of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. After his first meeting with Murray, he became the UMW’s chief statistician in l9l7, vice-president that same year and, soon after, acting president replacing the aforementioned Frank Hayes. As acting president, Lewis became the candidate for office of UMW president and won the election held in December l920.
In that December l920 UMW international election, Murray’s margin of victory over his opponent, Alex Howat, Lewis bitter enemy, was only ll,000 votes. Lewis margin over Robert Harlin was 60,000. Harlin, from Washington State, was the insurgents’choice to run against Lewis.
Compared to Lewis’ margin, Murray’s narrow victory in that election was a reflection of the man’s self-effacing attitude where the ordering of priorities was concerned.
It was Murray’s dogged persistence to put aside the urgency of his own interests and bring home the vote for Lewis from the eastern Appalachian region, especially the West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and Alabama fields. Murray garnered for Lewis not only the 60,000 vote margin of victory over Harlin but perhaps more importantly the l639 to 23l convention vote in January 5, l920 approving Lewis’ handling of the l9l9 strike. His perennial enemies, Farrington, Walker and Howat, had accused Lewis of kow-towing to the big business interests by ending that strike which charge they tried to wield against him in the election.
From the beginning to the end of his tenure as president of the UMW, Lewis will follow the lead of John Mitchell, UMW president from l898-l908, who established strong central control over the union’s constituent bodies and who made it known to the rank and file that the president and executive board know best and must take precedence over provincial concerns. Beginning with his election in l920, Lewis in his bombastic and autocratic way will tighten the screws of central control and encapsulate the power of the top UMW leadership which for over 20 years after his incumbency will carry into the early 80s when the democratic reform engendered during the presidency of Richard Trumpka were established.
From the very beginning of their partnership, Murray was a fiercely loyal supporter of Lewis’ high-handed manner of administering union policy. Later, as president of the Steelworkers Organizing Committee (SWOC), the CIO and the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), he will follow the same pattern of leadership. However, the persona projected in Murray’s methods of administration would be, unlike Lewis’, teacherly, casual and almost fatherly.
So then from the beginning the contrasts between the two men’s styles were sharply apparent. When David J. McDonald, as a young man seeking employment, first encountered Philip Murray, Murray was in his mid-thirties. Writes McDonald in UNION MAN, he “was a handsome, dignified, impeccably dressed man with a shock of black hair that bent over rigidly horizontal eyebrows. The eyes, brown and cool, regarded me quizzically as my benefactor—a UMW organizer named Dave Hickey—said, “I’ve found a secretary for you, Phil.”
McDonald describes how ‘scared’ he was in Murray’s presence, but Murray immediately put him at ease by saying, “You sound ambitious. You want to work for me?” The answer to that question is history. Upon the death of Murray in l952, McDonald succeeded him as president of the USWA. His job as Murray’s secretary in the UMW and then secretary-treasurer in the SWOC and USWA lasted for over 30 years.
In the eyes of McDonald, Murray seemed a ‘strange combination of working man and scholar, sharp but no way flashy.” And he always wore conservative suits and was ‘dignified to the point of stuffiness.”
This outward reserve was a means of keeping the focus on what was important, that being his concentration on his work. In that regard Murray was a single-minded man. When he spoke people listened. He spoke in a direct no-nonsense voice and he shone especially in his eloquent articulation of the union’s cause before House and Senate hearings on labor.
As a self-taught labor leader he was especially good at academic one-upmanship as in the case of the senate Hearings on the industry situation in West Virginia, l92l when he turned the tables on big business supportive Republicans on the committee by quoting two Republican presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft, of the former quoting, “I believe emphatically in organized labor…organizing is one of the laws of our social and economic development at this time…” Then quoting Taft, “What the capitalist who is the employer of labor must face is that the labor union is a permanent condition in the industrial world. It has come to stay.”
Even J.D. Rockefeller, said Murray to that same Committee, admitted that “…it is just as proper…for labor to associate itself into…organized groups…as for capital to combine…”
Lewis spoke also to the committee members during those same Senate Hearings but everyone expected him to say what he did with, perhaps and characteristically, more flair than was necessary while Murray, on his end, let the words speak for themselves.
Source Notes for Chapter Three: WAR & ITS AFTERMATH: NEW GENERAL & HIS ‘TRUSTED LIEUTENANT’ TAKE COMMAND—l9l7-l92l
A MINER’S LIFE, ll7; l24; l30; l3l-33; l42-43, l49-5l. ORGANIZED RELATIONS AND INDUSTRIAL PRINCIPLES IN THE COAL INDUSTRY, 94; 96-97; 99. INTERVIEW WITH PAT FAGAN, l5-l6; l9. ORGANIZED LABOR IN AMERICAN HISTORY, 350. William Z. Foster, THE GREAT STEEL STRIKE and its Lessons, (New York, MCMXX), 42-43; 48; l05. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, JOHN L. LEWIS, A Biography, (New York, l977), 4-l0 (Dubofsky and Van Tine go on in exhaustive detail, over several pages, calling to account the dubious personal history Lewis often laid claim to but for which chronicles facts to support them seemed often to come up wanting. 25-26; 29; 3l; 62-65; 70; 80; 96-97; ll8. Craig Phelan, “John Mitchell and the Politics of the Trade Agreement, l898-l9l7,” THE UNITED MINEWORKERS OF AMERICA, 79 & 86. David J. McDonald, UNION MAN, (New York, l969), 66- 67. “The Case of the West Virginia Coal Mine Workers,” Murray quoting Howard Taft, & J.D. Rockefeller Jr., l6-l7; 25. “The Coal Strike is On”, THE OUTLOOK, l30 (l922), 579. COAL AND MEN, 224-225. Alan J. Singer, “Something of a Man, John L. Lewis, the UMWA and the CIO, l9l9-l943”, THE UNITED MINEWORKERS OF AMERICA, l06.
CHAPTER FOUR
STATE OF THE UNION: Gathering Forces from Within and Without—l922-24
If ever in his career as a union leader Murray exhibited strong instincts for survival, for his own preservation as well as the union’s, it was during his first four years as Vice-president of the UMW.
During those four years he and Lewis, constantly challenged by the union’s militant faction, had to restructure district, sub-district and local UMW offices to maintain discipline in the ranks, were forced to tighten the purse strings on a financially teetering treasury, and out of necessity had to settle the l922 coal strike a cold hearted move, Lewis’ enemies charged, that may have ended the strike but cost the union its soul.
Though the dust was beginning to settle on the heightened anti-union passions evoked by the Espionage and Sedition Acts of l9l7 and l9l8 that presupposed threats of a class uprising led by organized labor (some parts of the acts refuted in court tests by intellectuals such as Oliver Wendell Holmes), organized labor’s adversaries remained virulent: Many judges at the state level (West Virginia and Kentucky especially), ruled it a crime for the UMW to try to organize non-union mines; the J.P. Morgan dictum that where no unions in mills exist none shall ever come to be remained the ‘law’ of the corporation, and the American Plan, which stressed employers’ rights to maintain complete control over employees by chasing unions from their premises as they saw fit, became, virtually, an institutionalized attitude in the industrial world.
To this union-repressed state of affairs, Murray, speaking at the Senate Hearing on the situation in West Virginia, said that elected public officers have a responsibility to see to it that a “preeminence of human rights over property rights” be established in the government.
Those were the pre-existing conditions that were in place when the UMW stepped out on strike on April l, l922. The strike was essentially called to organize and unionize the non-union mines, especially the captives controlled by the corporations.
6000 mines were affected by the strike involving one half million miners. Most crucial to the success of the strike was the UMW’s expected accountability to the risky Brophy-led walkouts in District #2 that involved l4,000 non-union members in search of union support.
A collapse of the strike’s purpose would have a devastating effect on the miners and their families in that district since scabs by the train-carloads had been brought in, but worse, striking miners and their families were evicted, en mass, from their company homes.
Because of the odds stacked against the UMW, the worst was bound to occur and inevitably it did.
From the beginning, the operators had seen to it that coal in the millions of tons had been stockpiled to take them deep into the strike. Then to maintain the stockpile, scabs in some counties were producing coal up to 70% capacity.
The country seemed to favor the operators’ claim that miners wages contributed most significantly to the high price of coal despite Murray’s public utterances that one could, “Take the entire labor cost out, make the miners produce for no wage and the price of coal would still be exorbitant. Reduce the miners’ wages 25 or 30%”, said Murray, “and the difference to the average buyer, the households, would be infinitesimal.”
The charge was startling enough in itself to be worthy of a public debate. But it went ignored so the situation became ‘hopelessly deadlocked’. Within three months financial conditions deteriorated so precipitously for the UMW that desperate measures needed to be taken to avoid bankruptcy and insure the union’s survival.
The fact that production of coal in non-union fields never fell below 64% of capacity all but sealed the coffin of the UMW.
So Lewis and Murray took what they could get by negotiating contracts with unionized mines district by district. The best they could manage were contracts that maintained existing wages and conditions so that at least no backward steps were taken.
But it was a dubious victory to say the least. By necessity strikers in the non-union fields were virtually abandoned for the simple reason that there was no money in the UMW treasury to save them. So desperately close to bankruptcy was the union that it had to tap its securities and then borrow money from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and the Harriman Bank of New York just to maintain its ‘penny account’ against the combined USS corporation, banks, trust companies and intermingling directorates that, cumulatively, had a total capitalization of ten (or so) billion dollars and change.
As expected, the up-shoot of the l922 bituminous coal strike disaster was a surge of militants’ power to oust Lewis and Murray on the grounds of abandoning thousands of miners to pauperism and starvation. William Z. Foster was their point man to the takeover whose intent it was to unseat Lewis and take the UMW to a higher level of militancy against the coal operators.
The would-be coup came to a head during the UMW January-February convention of l924. A near bloody riot led by the left-wing faction ensued in the wake of a challenge to Lewis’ right to appoint union organizers in the field.
Lewis won the vote on the resolution by 2236 to 2l06. The margin of victory was too narrow to suit the militants that caused the aforementioned ruckus on the convention floor but the Lewis-Murray supporters prevailed.
This turn-back and ouster of the insurgents by Lewis and Murray put the cap on Lewis’ power over the UMW and established once and for all that the man at the top was unto himself an impenetrable fortress.
Murray followed Lewis autocratic lead as president of the CIO and USWA but unlike Lewis was unassuming and subtle in the ways he manipulated union policy. Threats to Murray’s power were seldom announced. His modest subtle touch would be Murray’s distinguishing characteristic as a labor leader.
Blustering through a series of victories over the militants in the UMW, Lewis seemed unable to transfer this skillful success to other union and industry problems: over- expansion for one and the resulting cut-throat competition that not only caused miners’ hours and wages to be reduced but also sent many honest coal operators into bankruptcy.
Was nationalization of the industry the answer?
Brophy thought so and presented to a post strike House Committee in l922 a plethora of detailed figures why it would be.
Neither Lewis nor Murray thought nationalization was a good idea, Lewis calling government ownership of the industry an impossibility and Murray saying the elimination of industry autocracy and tyranny would be better.
Was the answer to ‘industrial autocracy and tyranny’ the creation of a Labor Party? Lewis, Murray and the AFL top leadership dismissed that idea out of hand but the Chicago Federation of Labor sponsored a labor-endorsed party at a convention held in Chicago November l2, l9l9. There, the Farmer Labor Party was formed which in the l920 election polled nearly 300,000 votes. But the little interest labor leaders and workers in all industries demonstrated toward the idea of a labor party were revealed in the election results: the party’s best showing was in non-industrial areas. In l923 other failed attempts to create third parties to unite labor groups were manifested in the formation of the Federated Farmer Labor Party whose candidate was Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin and the Communist based Workers Party whose ticket, headed by William Z. Foster, received only a few votes in the l924 election.
The idea of nationalization of the coal industry may have gained impetus in the minds of its advocates by the surprise victory of the Labour Party in the l923 Parliamentary election in Great Britain. For the first time in English history, the Labour party had taken the reins of power in the parliament.
However, Ramsey MacDonald, the elected leader of the party, was considered by some within his own ranks to be a vain man too enamored by power and the allure of the society in London. MacDonald never did get around to setting coherent economic or labor agendas during his tenure as Prime Minister. Nevertheless, the idea of the Labour Party taking control of the government was a stunning event in its own right. It demonstrated to the world (or the Soviet Union at least) that democratic elections and mechanisms of government upon which they are based did work. The Labour Party victory also rejected the Marxist theory of history that revolutionary overthrow of governments was the only effective way to save the working class from the merciless rule of the economic class.
The Labour Party’s initial foray into national politics turned out to be little more than a political stutter-step, but the fact that a left-leaning government came into national prominence in one of the world’s most staunchly conservative sovereign states caused people to sit up and take notice.
However, other than being acknowledged in this country as a surprising political event, the Labour Party victory in GB took on little importance in the eyes of American labor leaders, especially Lewis and Murray. The establishment of labor parties and nationalization of industries was suited more to the political and economic systems of GB than the US.
The greater problem to be faced in this country was the growing colossus of industrial power causing the economic gap to grow greater between capital and ordinary working citizens trying to eke out a living. That, in Murray’s mind, was the immediate problem that had to be faced. In the case of the miners in particular, it was not nationalization of the coal industry that would solve the near-zero purchasing power problem the workers faced but a fiscal margin for miners and workers in all industries that guarantee them work, food and shelter to help them sustain their families.
By early l923 the whole issue of nationalization was dead. Such a physical and mental toll did it take on John Brophy that he resigned as president of District #2
After being raked over the coals by Lewis for taking a desperate chance and following left-wing reformists, Brophy fell into the great trap of guilt by association a smear which Lewis shamelessly invoked against him and all the other perennial Lewis haters who had (for sure now Lewis could say it) political motives of their own. With that charge Lewis all but sealed the fate of the militants in the UMW at least as a threat to his leadership.
The Jacksonville Agreement too, coming on the heels of the nationalization debate, handily helped reinforce Lewis and Murray’s position of power in the union that by now still looked like a citadel on the outside but on the inside was crumbling.
The agreement was signed February l924. It was considered the contract of contracts, longer than any other in the history of the industry. It was on course to go three years, from April l, l924 to March 3l, l927.
On its surface the Jacksonville Agreement was a triumph of union-industry cooperation. It was greeted with praise by Secretary of Commerce Hoover, president Coolidge and other prominent businessmen, especially when Lewis (sounding like a true Republican) praised a hands-off policy permitting economic market forces to follow their own path.
l924 was a good year for both labor leaders to negotiate agreements. Considering that the recriminations and hardships of the l922 strike still hovered in the air, they continued to maintain the UMW’s stability. The ghosts of ‘betrayed’ miners were hanging about everywhere, ready to pronounce doom on the union should an event similar to the l922 strike seem even remotely possible.