In the fall of 1962 a long and bitter strike began in the coal mines of eastern Kentucky. The roots of the strike went back to the post-World War II period when, in a drive to reduce wages and other costs and break the United Mine Workers, the big mine owners introduced “truck mining” as the predominant form of mining in the area. Small mines were leased to individual operators who usually refused to pay the union wage, and in many mines wages had fallen as low as $5 or $3 a day.
Furthermore, the mine operators were refusing to pay the 40-cent-a-ton royalty to the union welfare fund – a fund which financed four hospitals in the eight-county area of eastern Kentucky and provided free medical care to the miners and their families. When the union began cutting back on free medical care, claiming it could no longer pay the costs, the action touched off the miners’ strike.
Herman Gibson, who had helped organize the United Mine Workers in the 1930s, became one of the central leaders of the strike. The UMW leadership denounced the strike as “unauthorized” and led by “nonunion elements,” and decried the “lawlessness,” not of the mine operators, but of the strikers.
The strike received a great deal of publicity, not only in the radical press, but in the liberal publications, the daily papers, the slick newsmagazines and on television. Many radical organizations and publications, including The Militant were involved in helping organize support for the strike – sponsoring meetings, pressuring unions to aid the miners, and collecting funds. Enter PL.
Such was the situation when Progressive Labor decided the time was ripe to make some quick gains.
Revolutionary organizations have always recognized their obligation to give maximum support to strikes and other labor struggles. Such an obligation is of a two-fold character: to advance the immediate struggle and – equally important–to seek to have such aid promote class and socialist consciousness among the strikers as well as among those whose aid is being solicited.
The second half of this proposition is something that a serious socialist organization carries through in as conscious and responsible a way as the first. That is, it is always careful that its efforts to aid a given strike do not in fact become an obstacle to it. And in the circulation of its socialist literature in strike situations, revolutionaries try to proceed with good judgment and common sense.
For example, there are situations where a union may face heavy red-baiting from the employers and press and, sometimes, even from elements in their local unions. And there are occasions, too, when the level of consciousness among the strikers may be quite low and they may be very susceptible to such red-baiting.
All of these are factors that revolutionaries must carefully weigh in determining precisely how to conduct themselves in intervening in a strike situation. Such considerations assume greater weight in particular regions –in the South, for example, where the political level of the white workers is often lower than elsewhere and where the difficulties this presents are compounded by more widespread racial prejudices. During periods like the McCarthy era such considerations assume even greater weight.
Despite all such considerations, however, the leadership of Progressive Labor proceeded to intervene in a manner that made it clear they had no concern for the real welfare of the striking miners. They were interested in making a name for Progressive Labor, and if that aim happened to conflict with the goal of winning the strike, it was unfortunate for the miners.
From the outset the PL leaders tried to create the public impression that they were the leadership of the strike and that Gibson was functioning as a PL collaborator. All of this was done without regard for factor consequence.
There were, however, undoubtedly numerous supporters of the Hazard miners who got caught up in PL’s campaign and unknowingly contributed to the problems of the strikers, due to their own lack of experience or naive confidence in the “trade-union experience” of some of the PL founders.
The Hazard campaign was announced in the January 1963 issue of Progressive Labor under a front-page banner headline, “Class War Rages in Kentucky Coal Fields.” The issue devoted several pages to articles outlining the background and disputes involved in the strike, interviews with wives of the miners, and appeals for aid. But the appeals for help give the best indication of PL’s self-interested approach to the struggle.
“IT DOES NOT MATTER TO HUNGRY CHILDREN WHICH WAY THE AID GETS THERE–AS LONG AS IT GETS THERE,” (emphasis in original) proclaimed PL. The magazine then gave three ways to send aid. First, by sending it directly to PL (three telephone numbers and an address were listed); second, by sending it to the Trade Union Solidarity Committee for Hazard Miners and thirdly by sending it to the miners directly registered mail, care of Herman Gibson. But it was clear that the preferred method to send aid was through PL.
It is true that the children of the Kentucky miners were more interested in food for their stomachs and clothes to keep them warm than anything else. But it would also have been evident to any supporter who stopped to consider the question that a publicly flaunted campaign in the name of PL opened the strikers to a serious danger of red-baiting.
But such thoughts, if they crossed the minds of PL’s leaders, did not deter them. PLers went house to house in some areas collecting food and clothing and money for the miners–in the name of PL. Again, however worthy the intentions of some supporters may have been, it was at best a tactically questionable move. PL members and sympathizers, had they acted in the interests of the strikers rather than trying to exploit the struggle would have at least carried out their strike-support work under the auspices of the Trade Unions Solidarity Committee.
Also another consideration should have been kept in mind. The scope of aid needed by the miners was far greater than any single small, radical organization, or even all of them together, could have mobilized at that time. The only force strong enough to tip the scales in favor of the miners was the organized labor movement. If PL had been seriously interested in assuring victory to the miners, wouldn’t the organization have devoted the bulk of its energy to seeking union endorsements for the Kentucky miners, and pledges to send substantial aid?
PLers did not limit their activities to areas remote from Kentucky, unfortunately. PL correspondents and others went to Hazard to cover the events there and distribute their literature. On the surface, again, it would seem harmless enough. After all, Herman Gibson and other miners’ leaders had made statements, like the one to the National Guardian (Jan. 31, 1963) saying, “They call us integrators because we got colored miners on the picket lines; they call us communists – everything. But we’re all in this together and we won’t be split up, because we got nothing to lose and no place to go but up.”
So, throughout the area PL distributed the issues of the magazine which covered the miners’ strike. And the expected was not long in coming.
On Feb. 7, the Hazard Herald printed a screaming banner headline: “Communism Comes to the Mountains of East Kentucky.” Along with it was an article opening up a vicious red-baiting attack on the miners because of the presence of Progressive Labor reporters and the fact that PL had been so obtrusive in the support campaign.
PL’s response was a quick letter to the Herald, challenging the editor, a Mrs. Nolan, to a public debate in Hazard.
The response of the miners’ leadership was not quite so happy. PL’s lack of discretion had put them in a very vulnerable position. Herman Gibson, speaking at a mass rally the same day that the Herald article appeared, disclaimed any association with communists but said they weren’t going to send back any aid they had received.
However, the pressure on Gibson obviously continued to mount, and on Feb. 19 he wrote a letter to Milton Rosen of Progressive Labor, with a copy to the Hazard Herald. Receipt of the letter was acknowledged by PL in its March issue, with the following comment:
As we went to press. Progressive Labor received a letter from Herman Gibson in which he disassociates himself from communists. Gibson has said from the outset that he is not a communist, but this has not prevented the coal bosses and politicians in Hazard from using red-baiting to pressure him and others connected with the strike. The latest developments from Hazard will be reported in full in the next issue of PL.”
But the next issue said nothing of these “latest developments from Hazard.” In fact, the Hazard story suddenly dropped to page 9. PL readers never learned what Herman Gibson really said.
Thus even PL activists never really knew why they suddenly were no longer campaigning for a strike action on which they had been going all out–hardly a way to educate and develop revolutionary cadres.
The letter was printed in the Feb. 21 issue of the Herald, and in it Gibson disassociated himself from PL in the strongest possible terms. In fact, there is an element of red-baiting in Gibson’s letter itself which, while inexcusable, testifies to the degree of pressure he was under. Gibson was known even among radical supporters of the strike, as an honest, straight-forward trade-union militant and responsibility for his capitulation to the prevalent anticommunism must be placed primarily on the doorstep of PL, whose actions placed him in an untenable position. The letter said in part:
The charge has been made that I and the group which I have been chosen to lead here in Perry County has allowed itself to become affiliated with communism or subversion or with ’reds’ or ’pinks.’ This group and I want everyone to understand that we are not in any way in sympathy with any such organization or movement.
We are against such organizations and we don’t want either their ’moral’ or financial support, and we don’t knowingly accept such support.
Especially we want you and everyone else to understand that neither you, nor Progressive Labor nor any other person or group speaks for us or me.
Court injunctions were obtained in most counties to prevent picketing; severe spring floods further demoralized the embattled miners and destroyed many homes and meager resources; Gibson and other strike leaders were framed-up on charges of dynamiting a railroad bridge; and most of the men drifted back to work, forced to accept the same conditions which had driven them to the strike seven or eight months earlier.
Progressive Labor was hardly responsible for the defeat of the strike. But there can be no question that they seriously damaged the strike efforts by their cynically adventuristic attempt to make some fast gains for their own organization, and did little to help the cause of socialism in the Kentucky mountains.
Even worse, however, the Hazard adventure was not an isolated, unfortunate, tactical error. It is but one example of a general method of operation for PL one that was soon to be repeated in Monroe, North Carolina.