Richard L. Davis and the Color Line in Ohio Coal by Frans H. Doppen

Author:Frans H. Doppen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

The Strike of 1894

On January 9, 1894, Davis attended a Special Session of District 6 in Druid’s Hall, South Fourth Street, in Columbus, held “for the purpose of discussing the depressed condition of the coal trade,” that rejected the operators’ proposed scale.121 By the middle of month work in the Sunday Creek Valley remained very poor. During the second week Mine No. 3 only worked one and one half days. Blaming the depression on the manipulation by “the money kings gambling in stocks and bonds,” Davis reported hearing “the cry of hunger and starvation” from throughout the state. “How long,” he despaired, “will we, the people allow it to continue?”122 When the miners in New Straitsville, desperate for work, proposed to work at a 20-cent reduction regardless of the miners in the rest of the state, Davis once again reminded his readers that unless “united we stand, divided we [will] fall.”123 By the end of the month, while writing his letter to the editor and excusing himself for not being in church “where all good people ought to go,” he started to suggest the possibility of a national strike: “Not only do I mean for the miners of Ohio to stop but Indiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania and as many of West Virginia stop as well … we will never know what we can accomplish until once we try it,” he wrote, and “if down we must go let us go together.”124

On March 25, 1894, a protest march of a hundred jobless men, led by businessman Jacob Coxey, left Massillon, Ohio, on its way to Washington, D.C., to demand the government create public work jobs. When the march arrived in the capital on April 30, Coxey’s Army, as it became known, had increased to 6,000 men. After Coxey and others were arrested the next day for walking on the grass of the United States Capitol, the movement quickly dissipated. Interestingly, Davis did not comment on Coxey’s Army. Neither did he write any letters to the editor until May. Chris Evans reported, however, that on Friday, April 5, 1894, at the Sixth Annual Convention of District 6, “Brother R.L. Davis was called on and thanked the miners of district 6 for the complimentary vote he had received and promised to continue his untiring efforts for and loyalty to the organization.”125 As during the year before, Davis was again paid monthly from January through June, except in March, and once more in November “for work” and attending convention and board meetings.126

The fifth annual convention of the United Mineworkers of America met in Columbus on April 10. As President McBride addressed the convention he reminisced that when they met the previous year they were “full of hope and expectancy as the future appeared bright” but that due to the financial panic of 1893 “the promised prosperity to our craft and country” had “gone glimmering” and it was uncertain what the future would hold. Due to what he called an “insane competition” mining rates had dropped to below a living standard.

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