Reckoning at Eagle Creek by Jeff Biggers

Author:Jeff Biggers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nation Books

“WHEN MINING BEGAN,” noted a U.S. Coal Commission report in the 1920s, examining the conditions before the union movement in 1897, “it was upon a ruinously competitive basis. Profit was the sole object; the life and health of employees was of no moment. Men worked in water half-way up to their knees, in gas-filled rooms, in unventilated mines where the air was so foul that no man could work long without seriously impairing his health. There was no workmen’s compensation law, accidents were frequent. . . . The average daily wage of the miner was from $1.25 to $2.00.”

There were no such things, of course, as workplace safety laws or mining inspections. In fact, the late-nineteenth-century boom in coal mining had generated a rash of so many unskilled and ill-prepared small operations that those mines functioned as certain death traps.

Miners not only lived and worked in deplorable conditions, they were subjected to the whims of the market, often out of work for the long summer months and forced to migrate for poorly paid day labor. Displaced and unorganized, the miners faced a situation of extreme vulnerability. They often lived in company-owned houses, held in debt, compelled to patronize company-owned shops, and were paid in a company script only valid at company businesses.

To address this miserable situation, the United Mine Workers of America called for a general strike across the nation in 1897. Founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1890, they counted less than four hundred members in Illinois. Little did the district leaders know that a flamboyant thirty-one-year-old miner in southern Illinois, a veteran of hunger marches on the nation’s Capitol in Washington, DC, in 1894, would don a silk top hat, a Prince Albert topcoat, and an umbrella and declare himself “General” Alexander Bradley.

Born in England and raised in Collinsville, Illinois, Bradley had first entered the mines at the age of nine. Over the years, he had listened to his coal-mining father’s stories about the need to “stand up and face the mine-owner and insist on fair treatment and a wage sufficient to permit him to live like a human being.”

Calling for secret meetings in the woods outside of Mount Olive, Bradley took the lead in organizing miners into the nascent stages of the movement. The mines in their area were not the largest, however, so they devised a plan; they began to march from mine to mine in southern Illinois, in a crusade to unionize the workers. Thousands of miners swept across the coalfields, attentive to Bradley’s spellbinding speeches and flashy attire, assisting in setting up a union vote.

In what could have been an explosive situation, Bradley managed to march his band of brothers with an astonishing level of calm and levity. He somehow found the funds to feed his army. He forbade any violence. And the mines unionized.

By the end of 1897, the union ranks grew from 400 to over 30,000. With the backing of the militant southern Illinois contingent, the United Mine Workers ironed out a deal

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