Newark leader. ([Newark, Ohio]) 1917-1946, 1918-08-16
The ShaCkIeS Thrown Off
COAL MINERS SEE FREEDOMS
GOLDEN DAWN
After Years of SerfdOm $4,000 Men
Join Mine Workers of America
at FairmOnt, W. Va.

Wheeling, w. Va.-The convention
of newly-organized coal miners at
Fairmont, w. Va, marks new era
from the days of Cabin Creek and
machine guns.
The story is told by Walter Hilton,
editor of the Wheeling Majority, who
attended this notable gathering, and
who writes to his paper from Fair
mont
Something, generally unexpected,
and wonderfully surprising has hap
pened in West Virginia. Within two
months $4,000 mine workers, after
suffering years of serfdom-a serf-
dom which kept them terrorized and
helpless-have joined the United Mine
Workers of America, held delegate
convention, and stood up on their
hind legs like men-and drew up a
wage contract to present to their en-
ployers!
"Possibly there never was con-
vention just like the one held here
in Willard hall. Labor gatherings
usually follow the pathway beaten by
experience. Even on occasions when
sudden increases in membership ap-
parently swamp a convention, still
there is a leaven in the lump, a leaven
of veterans, the warriors of the old
locals that held the battle line through
the darkest years, and it is a leaven
of advice born of grim experience.
But here there was not one old local,
and though there was, here and there,
a man who had belonged to a union,
perhaps, their number and experience
was not such as to factor in shaping
and fashioning this collective group
ing of $4,000 men, who had until
then been kept in frightened individ-
ualism, and who, for the first time,
could stand up, unafraid, in the pro-
lection of numbers, and give voice to
their sufferings and their aspirations.
"They told of having been bounded
from mine to mine, and driven from
Job after job whenever the spirit of
Americanism fared family enough to
induce them to speak one word that
sounded to their boss like unionism
or independence. One man with 10
children, told of being discharged for
accurately measuring a coal car and
truthfully stating the result; told OF
being driven from Independent jobs
outside the mine by the influence Of
the companies that frightened private
employers; told of selling his cow,
when the smallest children were cry
ing for milk-told of finally selling
the carpets from the floors. And if
you ever tried to raise ten children,
with a job as insecure and wage as
low as mine has been-if you ever
had to sell your COW, with the young
sters begging you not to-then you
know what an experience that is.
Ignorant foreigners? This man
mas several ReHeIdClOIlo VI AlllCl lSdh
ancestry behind him, and was a
school teacher before he became a
blacksmith.
at is all an old story to the
readers of the labor press; the stories
of blacklisting, of browbeating, of
company guards, bulls Of coal cars
growing in height, and depth and
breadth, and still officially holding
the same amount of coal; of men
being denied the privilege of going to
the postoffce, of uniOnism being
stamped out, wherever it seemed to
show, as ruthlessly as the government
stamps out treason in these war
times.
"But the delegates felt that this
was all over now, that it was a
waste of time to even talk about it.
1t was enough to know that there
was a new deal, a new order of
things, and that the old autocratic
feudalism, the old dictatorship of the
iron fist, was dead and buried"