Mendel Letters 95 — Coal Miners
September 17, 2022
Dear Mendel.
As I became more politically active and a more serious student in the late 1960s, I decided I needed to study working-class movements and learn why some working people were radicalized. In my junior year in college I did a seminar paper on British trade unionists and I dreamed of going to England to study, but that never worked out. In my senior year I interviewed your father about his experience in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Zayde was losing his English and Aunt Kate helped me when he reverted to speaking Yiddish. The ILGWU was considered a socialist union, but Zayde was never very political. As part of my research on the union I visited its retiree center where I met and spoke with its Past-President David Dubinsky.
In graduate school I did research on an interracial longshoreman’s strike in New Orleans in the 1890s that defied Jim Crow segregation, Southern New Jersey hand-blown window glass workers, and the United Mine Workers international office that endorsed nationalization of the coal mines in 1919.
My big problem as a graduate student and researcher was my total lack of facility in any languages other than English. English working-class history was considered part of European history and to focus on it I would have had to demonstrate competence in two European languages. It was just not possible for me. I had a different language related problem with studying the history of the ILGWU. Many of the union’s primary source documents were in Italian and Yiddish.
The New Orleans longshoreman and the Southern New Jersey window glass workers proved to be dead ends. The UMWA archives and publications from the 1920s were in English and it was easier for me to travel to their national headquarters in Washington DC and the coalfields in central and western Pennsylvania than it was for me to learn to read Yiddish and Italian, so my doctoral topic was settled.
When I visited the UMWA headquarters in Washington DC a dissident group had just taken over control of the union and they were anxious to learn what was in the archives. They gave me full access and the use of a copy machine. I later wrote up my findings for them in a chapter that was published as part of the UMWA’s 100th anniversary.
In 1975, you and mother lent me your car so I could drive to central Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Ohio, and Bloomington, Indiana on an extended research trip. The most important part of the trip and the most exciting part of the dissertation research was my stay in Nanty-glo, Pennsylvania, a small town about an hour east of Pittsburgh. From the 1920s through the 1940s the bituminous coal miners in this region were the most radical and class-conscious in the United States. They battled coal operators, the Ku Klux Klan, and government officials to build their local unions and during World War II they were possibly the only workers in the United States to go on strike when wage freezers left them unable to support their families.
I had a letter of introduction to the editor of the local newspaper whose father, now in his seventies, had been active in strikes in the 1920s and whose mother, also in her seventies, was the daughter of the local union President during that period and the niece of the President of the regional district union. The family invited me to stay in their home and took me around introducing me to retired coalminers who told me their stories. They arranged for me to go down in a closed mine that was, as the song goes, as dark as a dungeon. I made friends there and the next summer brought a busload of teenagers from the Brooklyn community centers youth program to meet with the retired coalminers and learn about their work and the union.
The Central Pennsylvania coalfields are now largely dried up and the people in that region are heavy Trump voters. Radicalism ebbs and flows as conditions in people’s lives change. Nothing is permanent. I think that is the most important lesson I’ve learned from my research and from you.
And thanks for lending me the car!
Your son
