The story, of the “Kern Resolution” is the story of Kern. But behind the resolution itself is a story that must be told if we are to understand the full significance of it.
I
COAL has been the crown and the crime of West Virginia. The second state in the union in its deposits of coal, the industrial, social and political life of the commonwealth revolves about the mine. Until a few years ago there was no organization among the miners. They were industrial slaves. The living conditions under which they worked were horrible beyond description. They had no rights that the coal barons were bound to respect, and none that the civil authorities apparently cared to enforce. In the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek sections in the county of the state capital these conditions existed for years. They were robbed of the full fruit of their labors by a system which denied them the privilege of having a representative in the weighing of the coal they produced. Compelled to live in the cottages of the companies, they were charged unreasonable rentals for impossible huts. Forced to purchase their food from the company stores, they were made to pay on an average of thirty per cent more for the food necessities of life than were being charged at independent stores.
From their meager pay the companies deducted every month $6 for rent, $1 for coal, $1 for a physician, 20 cents as a hospital fund, 50 cents for the blacksmith, 80 cents per gallon for miners’ oil, and for various other things approximating an average of $11.05 each month. By the time the miner with a family had paid all this and for the bare necessities of life he was usually in debt to the company. Thus a form of peonage—peonage in reality if not in the legal sense—was established. These men were slaves.
It was the game of the companies to keep them slaves. They thought it paid better than to have free men. And to this end these companies perfected a remarkable organization to prevent the unionization of the miners. This organization was known as “mine guards,” and the miners were compelled to pay the bills. These guards were furnished by the Baldwin-Felts agency and were composed largely of the scourings of the slums of cities. These gun-men had no legal status but the miners were forced to recognize their authority—and their authority was a gun.
The pretext for the use of these armed thugs was the protection of the mines, the purpose was to prevent the organizers of the United Mine Workers from entering the field, to prohibit newspaper men from visiting the camps and exposing the infamy, to forbid the miners from exercising their constitutional right to meet in peaceful assembly for the discussion of their wrongs. The purpose was to Siberianize West Virginia. And the purpose was met.
They were there to terrorize over the miners, to panhandle newspaper men and beat up the organizers of the United Mine Workers—and they did their work with a zest.
These guards met the trains regularly and every organizer of the United Mine Workers understood that if he left the train he did so at the peril of his life. This condition existed for years within a few miles of the state capital, within little more than two hundred miles of the capital of the republic and was known to exist. The riff-raff of the scums of the cities, reeking with rotten whisky and armed with guns, held high carnival, panhandling organizers, terrorizing miners, insulting women and children, and they did it with impunity.
And the reason was that popular government had broken down and had been displaced by the feudalism of the coal barons and their allies. To control the labor market, to dictate the laws, to interpret the laws, the mine owners entered politics and became the bosses. Such, in a general way, was the condition in the mine sections of West Virginia when the supreme fight came in 1912.