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Unionism, Communism, and the Great Depression: The Carbon County Coal Strike of 1933
Unionism, Communism, and the Great Depression: The Carbon County Coal Strike of 1933
by Helen Z. Papanikolas
IN 1933, IN THE DEPTHS OF THE economic Depression that was to last throughout the decade, two unions competed to unionize the vast, bituminous coal fields of Carbon County, Utah. One was the United Mine Workers of America that had been active there, but unsuccessful, since the beginning of the century. Aligned against it was the National Miners Union, an unfamiliar organization whose officials were strangers.
The race for the miners' membership, strikes, and the armed response of elected officials marked the end of an era of courageous, illegal, and thwarted struggles by labor. The events of 1933 changed forever the character of unionism.
THE UNION MOVEMENT
Labor conflicts in Carbon County and the strikes of 1901, 1903-4, and 1922 were carried on under conditions that were characteristically American. Against a background of Protestant individualism, employers in no other Western country fought trade unions as viciously with the aid of civil, judicial, and army authorities. It was a common conviction of employers that "God in His infinite wisdom has given [us] control of property interests in the country" and that coal could not be mined without machine guns.
In the sparsely inhabited terrain of the American West, management was given even greater power. The settling of disputes by violence, a legacy of the recent frontier past, was a regular expediency. This inclination and the cry of mine operators that strikers were dangerous anarchists who required military force placed the state in its role on the side of management. No strike escaped this western justice from small ones to the infamous Ludlow Massacre of Colorado and the Coeur d'Alene battles where President William McKinley's sending in of federal troops destroyed the syndicalist Western Federation of Miners in Idaho. In the Carbon County strike of 1903-4, the Bingham strike of 1912, and the Carbon County strike of 1922, all or part of the National Guard was called in.
The great influx of unskilled immigrants intensified labor's problems. The conflict between craft (skilled) and industrial (unskilled and semi-skilled) unions began here. The skilled workers were "an aristocracy of labor. They tend[ed] to work with the employers against the great mass of unskilled immigrants."
By the second decade of the century, immigrant laborers in Carbon County, predominantly from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Austria, were greater in number than the native born. In 1933 immigrants formed the larger bloc of miners; their sons were coming of age and entering the mines.
Some of the Italians had been boys and young men in the strikes of the 1900s. They had been herded into bull pens near the Price railyards where they cooked spaghetti in coffee cans and danced around bonfires at night. Many immigrants had come directly from the mining towns of southern Colorado, ruled by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company dynasty. A great number of them had taken part in the bitter Carbon County strike of 1922. A Greek striker and a deputy sheriff were killed; several miners and deputies were wounded. Forced out of company houses, families suffered in tent colonies through winter weather. Governor Charles Mabey called out the National Guard, and the United Mine Workers were almost obliterated in the state.
Lesser insults to the miners' dignity were commonplace. Superintendents told their workers how to vote. Several of them owned interests in automobile agencies and miners had to buy from these dealers or lose their jobs. There were also superintendents who expected the men to "contribute" toward large purchases such as cars. To insure jobs, gifts and money to foremen and to strawbosses were part of the laboring system. Constricting the whole of the miners' lives were the law enforcement officers on company payrolls.
In 1933 a catalyst was added to the unstable combination of management's sovereignty, the West's special traits, and the large number of immigrant miners: the immobilizing Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929.
During the decade of the 1920s, national union membership had decreased, except in the building trades that had been spurred by a building boom. The half million union members of 1897 had risen to 5,110,800 by 1920. Within three years the virulent anti-unionism of employers had cut membership to 3,780,000. In Utah the Open Shop (the American Plan) campaign organized by Utah Associated Industries left unions powerless, their membership depleted into insignificance.
In 1930, 1931, and 1932 union membership continued to decline as unemployment rose. Four and a half million Americans were unemployed in 1930, thirteen million in 1933. Industrial workers, the unskilled and semi-skilled, were the most greatly affected. Although union membership always declined with industrial depressions (an exception was the rise of the Knights of Labor in the West), newly formed ethnic organizations, Unemployed Councils, International Labor Defense Leagues, farmers and workers organizations agitated for unionism.
As the Depression deepened, Carbon County mines began to close; others worked half shift. Whistling steam locomotives clipped less often from thirty mines in juniper-covered mountain draws and out of the Price and Helper railyards. Mine company houses were boarded up and families became migrants.
Hunger was widespread in the mining towns. In the summer months when coal was not needed for household furnaces, more miners were laid off and compelled to leave company houses. The Carbon County Commission voted for a twelve-thousand-dollar relief fund, part of it to be raised by public subscription. Many elected officials, imbued with the American—and more recent western—spirit of individual responsibility, were against this expenditure of public funds to alleviate destitution.
The dilemma of where to find money to continue the relief work was inadequately solved by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Established in 1932 during President Herbert Hoover's last year in office, the public assistance program paid small sums of money in return for work performed. In Carbon County half of the money was issued in scrip for buying in local stores. The relief projects included cleaning canals, spading their banks, cutting trees and willows, and grading and widening streets. The alloted money had to be spread over thousands of families. It was meager and the miners looked to the new president for help.
In the 1932 presidential campaign Franklin D. Roosevelt had said nothing about trade unions' right to organize and to bargain collectively. Only the United Mine Workers, ravaged and in "shambles," worked for the right to organize with legal guarantees. Roosevelt, however, promised federal relief, unemployment insurance, and other reforms. Under the influence of labor leaders and of Senator Robert F. Wagner, Roosevelt drafted collective bargaining into his recovery bill.
Several weeks before the bill was sent to Congress the first organizers of the National Miners Union came to Carbon County. It was the spring of 1933. Within days of Paul Crouch's arrival, he and his wife mimeographed sheets of paper announcing their presence and the aims of their union. The papers were distributed in the towns and mining camps of the county. The strangers, soon followed by Charles Guynn, Charles W T etherbee, and their wives, sparked curiosity. Crouch, tall and slender, was especially distinguished; Guynn was dark and therefore "looked foreign."
The organizers began a concentrated campaign in the mining towns around Helper, where dispirited men stood outside of pool halls and company stores hoping for a call from the mines. The South Slav miners in Spring Glen, a small farming community two miles south of Helper, were their most attentive listeners. Crouch held his first meeting with them in Millerich Hall, a Serbian-owned building. Behind him was a red banner with hammer, sickle, and sheaf of wheat.
Millerich Hall became the headquarters for the union. Dances were held there to raise money for expenses, and meetings were conducted in the hall and at the Helper park after Sunday baseball games. One of the few diversions of the Depression years were the games of the semi-professional Utah Industrial Baseball League. Many spectators
stayed after the games to hear the organizers and an increasing number of local miners recount indignities, privations, and the need to organize. As a true industrial union the NMU invited all workers involved directly or indirectly with mining to join, not only miners to whom the United Mine Workers restricted its membership. Among the principles of the NMU, listed in the membership book, were:
Few of the immigrants could read English well enough to understand the ideology of the NMU. They were not concerned with the government's being capitalist or socialist. They were concerned with work and wages.
An incident at the Standardville mine came at an opportune time for the NMU organizers. In defiance of Reconstruction Finance Corporation rules, the management had cut wages for day miners. The NMU called a strike that showed surprising strength. In the middle of May the strike ended with restoration of the men's wages and a concession to reduce rent on company houses in the summer months when coal production was at its lowest point. The small victory gave the organizers authority in the eyes of the miners, but county officials, many of them American Legion veterans, became suspicious of the organizers' "un-American" talk.
On May 28, 1933, the National Miners Union officially organized in Helper. A spy for the National Guard infiltrated the meeting and estimated the number of people as "probably 500 present, mostly foreign men. About a fourth of the crowd were enthusiastic."
Charles Wetherbee of American Fork presided. A miner from Tintic spoke on the old complaints: high rent on company houses, shortage of weights, low wages, and slow payment. The next speaker, Paul Crouch (called Krautz in the report), spoke against President Roosevelt's New Deal programs. The government showed, he said, by lowering wages to a dollar a day, that it was again on the side of employers. (Crouch did not explain that this was the pay for reforestation youths. Carbon County's quota was seventy-three men, each to be paid thirty dollars a month. Of this sum the men were expected to make substantial allotments to dependents.) The reforestation program [of the Civilian Conservation Corps] was a ruse, Crouch said, to put young men in uniform, with guns whenever the government wanted them.
M. P. Bayles, a representative of the International Labor Defense League, was "very radical in his speech and used profane language." Bayles spoke of lynching and the electric chair awaiting Negroes who objected to white men "taking" Negro women. "This apparently was said because of the presence of a few Negroes . . . the word 'comrade' was used often by all speakers." Bayles exhorted the miners to organize to prevent their daughters from resorting to prostitution and their sons to murder for something to eat.
Five local people were named to head the organization in the county, including Tony Bonacci—unrelated to Frank Bonacci, United Mine Workers official. Wetherbee ended the meeting with a promise to fight for a reduction in company house rent; a raise in wages; payment every two weeks; all back wages to be paid in full and in cash, not scrip; a miners' check weighman; the recognition of a miners' grievance committee; and permission to remain in company houses after being laid off.
The meeting set the tone for the subsequent weekly gatherings. Accounts of the proceedings were published in an NMU newspaper, the Carbon County Miner. The small-sized newspaper was printed in the Helper Journal office and sold for two cents an issue. Local and national NMU activities were reported, including the successes of Women's Auxiliaries, the organizing of Youth Sections, and Charles Guynn's instalments on militant strikes in the eastern United States. Helper restaurants, grocery stores, pool halls, and other businesses advertised in the newspaper.
"Americans" of the county became alarmed. Nationwide labor troubles, bread lines, and actual starvation were regular radio and press news. The words, Reds, Communists, Wobblies, anarchists, Bolsheviks, that had reached a fanatical apogee in the early 1920s, were revived. Unskilled labor was again "un-American;" people of immigrant background were again suspected of disloyalty and were believed to be following orders from Hitler, Mussolini, and vague "radical" and "communistic" Slavs.
COMMUNISM AND THE DEPRESSION
Native Americans in Carbon County had long resented old-country customs, the speaking of foreign languages, immigrant newspapers, native lodges, and Greek coffeehouses. To be of immigrant stock and to favor unions was the ultimate in un-Americanism. The anti-immigrant campaign after World War I, led by the American Legion, and the 1922 strike when Greek, Italian, and Slavic miners paralyzed the coal industry were forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan attacks of 1924.
A view prevailed in the country that East European and Mediterranean immigrants held radical ideas. There was no support for this notion in any of the Utah strikes before 1933. Miners who asked for wage and work reforms were conveniently called anarchists and radicals. The native attitudes of Mediterranean and South Slav immigrants toward authority have been only superficially investigated. The Slavs with whom John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers (1898-1905), had problems because of their militancy were almost all Poles, Slovaks, and Hungarians, not South Slavs.
Yet in the large crowds at the NMU meetings, Price city officials and the American Legion saw the influx of communism and the erosion of American ideals. Mayor Rolla E. West of Price inquired about the union at the Utah Federation of Labor headquarters in Salt Lake City. Mayor West, a veteran of World War I and active in the American Legion, belonged to the AFL Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, among the "aristocracy of labor."
The president of the Utah Labor Federation passed him the information that the National Miners Union was a Communist front organization, propagated by the Soviet Union and the sponsor of the troubles then happening in the southern Illinois and Kentucky coal fields. They gave as their information none other than the United States Department of Justice.
The Communist charge was correct. The National Miners Union was founded in 1928 after a four-year struggle within the United Mine Workers. John L. Lewis's inability to deal with the burgeoning pressure brought by high production of coal in unorganized mines caused an eruption that ended with his expelling the Communists on the Save the Union Committee. The Communists immediately formed the National Miners Union, a full-fledged dual organization, intent on invading the UMWA's jurisdiction and competing for members.
Steadfastly, however, the NMU organizers in Carbon County denied they were Communists. The hammer and sickle banner was not displayed again. The first task for Crouch, Guynn, and Wetherbee in making themselves known in Helper and the nearby camps was to establish their union's identity and to make certain they were not confused with the UMWA. Any UMWA officials coming into the district, Crouch said, "would be very quick to . . . pick off the tar and feathers."
There had been a long rivalry between the two main towns of Carbon County: Price, the county seat, and Helper, seven miles north, the nucleus for the majority of the mining towns. Price was the "coal operators' town" and the "old-timers' town" where the native American population exceeded that of the immigrants. Helper was the "miners' town" and the "foreigners' town." Business life in Helper was dependent on the surrounding mining camps. Many of its elected officials were naturalized Americans from the Balkans and the Mediterranean. At the time of the NMU's entrance into the county, a large portion of Helper businesses were owned by immigrants who had risen from the laboring class.
Yugoslavian immigrants, called "Austrians" because of Austro- Hungary domination of part of their country before World War I, rushed to enroll in the NMU. Mainly Croatians, Serbs, and Slovenes, they joined with bitter enthusiasm as did many Italians. Slavic families in Spring Glen formed the center of proselytizing activity. Besides Millerich Hall, the Rat Race, a bar on the south edge of Helper that served bootleg beer, was another active, noisy meeting place.
Rumors that Slavic and Italian language newspapers and immigrant lodges were fomenting subversion deluged the county. To native Americans the NMU organizers were dangerous agitators who were leading incipiently radical "foreigners" into anarchy. A Serbian leader of the strike, Mike S. Dragos, says:
The dormant United Mine Workers, long ignored by coal operators, now came to life, spurred not only by the new legal sanctions of the National Industrial Recovery Act but by the swelling successes of the National Miners Union. In June Frank Bonacci left his mine job at Little Standard to become field worker for the United Mine Workers District 22 that was comprised of Utah and Wyoming. Intermittently working for the union and renouncing it temporarily under yellow dog contracts during extreme economic necessity, Bonacci was the spirit of the United Mine Workers of Carbon County.
With Nick Fontecchio, newly arrived national UMWA organizer, Bonacci and other local union officials worked to counteract the NMU's growing influence. TheUMWA was in a position that it could not have foreseen the previous year. For the first time in the state a union, the UMWA, had the sanction and help of county officials. Fontecchio was welcomed to Price by Mayor West himself. The Price Sun Advocate was favorable to the UMWA. The Helper Journal supported unionization, claimed neutrality, but championed the NMU. The Wyoming Labor Journal, official publication of UMWA District 22 at Cheyenne, Wyoming, was influential among miners and printed news of Communist aims and infiltration methods through the NMU.
The American Legion of Price was the UMWA's greatest asset. Although Legion members belonged to both unions, the smaller number affiliated with the NMU were looked upon as traitors. The UMWA had the further advantage of having been allied with "the American labor movement [that] had been among the most militantly anti-Communist forces in the nation."
Several factors had changed the climate of labor and management relations in the country and given the UMWA its new status. The infamous "government by injunction" had culminated in 1932 with the passage of the Norris-LaGuardia Bill that gave protection against this reprehensible form of antilabor activity and mitigated the power of yellow dog contracts. The severe measures of industrialists were beginning to be questioned. Employers were seen now as not all-powerful: they could not cope with the Depression. Their enormous prestige was lost.
The most important development of all was the National Industrial Recovery Bill—creating the National Recovery Administration (NRA)—that the Roosevelt administration sent to Congress on May 17, 1933. The right to join unions and the collective bargaining aspects of the bill were innovations in United States political history and gave great vitality to union activity everywhere. Employers saw no stemming of the rush toward unionization and hoped to retain control of labor by establishing company unions or at least unions that were not dominated by Communists. Apprehensive at the spectacular growth of the NMU in Carbon County, mine management hastily supported the UMWA. Hiawatha managers continued their old policies, however, and the first appeal to their miners was made by Varro Jones in the junipers surrounding the town. Columbia also would not allow UMWA meetings on company property.
The competition between the two unions became intensely hostile. Italians, particularly, were rallied against each other: those with Frank Bonacci and the UMWA against those with Tony Bonacci and the NMU. The most militant and vociferous were the Slavic miners who put aside centuries-long, old-country dissensions based on varied languages, religions, and politics and collectively drew toward the NMU.
The Greeks no longer made up the largest part of the county's labor force. Leaders of the 1922 strike, in which they believed they had not been fully supported by the entire UMWA, they assumed a passive attitude, although ostensibly for their union. A few joined the NMU. NMU meetings in the Helper park were drawing greater crowds. Wives and daughters of immigrants, especially the Slavs, became increasingly active. They roasted lambs and chickens they had raised for picnics, cooked for strikers in jail, and gave money they needed for their families to pay court and attorneys' fees. Their cultures assigned women to subordinate roles, repressed and powerless, but at confrontations with mine and county authorities the women ranted and jeered with the approval of their men. Several of the women became well known as hecklers, and officials always expected trouble when they appeared.
The NMU organizers, Paul Crouch and Charles Guynn, were experienced speakers and easily aroused audiences. Their public criticism of the government awed the immigrants. Guynn's wife, Rae, was as important to the campaign as her husband. She was articulate and also wrote simple, persuasive articles for the Carbon County Miner. With Crouch's wife, Sylvia, she visited in the houses of strikers to strengthen the women's new convictions and to instruct them in strike techniques. One of these taught girls and women to place themselves between strikers and deputies to give NMU men an opportunity for escape.
The Communist affiliation of the NMU was not generally known to the miners at first:
The NMU organizers in Carbon County tried to handle the Communist stigma carefully. In the June 11 meeting
In the June 18 meeting Guynn made the principal speech—the word comrade unsaid. He refuted UMWA organizer Nick Fontecchio's claim that the NMU was of Russian origin and its aims dictated by Russia.
As the weekly meetings progressed, denials of Communist affiliation continued and attacks on government programs and on the United Mine Workers increased. The government was constantly presented as "run by the rich" who had no interest in the poor. General Hugh S. Johnson, administrator of the NRA, and Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, were castigated, Johnson for paying "income tax on nine million" and Miss Perkins for her "only worry . . . figuring out how she was going to beat her chauffeur out of his month's salary." "It doesn't look good when they put in millionaires to do things for the poor people, it doesn't look sincere."
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was the organizers' main target. Charles Guynn brought a petition to Utah relief authorities asking adherence to RFC stipulations that money, not scrip, be paid for work performed. Denouncing of coupons had psychological impact. Payment in scrip that had to be used at higher-priced company stores had been a constant grievance of miners since the beginning of the country's industrialization. A law against such coercion had been passed by the Utah State Legislature in 1901 but had no effect on the practice.
Crouch harrangued that the UMWA was a company union and guilty of a "sell-out" to mine management. Superintendent Oliver Sutch of Mutual and R. R. Kirkpatrick, "notorious super of Standard," were accused of conspiring to bring the UMWA into the mines. The United Mine Workers were denounced as having been strikebreakers since 1922 and failures at unionization. Frank Bonacci answered Crouch in the Price Sun Advocate with a history of the 1922 strike. He recounted the great financial drain on the UMWA to bring in tents and food for the strikers' families, the miseries endured, and the onslaught of the National Guard with machine guns on every tipple.
That the UMWA was strong enough after the 1922 strike to have any effect on coal mining in the county and that members worked as strikebreakers since that time were false, but persuasive, accusations to the immigrant workers for whom many of the events of the period were inexplicable.
The NMU's contention that company unions were being organized with mine superintendents at their head incited the miners. Employers were rapidly installing company unions to ward off the NRA's sanction of the right to unionize. In November 1933 a sample survey revealed 400 out of 623 company unions in effect had been organized since the NRA's enactment. In this they were emulating the company unions of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., organized in the Colorado Fuel and Iron coal mines after the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. The company unions "manifested a more benevolent approach [than hostile anti-union tactics]. Whether belligerent or benevolent, employers gained strikingly similar results."
The race for the miners' membership accelerated. Frank Bonacci and Fontecchio were gaining among the native American miners in all of the mining camps. "Pawns of the coal operators," Guynn said of them and denounced the employment of eleven guards by the Independent Coal and Coke Company of Kenilworth. The appearance of guards was always, he said, the prelude to violence. The NMU claimed that railroad men sympathized with the miners as they had in the 1922 strike, and if a strike were called, they would not move coal even if strikebreakers mined it. A new element now entered NMU talk: the general strike, the traditional aim of syndicalists who championed labor union control of industry and government.
TRADITION AND PROTEST: THE 1933 STRIKE
By the end of June the NMU reported that the Mutual Mine had been organized one hundred percent, bringing their total membership to twelve hundred. Organizing was given impetus by an unexpected incident. The annual Fourth of July parade, that alternated each year between Price and Helper, was to be held in Price. The American Legion of Price, sponsors of the celebration, refused an NMU request to march in the parade. Tony Bonacci reported at the July 2 NMU meeting that Mayor West told his committee "they were red communists . . . and given two minutes to leave town." Mayor West called the NMU organizers "three skunks . . . [with] red stripes down their backs. They are commonly known as communists." West soon was accompanied by day and night bodyguards. A Slavic woman, Margaret Nemanich, one of the fearless hecklers, said, "If we are bolshevics, so are our children and we will not allow them to parade and play in the Price [Carbon County High School] band on the Fourth." Mrs. Nemanich was to prove herself the equal of martial "Big Mary" Septek of the 1897 anthracite coal strike.
Carbon County residents had a unified enthusiasm for their marching school bands. The refusal of Price officials for NMU participation in the parade and the retaliation of NMU members by withdrawing their children from the band was the complete break between the two towns. The band had just returned from the Chicago World's Fair with first place honors.
Mayor Frank R. Porter, an engineer on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad whose unconditional support of labor had earned him the title of "radical," invited the NMU to hold a Fourth of July parade in Helper. Price held its scheduled parade followed by an outing in the park; UMWA cars, decorated with colored crepe paper, were cheered. The Helper parade mixed diverse community elements: Charles Wetherbee was the marshal; the Helper Junior High Band, the Mayor Rolla West of Price was a major figure in the 1933 strike action in Carbon County. Courtesy Mrs. Rolla West. Greek American Progressive Association, and fifteen hundred members of the NMU, their Women's Auxiliary, and Youth Section marched.
The Helper Journal chided Mayor West for "recognizing one union and denying the other." The deteriorated relationship between Price and Helper and the increasing hostility of the two unions induced the Helper Chamber of Commerce to attempt a pacification meeting. Both unions were invited to meet with the chamber, but the UMWA did not appear.
The July Fourth parade forced many uncommitted miners to take sides. The Kenilworth Mine was completely UMWA, but all others had miners representing both unions. Eight hundred people attended the July 9 meeting of the NMU and heard that the general strike was set for Labor Day. The NMU insistently harangued on the inequities of government agencies, particularly the RFC, and assured their members that railroad men would not transport coal in a general strike. The UMWA, meanwhile, projected a fervid patriotism.
During the first two weeks of August NMU miners at Mutual went on strike twice. In the first strike they demanded recognition of their union, and in the second they protested the hiring of "men from distant farming communities" rather than "men living in camp and waiting to be put on." 48 This was a tactic of mine management— asking Latter-day Saints church authorities to supply men during labor troubles. The rounding up of thugs as guards and strikebreakers by detective agencies was implemented in earlier Utah strikes with immigrant labor agents recruiting large numbers of recently arrived, unemployed men and by the LDS church's call to farm areas for help.
Superintendent Oliver Sutch maintained the strikes were called because he did not accede to NMU demands that he discharge miners who had recently joined the UMWA. Recognition of the union was refused, and a large number of women and children joined the picket line. Both unions accused each other of threatening to harm their members and families. Because an abundance of coal was on hand, the mine was shut down. Sheriff Marion Bliss was "keeping an eye on the property."
The strikes were quickly settled without NMU recognition but with assurances that precluded management's bringing in outside labor. At the August 13 meeting of the NMU, Charles "Jack" Guynn said the general strike would take place as planned unless the mines agreed to an NMU mining code. "He is . . . the head organizer and who we also learn is an Austrian." From then on Guynn was called "Guynnovitch" by NMU enemies. Being not only an agitator but "foreign" made Guynn even more menacing. (Yugoslavians involved in the strike say Guynn was not "Austrian.")
As NMU rantings against government relief programs continued, many NMU miners and their families publicly announced their support of communism. Robert H. Hinckley, state director of public relief, told a meeting of county commissioners that "unless the vicious attacks made
against the President and the National Recovery Act in Carbon County were discontinued government action would be taken."
Reaction came quickly. "This is probably the most open move in the direction of a Fascist dictatorship ever made by a public official in this country," the Carbon County Miner said. Businessmen of Helper held an emergency meeting for "immediate discontinuance of such alleged anti-government remarks which might be injurious to the good name of Carbon County."
Inspired by the partial success of the Mutual strikes and bombarded by Crouch, Guynn, and Wetherbee's eroding attacks on the RFC and the NRA, 215 miners refused to wait for the Labor Day general strike and struck the Spring Canyon Mine on August 23. The UMWA miners remained at work, but since a large supply of coal was on hand the superintendent closed the mine.
Immediately county commissioners and Sheriff Bliss asked the governor for troops. Bliss called the strike a "political uprising, ... a communist movement . . . the strikers do not deny they are communists." He would need five hundred men, Bliss said, but he would not get them from the United Mine Workers, "because it would result in pitched battles." Governor Henry H. Blood hesitated; he was relying on the adoption of the NRA coal code to settle the strike. In a telegram to General Hugh S. Johnson, he asked that "all consistent speed be used in promulgating the code." The governor then sent O. F. Shane and William M. Knerr, chairman, of the Industrial Commission to mediate the strike. Wetherbee informed the two men that picketing would be peaceful: "If any trouble is created, the responsibility will lie with Sheriff S. M. Bliss and his deputies." Mine guards, he said, were UMWA members armed with pick handles.
When the strike was called, five NMU machinists were working the afternon shift and were unaware of it. Their wives heard that UMWA men, wielding new pick handles from the company store, were waiting for their husbands to emerge from the mine portal. With a three-hundred-pound miner's wife leading them, the women walked through the cordon of United Mine Workers and "brought their men out.""
Knerr remained in Helper and worked for a truce. He repeatedly warned against the need for the National Guard and maintained that reports of violence were rumors and that picketing was, as had been promised, peaceful.
UMWA locals met twice in the American Legion Hall in Price and voted for resolutions to show appreciation of the "efforts of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, General Johnson and all concerned in the NRA declaring war on depression." They asked the governor to remove Communist leaders "from our midst" who were "recruiting people for their party, largely irresponsible, of a bad repute, and enemies of our government." By this time a considerable number of native Americans and immigrants had joined not only the NMU but also the Communist party.
The strike spread to the three Gordon Creek mines: Consumers, National, and Sweet. Sheriff Bliss gave the number of men leaving work as two hundred fifty. National was just inside the entrance of Gordon Creek Canyon; a half mile into the canyon was Consumers, and another half mile beyond was Sweets. NMU pickets at National, inflamed by reports of the National Guard coming into the county, stopped cars and trucks and searched them for guns and ammunition. "Ingress and egress of the workers at the other two mines is somewhat limited as a result of the picketing," the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Knerr went to National to explain Utah laws governing picketing, particularly on highways. He asked the miners to return to work while grievances were adjudicated, but Guynn convinced the men that, unlike the UMWA who were willing to wait for the NRA code, the NMU saw advantages in winning concessions before the code adoption. Fontecchio's claim that pay scale would be $6.72 was a lie, Guynn said. Scale would be $4.46 under the code.
Mine managers now put greater pressure on Governor Blood for the National Guard. The president of the Sweet Coal Company wrote him that the NMU had taken men off freight trains to take possession of the company's property. "The situation in Carbon County is liable to result in bloodshed unless the power of the law is asserted." The Helper marshal sent Governor Blood a copy of the Communist Young Worker taken from Paul Crouch's rented car. NMU headquarters were raided and Communist literature was found.
Mine managers continued their demand for the National Guard. Governor Blood held a meeting with them and Carbon County, Salt Lake City, and state officials. The mine operators insisted that all, or at least part, of the Guard was needed. Mayor West, Commissioner Reid, and Sheriff Bliss retracted the commission's earlier appeal that the Guard was needed and convinced the governor that Carbon County could handle any problems arising from the spreading strike.
Rumors that the National Guard was coming to the county aroused the people of Helper who had lived under martial law during the strike of 1922. The NMU sent two petitions to the governor, one signed by 251 people who claimed the strike was peaceful and the Guard not needed, the other signed by 619 people with an added remonstrance that the $45,000 for which citizens of Carbon County would be bonded was an economic hardship that "could result in the loss of their houses." The petitions were signed by businessmen, railroad men, students, and the greater number by miners and their wives. In pencil, the labored signatures gave testimony to the great immigrant force that had come to a new country for a better life.
The Helper Journal commended Governor Blood and Industrial Commissioner Knerr's rebuff for the National Guard request:
The mine managers, however, continued to beseige the governor for troops. Although maintaining that Carbon County could solve its problems, Governor Blood sent Preston G. Peterson, a member of the State Road Commission, to Price. Peterson was authorized to appoint County Commissioner Reid as his assistant and Mayor West as chief deputy sheriff of Carbon County with the authority to organize and direct deputy sheriffs to "resolve the troubles of the county."
Frank Bonacci and Nick Fontecchio telephoned the coal camps; in quick response UMWA men came in large groups to offer their services. By Friday, August 25, Mayor West and Sheriff Bliss had deputized nearly three hundred men. Among those deputized were a Mormon bishop, a Helper school principal, and a Spring Glen school principal.
Two detachments of National Guard troops with equipment arrived while the deputizing of the UMWA was proceeding: the first on Thursday evening, August 24, was led by Lt. Col. Albert E. Wilfong of the 22nd Field Artillery, chief of Ogden police; the second on Friday morning was in charge of Lt. Harry A. Randall of the 145th Field Artillery. Lieutenant Randall's men were a riot squad trained in using tear gas. The convoy of army trucks, driven by state highway patrolmen, also brought three hundred rifles, a large number of gas masks, and tear gas bombs.
On Friday Adj. Gen. W. G. Williams of the Guard, "acting as a citizen and not in his official capacity," told the deputies to use their guns only as a last resort. A relative few, he said, were intimidating American workmen.
Hearing of the activities in Price, NMU strikers blockaded the Gordon Creek road with railroad ties, mattresses, and a truck. State Road Commissioner Peterson and six state patrolmen drove to the canyon and told the pickets the highway was part of the state road system and had to be kept open. The strikers immediately removed the barricades. County attorney Walter C. Gease also drove to Consumers and gave the strikers the same message.
NMU activity had been especially intense among the Slavic strikers in Consumers. They were extremely hostile to the superintendent of the mine, David Parmley, who was also chairman of the Carbon County Commission. At four in the morning, Saturday, August 26, the deputies, each with a lunch, got into state road trucks, old white GMC World War I surplus, "to clear the road" at Consumers. Eight national guardsmen with grenades and tear gas equipment accompanied them.
While the cars lumbered slowly up the canyon road, young attorneys of the county, accompanied by Sheriff Bliss and Commissioner Reid, drove past. The attorneys, fearing a clash would result between the deputies and pickets, were driving to Consumers to "explain the National Miners Union background to the strikers," many of whom were clients of theirs, and to advise them of their rights. Commissioner Reid, a devout Catholic, hoped to sway his fellow Catholics. All Slavs, however, had turned violently against him.
Rolla West stopped his men at a section house four miles from Consumers to await the outcome of the attorneys' mission. The men waited for hours. The August sun was hot and Gordon Creek, where they had expected to find water, was dry. Several hours later, David Parmley came down the road followed by "6 big Austrian women." They had thrown him to the ground, taken his revolver, and "peed on" him.
West told his men to put the kicking, shouting women into a small room of the section house. Armed guards were placed at the doors and windows. "West arrested them—not in Dave Parmley's behalf— but because he recognized them as notorious hecklers and knew they had come down to heckle the deputies."
In the late afternoon the lawyers drove back down the canyon; their mission had been unsuccessful. The deputies got into the trucks and were driven to the entrance of Consumers where Mayor West placed the four companies in military formation. (Mayor West had given each man who had served in World War I the same rank in his deputy force.)
A crowd of shouting NMU pickets, including women and children, stood about the entrance to the mine. The deputies marched toward the portal. When the pickets did not move, the riot squad threw four tear gas bombs at them. Choking, eyes watering, the pickets ran into ravines leading off the mine entrance and others into the mine. Those caught were forced into the road trucks. The deputies then continued their march into Sweets and National.
Sixty-eight pickets were arrested on a charge of rioting, including Sylvia Crouch. She was held incommunicado until nine in the evening when J. H. McKnight of Salt Lake City, one of the attorneys for the strikers, succeeded in having her released. She went at once to the Spring Canyon picket line and told the strikers to defend themselves when the deputies came to disperse them.
The next day plans were made to enter Spring Canyon the following morning. 80 To keep the deputies from "spitting cotton for the entire day" Brigham H. Young, the county clerk, was asked to get twelve dozen empty pint whiskey flasks that would be filled with water. (A controversy was being fought in the state at the time over the legalization of 3.2 beer, yet whiskey was readily available.)
In Spring Canyon the picket camps were high on the mountain slopes among boulders and junipers. An early frost had broken records, and camp fires burned continuously at night to warm the strikers. Four hundred men, women, and children "derisively greeted" the deputies when they arrived at the mine. Eight hand bombs and three rifle grenades were thrown at the pickets. Screaming invectives, women sprang at the deputies and threw pepper into their eyes. Rolla West's account of the deputies coming over the mountains and descending on the camp describes six hundred NMUs milling about the mine entrance and within minutes mixing in with the deputies. West ordered the deputies to put the men into the state trucks. "The deputies were just a little hesitating" until an Italian boy "tried to take a rifle away from" a former infantry man who broke his arm. This spurred the deputies to march the men, women, and children a half mile to the Peerless Mine where the men were put into the trucks. As the Helper Journal described it:
Harold Huff, the local president of the NMU, who "had been particularly obnoxious with the NMU that summer" was arrested by West, handcuffed, and put into a boxcar. Later in the day West gave him the "opportunity" to leave town and not come back.
After news of the men's arrest went out, a group of marchers gathered at the outskirts of Helper on the Spring Canyon road. Hearing this (there were spies on both sides), deputies drove down to meet a group of men led by "maybe 30 or 40 women. The front row of marchers [two of them carrying American flags] were very pretty young ladies, apparently Austrian, about 18 or 20 years old." The marchers stopped when they saw the deputies. West sent two "older" deputies ahead "to accost these women with the idea that they could refrain from using excess force better than the younger men." The strikers behind the front row of women ran back toward Helper. Deputies broke off to chase them, but the women threw pepper into their eyes and they floundered, their vision blurred. West ordered the women put into state road trucks and taken to the sheriff's office in Price where there was no space for them. They were left to return to their houses, many in Spring Canyon sixteen miles away, as best they could.
On the march of the protesters, the Helper Journal reported that armed deputies hurled tear gas bombs at the gathering; a girl, carrying an American flag, was struck with the butt of a rifle; and women were slapped in the face. "High-handed tactics," the Journal described events, "in the name of law and order" and "a rather general charge of communism has been placed against the entire city of Helper." The paper commended the strikers for not destroying mine property. The Price Sun Advocate said, "It was necessary to use 8 bombs before the crowd dispersed."
REVERBERATIONS
The strikers held in the bull pens were forgotten. They had not been given water or food for twenty-four hours or blankets to sleep on. By noon of the second day a local restaurant, under West's orders, brought the men food and coffee. NMU women came daily with home-canned fruits, vegetables, and cured meats. Each visit was accompanied by shouting and swearing at the guards. Several women shocked the deputies by exposing their breasts and offering "suck to make humans" of them—an old Slavic act of hostility. The deputies
In a "comic, semi-climax to the local disturbances," six or seven truckloads of deputies converged on the Carbon Hotel in Helper and arrested Guynn and Wetherbee on a charge of rioting. Expecting something ominous, the faces of the organizers were "an ashen, yellowish green." 80 After four hours in jail, they were released on $5,000 bail. That evening at an NMU meeting, they demanded that the general strike set for September 4 take place.
The deputies gathered, angry at the freeing of the NMU organizers. They had thought that once the men were jailed, their influence on the miners would wane, and they could go back to the mines. Also, "the United Mine Workers were having satisfying conferences with the mine operators. The mine operators, however, seemed to feel the NMU issue should be disposed of."
The deputies told West, "We know where to find them tonight. We don't figure to let them need any bail this time." At a meeting that evening in the Price Savoy Hotel to formulate their plans, Mayor West was able to deter the men. After taking a last drink of whiskey, they returned to their houses.
Some of the strikers were let out on bail on condition they return to work and "maintain the peace," but approximately two hundred were left in the bull pens unable to pay the $1,000 bond. Some were transients who had joined the picket lines for something to eat. One hundred thirty of the men were aliens, and deportation proceedings were begun immediately. 03 The men refused to eat "the cold food thrown to us like dogs" until they were given a stove and a cook. Prominent citizens visited the men and tried to convince them to forsake the NMU because it was a Communist union. Among the visitors was Joseph Barboglio, president of two banks, who had been one of the Italian strikers held in the bull pens in the 1903 strike.
Roads leading into the county were patrolled to prevent shipments of guns and ammunition rumored expected by the strikers. Guards were stationed on all roads, bridges, and tunnels. "Wobblies" and strike sympathizers were turned back at the county lines. Under tight surveillance, the strikers could not carry out the general strike planned for Labor Day.
A week after Guynn's arrest on riot charges, Sheriff Bliss and a squad of deputies arrested him again for criminal syndicalism. The following day Wetherbee was arrested on the same charge. Neither was able to pay the $10,000 bail and remained in custody. The basis for the charge was inducing strikers to block the Spring Canyon road on August 23 "to prevent men not affiliated with the NMU from going to work," teaching anarchy, and urging NMU members to go on a general strike.
An uproar followed the second jailings; NMU men in Helper caught Virgil Miller, a deputy, and beat him severely. The Helper City Council quickly passed a resolution prohibiting meetings of three or more people. Several days later Guynn and Wetherbee's wives were arrested on an open charge. Crouch persisted in eluding deputies. Warrants on criminal syndicalism counts were drawn up for him and for Harold Huff.
Deputies continued to guard mines, protect UMWA miners on their way to and from work, and walk the streets of Helper to obstruct NMU meetings. The NMU met across the Duchesne County line to plan strategy. They mimeographed bills calling for a meeting in the Helper park and had them dropped on the mining towns from a small airplane. Strikers made their way through ravines and Italian farms; their wives and daughters tricked deputies with excuses; and a large number of NMUs converged on the park. Sheriff Bliss arrived and attempted to warn the crowd that they were breaking the law by holding the meeting.
"Kill him! Lynch him!" the crowd shouted. Men and women climbed onto the platform and pushed him off it. A leader of the Serbian women, Mrs. Mike Dragos, who had received bruises in the Consumers conflict and used this "reason" for needing to buy alcohol at a Helper drug store, pulled Bliss from the crowd. A figure of authority during the strike because of her fearlessness—the only basis for respect given a woman by rural Slav men—she was allowed to escort Bliss out of the park.
The NMU then called for a march to the Price county courthouse as a protest against the imprisonment of their leaders. Eight were still in custody. The strike committee maintained that following the meeting, they telephoned Sheriff Bliss that the NMU were coming "peacefully and he answered, 'All right.' " West instructed Chief of Police Vernon Davis of Price to deputize all male city employees and any other citizens he needed. The deputized United Mine Workers had gone back to the mines; farmers in Wellington, five miles south of Price, were immediately recruited. Several frightened high school boys were among them. They had been told they were to go to the aid of Mormons who "were being driven out of the county."
On Monday, September 11, four hundred men and women, including several wives of prominent Helper citizens, arrived at the entrance to Price in cars and trucks. Led by Lawrence Mower of Helper, chairman of the strike committee, and Ephraim Towne, NMU leader at National, they formed twelve and fifteen abreast and marched down the main street of the town toward the courthouse. Although word had been'sent out by deputies that citizens should stay away from Main Street, the streets were lined with people, almost all of them men. Onlookers crowded together at the windows of two-story buildings.
At the First East intersection Sheriff Bliss stopped the marchers and told them to return to their cars. The National Guard Riot Squad with tear gas equipment and the Price City Fire Department with hose stood behind him. The Price police were stationed on the west side of the intersection, Mayor West and his deputies on the north side of Main Street, and Commissioner Reid and his men on the south side of it. The state and local highway patrol kept traffic away from the street.
Towne and Mower answered Bliss: "We're going through." National guardsmen then discharged tear gas toward the marchers. Struggling they stood their ground. Water shot out of the fire hose. A motion picture film of the confrontation taken by J. Bracken Lee— whose long political career includes two terms as governor of Utah and three as mayor of Salt Lake City—shows the force of water passing over the marchers, women in long cotton dresses and overalled men. They sway like wheat in the wind.
Two Price deputies attempted to arrest Crouch at Rolla West's direction. NMU women converged about the deputies, shouting in their various languages obscenities "worse than men." In the melee Crouch slipped away. The Sun Advocate reported that when NMU followers surrounded the officers to prevent Crouch's arrest "a number of deputies charged the mob. Numerous hand to hand combats ensued, the officers being compelled to frequently use the butts of their rifles as clubs . . . some of the grenades . . . [were] thrown back by the demonstrators." In Lee's film rifle-carrying deputies smile as they follow the marchers up the railroad tracks west of Main Street to their cars. Young national guardsmen look as if they are enjoying an outing.
Sylvia Crouch, Tom Corak, and Dan Laner, who was hit on the head with a rifle butt, were arrested. Forty years later former NMU members insist that the blows broke Laner's neck and he died of it. Neighbors say he emerged from jail "funny," unlike his former self, and committed suicide the following March.
Immediately following the march Adjutant General Williams and Maj. H. Arnold Rich of the National Guard met with county authorities. To bring an end to "the agitating and inciting to lawless acts by the NMU organizers," they suggested "something like martial law with civilian instead of military personnel." County lawyers warned against this proposal. Word flashed through Helper that houses were to be searched and all NMU pamphlets and papers should be burned. Smoke rose from hundreds of backyard fires.
The following night a hundred deputies drove into Helper and rampaged through thirty boardinghouses, hotels, and private houses "to enforce county wide civilian martial law." The search, without warrants, failed to uncover Crouch. It is remembered as a night of terror: several of the deputies had "whiskey on their breath;" children cowered and screamed as their parents were knocked down. 108 Fifteen NMU members were arrested for having taken part in the Price "uprising" and put in the fairgrounds' bull pen. The NMU attempted to hold a protest meeting but were prevented by eighty guards patrolling the park and streets. They quickly mimeographed sheets of paper calling for another meeting to organize "defense squads to squash martial law."
Ordinances were passed by the Carbon County Board of Commissioners and the city councils of Helper and Price banning public meetings and dances. The Helper council asked for deputies to enforce the "civilian-martial law." The NMU's children's strike against the Helper deputized school principal was called off. Baseball championship games were transferred from Helper to Provo. The NMU established relief stations for the unemployed and put up tents for those forced out of their houses. Crouch, Guynn, Wetherbee, and five strike leaders were ordered to stand trial on September 16.
The International Labor Defense and the Unemployed Council of Salt Lake City advertised mass meetings in Sandy, Provo, American Fork, Midvale, and Salt Lake City to protest "women and children brutally beaten up in Carbon County," the threatening of handcuffed men, drunkenness (filling the whiskey flasks with water had been a mistake), and "trying to force miners to work under slave conditions by using guns, tear gas, and grenades."
Murray E. King, vice president of the Utah Farmers and Workers Congress, continued drives he had begun during the Spring Canyon strike to collect farm products for the strikers' families. Belle Taub, organizer for the International Labor Defense, who had come to Utah when the strike was called, made plans for a mass meeting in the Salt Lake City Congregational Church.
Protest letters and telegrams from Unemployed Councils, workers and farmers organizations, International Labor Defense chapters, and National Committees for the Defense of Political Prisoners streamed into Governor Blood's office. Numerous ethnic organizations—Lithuanian, Russian, Greek, Hungarian, Negro, Finnish, and Polish—sent telegrams. Years later, during Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's red hysteria, many of these organizations were brought before the Un- American Activities Committee.
Individuals, including the poet Lincoln Steffens and the novelist Theodore. Dreiser, also sent telegrams and letters to the governor. The governor answered a Utah citizen: "Although petitioned by officials of Carbon County, I declined to send the National Guard into the Carbon coal fields." Governor Blood maintained throughout the campaign against the NMU that the labor troubles were being handled locally.
THE AFTERMATH
While the NMU was embroiled with authorities, the UMWA was holding regular meetings with mine officials and progress was being made toward a coal code adoption. During this time Monsignor (later Bishop) James Edward Kearney of San Francisco, the well known Catholic chaplain of World War Fs famed Rainbow Division, came to Carbon County. He upheld Commissioner Reid with whom he had served in France and spoke out against the NMU, reminding the Italians and Yugoslavian Croatians and Slovenes that as Catholics they could not belong to a Communist organization. A few Catholics began to withdraw their support after the monsignor's admonition, but a majority considered their church's stand an unwarranted interjection of religious authority.
The International Labor Defense meeting in the First Congregational Church in Salt Lake City on September 15 drew six hundred people. The press, especially the Salt Lake Tribune, was accused of not telling the "whole truth of what happened down in Carbon County . . . still part of the state of Utah." NMU members told of being tear gassed and assaulted. Belle Taub repudiated reports that the International Labor Defense was Communist, and M. P. Bales declared the Bill of Rights had been denied the strikers. He condemned the NRA's forcing labor to agree not to strike thereby losing its only weapon and called the United States a capitalistic dictatorship.
He then read a resolution asking that Adjutant General Williams be removed from office for his activities in the strike and that a committee be appointed to investigate conditions in Carbon County.
A week later the report of the committee members, appointed at the request of the International Labor Defense, was printed in the Progressive Independent, a liberal newspaper published in Salt Lake City. Under the headline "Chaos Reigns in Carbon," Wilford Owen Woodruff decried Governor Blood's "general apathy and persistent procrastination." The terrorizing of women and children, he said, were reminiscent of the territorial days of LTtah and the acts of United States marshals. B. H. Roberts, president of the First Council of Seventies of the LDS church, who died a few days after giving his views on the strike, said there had been no mob, but a "peaceful march of people under consent of county authoritiesand without arms absolutely, to make petition for the release of men, leaders of the unfavored section from unjust imprisonment." Alfred Sorenson protested the use of deputies as young as fifteen years of age and called the Carbon troubles "a case of vigilantes seen under the guise of necessity (which necessity did not exist only in the fears of the officials.)" Carbon County officials denounced the report claiming county officials had not given permission for the march in behalf of prisoners, that the men were not held without charges, that the majority of the deputies were "not youths," and that the riot was touched off when Crouch and his sympathizers resisted his arrest.
These points were argued during the months of trials ahead. The county insisted that Sheriff Bliss had not given permission for the march and that its purpose was to "forcibly release the strikers." Attorney for the strikers, Harry G. Metos, refuted this by reading an unsigned letter sent to Sheriff Bliss advising him of the march. Testimony was given that the marchers were unarmed under direction of their leaders. The defendants testified they surrounded Crouch to protect him from a menacing situation.
On October 5 the trials of Guynn, Wetherbee, Crouch, Lawrence Mower, Tony Bonacci, Tom Corak, and Dan Laner began. While the hearing on the riot charge against Crouchwas in progress, Dan Black of Salt Lake City, who had brought Crouch to court, was taken from the steps of the Price City Hall, driven to the desert east of Green River, and beaten. An eastern photographer who was filming the large number of deputy sheriffs on the streets had his film confiscated. Walter Gease, county attorney, said the assailants of Black were law officers outside the county; Sheriff Bliss dismissed the kidnapping as a hoax. Black said his abductors interrogated and beat him by turns trying to force him to reveal where a cache of guns and ammunition was hidden.
Although forbidden, a mass meeting was scheduled for the following Sunday at the Helper park to protest the "civilian martial law" and the kidnapping of Black.
The attempt of the defense attorneys, J. H. McKnight and Harry G. Metos, to bring out Black's kidnapping met with the court's unconcern. During the hearing, the defense attorneys and Irvin Goodman, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney from Oregon, brought admission from Sheriff Davis that, despite denials of Governor Blood, Utah highway patrolmen and national guardsmen were in Carbon County. (Approximately thirty were on duty in the county.)
A defense witness, Raymond Toson, reported that the jury foreman, R. L. Loveless, was a deputy sheriff during the strike. Judge George Christensen stated that "nothing could be done at that stage," and Metos's motion for a mistrial was denied. Metos was harrassed and threatened throughout the months-long trial.
Guynn was judged guilty. Metos appealed the case to the Utah Supreme Court on the strength of admissions by Loveless while a jury was being impaneled to hear the case against Paul Crouch. As a prospective juror Loveless admitted under questioning that he had been a deputy under Sheriff Bliss and that he had expressed opinions on the NMU "lots of times"—called them "a bunch of reds who ought to be run out of the country"—but that he could "fairly and impartially pass upon the evidence in this case." The judgment of conviction was set aside and the case remanded to the district court for a new trial.
With NMU strength diffused, the UMWA was freely completing unionization of the mines and continuing code meetings with mine managers. NMU members were bitter and disgruntled; their children were hungry. Guards were everywhere. A small, low-flying airplane patrolled the mining camps and Helper and dropped tear gas bombs on congregations of people. A Deseret News editorial reported seventeen or eighteen agents from the Department of Justice in Washington, D. C, disguised as ranchers and farmers, had come into Carbon County. The city editor of the News, Alfred P. Reck, had spent a week in the county making an investigation for the paper. "The facts . . . will be presented in a series of articles starting . . . tomorrow," he said. "They will astound you with the gravity of the situation, stir you by the drab pathos of miners' conditions and cause you to ponder over one of the most serious situations this state has faced."
The articles never appeared. The day following the editorial, a few lines, gave a tenuous explanation: trials were still to be held [this was known six weeks before the editor's visit to Carbon County] and the UMWA's working with the coal operators "it is hoped will promote industrial peace in that troubled county."
The organizers' trials on rioting wore on through winter and into late spring and summer. They crushed the NMU. Criminal syndicalism charges were later dropped on condition the men leave the county; riot counts against the local NMU men were dismissed. Guynn's first trial on October 5 was significant. "The National Miners Union succumbed to a withering end . . . with barely enough hard core Communists to post the Red Flag at the Rat Race on Lenin's birthday, October 5."
Several NMU members sued county officials for alleged mistreatment, for searching their houses without warrants, and for beatings. Only one case was brought to court. After a disruptive trial that included jury-tampering accusations, a verdict was brought against the plaintiff.
At the end of October the Wyoming Labor Journal hailed the victory of the United Mine Workers in Carbon County: "United Mine Workers Utah Producers Near Agreement."
The coal operator's Mining Review was restrained; it had not printed a word concerning the 1933 year of coal strife in Carbon County, although indignant over Utah's refusal to ratify immediately the repeal of the Prohibition Amendment.
From the day the UMWA and management signed their agreement, Carbon County ascended in union affairs. Headquarters were moved from Cheyenne to Price and the UMWA went on unionizing western mines. Pay scale was $6.80 for an eight-hour day. On November 10, 1933, the Wyoming Labor Journal reported a great moral victory: Rockefeller's company unions in Colorado were "killed," and the UMWA was voted into the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company mines.
Immigrant Slavs, Italians, and a few Greeks who had looked to the NMU in desperation began joining the UMWA. Wetherbee advised them to forget their animosities and to unite for the improvement of their lives. Work was denied the former NMUs for months. Owner Terry McGowan of Consumers was the first to take them back.
As mine managers attempted to regain their former control, the Helper Journal carried headlines accusing them of threatening workers with discharge if they were seen buying in Helper stores. The editor suggested that Helper businesses refuse to pay their taxes in retaliation and printed figures listing the unpaid taxes of Carbon County mines.
The cultural fatalism of the immigrants helped them to adjust, but many of their children, particularly the young American-born Slavs, remained unappeased. A few openly spoke of themselves as Communists. Other former NMU followers registered for the Works Progress Administration as Communists. A tight band closed around the organizers and their wives as they tried futilely to bring defecting NMU members back into the union. Their last public demonstration was on communism's May Day. Spearing relief hams and bacon on rods and sticks, they paraded down Helper's Main Street shouting that the meat was "green and rotten," and "not fit for dogs to eat." Mrs. Nemanich thrust a ham under Mayor E. F. Gianotti's nose and told him to "take a whiff." A fight erupted and she was put in jail.
CONCLUSIONS
Four years after the strike a young priest, Father Jerome Stoffel (now Monsignor), was assigned to the Price parish. He found resentment still deep in the children of immigrant strikers. The humiliating treatment of their parents and themselves combined with the depressed economy to keep their faith in liberal causes strong. Their Catholic tradition, however, stirred ambivalent feelings toward their Communist convictions. When World War II brought an abundance of jobs with good wages, zeal for communism was tempered; but the old enmity has not completely dissipated. In dissensions former NMU men remind their fellow UMWAs that they had once carried guns against them.
Frank Bonacci continued his work for the UMWA in Utah and surrounding states. In 1936 he was elected to the Utah State Senate; the predominately Democratic county returned him for five additional terms. His foremost accomplishment was leading the drive for funds to establish the College of Eastern Utah in Price.
On one of Bonacci's many visits to John L. Lewis's office in Washington, D. C, he met Charles Guynn. Lewis's practicality would not allow the waste of talent, and Guynn had become an organizer for the UMWA. From this incident a myth arose in Carbon County that John L. Lewis sent Guynn and the NMU into the coal fields there to force management to choose the UMWA over the Communist union.
Paul Crouch rejected communism within a few years. At twentyfive dollars a day he became a government witness against his former comrades, and a number of them were subsequently deported under the Smith Act. "Professional stoolie," "renegade," "favorite stool pigeon of the Justice Department," Communists called him. Crouch described his Utah sojourn as Communist organizer for the years 1933 and 1934 to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Included in his testimony was a Daily Worker photograph of himself wearing a Red Army uniform, taken during his indoctrination stay in Russia. The attorney for one of Crouch's victims, Jacob Burck, a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, exposed him as a colorful liar.
The turning to communism in the Depression years was a final despairing act for a great number of professional people, intellectuals, and workers. No organization sought to help the millions of hungry, destitute unemployed—except the Communists. Unions backed away from the suffering and gave only token resistance to wage cuts and opposed strikes as well. Railway union leaders introduced and enforced a "voluntary" ten percent wage cut. "The communists brought miseryout of hiding in the workers' neighborhoods." They fought eviction orders; organized the jobless; marched on city halls; and demanded more relief in cash and jobs, hot lunches for children, and the end of discrimination against Black Americans, the greatest sufferers of the Depression.
They fought in the way most open to the dispossessed—by raising hell to force concessions from the rulers. ... In doing this, the communists
In the early 1930s the Slavs of the county were well aware of the rise of communism among their ethnic people in the East. Speakers and their foreign language newspapers brought liberal and radical propaganda to them. Still, Carbon County Slavs were only vaguely familiar with Louis Adamic, Slovenian-born, anti-Stalinist liberal, a leading American writer who was murdered for his views.
Italian immigrants were also subjected to totalitarian journalism. Mussolini, though, was anathema to many of them. The constitutions of their lodges specifically charged members with loyalty to the United States.
If the accusation that Italians and Yugoslavs were "receiving orders" from their homelands through their lodges were true, pandemonium would have been created—so diverse were the factions in their native countries. The Serbs and Croatians were traditional antagonists in Yugoslavia. The Serbs favored the present central government formed by combining the various partitions; the Croats wanted separation into federal states. Yet almost every Slav joined the NMU in Carbon County. As factions among Greeks and among Italians had put aside their old-country animosities during the Ku Klux Klan attacks of 1924 and presented a united defense, the Slavs joined the NMU and some became Communists in a common fight against the poverty and degradation of the Depression.
"It was the hard times that made Slavic people listen to the Communists in those days," says Mrs. Milka Smilanich, secretary of the Serb National Federation of Utah for fifteen years.
County officials who set out to destroy the NMU, proceeded under a philosophy of Protestant American individualism no longer tenable in the United States. Many residents sympathized with the miners initially, but the disclosure of communism frightened them. The justifiable grievances of the strikers were forgotten. They were treated as nuisances who were disturbing the peace of the community.
The strikers were never armed. Their blocking of the Gordon Creek road at news of the deputizing of UMWA miners that gave cause for the routing and jailing of them was a short-lived action. As soon as officials informed them of the illegality of blocking a county road, they cleared it. The march down Price Main Street was what the NMU claimed it to be—a protest against the imprisonment of NMU leaders. The contention that unarmed men and women could forcibly release their leaders in the face of a large contingent of armed deputies, assisted by the National Guard tear gas squad, is insupportable. The NMU strikers and their wives showed courage; they knew from experience what awaited them.
The National Miners Union, tenacious and bold, could well have been established in Carbon County in 1933 if it had foregone the unrelenting attacks on the Roosevelt administration. Scorn for the supreme efforts being made by the federal government turned away sympathizers and miners alike.
By the time of the 1933 strike the character of unions had already begun to change. The epic years of fighting against stolid opposition were fading. Labor's compassionate, stubborn Mother Jones said as she neared the age of one hundred:
In the early 1930s labor was evolving painstakingly toward an era that promised power and respectability. The New Deal's legalization of unions hurried the day. Industrial unions became the equal of craft unions. Belatedly the nation recognized that not only industry but labor had a sovereignty. Yet laws did not automatically insure better working conditions and the disappearance of injustices. There were still militant struggles ahead. It was also a long way forward from the early strikes in the century. In 1903, one hundred twenty-five strikers walked through thirty miles of snow from Scofield to Castle Gate to ask the miners to go out on strike with them. The company guards kept them from warming themselves at night around the coke ovens; they were turned away from all boardinghouses, the Knights of Pythias Hall, and private houses because they were built on company land; and they were forbidden to go to the company store to buy overshoes for their numb feet. They could only walk up and down the county road.
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