United Mine Workers Journal, July 15, 1933

Following months of violence and his failure to negotiate any kind of settlement between the UMWA and the Progressive Miners, Governor Horner appointed a legislative committee to investigate and issue a report on the conflict.

The committee’s membership included IL State Senators W.E.C. Clifford, Champaign; Louis L. Williams, Clinton; C.L. Ewing, Douglas; IL State Representatives Frank A. McCarthy, Elgin; Matt Franz, Chicago, and James T. Burns, Kankakee; Dr. Albert Britt, president of Knox College, Galesburg; Montgomery S. Winning, assistant attorney general, and James Mullenbach, Chicago labor arbitrator.

The report is noteworthy for several reasons.

As one might expect the committee was diligent to avoid taking sides in the conflict.  However they and Gov. Horner failed to acknowledge that by deploying the state militia in Christian County, the state essentially sided with the UMWA and Peabody Coal Company.  The presence of the state militia broke the Progressive Miners’ picket lines in Taylorville, Kindcaid and the rest of the Midland, restoring coal production to these Peabody Mines and eliminated one of the Progressive’s most effective tools – halting coal production.

To that end the committee seemed to lack a basic understanding of how unions gain and deploy leverage in labor disputes.  Specifically the committee rejected the notion of the closed shop.  The committee argued that:

“Labor unions are voluntary organizations, and it is the right of men to determine for themselves the union with which they will affiliate.  In making that determination, persons are guaranteed the right of free speech and the right to assemble in a peaceable manner to discuss the questions involved.  These rights, however,  do not authorize such persons to encourage others to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow men.  Every person complying  with the law has a right to work wherever and whenever he can secure employment, and no man can interfere with that right.”

And although the committee recognized that the solution lie in “one union under wise leadership”, it failed to chart a path to that solution, offering only the tepid recommendation that the state should “set up the necessary legal machinery authorizing arbitration in controversies where the public interest is affected or a great industry is threatened with destruction.”  It could have gone further and recommend a new election as the Progressives had demanded since their inception.  Such a recommendation would have made sense given that even the committee acknowledged that the split had been precipitated by a fraudulent election.

However the report also affirmed charges that the Progressive Miners had been making for months.

For instance the committee echoed the Progressives’ claim that local law enforcement had largely disintegrated and that local sheriffs were partisans in the conflict.  It also criticized the practice of deputizing coal miners.  (However, it should be noted that some local sheriffs sided with Progressives.)

The committee also criticized importing workers from other regions to work in the mines although no mention was made of this practice as a strike-breaking tactic.  Rather it was criticized because it “denies to the residents of such county the means of a livelihood at their accustomed occupation and increases unemployment and distress.”

Most important, the report highlighted the role that the coal operators and electric utilities played in the mine war.  In fact two of the four recommendations made by the committee speak to the complicity of public utilities and coal companies in the fracas.  Too often the Illinois mine war is described simplistically as a “Hatfield–McCoy” factional dispute between two labor unions.  Anyone reading this report will be disabused of that notion.

The report was published in its entirety in the July 15, 1933 edition of the United Mine Workers Journal.  A PDF of the full report is available here.

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