UMW Coal Strike (1919)

Sat Nov 01, 1919

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On this day in 1919, the United Mine Workers (UMW) initiated a nationwide strike of more than 400,000 coal miners, demanding better wages and a 30-hour week. The U.S. declared the strike illegal while the media smeared workers as communists.

U.S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, the same individual behind the infamous Palmer Raids, declared the strike illegal by invoking the Lever Act, a wartime measure that made it a crime to interfere with the production or transportation of necessities.

The law had never been used against a union before, and in fact American Federation of Labor (AFL) founder Samuel Gompers had been promised by President Woodrow Wilson that the Lever Act would not be used to suppress labor actions.

The strike was subject to Red Scare propaganda: coal operators made false charges that Lenin and Trotsky had ordered the strike and were financing it, and some of the press repeated those claims. Others used words like “insurrection” and “Bolshevik revolution”. Because of this propaganda and the Attorney General’s injunction against the strike, the UMW called the strike off on November 8th.

Many workers ignored this order, however, and the strike continued for over a month, with a final agreement being reached on December 10th. Workers won a 14% wage increase and the creation of an investigatory commission to mediate wage issues.

  • @Sarmyth
    4•1 year ago

    A quick Google search shows a lot of articles and documentaries. Several colleges included articles in journals they host as well.

    I think people want too many things put in “the textbooks” that just don’t make sense. I remember learning about the triangle shirtwaste fire in high school, and it didn’t really have an impact on me til college after I had worked for a couple of years. Many labor movements just don’t hit right without personal context, which comes a little after high school.

    But anyone who says things are left out of college textbooks is just cherrypicking or hasn’t taken a class for a while. There is always more content in the textbooks than there is time in the class to go over it all. I don’t think I ever finished a textbook while going through the class curriculum in my entire education. We’d hit big chunks but never the whole thing.

    • @TokenBoomer
      2•1 year ago

      There’s a reason I didn’t learn about the Tulsa massacre until I watched the Watchmen on HBO… just saying. Minority rights and labor struggles aren’t emphasized in American education. That’s a travesty, considering that students will be laborers after they graduate.

      • @Sarmyth
        2•1 year ago

        I guess my American education was different than yours. Although it’s been a couple decades at this point.