Ambush at Keystone, Part 1: No Gas? No Coal.

Kasama is publishing a five part series on communist political work in the miners’ strike wave of the 1970s. We will be posting one piece a day over the next few days.

Ambush at Keystone:
Inside the Coalminers’ Great Gas Protest of 1974

Part 1: No Gas? No Coal.

By Mike Ely

I had to hitchhike down to the big mass meeting. Like so many other people, I simply had run out of gas. And so I walked down the hill from our house to the main road and stuck out my thumb.

Jack P. picked me up in his beat-up green pickup. Jack was one of the safety committeeman at the Keystone #1 mine where I worked. He was a self-absorbed and extremely talkative man and in his eyes I was just a kid — so he chattered on, as we drove down the Tug Fork valley toward Welch. Pretending to listen made it easier for me to hide my excitement. It was early spring, and the steep hills were already filling the air with the smell of new sprouts and pollen.

There were also rumors of a strike hanging heavy in the air. And this was what we had come to southern West Virginia for — to connect with the wildcat strikes the coalminers, to become one with the people. I had by then been in the mines a little over a year. After passing through my “red hat” probationary months at the Itmann mine complex, our organization, the Revolutionary Union, had sent Gina, me and our son further south, into McDowell County along West Virginia’s southern border.

McDowell was one of the few places that had a high percentage of Black coalminers – in a band from Northfork Holler, down along the Tug Fork to Welch and then up U.S. Steel’s Gary Holler. We believed that connecting with radically-inclined people in that Black community was crucial for the political work we had in mind. [6]

Keystone #1 had, so far, been a bit of a disappointment for me. it was a relatively large and long established mine and the old atmosphere of company town lingered strongly there. Keystone’s workforce had a heavy percentage of older, Korean-war generation men, and not as many of the unsettled and rebellious Viet vets. It was about a third African American – as were the immediately surrounding coal camps.

The local union committees were almost all older Black workers (except for Jack P.), and they seemed to be on a friendly, almost familial, basis with local mine management. The younger workers there muttered in frustration that the “old sucks” were never willing to walk out — no matter what the provocation. Some quit saying they wanted a mine where the workers had more backbone.

Speaking Bitterness in the Courthouse

It was early March 1974, and a county-wide protest meeting of miners had been called for the old stone courthouse in the middle of Welch. [7]

I don’t know who opened the doors that Sunday, because by the time we arrived there was already a large crowd milling around in the main courtroom. And it didn’t take long for things to start. One by one, people stood up to address the crowd.

The U.S. was generally gripped by a gasoline shortage – but here in southern West Virginia it had produced particularly sharp class conflict. The crisis was triggered by an oil embargo launched by oil producing countries in the Middle East. Nightly TV showed long lines of cars snaking out of gas stations.

In West Virginia, the state’s Governor Arch Moore declared an arrogant policy of state-wide gas rationing. People in West Virginia would only be allowed to buy gas if their gas gauge showed a quarter tank or less. In a very American way, people were furious at the idea that some gas station attendant was being ordered by the state to stick his head into everyone’s car. A government agent entering your private property (your car!) without your permission felt intolerable — even if they were just local teenagers pumping gas.

And more: this “quarter tank policy” didn’t work for the many miners who drove the long narrow country roads to their jobs. People were simply running out of gas, unable to get to work or get home from work.

Here in the courthouse tempers were high. Several miners at the Maitland mine had been forced to spend the night in the bathhouse. And that story was mentioned again and again.

Some grievances have a deep symbolic meaning. For miners the memories are there, just under the surface, of how they and their parents and grandparents lived, and died, under the thumb of heartless coal operators. How their lives and suffering meant nothing, literally nothing, to those who rule the world. Such experiences shape you, and shape what is tolerable. And they left many miners with a sense that whatever you put up with you would then live with.
Not so long ago, virtually all miners had lived trapped in company towns in these valleys – living in deep debt to the company stores, attending company churches, and moving under the watchful eyes of company gun thugs. By the 1960s, most miners had moved out of company housing, and had broken out of debt-peonage. But, knowing the mercilessness of coal operators, people felt that without continuous struggle, the lives of miners and their families could tumble into an abyss of horrors.

At this meeting, these were mainly young men of my generation running the show. These weren’t that older generation with a hat-in-hand mentality and patriotic Korean-war buzzcuts. These were rednecks with handlebar mustaches and hair over their collars, many of them Vietnam vets. A row of them was reared back with their boots propped up on the courtroom railing, reeking of insolence. And when they stood to speak, their blood ran hot. [8]

Miners had been forced to sleep at the Maitland mine – curled up in the bathhouse! It was infuriating. What are we supposed to do? Move back into small company towns gathered around the mines? To give up the right to live and move as we choose? Let Arch Moore’s agents stick their faces into our cars to decide who gets gas and who doesn’t?
People grabbed onto the absurdity and injustice of this: Here we went underground every day, risking our lives in the dust, the gas and the rock, to give the world endless trainloads of coal — the energy that lights the cities and makes that steel. And they couldn’t even give us each a tank of gas in return? Were the company coal trucks on short rations? Obviously not!

Several women addressed the courtroom urging the men to strike hard and represent everyone by standing up to Governor Moore.

I wasn’t yet known to anyone – certainly not yet as the notorious communist I would soon become. I don’t remember my exact words, but when I spoke I embraced the determination to force the government back, spoke about the unbridgeable gulf between those who own and those who labor, and brought up the importance of supporting the rights of third world peoples to control their resources, like oil.

Meanwhile, it had been clear from the first moments where this meeting was going. A brother soon blurted out: “Here’s what I say: No gas? No coal!” to shouts of agreement.

Then Young Hatter jumped up on a table. He was from U.S. Steel’s Gary #10 — one of the smaller, newer mines with a very young workforce. Jack P. leaned over and whispered to me, “Those hot-heads never work up there.”
Hatter was a physically restless man, quick and muscular, with a pompadour curl hanging over his forehead. And he was short — jumping on that defense table made sense.

Hatter addressed the suddenly-hushed room:

“We all know what’s needed. We meet at the bypass tonight, 9 o’clock. These bastards will have injunctions quickly if we strike. But this isn’t a strike. It is a protest. We just don’t have enough gas to get to work. And if one man can’t get to work — none of us get to work.”

He jumped down. Men all around me were saying: “At the bypass tonight.” I had no idea what that meant.

A couple shouted, “No gas, no coal,” at the news reporters as we filed out.

The Great Gas Protest of 1974 had started.

Meeting at the Welch Bypass

Welch sits where Gary Holler feeds into the Tug Fork River. You can drive for hours in all directions, over narrow two-lane mountain roads, and run across mines scattered everywhere.

In its World War 2 heyday Welch had 100,000 inhabitants. But later the national railroads went diesel, and rapid mechanization of mining slashed the workforce in half. By 1974, Welch felt more like a ghost town. There were still mile-long trains of coal snaking their way out of the area. Welch was still the county seat and with 10,000 people it was still the biggest town around. But its hospital, movie theater, and a small shopping district were weather-beaten, and surrounded by boarded windows.

Above the southern edge of Welch, cut half-way up the mountain, runs a bypass road. It was built so U.S. Steel trucks could rumble out of Bluefield and turn up Gary Holler without stopping for lights or driving through Welch’s small streets. It is a long road without any turnoffs, ideal you want to see anyone coming from afar.

My heart was pounding as I drove up along the bypass that dark Sunday night. I was alone, and didn’t know what to expect. There is one sharp curve in the road with an especially broad shoulder. And there were a hundred fifty men there — in a meeting lit by headlights.

Men stood around in small groups talking. A few passed around bottles. People here have known each other all their lives, and now, at work, these men carried their lives in each others’ hands every day.

A few words were said from the back of a pickup truck about “Why we are here.” But we all knew of course. Then different brief announcements from the crowd: “I’m from U.S. Steel #50, our boys are meeting in Pineville and will take out Wyoming County.” And so on.

It was clear who was in charge, though no one discussed it. No one introduced the ringleaders. There were no votes. Three locals right around Welch were well known for their militancy — Capels, Maitland and the tiny Gary #10. A sizable crew had come from each of those mines. Their leaders conferred at the center of things. They sat together in a car, and would wave over a man they knew well. He leaned in the window, and in whispers instructions were given about which mines to picket. And he would take off with a small crew of five or six men. [9]

There were dozens of mines to pull out – and so the crews were sent out strategically. In some cases we just shut down a central cleaning plant – which meant that miners at a network of many small mines would stop work, and hear about the strike.

There would simply be no work until our demands were met. The state rationing had to be withdrawn and the gasoline had to flow. “No gas? No coal.”

Roving Pickets and Wildcats

As the strike erupted, we expect similar picket movements to develop at the edges of our territory – to spread the strike into new areas.

Under the national coal contracts, miners are contractually required to work. The union officials at all levels are legally obligated to prevent and suppress walkouts. In other words, strikes and walkouts end up being illegal, period. And coal companies can get restraining orders demanding that miners return to work. The cops can be mobilized to enforce them. Refusing to comply means that the workers and their leaders can be subject to punishment for “contempt of court” – fines, jail, and firings.

After the long awful corrupt decade of the 1950s, coal miners rediscovered their solidarity. It had something to do with the new upturn in coal production, and it had to do with fresh blood — the arrival of the 1960s and those Vietnam vets.

If someone was done wrong, he often only had to pour out his water at the mine — a symbol that he was going home. And one by one, the others would pour out their water too. At least that’s how it worked at the more militant mines. West Virginia sent more soldiers to Vietnam (per capita) than almost any other state, and more of those draftees came back AWOL, as deserters, than any other state. They brought with them a rebelliousness from that ugly war that didn’t tolerate well the insults of old-school bosses or the reckless swap of human life for profit.

Illegal strikes of this kind, initiated by the miners themselves, were called wildcats. And at some mines, the grievances were so many and the solidarity so tight that the mine struck often — sometimes weekly — for months and years on end.

At those militant mines, the coal companies were soon able to quickly get court injunctions and restraining orders against walkouts. They threatened to bankrupt local treasuries with fines (so that the miners would not be able to pay elected safety committeemen for time away from work). Increasingly, they threatened individual local officials with contempt of court and jail.

As these threats came down, the workers would go stand in front of neighboring mines, calling them out too. There had already been several area-wide strikes spread in this way, starting with the walkout over the Black Lung disease in 1969. By the mid-70s, huge wildcats would shut down the whole industry, over and over, in long weeks of intense conflict.

The backbone of larger strikes was roving pickets – teams of militants who stopped work at neighboring mines. Sneaking in to scab, working when the rest were out, was seen as the act of a coward and a backstabber.
There was something straightforward and heartfelt in how most miners viewed this: If someone asked for help, you didn’t say no. If someone set up a picket line you didn’t cross. And if a scab-hearted few didn’t understand, well that’s what beating and bullets were for.

As we walked out over the gas rationing, the workers tried to dream up a way to skirt the legalities. We were not striking, they said, we simply did not have enough gas to get to work. Or, they said, this was not a strike anyway, but a “protest.” And the hope was that by packaging our work stoppage that way, we would make it harder for the companies to get injunctions.

I thought that was unlikely, but no one was asking me.

This picket meeting drew militants who knew they were going into a dangerous spot. And looking over things, you just have to say: West Virginia coalminers are some roughneck boys. They were pretty fearless, and a lot of them just liked to fight. They have accumulated anger over a thousand slights and outrages they have experienced at the hands of the coal operators. And many of them just believe deeply in sticking together, backing each other up – in a beer joint brawl, or in a struggle between classes.

This is rural America where people come well armed. Gina and I used to laugh a bit remembering how, in the wake of the SDS breakup, many of the radicals would debate, soberly, the important question of when a revolutionary movement should “initiate” armed struggle. Well here, in West Virginia, everything was armed. [10]

[10] SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) was, one of the major radical organizations of the 1960s. As the student activists of SDS radicalized in the late 1960s, and as the organization’s core increasingly identified with Maoism and communism, they dissolved the loose organization after sharp factional struggles and build several early communist organizations, often with the intention of taking their new politics to the working class. Some forces around SDS thought that the U.S. might be moving into a revolutionary situation. One current argued for immediately launching an armed struggle within the U.S., and soon broke away to wage a campaign of symbolic attacks on icons of U.S. imperialism and war.

At the same time, it was a fact that down here many of the workers simply had guns with them all the time – a pistol stuck in a pocket or a glove box, a shotgun in a rack across the rear window. The strikes here were armed strikes, the meetings were armed meetings, the picketing was armed picketing, even the picnics were armed picnics.

This had a certain undeniable effect. In intense moments, people were often very careful of their words. And the local police were very careful not to drive up suddenly on miners’ picket lines – because that was a good way to die. (The town cops had often known these same boys all their lives, and everyone knew where you lived.)

If someone wanted to shut us miners up, well, they had to come in numbers and come “loaded for bear.” There were lots of forces – backward workers, company foremen, state police, authorities at all levels, even FBI, who knows – that wished us ill. But the crews we sent out that night were ready. They knew each other and the terrain, and they were quite formidable.

The Unexpected Color of Pickets

I was surprised to see that the bypass meeting was all white. This was not what I expected.

History remembers that the miners union had (from its beginnings in the late 1890s) always organized Black and white together. I had met several older African American miners active as leaders in the initial 1960s Black Lung movement. I knew that Black retirees and widows had been active, at least in some areas, during the 23-day 1969 Black Lung strike – the first wildcat strike to spread widely across the coalfields.

But here on the Welch bypass, I didn’t see any Black workers at all, even though the county had several large mines with a significantly African American workforces.

The revolutionary movement Gina and I came out of had been marked deeply by the militancy and consciousness of Black people. She and I had dropped out of school and spend the last years working as white supporters of the Black Panther Party. We had helped organize a collective that reached out to white working class youth with militant anti-racist politics – and we had then joined the Revolutionary Union (RU) which promised to carry out revolutionary preparations among working people on a serious, systematic and nationally-organized basis.

Our small RU project gathering in West Virginia assumed from the beginning that the militant core of the wildcat strike movements would, naturally, attract the most politically radical and conscious workers. Our new communist movement had, at that time, embraced a saying that “Black workers take the lead” – meaning that we also assumed that those active workers would include (above all) the younger Black workers.

So the fact that this first bypass meeting was all-white was the kind of surprise that rocked you back a bit. It was the first inkling we had that the most militantly active miners were not necessarily the same as the most politically advanced miners. And it would take quite a while to dispel some stubborn preconceptions and assimilate the implications of what we were seeing.

Notes

[6] The Revolutionary Union had been founded in 1968 in the San Francisco Bay Area, and mushroomed nationally after the summer of 1970. It absorbed significant forces emerging from the radicalization of SDS. The RU changed its name in 1975 to the Revolutionary Communist Party. At its height it probably included 1,200 to 2000 members or close supporters, and declined steadily in the decades after the 1970s. A small group still exists using that name.

[7] For history buffs – this is the same courthouse where the miners’ hero, Two-Gun Sid Hatfield, was lured into an ambush and assassinated by Baldwin-Felts gunthugs in 1921 – igniting armed clashes of miners and company gun thugs that culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain.

[8] It is an irony that many communist organizers, including me, had “cleaned up” in order to “go to the working class” – cutting our hair, toning down our styles – to match certain preconceptions of working class culture, and then found out, on arrival ,that many of the more militant workers were growing their own hair out and smoking lots of weed.

[9] Each coal mine has its own local and its own union committees– and with a workforce of only 15 to 500 men per mine, those representatives are all working miners. In the turmoil of these times, those local officials were often forced out when they didn’t seem militant enough. When some circle of militants took over a mine local, it often led to wildcat strikes as the workers took on the many accumulated injustices of the company.

[10] SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) was, one of the major radical organizations of the 1960s. As the student activists of SDS radicalized in the late 1960s, and as the organization’s core increasingly identified with Maoism and communism, they dissolved the loose organization after sharp factional struggles and build several early communist organizations, often with the intention of taking their new politics to the working class. Some forces around SDS thought that the U.S. might be moving into a revolutionary situation. One current argued for immediately launching an armed struggle within the U.S., and soon broke away to wage a campaign of symbolic attacks on icons of U.S. imperialism and war.

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