This Day in Labor History: May 8, 1935

On May 8, 1935, Mine Mill leads zinc miners out on strike in the Missouri/Kansas/Oklahoma tri-state border area. This strike was unusual because of the political conservatism of many of the workers. And the union completely lost the strike, based largely on its inability to create the white, male, nostalgic workplaces of the past that rank and file miners wanted in this region and industry.

It’s a lie that labor historians tell, but perhaps a necessary one. That lie is that the American working class is ready to organize and protest and revolt, with the right leadership, whatever that means at the given time that the activist/historian is writing. Well, maybe. But the truth has always been more complex than this and the stories many labor historians have chosen to tell say more about their own political beliefs than about the American working class. There are so many factors that determine the radicalism of the working class, including local histories, religion, ethnicity, etc. In fact, the times in which they live are probably less important than any of these. So you have situations such as the 1911 Grand Rapids furniture strike, in which the industry was dominated by Polish Catholics and Dutch Reformed Calvinists. The former were very ready to strike and strike hard. For the latter, striking was against their religion. So the workers were divided and the employers won. The latter stories are just as important to tell as the former, but they don’t move forward narratives labor historians want for the present. So they don’t get told as much.

Well, sometimes these complexities could create issues within unions. Mine, Mill was the descendant of the Western Federation of Miners, the pretty radical hard rock mining union that helped form the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, though they soon backed away from the IWW. The WFM became The International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in 1916. Almost always known as Mine, Mill, it was a largely communist led union by the 1930s.

But the zinc miners of the Missouri/Oklahoma/Kansas border area were a pretty different breed of miner than the silver miners of Colorado. They were largely quite conservative, especially on racial issues and on gender. They believed very strongly in masculine work and independence. The anti-work left today, which spreads into much of liberal world as well, dismisses traditional work ethic based around masculine labor as out of touch and antiquated, but dismiss it at your peril. Those ideas mean a lot more to these workers than just about anything else. They weren’t easy to unionize either. The fleeing of large parts of the working class to Trumpism is very much about nostalgia over manly hard work, however unpleasant that work actually was when it existed.

Now, the Great Depression decimated these workers, as it did workers throughout the country. Zinc prices plummeted. Many miners had to leave the region. Those who stayed saw drastically reduced wages. Employers used the crisis to take greater control over the workplace, stripping laborers of their manly autonomy. This opened the door for Mine, Mill, which had struggled in the past to organize these miners. To these workers, the appeal of the union was not a new future. It was to hold onto what they saw as their rights as white, male, native-born American workers to be at the top of the hierarchy of labor as largely independent men. Mine, Mill had no choice but to lean into these ideas if they wanted to organize the workers.

Given the skepticism of the workers to Mine, Mill and its politics, not to mention unionism in general, union leaders had to tie their organizing attempts to some mechanism to provide the vision of the past the workers wanted. That became the National Recovery Administration. Created in 1933, the idea of this early New Deal program was for industries to create codes that would allow them to self-govern themselves in reasonable ways, including on issues around wages and other working conditions. But the NRA didn’t really work, especially in these low-capital, high-competition industries. Mine, Mill had a problem–their pitch to workers was that organizing would help them become a power within the confines of the NRA. But industrialists were by and large not particularly interested in this. Plus, the NRA’s constitutionality was questionable and would soon be tossed out by the Supreme Court. It did not take long for industry to challenge it.

To try and force the issue, Mine, Mill led the miners out on strike. They said that only through striking would workers be able to see the promise of the New Deal fulfilled over recalcitrant employers. In truth, they always had a minority of miners, but they had a decent base of support. The strike quickly paralyzed mining in the region. But the owners didn’t care much. They hoped that workers striking would reduce production enough that prices would rise, which was part of the point of the NRA anyway. Companies also determined to make sure there would be no food or financial relief for strikers. Starve them into submission was always a good strategy. And while there were New Deal appointees there, they were mostly local hires who reflected the larger hatred of organized labor and were happy to assist the employers.

So, yeah, the strike was a disaster. These workers, highly distrustful of unions anyway, started to blame the union for their problems, rejecting collective action as a principle. Within just a few days, armed miners started seeking to bust the strike and get back to work. Instead, a company union called the Blue Card Union sprung up that was explicitly white supremacist and claimed it would restore the old ways of work. This was an area with a long history of anti-union violence and the BCU called for open violence against Mine, Mill members and organizers. It reaffirmed them as strong white men with all the privileges they deserved, including a reinstatement of the market forces they believed would work for them.

Of course it was all hooey. But it appealed to the miners and Mine, Mill was completely eliminated in the region. The American Federation of Labor then attempted to charter the BCU as a legitimate union as a shot against the new Congress of Industrial Organizations and radicalism generally. That didn’t work. The National Labor Relations Board correctly identified the BCU as a company union as Mine, Mill used the new legal framework to fight for its version of unionism. But they never would meaningfully organize these miners. Their belief in nostalgic visions of a past economy tied up with male and white privilege would make them effectively impossible to organize for the future.

There’s at least as much we can learn from this strike as anything led by the IWW or any of the big strikes that did win. Given that strikes in the United States have lost much more than they have won, maybe we labor historians should pay more attention to what in huge swaths of the American workforce make effective organizing essentially impossible.

I borrowed from Jared Roll’s Poor Man’s Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850-1950 to write this post.

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