Why Don’t Coal Barons Support Immigration Like They Used To?
West Virginia’s politicians are rejecting the state’s immigrant history -- Here’s Why
“[John Nugent’s] post in 1907 was an odd one, and at first glance he did not seem to be employed by the coal owners, for he was appointed by the governor and had the title of State Commissioner of Immigration. But the post carried no salary. He was paid by the coal companies to bring in labor, was even sent to England and Wales for that purpose. In other words John Nugent became a labor agent.”
-- When Miner’s March p.55, William C. Blizzard, edited by Wess Harris
It’s no secret that West Virginia’s government has long been in the grasp of the coal owners and out-of-state industrialists, and as author William C. Blizzard highlighted with this reporting in November of 1952, West Virginia’s official state policy was pro-immigration.
So why does West Virginia seem so opposed to immigration from anywhere as I write this in 2021?
The party in control of the state is holding town halls about how Biden is allowing immigrants from south of the border to destroy our West Virginian way of life, and we are one of just four states to reject every single Afghan refugee.
The West Virginia state government website for the National Coal Heritage Area & Coal Heritage Trail notes what happened after John Nugent assumed his coal company salary for his State Commissioner of Immigration position, and how immigration is as West Virginian as coal workers.
“By 1910, more Italian immigrants lived in McDowell County than anywhere else in the state. Immigrants in southern West Virginia comprised some 25 nationalities, including Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Austrians and Russians. Ukrainian immigrant Nick Gurski began working in the Boone County coal mines in the 1920s. Eventually, his sons and grandsons also worked in the mines. Meanwhile, his wife Mary operated the Nellis boarding house for foreign-born miners.”
What the West Virginia government’s webpage on the matter leaves out is that this was done to break the union drives and to replace miners who had gone on strike at Paint and Cabin Creeks, among others.
Coal mining isn’t glamorous work now, and it was even worse in 1907. But the demand for it was high: in part because of the death and injury rate of miners, and in part because freight, steel, and every blast-furnace in America were all demanding ever-more coal.
All of this meant that there was more demand for labor than there was supply at any given time. As a report by author C.E. Zipper, Mary Beth Adams, and Jeff Skousen notes:
“More than 150,000 people perished in US coal mines (Breslin 2010; US MSHA 2019), including more than 100,000 since the year 1900, with most fatalities occurring during the era of Appalachian coal dominance. In the early twentieth century, average fatality rates exceeded 3 per 1000 workers, which means that a miner with 25-year career had nearly a 1 in 100 chance of dying in a mining-related incident.”
As I’ve written before, when demand for labor outstrips supply of labor, price for labor (also known as wages) should go up.
Despite the myths of classical economics, wages did not go up.
The companies found cheaper ways to break the demands of workers. One method was to hire Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts and other such private strike-breaking thugs to intimidate workers.
Another method was to buy politicians to enforce martial laws that selectively applied to pro-union miners, which included suspending the First and Second Amendments.
Yet another method to break workers was simply to hire labor agents who would go out to find people from anywhere in the world, within cost of importation, who would be willing to come in and work in worse conditions than the West Virginia miner was striking against.
John Nugent’s role combined both buying politicians and hiring a labor agent. He served as a state appointed commissioner whose role was simply to find desperate foreigners to replace the workers who demanded more from the coal barons.
And it wasn’t just John Nugent working from his company-sponsored governmental position. Another, who worked in the private sphere, was George Williams of the “Industrial Corporation.”
As William C. Blizzard reported, Williams was promised $3,000 in exchange for providing scab labor for one year. In 1913, $3,000 would be equal to $84,000 roughly, in today’s dollars.
George Williams took his salary and he ran ads in many major U.S. cities, and Blizzard reports that Williams bragged that “In the wintertime I can get a half-million men for any kind of work -- strikes or any kind -- because outside work is closed and people are starving in the big towns.” (“When Miner’s March, p. 53).
Hiring men like Nugent and Williams to import desperate immigrants and poor city-dwellers was an escalation on the part of the coal companies.
Before the likes of Nugent and Williams, coal operators had turned to the cheap labor of freed Black Americans to undercut the demands of workers and to force workers to accept lower wages, longer hours, and poor conditions.
Blizzard highlighted this pattern when he was reporting an oral history of the Mine Wars back in 1952.
“[P]atterns of industrial conflict were set very early in the Valley. What was apparently the first major dispute was at the Marmet mines in Putnam County in January, 1891. The men went on strike and the company imported Negroes as strikebreakers. This vicious practice accomplished two things: It brought the miners to terms and it divided the labor movement by setting the Negro against the white and vice-versa. In this manner good workingmen, black and white, were blinded to their common interests.”
-- When Miner’s March, p.27, William C. Blizzard, edited by Wess Harris
CoalHeritage.wv.gov presents a sanitized version of this same history: “Coal operators enticed workers—many African American—to move to West Virginia from Virginia and the Deep South. During the first three decades of the 20th century, African Americans comprised about 25 percent of all southern West Virginia miners.”
It’s a very American story.
While we pride ourselves on being “the United States of America”, we are constantly told by the wealthiest in our society that we are in a dog-eat-dog competition against each other. If division based on the color of our skin won’t do it, then dividing “Americans” versus “immigrants” will do, and if that won’t work, then dividing “city-slickers” against “country-folk” will do. As I’ve written before, it’s why the rich want us to hate foreigners.
This isn’t a novel thought. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968 he was in Memphis to support the sanitation workers union. In his last speech, Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that what was happening in Memphis and across the country was the same tactic of dividing workers that had been used by the powerful since at least the time of Egypt’s Pharaohs.
“We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying -- We are saying that we are God's children. And that we are God's children, we don't have to live like we are forced to live.
Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.”
While West Virginia has never had a Pharaoh, our coal barons have been functional substitutes. They have likewise controlled every aspect of this state’s culture and politics for over 100 years - and they’ve used division, very effectively, to pit workers against each other to this very day.
And, as disparate groups (black, immigrant, white, rural-born, and urban-born) joined together in West Virginia against the coal barons from the 1920s until the 1950s - good things happened. Union ranks climbed, along with wages and benefits and general standards of living, along with general prosperity in the state, and along with a peak population of just over two million people in 1950.
So what happened to the coal industry’s desire to entice desperate immigrants and others to move to West Virginia? Why did our population peak in 1950? And why, with a coal billionaire as WV’s governor, are we now one of four states that are not accepting any Afghan refugees?
Automation happened.
James A. Haught noted this in Beckley Register-Herald back in 2017:
“Our state had 125,000 pick-and-shovel miners in 1950 when I was a teen. Most of the diggers lived in company-owned towns. Coal was the state’s throbbing pulse. Explosions killing scores of miners were common. Violent strikes were common.
In the 1950s, coal owners began replacing human miners with digging machines, and misery followed. Around 70,000 West Virginia miners lost their jobs and fled north via the “hillbilly highway” to Akron and Cleveland. But coal production remained high.
In the 1970s, longwall machines could produce 10 times as much coal with half as many workers. And more jobs vanished because mining switched to huge surface pits, where monster machines and explosives do the work. The number of West Virginia miners continued falling — to the 30,000s in the 1990s, then below 20,000 in the new 21st century. Official state figures put today’s total around 12,000. The number of operating mines fell drastically.”
So, automation killed close to 90,000 coal jobs between the time that Harry Truman was in office in 1950 and the time that Ronald Reagan left office in 1988.
In other words, more than a quarter of a century before Barack Obama became president, fully 90,000 jobs -- the vast majority -- had been eliminated in West Virginia’s coal fields.
From the coal company standpoint it makes perfect sense: the deep mines had were becoming less profitable per unit of coal, and with big machines and longwall, surface and strip mining, you can get more coal for lower cost per unit, and with fewer workers to pay!
And beyond that, machines don’t have immune systems and so they don’t get sick or need health insurance, they don’t have families who need care. Machines don’t need to miss work for a funeral or for vacation. Machines never talk back to the bosses, and machines never go on strike, and therefore the company doesn’t need to hire ‘private detective’ strike breaking agencies.
Bottom line? More coal, fewer costs.
And with that, coal barons just seemed to stop caring about ‘enticing’ desperate people to move to West Virginia’s coalfields.
All of a sudden the rhetoric switched.
For decades now we’ve heard endlessly about how immigrants are taking jobs from West Virginians, even as West Virginia lost so much population that we have lost four out of six congressional districts since 1960. We’ve lost 67% of our representation in the House of Representatives since 1960.
It wasn’t immigrants. It was out-of-state capitalists investing in machines to replace labor, to deliver more profits to out-of-state capitalists.
We also started hearing about how coastal elites and urbanites are trying to destroy our coal country and our coal heritage -- never mind that in previous decades the companies had hired people to recruit scabs from those same urban centers, just to make sure that they didn’t have to pay West Virginian workers what the workers demanded and deserved.
And despite the crocodile tears, the entrenched interests in West Virginia have benefitted from de-population.
As the population dwindles in communities across the state, the industries that remain are able to avoid national attention when they poison the waters and pollute the air. The MCHM spill in the Elk River only really gained national attention because it feeds the Kanawha River so closely, and thereby it poisoned the waterway of a state capitol.
If companies can avoid attention, if companies can ensure that only poor and sparse communities live where the companies operate, then the companies can avoid fines because the people are too stretched for time to notice the harms.
If someone in a de-populated area does notice the harms, they are often too resource-stretched to afford the team of lawyers that might take the company to court for the harms. The companies prefer to operate under the idea that “if no one notices anything bad, nothing bad is happening.” (It’s the business version of a tree falling in the forest and no one hearing it.)
Beyond hiding environmental harms through de-population, the political and business elite from both parties consolidate power as the state de-populates.
The Republican Party is running the show now, but the Democratic Party had 80 years of power in this state while the coal barons did what they pleased in order to maintain their profits and their power.
In many ways, our coal baron governor, Jim Justice, is the epitome of West Virginia politics, first a coal baron, then elected governor as a Democrat with support of the Democratic Party, then changing parties, and then getting re-elected as a Republican with support from the Republican Party.
Considering this, it’s no wonder that West Virginians are disenchanted and disaffected by politics: there is a history, more than 100 years long, of big business colluding with the state government in order to impoverish West Virginian workers.
After all, coal companies as far back as 1907, literally paid the salary of state employees to import scabs and strikebreakers from Europe, from major American cities, and from the American South.
But if coal interests are playing whatever party nominally holds power, why haven’t the coal barons done anything to stop the loss of population, so that they might extend their representation in Congress?
First, I’d argue that they’ve actually gained power vis-a-vis how few votes they need to keep U.S. Senators in power. Both of West Virginia’s U.S. Senators proudly represent the coal industry in Congress, even as the industry has laid off the majority of its West Virginia workforce during their lifetimes.
Second, de-population plays into exactly what Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich noted about Republican Party power back in 1980 when he declared:
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
What we need now more than anything, as Martin Luther King Jr. called for, is to maintain unity among working people and families and neighbors and communities across this state.
We cannot allow ourselves to continue to be divided, whether it’s by “left versus right,” or by “black versus white,” or by “urban versus rural,” or by “American versus immigrant.”
Efforts to bring “remote workers” into the state are mere lip-service addressing the problem.
The problem isn’t just that we’ve lost people -- the problem is that we’ve lost people because of decisions made by the wealthiest and most politically powerful in this state.
Change in this state will never come from above, unless it benefits the Good Old Boy network that has run this state for more than a century.
Change in this state must once again swell up from the community level, as it did from the beginning of the Mine Wars until the Good Old Boy coal network realized they could destroy our unity and our communities by investing more in machines than they did in working people.
We will never re-populate the state if our communities do not welcome the most desperate, if we don’t welcome the other, and if we don’t welcome everyone who is ready to move here and join in our communities’ struggles to build a statewide community that makes people want to move here without cash incentives.
If we want West Virginia to be a thriving state, if we truly want to “Make West Virginia Great Again”, we need to build unity amongst ourselves again.
And that means we need to reject the racism and xenophobia and nationalism that are all simply blunt instruments for the rich and powerful to pit workers and families against each other.
Brilliant - well said, Troy! Every West Virginian should know this history. One wonders if Manchin's coal empire rests on a foundation of cheap labor, too? That would make a fascinating investigative report that could get national traction...