Chapter XV: Kern’s Fight Against Feudalism in West Virginia

Scarcely had Senator Kern assumed the leadership of the senate until he was engaged in the most notable and bitter battle of his career against the feudalism of the coal barons of West Virginia. His resolution for a senatorial investigation into the conditions in the Paint Creek district where anarchy was apparently in full flower, with the constitutional guaranties of citizens brushed aside, and men being tried for their lives by drumhead courtmartials while the civil courts were open, was the signal for the marshaling of an army of opposition embracing railroads, coal operators, bankers, all the powerful moneyed interests. Never before in history, in a distinct fight between the working classes on the one side and the great interests on the other, had the masses won in the senate. Never before had a senator just assuming leadership so audaciously challenged defeat. And he won.

But to appreciate the significance of his triumph it is necessary to record something of the ineffable inhumanity of the industrial feudalism which had been established through the employment of armies of gun-men, the subsidization of the press, the prostitution of the courts, the cringing sycophancy of politicians, and the organization of bi-partisan political machines to meet the demands of greed.

It must be a startling story--a story of greed fattening upon the hunger of children, of the trampling of inalienable rights, of the kicking to death of unborn babes by brutes untouched by the law, of the murder of women, and the shooting of unarmed men in the night--a story of tyranny and brutality as infamous and cruel as was ever born of the dynasty of the Romanoffs.

And this story, which shocked the most conservative members of the senate, and shamed a republic, must be told primarily because the American people have been told too little of it. And it must be told in the story of Kern as an illumination of his political character and as an explanation of the bitter hostility with which his course was viewed by such a large portion of “our best people” in his own state.

The story, of the “Kern Resolution” is the story of Kern. But behind the resolution itself is a story that must be told if we are to understand the full significance of it.

I

Coal has been the crown and the crime of West Virginia. The second state in the union in its deposits of coal, the industrial, social and political life of the commonwealth revolves about the mine. Until a few years ago there was no organization among the miners. They were industrial slaves. The living conditions under which they worked were horrible beyond description. They had no rights that the coal barons were bound to respect, and none that the civil authorities apparently cared to enforce. In the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek sections in the county of the state capital these conditions existed for years. They were robbed of the full fruit of their labors by a system which denied them the privilege of having a representative in the weighing of the coal they produced. Compelled to live in the cottages of the companies, they were charged unreasonable rentals for impossible huts. Forced to purchase their food from the company stores, they were made to pay on an average of thirty per cent more for the food necessities of life than were being charged at independent stores.

From their meager pay the companies deducted every month $6 for rent, $1 for coal, $1 for a physician, 20 cents as a hospital fund, 50 cents for the blacksmith, 80 cents per gallon for miners’ oil, and for various other things approximating an average of $11.05 each month. By the time the miner with a family had paid all this and for the bare necessities of life he was usually in debt to the company. Thus a form of peonage--peonage in reality if not in the legal sense--was established. These men were slaves.

It was the game of the companies to keep them slaves. They thought it paid better than to have free men. And to this end these companies perfected a remarkable organization to prevent the unionization of the miners. This organization was known as “mine guards,” and the miners were compelled to pay the bills. These guards were furnished by the Baldwin-Felts agency and were composed largely of the scourings of the slums of cities. These gun-men had no legal status but the miners were forced to recognize their authority--and their authority was a gun.

The pretext for the use of these armed thugs was the protection of the mines, the purpose was to prevent the organizers of the United Mine Workers from entering the field, to prohibit newspaper men from visiting the camps and exposing the infamy, to forbid the miners from exercising their constitutional right to meet in peaceful assembly for the discussion of their wrongs. The purpose was to Siberianize West Virginia. And the purpose was met.

They were there to terrorize over the miners, to panhandle newspaper men and beat up the organizers of the United Mine Workers--and they did their work with a zest.

These guards met the trains regularly and every organizer of the United Mine Workers understood that if he left the train he did so at the peril of his life. This condition existed for years within a few miles of the state capital, within little more than two hundred miles of the capital of the republic and was known to exist. The riff-raff of the scums of the cities, reeking with rotten whisky and armed with guns, held high carnival, panhandling organizers, terrorizing miners, insulting women and children, and they did it with impunity.

And the reason was that popular government had broken down and had been displaced by the feudalism of the coal barons and their allies. To control the labor market, to dictate the laws, to interpret the laws, the mine owners entered politics and became the bosses. Such, in a general way, was the condition in the mine sections of West Virginia when the supreme fight came in 1912.

II

An hour’s ride from Charlestown, in the Kanawa mountain, are two ragged gulches eight miles apart and divided by a sharp ridge. One is the Cabin Creek mining settlement, and the other the Paint Creek settlement. A decade or more before the trouble of 1912 the miners along Cabin Creek had, after much travail, been organized, but an ill-advised strike had wrought their ruin and resulted in the restoration of the old non-union conditions aggravated now by the hate born of the victory over them. This settlement had come to be known as “Russia.” The mine owners had here established an ideal feudalism. They owned everything in sight but the country road, which was the bed of a creek. Thus it was practically impossible to visit Cabin Creek without trespassing on company ground and being roughly handled by the whisky-crazed gun-men called “guards.” A miner or his family could only call at the shack of a neighbor by suffrance, since he could not reach the neighbor’s house without trespassing on company property. Here the gun-men were supreme. The men were slaves in all but name. They submitted to being robbed of the fruit of their labor, to extortion in the matter of rental and in the purchase of food in the company stores, and organizers of the miners understood that he who ventured into Cabin Creek would probably be carried out upon a stretcher.

The miners of Paint Creek had been organized, but in the spring of 1912 the coal barons determined to extend the feudalism of Cabin Creek across the ridge. The opportunity came when the time for the signing of a new contract was reached. In the conference between the miners and the operators at Charlestown the miners submitted many demands, all of a kind conceded in other mining states such as Indiana and Illinois, but after more than a week the operators refused to sign. In the interest of industrial peace the miners thereupon agreed to continue under the old contract with the old prices and conditions, provided the operators would agree to the full recognition of the union. This, too, was refused, and a strike was ordered. Within ten days the miners were asked to meet with representatives of the coal companies in an effort to adjust the difference, and this, agreed to by the miners, resulted in a further compromise and the signing of a contract by the operators and the miners. The operators almost immediately broke faith, the strike was renewed and the fight was on. The issue was clear from the beginning--whether or not the conditions in Cabin Creek domineered over by drunken gun-men, should be established in Paint Creek.

The representatives of feudalism acted quickly. Almost immediately Paint Creek was invaded by the gun-men, headed by the infamous and murderous Ernest Gaujot, the “King Guard,” a man with a criminal record, with machine guns, plenty of ammunition and searchlights. Thugs, gun-men and thieves were hastily scoured from the scums of the cities, supplied with whisky and guns and turned loose upon the miners and their families. The program was to terrorize the miners into surrender. In the darkness of the night the gun-men fired the Gatling guns for practice. They swaggered in their drunken insolence into the homes of the unarmed miners, leeringly speculated aloud on what a good target the master of the house would make, turned everything upside down, kicked and cuffed the children, ordered drink and food, and let loose the flood gates of profanity and vulgarity in the presence of the women and babes. Nothing so nearly resembling anarchy has ever been seen on American soil. These drunken brutes invaded the home of a miner by the name of Frank Russe, and finding no one at home but the wife, who was about to become a mother, they slapped her face and drove her from the house. But the crime of that time that cries to heaven and curses the civilization that permitted the criminal to live, was committed at the home of Tony Sevilla, who was in Ohio at the time in search of work. The unspeakable Gaujot and his gang searched the house, and after they had gone a neighboring woman, knowing that Mrs. Sevilla was in a delicate condition, hurried over to find her on her knees, an expression of agony upon her face, making the sign of the cross. Pointing to her side, where one of the gun-men protectors of feudalism had kicked her, she moaned in broken English: “I don’t hear my baby calling me now.”

They had murdered the unborn babe and mother and were permitted to go on with their murderous work. No one was arrested for that! No one was molested for that! That was two hundred miles from the capital of the republic, in the county of the capital of an American state, and in the twentieth century of Christian civilization.

And the barons were satisfied. They wanted quick action. The guards were instructed to throw the miners out of their homes without mercy. Women about to become mothers, the sick, the babes, were driven shelterless into the fields. The miners established a tented camp at Holly Grove at the mouth of the creek and another at Mossey, near its headwaters. At Mucklow, near by, the guards--Gaujot’s men--were established. And when the miners, driven to desperation by the prodding of the guards, twice attacked the Mucklow camp, the papers of Charlestown contained lurid accounts of the brutal and bloodthirsty attacks of the anarchistic miners upon the representatives of law and order personified by Gaujot. There was much sympathy for the operators. It looked as though the miners were whipped--that America would be driven out of Paint Creek and Russia established.

III

On July 6 an old woman alighted from the train in Charlestown. She had now reached her eighty-third year and during the greater part of her life she had been the heart and center of the great industrial battles of the country. The country had come to know her as “the angel of the miners,” and her boys, as she called the miners, as “Mother” Jones. For years she had gone where men had not dared to venture. She had faced guns, thwarted conspiracies, partaken of bull-pen fare, but, as this gray-haired old woman with a grandmotherly face, she was planning for the greatest battle of her life. She knew the West Virginia coal fields and the conditions. She had been there before. And she realized that the representatives of feudalism were preparing to exterminate unionism and establish gun-men rule in Paint Creek as across the ridge. She was a strategist. She had no faith in defensive warfare. She proposed to force the fighting, to sustain unionism in Paint Creek and carry it across the ridge.

Having decided upon this counter movement she quietly arranged for an initial demonstration that would awaken the public to what was going on. One day the city of Charlestown was startled to see an old woman leading three thousand miners through the streets to the state house, and bearing banners to the effect that the gun-men had to go. The men were sober and orderly--she had seen to that. Governor Glasscock saw her. She served notice upon him. Calling attention to the inscription in front of the state house, “Mountaineers are Always Free,” she told the governor, that the boast would be made to stand the test of reality. And she gave the governor twenty-four hours to get rid of the gun-men. And if the state failed to rid the mining region of these guards she told him boldly that the miners would. The gun-men did not go in twenty-four hours. It was now evident that the state, organized for the protection of society, would not intervene and rid the commonwealth of these ruffian mercenaries. The miners determined that they would no longer be terrorized, beaten, robbed, their wives and daughters should no longer be insulted and cuffed about, their constitutional rights no longer disregarded. And while they had no thought in the beginning of civil war they now proceeded to arm themselves--to do for themselves what the state had refused to do for them. In less than three weeks after “Mother” Jones had served notice on the governor, the miners, infuriated at the prodding of the gun-men, entrenched at Mucklow, moved upon the stronghold of the enemy with such fury that the pitched battle resulting left the guards in danger of annihilation. The state now became alarmed. This was serious. And the governor hurried the state militia to the scene in special trains. The militia now proceeded to disarm both sides.

During the first week in August, “Mother” Jones, taking her life in her hands, invaded Cabin Creek, and in the early afternoon called a meeting of the miners at Eskdale.

And that afternoon she organized them into the union and swore them to the oath of the United Mine Workers. The men were instantly discharged and told to “go to ‘Mother’ Jones for work.” A week later another meeting was held at Eskdale and when eighty Baldwins attempted to prevent the meeting they were put to flight by five hundred armed miners. This was followed by evictions, and West Virginia was in a state of civil war.

To the gun-men and the coal barons “Mother” Jones became a pet abomination. The brutal treatment accorded her by the guards has seldom been equaled in the case of a woman. Meanwhile martial law had been declared.

Realizing the necessity of informing and arousing the country on the conditions, “Mother” Jones left for a speaking tour which included the city of Washington. It was unnecessary. The operators had planned something much better for that purpose.

IV

The miners’ tented camp at Holly Grove had become an eyesore to the representatives of feudalism. They determined to wipe it out and thus terrorize the strikers into submission. Their plan was diabolical, medieval in its brutality. An armored train was equipped at Huntington, W. Va., for the purpose. On the night of February 7, 1913, the special crew went aboard.

The miners were peacefully in their tents or houses that night, many asleep, when between ten and eleven o’clock the armored train moved slowly at a speed of about seven miles an hour through Holly Grove pouring a fusillade of bullets upon the unsuspecting and unprepared inhabitants. Cesco Estep, who was sitting with his family by the fire when the shooting began, called upon his family to take refuge in the cellar and led the way. He fell dead a few feet from the cellar door. His wife, who was about to become a mother, fled for her life. One woman was shot in the feet. About fifteen shots passed through the Estep house, which sheltered women and children that night. The woman was shot in her own home. Bullets passed through many houses and tents, setting fire to a store, and the marvel was that many were not murdered. The miners, as quickly as they could recover from their surprise, in a few instances returned the fire, and this was the occasion for much indignation in the capital, where it was understood that the miners had brutally attacked an armored train. The train passed on and was dismounted in the C. & O. shops in Richmond. This incident was something novel in the history of industrial warfare in America.

V

The following evening “Mother” Jones went to Hansford to see what arrangements had been made for the burial of the murdered man and what could be done for the widow and orphans. The miners there, expecting a visit from the train later, had taken precautions to prepare. There was some excitement. Later that evening “Mother” Jones went to Charlestown. Meanwhile troops had been sent into the mining section, martial law had been declared, and miners were being arrested in numbers. Hearing of the intense excitement at a mining camp known as Bloomer, where the majority of the miners were Italians, “Mother” Jones called a meeting there with the view to preventing them from taking extreme measures. The excitement was so intense that she adjourned the meeting until the next morning at Long Acre, a few miles distant. Having impressed them with the thought that lawlessness would be a play into the hands of the enemy, she had them select a committee to call upon the governor with a request for the release of their fellow workers. She paid their fares to Charlestown. When she reached Charlestown she was taken into custody by local officers, taken to a justice of the peace court where a warrant was sworn out against her, conveyed across the river to a C. & O. train, carried twenty-two miles into the martial law zone, and turned over to the military authorities. There this venerable woman was placed in a room in the house of a poor miner where the only furniture in the room was a small lounge, on which she slept, a small table and two rocking chairs, with no wash bowl. For eight weeks, day and night, two or three militiamen marched around the house keeping guard. No one was permitted to see her. Newspaper men were especially taboo.

And she was to be tried before a drumhead courtmartial, with all the civil courts open, on a charge of murder! Others were included in the charge. The miners who had fled from Holly Grove to Hansford after the attack, had set out to capture a machine gun near Mucklow, and in the pitched battle the bookkeeper of a coal company was killed. There was no concern over the murder of Estep. The killing of the bookkeeper was followed by the arrest of more than a hundred miners--and “Mother” Jones.

VI

We now enter upon the most startling feature of the feudalism of West Virginia in the coal districts. It was soon made evident to the thoughtful that the system was in position to enforce darkness. With pitched battles, armored trains, murdered women, there was little or nothing about it in the press of the country. But when the story that a woman of the celebrity of “Mother” Jones, loved by millions among the toilers, was to be tried for her life before a drumhead courtmartial was told in less than a dozen lines, the system made a fatal blunder. That little light illumined the darkness. Senator Kern, reading these few lines in the _Washington Post_, expressed his amazement to those in his office that so little information was furnished. Far out in San Francisco, Fremont Older, the fighting editor of _The Bulletin_, who had been one of the leaders in the movement that destroyed the Schmitz boodle brigade and sent Abe Reuf to the penitentiary, talked it over with his clever wife and decided that she should go at once to West Virginia and ascertain by personal observation the occasion for the silence. The story of Mrs. Older was soon told in _Collier’s Weekly_--a brief, gripping, startling story of an unthinkable situation for America.

The darkness gave such light that magazines took steps to secure articles concerning an unparalleled condition. Harold E. West’s startling story of “Civil War in West Virginia” appeared in _The Survey_ in early April. An even more amazing story from M. Michelson, under the satiric title, “Sweet Land of Liberty,” appeared in the May number of _Everybody’s Magazine_. _Collier’s Weekly_ gave its readers Mrs. Older’s story about the middle of April. The country began to wonder--and to wait.

Meanwhile the most dangerous and startling evil in the situation--the power of the governor to trample upon the constitutional rights of the people of his state, to ignore the civil courts when they were in session, and try men and women for their lives by a military tribunal--was vigorously contested in the Supreme Court of Appeals in the now famous habeas corpus cases of Mays and Nance and a little later in the cases of Jones, Boswell, Batley and Paulson. The constitution of West Virginia was explicit and emphatic on the point, but the court decided that the constitutional rights of citizens could be brushed aside. A more remarkable decision has probably never been handed down by any American tribunal. How remarkable the world was permitted to understand through the vigorous and indignant dissenting opinion of Judge Ira E. Robinson.

And yet for three months this military tribunal sat at Pratt on Paint Creek sending men to the penitentiary and jail and fixing penalties in many cases in excess of those fixed by the statute with the approval of the then Governor Glasscock.

It was long after her release that “Mother” Jones found that she had been sentenced to the penitentiary for five years and that several of the men had been sentenced to twenty years. She went back to her prison.

VII

Senator Kern introduced his famous Paint Creek resolution in the senate, on the request of representatives of the United Mine Workers, on April 12, 1913. He did not at that time have the slightest idea of the tremendous importance of his act. The disclosures made to him were so unusual as to convince him that light could do no harm, and his confidence in the judgment of William B. Wilson, then secretary of labor in the cabinet of the president, who had introduced a similar resolution in the House, and of Senator Borah, who had presented such a resolution in the Senate in the preceding session, was such that he did not hesitate in acceding to the request. But he was not to be left long in the dark as to the significance attached to his resolution by many of the most powerful financial elements in the country. The original resolutions directed that an investigation should be instituted to ascertain whether or not a system of peonage was maintained in the coal fields of West Virginia; whether or not access to the post-offices in these coal fields was ever denied miners, and if so, by whom; whether or not the immigration laws of the country were being violated; in the event that any such conditions existed, what could be done to remedy them, whether the commissioner of labor or any other government official could be of service in adjusting the strike, and whether or not parties were being convicted and punished in violation of the laws of the United States. This resolution was offered on April 12. The following six weeks were to astonish the senator in the disclosures of the resources and ramifications of the representatives of feudalism in West Virginia.

Taking its natural course the resolution went first to the committee of the senate on contingent expenses, and here the system first became active. One of the operators of West Virginia, a former member of the senate, wired former colleagues protesting any investigation. It was sixteen days before the committee submitted back a favorable report with certain amendments, and while there was nothing on the surface during these sixteen days to indicate that a bitter battle was being fought, it was impressed upon Senator Kern in many ways. It was not until May 9, or twenty-seven days after the resolution was presented, that the resolution really got before the senate in shape for discussion. Meanwhile the author of the resolution was learning things concerning conditions in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek region. Letters and telegrams by the hundreds poured in upon him from people in all walks of life familiar with those conditions, miners, merchants, lawyers, school teachers, telegraph operators, former legislators, and the striking feature of these letters was the request that their names be protected from publicity. The merchant frankly feared a boycott, the lawyer social ostracism, the teacher a discharge from his position, the operator the blacklist of the railroad, the former officials political destruction, but all united in one common story--a story of such unthinkable lawlessness and cruelty as to be almost past belief. Newspaper men who had attempted to enter the field to ascertain the real conditions and had been met at the train by the armed guards and sent on about their business, added their story. Mrs. Fremont Older, who had been both a witness and for a time a victim of the system, went to Washington and told him her story--a story calculated to outrage any man of the legal profession who entertained the slightest regard for the courts or the constitution. Representatives of the United Mine Workers armed him with plenty of ammunition from their arsenal. But even before the miners’ side of the story had been impressed upon him Senator Kern was convinced of the imperative necessity for the investigation by the nature and persistence of the opposition. Men with no apparent interests in the coal fields not citizens of West Virginia began to wire and phone their importunities to drop the proposed investigation. Many railroad officials seemed morbidly concerned. The highest financial circles of New York City brought every possible influence to bear. Being a man of more than ordinary perspicacity the grave concern of these men opened to the senator a broad vista. The climax of this campaign to influence him to drop the fight came when an old and valued friend in New York City connected with one of the greatest financial groups of that city called him on the phone in an effort to dissuade him.

“I will see you in hell first,” was the reply as Kern slammed up the receiver.

As usual with men of this type their vaulting ambition overleaped itself. Meanwhile Governor Haywood of West Virginia, elected to succeed Glasscock on the pledge to eliminate the armed thugs called guards, gave an interview to the press which was sent throughout the country attacking Kern in the most bitter language.

Thus at a time when the public, kept in the dark as to the horrible conditions in West Virginia through the deliberate suppression of the most sensational news, Kern was being pilloried throughout the country as a demagogic sensationalist, in league with lawlessness, and not above stooping to ordinary falsehoods. The conservative element, prone to suspect all strikers, and exonerate all against whom strikes are aimed, was being prejudiced against him. The masses of the people were not aroused because they did not have the facts. The most powerful influences were in league against him. And the whisper went about the corridors of the capital that the resolution was a deadly blow at the rights of the states, and was only the beginning of more dangerous encroachments upon state sovereignty. Mr. Kern had only entered upon his work as senate leader and his personal, and especially his political enemies, knowing little and caring less about the merits of the resolution, and convinced that it could never pass the senate, were already gloating over his humiliation, and preparing to herald it as an early repudiation of his leadership by his party.

Never before in the history of the United States senate in a straight contest between the lowly or the workers and the great financial interests had the workers won--and the politicians were judging the future by the past.

But on the very day that Haywood issued his scurrilous statement an historic telegram was placed in the hands of Kern which did much to turn the tide. This telegram has its own story.

VIII

One day in early May, Mother Jones, enjoying life in “the pleasant boarding house in a private family on the banks of the Kanawha river,” was startled by some one throwing into the open window of the room where “she was detained but in no sense confined” beyond the fact that armed sentinels saw to it that she did not leave the room, a copy of _The Cincinnati Post_. Opening the paper she found under glaring headlines the story of the battle in the senate of which she had been in utter ignorance. This article told of the bitter fight being made against the Kern resolution, of the long distance call to Kern from New York City, and of the senator’s indignant response, “I’ll see you in hell first.” And she realized that if the battle in the senate was lost the cause of the miners in West Virginia would be set back for a generation. She did not know Kern--had never met him. The thought came to her that she should write him of the real conditions. Then she read _The Post_ article again in which the comment was made that the New York financiers “did not write, did not telegraph--they took the quickest way to reach him.” A letter--it might never reach him, and everything might be lost in the meanwhile. She decided to send a telegram. And she wrote:

HANSFORD, WEST VIRGINIA, MAY 4.

Senator Kern, care Senate Chamber, Washington,
D. C.:

From out of the military bastile, where I have been forced to pass
my eighty-first milestone of life, I plead with you for the honor
of this nation. I send you groans and tears of men, women and
children as I have heard them in this state, and beg you to force
that investigation. Children yet unborn will rise and bless you.

MOTHER JONES.

Reading it critically she concluded that the words “military bastile” might smack of pose and she substituted “military prison walls.”

The next problem was how to get the telegram to Washington. The poor people at whose home she was “detained” were friendly to her and her cause, although this was not known to the authorities. Early during her incarceration she had thought it possible that she might be in need of communication with the outside world and with the aid of the head of the house a part of the flooring had been cut, and an empty bottle was suspended by a wire into the cellar. It was the understanding that at the sound of a bell with which she had been furnished the man should go to the cellar, where he would find a communication in the bottle. Into this bottle she stuffed the telegram with a note of instructions to deliver it to an operator who was friendly some distance away with the message from her to “get it to Washington if it is the last thing you do in life.” Some time later the messenger returned with the message from the operator--“Tell Mother Jones that telegram will be in Washington before you get back.” And it was.

That telegram was instantly given to the press and flashed over the country. It created consternation in Charlestown. It threw open the prison doors to the venerable woman. One of the military men at Pratt was instructed from the state house by phone to conduct Mother Jones to the capital by the first train. Reaching Charlestown she was taken before the governor and treated with exceptional courtesy.

She was permitted to spend the night in the hotel in Charlestown where she was accustomed to stopping. Immediately afterward at a miners’ convention in the city she was instructed by John P. White, president of the United Mine Workers, to go to Washington and give all possible aid to Kern in his fight.

And thus she went, without having been formally set at liberty and without knowing what the sentence of the military tribunal had been.

Reaching Washington she went into conference immediately with Kern, and the following day found her, loaded down with letters to senators from Secretary of Labor Wilson, trudging the interminable marble corridors of the senate office building, informing senators individually and at length of the conditions in West Virginia. At times her eighty-odd years bore heavily upon her and worn and weary she would return to Kern’s office, sink exhausted into a chair for a rest of a few minutes--then on her way again.

The most impressive and effective lobbyist that ever trod the stones of the capital was this old woman.

IX

Senator Kern in opening the debate on the “Kern resolution” on May 9th asked that “this investigation proceed that the full light may be let in on this foul spot and that all the facts bearing on these questions may be brought out to the end that wrongs, if they exist, may be righted, and that any men who are unjustly accused may be vindicated.”

Five days went by before the resolution was again considered by the senate. In the meanwhile the country was awakening to the significance of the fight and Kern was able to present scores of letters, telegrams, petitions from miners of West Virginia and elsewhere, and a striking telegram from the victims of militarism then held in the jail at Clarksburg, West Virginia, “stripped of constitutional rights, denied a jury trial, forced to face a drumhead court martial, deprived of their citizenship, reduced to subjects and thrown into jail.” This resulted in the renewal of the discussion and Senator Kern said:

“I had a telegram the other day from a leader of Socialism
denunciatory of these conditions. When I showed it to a senator
here he deprecated the idea that there was such relationship
between me and that man that he would feel free to telegraph me.
Men are being imprisoned in West Virginia to-day because they are
Socialists; newspapers are being suppressed because they teach the
doctrines of Socialism; men are discharged from mines, according to
the testimony taken before the military commission, because they
vote the Socialist ticket and because they belong to a labor union;
and while the doctrine of judicial recall gains favor with the
people whose rights are stricken down by unjust decisions, so do
the forces of Socialism multiply in such breeding grounds as those
in parts of West Virginia, with special privilege on one hand
eating out the substance of the people, and with judges setting
aside constitutional safeguards to the end that the people may be
oppressed and denied rights for which their fathers fought and
died.

“Socialism has grown in this country until more than a million men
cast their votes for the Socialist ticket at the last election. The
fire of Socialism is fed by such fuel as this West Virginia
decision, and the lawless action there of men charged with the
execution of the laws. Socialism grows and will grow in exact
proportion as wrongdoing is countenanced and upheld, not only by
the strong legislative forces of the country, but especially when
they are backed up by the judicial arm of the government.

“Senators, these million men who voted the Socialist ticket last
November are the men who ought to be full of that kind of
patriotism in time of war that would impel them to go out and walk
on the uttermost ridge of battle, to peril their lives in defense
of their country and their country’s flag because they love their
country, because they venerate the laws of the land.

“This great body of a million or more men whose loyalty you
question, and the millions more who make up the organized labor
forces of the land, and who are not yet Socialists, will love their
country and its flag if you will permit them, and not drive them
away by making them constantly realize that they can not expect
fair treatment either in the administration of the law by executive
officers or in the construction and enforcement of law by the
courts.

“If the time comes--we all pray it may be averted--when the
integrity of this nation is assailed, either from within or from
without--if the time comes when the American Republic is brought
face to face with the marching armies of the nations beyond the
sea, we will need those million of men, for they are men that toil
with their hands. They have strong arms. They are the same type of
men as that splendid Army of the Republic fifty years ago who won
for themselves imperishable renown by their sacrifices in behalf of
the Union and the flag.

“Do you make good citizens of men by denying them their rights? Do
you command the respect and the patriotism of the toilers of this
land by turning them away when they come into this great tribunal
and simply ask that the light be turned on, to the end that the
people may know as to whether or not God reigns and the
Constitution still lives, and whether they and their kind are to be
despoiled of their heritage of liberty?

“For a man to be a loyal, good citizen of this country he must love
his country. Can you ask him to love his country and be true to her
traditions and institutions when in his heart of hearts he knows
that in this land and beneath its flag there is a law for him which
is not enforced against others, and that he can no longer appeal to
the courts for the enforcement of his constitutional rights?”

Strong support was given the resolution by Hollis of New Hampshire, Borah, Kenyon, Martine, but it was left to Root to brush aside the technicalities and precedents and insist that the vital thing involved was the preservation of American institutions. The fight against the resolution finally resolved itself into the proposition proposed and championed by Bacon to strike out the clause providing for an investigation into whether or not “citizens of the United States have been arrested, tried and convicted contrary to or in violation of the constitution and the laws of the United States.” It should be said in justice to Bacon that he was as forcible as any in his condemnation of the oppression of the miners, and favored the investigation with the elimination of the fourth clause. His amendment, however, was defeated by a vote of 59 to 10, and the resolution, as finally shaped by the committee on Education and Labor was agreed to without a record vote. This differed from the original resolution in that it broadened the scope of the investigation to include an inquiry into agreements and combinations contrary to the laws of the country.

Thus for the first time in the history of the senate in a fight involving a contest between capital and labor the workers won. The leadership of Kern was not “repudiated” as newspapers antagonistic to him, counting their chickens before they were hatched, had framed their headlines to read. The next best thing was done--as little was said about his triumph as possible.

X

And the result of the investigation was a vindication--and a triumph for the miners. The sub-committee of the committee on Education and Labor, to which was assigned the task of investigating, was highly satisfactory to the author of the resolution. It was proof positive against a white wash. Kern was particularly pleased with the presence on the committee of Borah, Kenyon and Martine, all of whom were temperamentally sympathetic toward the oppressed, and interested in social justice, and the first two were in addition able lawyers and men with vision. The committee sat in Charlestown in July and with a recess necessitated by important business in the senate, concluded its work in Washington in September and early October. The reports were all the more impressive because of their fairness and the conservatism of expression. Peonage in the legal sense was not disclosed. That men who were indebted to the companies were in a state of virtual peonage there is no doubt. No proof was found that any “attempt to prevent the delivery of mail to patrons of the postoffice” had been made, other than the fact that the postoffice, in the company stores, were frequented by the armed guards. No evidence was adduced showing a violation of the national immigration laws though the fact was disclosed that men were induced through “misinformation and misrepresentations” to accept employment in the coal fields and that “hardships in this respect were disclosed.” But the all important charge that the constitution had been set aside, martial law established, men arrested without warrant of the civil authorities, tried by drumhead court martials, and given sentences in excess of any provided in the statutes was made good. This phase of the investigation was in charge of Senator Borah, who treated the evidence in a conservative judicial manner. In his supplementary report Senator Martine took occasion to say: “I charge that the hiring of armed bodies of men by private mine owners and others corporations and the use of steel armored trains, machine guns and bloodhounds on defenseless women and children is but a little way removed from barbarism.” Senator Kenyon in discussing the cause of the trouble and the suggestion of Bishop Donahue that “human greed on both sides” was responsible said: “It is a little difficult to realize how there can be so much human greed on the side of a man who is supporting a family and working day by day in the mines at ordinary living wages, but there is greed on the part of the owners of the property.” And the committee report, commenting on the situation at the time of its preparation, said:

“The differences between the miners and operators, which were
considered irreconcilable, have been amicably adjusted. Peace now
reigns in this section where heretofore existed strife, contention,
and armed conflict. The relations between the operators and the
miners have become friendly and conciliatory. Business has been
resumed and the mines are being operated. Martial law has been
abolished and civil law and authority fully established. The
committee is satisfied that the investigations have greatly aided
in the accomplishment of these beneficial and much-desired
results.”

And the miners knew, what was of more vital importance to them, that none of their men would serve twenty years in the penitentiary at the behest of a military despotism, and Mother Jones declared that “Senator Kern threw open the prison doors for me.”

The militant courage of Kern held high the torch that illuminated the darkness of the darkest spot, industrially on American soil, and it will never be so dark again. His action made him powerful foes, even in his own state. But it won him something that he cherished--the undying gratitude of the workers who go down into the earth for the fuel that warms mankind.