Bloody Williamson (18 page)

By early summer 1904, the Zeigler Coal Company, operating the Leiter mine, was ready to go into operation. In all respects, the establishment excelled anything of its kind in the country. Equipped with the latest machinery, the mine had a daily capacity of five thousand tons, the largest in the state. A bathroom, with hot and cold water and a locker for each man, was an unheard-of facility. Leiter took so much pride in the property that he caused the cornerstone of the powerhouse, the largest building, to be dated 2904, on the ground that the mine was a thousand years ahead of its time, and in his exuberance had the cement out of which the cornerstone was made mixed with champagne instead of water.

The town of Zeigler was even more remarkable than the mine. Wide streets, bordered by good walks, extended like spokes from a circular park in which the company office, with an apartment for Leiter’s use, was located. No house—and they numbered 115—had fewer than three rooms, and all were weather-boarded, plastered, and calcimined. Rents ranged from six to nine dollars a month, including running water, and for an extra charge of twenty-five cents a month any occupant could have electricity. “Superior to the class of dwellings usually found in an exclusively mining village,” the secretary of the Illinois State Mining Board commented, “and furnished at reasonable rates.” In addition to good houses, the company provided a brick schoolhouse and a well-equipped hospital.

On June 9, 1904, just as the Zeigler Coal Company hoisted its first coal, Levi Z. Leiter died. His will devised his mining properties to his wife, his son, his two daughters, and one other as trustees, and vested the management in the son.

To a young man who often chafed under parental restraint, the future must have seemed bright. Yet he was soon to encounter, in union labor, an obstacle far more intractable than his father.

During the development of the Zeigler properties all work was done at day-wage rates. A local of the United Mine Workers of America had been organized at the mine, but its members, along with a large number of laborers and mechanics, were employed in sinking shafts, grading surfaces, laying tracks, and erecting buildings rather than in mining coal. Leiter had not dealt with the union, and did not pay the union scale, but no attempt had been made to interfere with his operations or to prevent union men from working for him on an open-shop basis.

As it turned out, the union was merely waiting until the mine started to hoist coal. When it did, the miners presented three demands: first, that he recognize the union; second, that he hire only union men; and third, that he pay the Jackson County scale of 56¢ a ton, recently agreed upon by the miners and operators of the district, without any differential for machine mining. Leiter replied, on July 7, with an announcement that thereafter the rate at the Zeigler mine would be 38¢ a ton. The union called a strike immediately, and on the next day 268 men walked out.

The principal grievance, ostensibly, was Leiter’s introduction of mining machinery on a scale far beyond that which any other operator in the district had attempted. The Zeigler mine approached complete mechanization as closely as was then possible. By the use of machinery the company claimed that miners working at a rate of 38¢ a ton would earn at least as much as they would in the hand mines at 56¢. This contention the men denied, and alleged further that the loading and weighing ma
chine that had been installed was inaccurate, and that they were not receiving credit for all their tonnage. The situation was made more difficult by the fact that the union had not adopted a pay scale for a fully mechanized mine, and would not admit that there should be a differential.

Company policy pushed the question of union recognition into the background. Leiter’s attorney, Henry R. Platt of Chicago, interviewed after the strike had been in progress two weeks, expressed his client’s position officially:

“The best of skilled labor is desired. Mr. Leiter believes, and will put into practice, the theory that a well-paid, intelligent employee is preferable to a non-union man.… He desires union men, believing that they are better laborers. He has no fight to make against unionism, but rather is its friend, and as such expects to continue.”

But years later, testifying under oath, Leiter gave a different version.

“We knew,” he said, “we would have trouble with the unions over the question of working mechanically, the unions being opposed to it because it decreased the number of men to be employed and it decreased the cost of production.… Knowing we would have to have the thing out with them we thought we would protect ourselves by buying all of the land, and owning the top so that we could chase them off of that.”

From Carbondale, ten days after the strike had been called, a correspondent of the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
summarized the situation. Ten thousand union miners, he wrote, were lined up against the great Leiter fortune. “Never before in all the history of coal mining in this section has such a tremendous struggle been on.”

The struggle began on July 8, the first day of the strike. Leiter took the initiative and moved fast. Before nightfall forty-two Pinkerton guards patrolled the property. All striking employees were given eviction notices, although with unusual clemency they were allowed a week in which to move. (The company
leases contained a twenty-four-hour eviction clause.) Work commenced immediately on an elaborate system of fortifications: a high fence surrounding an enclosure, 1,500 feet by 400 feet, in which the top works of the mine stood; two-story blockhouses, built of double thicknesses of oak logs with dirt between them, at two corners of the rectangle; smaller blockhouses on top of the office building and at the pumping-station on the Big Muddy River, the source of water for both mine and town. Machine guns were mounted in the blockhouses and a large searchlight was placed on the mine tipple, 125 feet above the ground. As a final protective measure Leiter, on July 16, incorporated the Zeigler Coal Company under the laws of Delaware, thus enabling it to come into the United States District Court and file a bill for an injunction against the striking miners.

In three weeks town and mine were ready to stand a seige. On August 1 a Du Quoin newspaperman reported the delivery, at Zeigler, of a carload of beer, five cases of cartridges, and two safes full of money, adding: “The stockade is completed, the rapid-firing guns being placed in position, and, with the addition of today’s supply of ammunition, Zeigler can defy the strikers.” On the same day Judge Otis M. Humphrey, in the United States District Court at Springfield, issued a temporary injunction restraining the officers of the Seventh Illinois District, U.M.W.A., and some three hundred striking miners from going on the property of the Zeigler Coal Company without permission, from picketing the town or mine, or from interfering in any way with the operations of the company. United States deputy marshals could now be added to the force of Pinkerton men.

On the other side, the strikers made such dispositions as their limited resources allowed. Most of them moved into a hastily constructed tent city near the town of Christopher, five miles north of Zeigler, where any imported strikebreakers would have to be transferred from the Illinois Central to the railroad running to the mine. Then they sent men to every large city for
miles around to watch the trains and report the movements of gangs of workmen who might be headed for Zeigler.

The first test came on July 27, when a carload of nonunion men, mostly laborers hired to complete the Zeigler stockade, was attached to an Illinois Central train departing from East St. Louis. Twenty-five of Leiter’s guards and a number of railroad special agents provided protection. Even so, at Belleville several United Mine Worker officials succeeded in boarding the train and tried to induce the men not to continue. None got off—the guards saw to that—but several promised to leave the stockade at the first chance. At Christopher shots were fired into the train, but no one was hit, and the contingent landed at Zeigler with whole skins.

Three days later Leiter guards attempted to bring in thirty-seven men, this time miners as well as laborers, in another chartered car. Somehow a number of strikers gained access, and between East St. Louis and Pinckneyville persuaded the strikebreakers to desert. The guards locked the car doors, but when the train stopped the men jumped out the windows. Zeigler, they had come to believe, would turn out to be a less desirable spot than they had at first supposed.

Nevertheless, Leiter succeeded in importing a labor force, though at great expense and danger. His efforts in August 1904 typified the first several months of nonunion operation. On the 10th Leiter himself brought in forty miners from West Virginia without disorder. Two days later a special car containing fifteen men from Pittsburgh was stoned and fired on, but without casualties except to the car windows. On the 15th, striking miners at Du Quoin tried to board cars in which seventy-five Italians were riding to Zeigler, but the guards kept them off and the miners could do nothing but shout abuse at the foreigners. On the 17th eighty-four Pennsylvania strikebreakers came through without trouble by using a different route, but on the next day a special train with more men aboard was fired on near Christopher and three of the guards were wounded.

Bringing nonunion miners into Zeigler was one thing; keeping them there was another. As early as August 10 the Carbondale correspondent of the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
reported that sixty per cent of the men imported had already deserted, and that the union camp at Christopher was growing daily through recruits from Zeigler. On October 1 the same reporter asserted that ninety of Leiter’s miners had quit during the preceding twenty-four hours. On November 19 all the men who had been brought in during the last week deserted. Despite the hundreds of men Leiter imported, he could keep no more than a hundred, on the average, at work during his first year of nonunion operation.

According to the newspapers, the men left because conditions at Zeigler had been misrepresented to them, or because they earned less money than they expected, but it is probable that bullets also had an influence. As the strike wore into late summer and fall the strikers became bolder, working their way into Zeigler after dark, firing into the stockade and the company houses. The guards returned the fire. “There was shooting in town practically every night,” said Leiter’s chief engineer, “or the blowing of dynamite here and there … half a mile to a mile from the town.… We would shoot at them [the strikers] at various times and when they fired into town we would fire into that particular locality.”

Yet all the shooting caused only one fatality. That occurred in mid-November when an Austrian, one of a contingent on the way to Zeigler, was killed by a rifle bullet fired from ambush. His death, however, heightened apprehension to such a point that the sheriff applied to the Adjutant General for rifles and ammunition with which to arm fifty deputies. No sooner had the arms been received than an attempt was made to assassinate two of Leiter’s principal officials, Henry R. Platt and William Browning. On the afternoon of November 25 these two men took Leiter to the near-by town of West Frankfort, where he boarded a train for Chicago. On their way back to Zeigler they were ambushed.
Although twenty or twenty-five shots were exchanged, no one was injured.

The attack on Platt and Browning, coming so soon after the killing of the Austrian miner, brought the state militia to Zeigler. Sheriff Stein of Franklin County telegraphed to Springfield for troops that same evening, asserting that he could not keep order; Platt and Leiter, in separate telegrams, also demanded military protection. In the absence of Governor Yates, Adjutant General Scott ordered Company F of Mt. Vernon to Zeigler; a day or two later he called out Company C of Carbondale. The following week the governor, who by then had returned to Springfield, approved Scott’s action and promised that the troops would remain on the scene as long as they were needed.

For several months Zeigler resembled a battlefield. In one camp were seventy state militiamen, forty deputy U.S. marshals (whose salaries Leiter paid), and a varying number of private mine-guards and deputy sheriffs. In the other camp were several hundred striking miners, armed with everything from revolvers to shotguns.

Yet the miners were anything but a disorderly mob. Adjutant General Scott, who had visited Zeigler shortly before the attack on Platt and Browning, referred to their camp as being “under discipline of the strictest sort,” and added: “I passed it without fear, and if my business had taken me into their tents I have no doubt I would have been civilly treated.” Nevertheless, shooting took place almost every night, with dynamite explosions at frequent intervals.

Zeigler, under siege, had to be seen to be believed. To C. H. Leichleiter, a magazine writer who visited the town a few weeks after the militiamen were stationed there, it was an anomaly in the peaceful America of 1905. “The heavily armed men,” he wrote, “and the silhouetted shadows of the soldiers, gathered perhaps about a campfire on a wooded hill or standing, silent and alert, in the shadow of the dense timber, give the impression of a beleaguered camp.” A beleaguered camp, moreover, that
showed the scars of war. Leichleiter found them most noticeable at the pumping-station on the Big Muddy. There, because of heavy timber on the far side of the stream, attackers could approach within thirty or forty yards without being seen. As a consequence, the building was fired on practically every night, and its heavy protecting timbers were scarred and studded with rifle bullets.

Most eerie of the sights that Zeigler had to offer, and most galling to the strikers, was the company searchlight. Leichleiter wrote: