In 1915, coal miners affiliated with the United Mine Workers (UMW) labor union at the Wheelbarrow Mine in Johnson County, Arkansas, went on strike against the mine's operators, the Pennsylvania Mining Company (PMC). The strike ended in 1917 after the PMC declared bankruptcy and a new company, the Fernwood Mining Company, was established to operate the mine and quickly agreed to recognize the UMW.
The prelude to strike action at the Wheelbarrow Mine began in 1910 when the existing contract between the UMW and the Anthracite Coal and Land Company, which owned and, at the time, operated the mine, expired without a replacement contract. In October of that year, PMC was established and began operating the mine under a lease from the Anthracite Coal Company. This new company refused to negotiate with the UMW and began to bring in immigrant workers from Pennsylvania to work at the mine, leading to tension and some sporadic instances of violence between these replacement workers and former UMW miners. For the next several years, the UMW attempted to organize workers at the mine and planned for a strike against PMC, and on June 9, 1915, several miners performed a walkout following a change in company policy regarding how miners were compensated for the amount of coal they mined, resulting in a strike.
Following this walkout, UMW officials quickly organized a new local union in Johnson County and made plans for carrying out the strike. Over the next several months, there were several instances of violence between pro- and anti-union sides, and on August 24, a trestle bridge in the county was partially destroyed in an act of sabotage. Following this, UMW official James Moran negotiated with the company a potential end to the strike by the end of the year, but unbeknownst to the union, PMC had by this time initiated legal actions against the union. However, within about one year of filing this lawsuit, PMC declared bankruptcy, in part due to costs associated with the strike and subsequent litigation. PMC ultimately lost the right to operate the Wheelbarrow Mine, and their successor company, the Fernwood Mining Company, quickly recognized the UMW as a collective bargaining organization and negotiated an end to the strike in November 1917.
In the ensuing years, PMC and the UMW continued litigating in various courts, with the company alleging that the union had engaged in conspiracy regarding interstate commerce that violated the terms of the Sherman Antitrust Act. However, the union rejected these accusations and, in a final hearing in September 1928, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit sided with the union and rejected the company's case, awarding the UMW court costs. While the union ultimately succeeded in both their strike and subsequent legal battles, the coal industry in Arkansas had by this point entered into a state of decline that hurt unions such as the UMW's influence in the state.
Background Coal in Arkansas In 1840, coal was discovered in the town of Spadra, in Johnson County, Arkansas, with coal mining operations beginning that same year. Initially, mining was primarily for local use in blacksmithing, but the construction of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad in the 1870s opened the region up for more commercial mining activity, primarily in the counties of Franklin, Johnson, and Sebastian. The coal in this area, a region in the Arkansas River Valley stretching roughly from the city of Russellville to the Oklahoma state border, is mostly bituminous coal, though anthracite is also present in an area known as the Spadra field. By the early 1900s, Arkansas boasted the only anthracite mining operations in the United States between Colorado and Pennsylvania, and in Johnson County, the anthracite vein measured more than in width in some areas and was situated approximately beneath the ground.
Labor in the coal mines After the American Civil War, mine operators in the region relied on convict leasing, though this system fell out of use by the late 1800s following an 1888 investigation by the state government that revealed numerous instances of workers' abuse and death in the mines. Following this, the miners in the region were primarily agricultural workers who engaged in mine working on a part-time basis, and the mines attracted workers from nearby cities such as Jamestown and Clarksville, the county seat of Johnson County. By the late 1800s, mine workers began to organize and conduct strike actions against mine operators, with two of the three strikes reported by the state of Arkansas to the United States Commissioner of Labor between 1881 and 1886 occurring in the coal mines of Spadra. By the 1890s, miners in Arkansas began to join national labor unions, such as the Knights of Labor, and in 1894, roughly 1,400 miners in the state participated in a general strike that had been called by the United Mine Workers (UMW).
The UMW had been formed in 1890 and within a few years of its formation had been successful at agitating for increased wages and better working conditions for miners in states such as Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and in 1898, the union began to focus its efforts on organizing miners in Arkansas. In 1899, the union called for its first strike in Arkansas, which fell under the union's District 21, a regional division that also represented workers in Oklahoma and Texas. By 1903, the UMW had achieved union recognition in western Arkansas and began to engage with local mine operators in collective bargaining, and by the end of the decade, almost all miners in the region were members of UMW District 21 and organized into local unions. In 1910, UMW District 21 boasted a membership of roughly 35,000 members, with the workers in Johnson County organized under Local 2773.
Wheelbarrow Mine In the early 1900s, the Wheelbarrow Mine in Johnson County was an anthracite mine owned by the Arkansas-based Anthracite Coal and Land Company, which, as a member of the Southwestern Coal Operators Association (the regional employers' organization), operated the mine under an industry-wide agreement with the UMW. In 1910, the existing contract between the UMW and the Anthracite Coal company was set to expire, but a strike that year affected negotiations on a replacement contract, and as a result, when the contract expired on April 1, the company decided to continue to operate under the terms of the now-expired contract. In October 1910, James Gearhart, a businessman from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who was an officer at the Anthracite Coal company, established the Pennsylvania Mining Company (PMC) to operate the Wheelbarrow Mine. This new company, which was a subsidiary of Anthracite Coal, gained the mining rights for the Wheelbarrow Mine for roughly $484,000 and reneged on the existing deal with the union, operating the mine without a union contract. This decision angered many longtime miners, prompting many of them to seek employment either in other nearby mines or in agriculture. In the ensuing years, local union membership declined from about 100 in 1910 to 13 in 1913, at which time no union member who had worked at the company during its time operated by the Anthracite Coal company worked at the now-PMC operated mine. Within the community, many locals viewed people who continued to work at the Wheelbarrow Mine as scabs.
Immigrant workers brought in from Pennsylvania Given the resignation of many UMW miners, starting in late 1910, PMC began to replace local miners with a primarily immigrant and non-union labor force. Many of these workers were immigrants from Eastern Europe, such as Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Russia, who had been living in Pennsylvania and were brought in by PMC from Scranton to Clarksville via rail transport and then via horse and buggy from Clarksville to the mine. This occurred during a larger trend of eastern European immigrants, including many Slavic people, being recruited by mine operators in western Arkansas, and in total, between 1910 and 1915, a total of roughly 1,500 immigrant workers were active at various points in the Wheelbarrow Mine under PMC operation.
For the length of the labor dispute at the Wheelbarrow Mine, the immigrant workers were, in the words of historian Suzanne S. Lewis, "pawns in a vicious chess game played out between union and management". National UMW official Thomas King stated that these immigrants were brought to Arkansas from Pennsylvania under false pretenses, alleging that the company had promised the immigrants work in a union mine. On the other side, the union encouraged many immigrants to seek employment in other mines, and the UMW spent approximately $10,000 over the course of the labor dispute on this program. According to one union organizer in Johnson County, many of the immigrants were eager to seek employment elsewhere due to the poor working conditions at the Wheelbarrow Mine. On the other hand, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes that some union members took advantage of the immigrants' poor grasp of English to trick them into moving to other states for work, and there were some instances of immigrant workers facing threats of physical violence from pro-union individuals.
Increased violence in Johnson County As the labor dispute continued, a sense of lawlessness and increasing tension grew in both the nearby towns and the tent camp that housed the immigrant laborers, and while the PMC was initially unconcerned, the company eventually hired armed guards and instituted changes in company policy. These guards primarily kept the workers from leaving the tent camp and prevented locals, including union organizers, from entering the camp, thus damaging unionization efforts among the workers. There were numerous instances, especially in 1911 and 1912, of confrontations between company guards and union activists, and in at least one instance, a company guard worked covertly as a spy for the UMW. By the later half of 1913, the UMW decided to increase their efforts in Johnson County, and in November of that year, during a political rally outside of the courthouse in Clarksville, a union activist called the manager of PMC a "slave driver" and urged the townspeople present "to take shotguns and go down and get them". In July 1914, there was a violent confrontation between pro- and anti-union activists at the Prairie Creek Mine in Sebastian County, roughly from the Wheelbarrow Mine, prompting PMC to increase security while the UMW began to recruit more active miners in the Wheelbarrow Mine. According to a 2021 article in the Southwest Times Record, 1914 represented a general peak in labor disputes in the coal fields of Arkansas, with the year experiencing several instances of riots and violence in the area.
Prelude to strike action