Fannie Never Flinched Read online

  Boys started in the mine as early as age six or seven. Some “nippers” crawled into crannies to chip away the coal. Other little boys sat long hours fighting to stay awake in complete darkness. Their job was to fling open the heavy wooden doors for the mules hauling ore through the tunnels to daylight.

  In Colliers, Fannie saw the bony-legged children and their mothers’ empty eyes, and she realized that her dream of better lives for all workers was a long way off. Still, she didn’t give up—she got busy.

  Striking was the only way workers could try to influence the mine owners, but Fannie knew that the miners would not stay on strike if their children were hungry. She solicited donations of food and clothing for the miners’ families. Her charisma and passion roused the workers, as she cared for the sick and helped mothers in childbirth. Union families called her an angel of mercy.

  Mules stabled deep underground pulled carts loaded with coal out of the mines. Young mule drivers worked from 7:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mine owners considered the mules more valuable than the human workers. Workers could be replaced easily, but mules cost money. Brown Mine, West Virginia, September 1908.

  Coal miners’ children play in front of company housing. Grant Town, West Virginia, c. 1915.

  The United Mine Workers Union raised funds from members across the country to provide food and shelter for workers on strike like these in Ludlow, Colorado, 1914.

  The miners whispered about organizing a union, and Fannie encouraged them, but a judge had outlawed the United Mine Workers of America, or UMWA, in the region. Men could be fired for even talking about it!

  Union followers held secret meetings.

  “Might as well starve striking than working,” some said.

  But others argued, “Too risky.”

  The coal company owned them body and soul. It owned the shanties they lived in, the stores where they bought groceries, and even the schools and churches.

  The day finally came when each man had to decide for himself. Union leaders marched to the mouth of the Colliers mine with a brass band. As miners came off shift, the union signed up those willing to strike.

  But mine managers refused to acknowledge that the miners had the right to join a labor union. They evicted families from their houses, dumping everything they owned on the ground. Bosses hauled in a trainload of strikebreakers to replace the workers. And a federal judge threatened to arrest anyone who spoke in support of the union, whether “in their homes or on the streets.”

  The antiunion coalfields of West Virginia came close to the feudal systems of the Middle Ages, where the lower classes worked for landowners and remained indebted to them for life. Fannie’s attempts to organize mine workers and give comfort to their families was called “inciting to riot” by the local authorities. Most of what Fannie was doing at the time would be called social work today.

  Union families evicted from company housing after striking against the Liberty Fuel Company. Scotts Run, West Virginia, October 1924.

  As in West Virginia, striking miners in Colorado also lived in tents throughout the winter, having been evicted from company housing. Here, families pose outside Joseph Zanetell’s tent. His wife, Emma, did not come outside for the picture, having just given birth to twins who died soon thereafter. When militia came to destroy the camp, this tent was spared, because Emma Zanetell was too sick to move. Forbes Camp, Ludlow, Colorado, 1914.

  December 3, 1913, Fannie joined the striking miners in a huge rally to show solidarity. She knew if she spoke out for her dream, she might go to jail. She climbed right up onto the platform.

  “I am free and I have a right to walk or talk any place in this country as long as I obey the law,” she said. Miners whistled and shouted. Women and children cheered.

  “The only wrong I have done is to take shoes to the children in Colliers whose bare feet are blue from the cruel blasts of winter,” Fannie said. “If it’s wrong to put shoes on those little feet, then I will continue to do wrong as long as I have hands and feet to crawl to Colliers.”

  Fannie was arrested for defying the antiunion injunction, but the judge let her off with a warning. She stuck with the striking union families through the winter.

  They lived in tents, depending on the kindness of others for food and clothing. The women and children sometimes heard gunfire as company guards took strikebreakers to the mine each day and strikers tried to stop them. One guard was wounded, one striker killed.

  Still, Fannie never stopped believing in her dream. She inspired the women around her to dream, too. When the miners wondered if they should quit the strike, their wives told them to hang tough.

  One spring day in April 1914, as nonunion workers neared the mine, a striker threw a punch, and everybody jumped in slugging. With knuckles and clubs, the union men chased the strikebreakers from the mine to the railroad depot and put them on the next train out of town.

  Eleven men were accused of being ringleaders in the fracas and arrested. Fannie took no part in the fight, but she was arrested, too. “I do not advise violence,” Fannie said. “Except in self-defense as a last resort.”

  Union lawyers argued to free Fannie and the men, but they lost the case. Fannie was sentenced to six months in jail, and the union did not have enough money to post her bail. Union members photographed her behind bars and put the picture on postcards. People from all over the country sent the postcards to President Woodrow Wilson, asking him to free Fannie.

  Fannie Sellins in the Marion County jail. Bail for Fannie and a fellow labor organizer arrested with her, James Oates, was set at $3,000, about $71,600 in current dollars. Fairmont, West Virginia, spring 1914.

  Thousands of postcards like this were printed for union supporters to send to the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, on Fannie’s behalf. The front of the postcard featured the previous photo of Fannie in her jail cell. President Wilson eventually pardoned Fannie Sellins.

  Living with the poor miners’ families, Fannie had become weak from working so hard and not eating enough. In jail, her health grew worse. The Marion County jail had no sanitary facilities for women. In her cell, Fannie was in view of any men who might walk by, some of whom were drunk and disorderly. The jail cells were constructed in tiers three high, and Fannie’s cell was on the top tier where men below could peer up at her through a grating. The jail physician wrote the Marion County Board of Health that due to “close confinement and very hot weather” Fannie risked great injury to her health.

  The coal company and the strikers finally reached an agreement. Miners would get a raise in pay, but the union would have to go. Mine owners refused to deal with the UMWA. The union raised enough money to free Fannie after she had served three months. Later, President Wilson pardoned her and several other union organizers.

  After her stretch in jail, most folks would not have blamed Fannie if she gave up fighting for poor workers. But Fannie could not stand by and do nothing. In her mind, it was a matter of justice.

  * * *

  LABOR WAR

  WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA, 1916

  Across the West Virginia state line, in Pennsylvania’s Alle-Kiski Valley, known as Black Valley, some of the richest corporations in America piled up profits. Their owners, such as J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, wore diamonds, while their workers wore rags.

  Again, Fannie’s fiery words reminded workers that they deserved better. In a wave of strikes in Western Pennsylvania, box makers, steelworkers, laundrywomen, and machinists all won higher pay.

  Still, coal miners in the Allegheny and Kiskiminetas river valleys, a region rich with natural resources, seemed stuck in poverty. Natrona sat on the western bluff of the Allegheny River north-east of Pittsburgh. The town bustled with Italian, Polish, and Slavic immigrant families who raised flocks of ducks and geese on the river much as they had in the Old Country. Wealthier native-born Americans in Allegheny County gave the place the derogatory name Ducktown. They were suspicious of the foreigners, who didn’t speak Engli
sh, ate strange foods, and had strange customs.

  Business tycoon John Pierpont “J. P.” Morgan’s daughter (center) and friends frequented the Coaching Club of New York to enjoy polo, horse racing, and tennis. Date unknown.

  Andrew Carnegie’s main residence was a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Here, he’s pictured at his golf cottage. Westchester County, New York, 1911.

  Children standing in the dirt street of a company coal town, showing typical houses with a mine shaft in the background. Western Pennsylvania, c. 1910.

  Despite prejudice, the immigrants exhibited a pioneering spirit, building ethnic churches, grocery stores, and fraternal halls. But their well-tended vegetable gardens, small frame houses, and privies were blackened with soot from coal-burning steel plants nearby. Families couldn’t seem to get ahead. Fathers and sons followed paths down the bluff to the nearby coal mines in Brackenridge, where they worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. On payday near the entrances to the mines, lines of maimed and debilitated workers begged for handouts.

  Pennsylvania coal country was the most dangerous place to work in America. Death and injury waited in the dark shafts where rock fractured and crashed down without warning. On average, a man died in the mines every day, often crushed by coal cars or killed by explosions.

  When children heard the whistle blow, they stopped playing and ran home. They waited with their mothers, hearts pounding, as men came up the street carrying the limp body. Covered with coal dust, miners’ faces all looked alike. At which house would the silent procession stop? Sooner or later, nearly every family lost a father, brother, or son.

  But that’s not why union people called it Black Valley. The dismal name came from the bleak opportunities workers faced in the region, where iron, coal, and steel companies had busted unions for two decades. Fighting between labor unions and mine owners was so fierce, they called it war. Labor War.

  An injured miner receives treatment at the emergency hospital at a Pennsylvania mine. Date unknown.

  A millionaire named Lewis Hicks ran fourteen mines where bosses treated workers like slaves. He paid less than other companies did, made his miners work two hours a day longer, and cared little if miners got hurt on the job.

  Every day Fannie talked to Black Valley miners and their families, telling the women they deserved to live like Americans: have bathtubs, indoor plumbing, and sanitary homes with curtains on the windows. Their children were entitled to a proper education and a balanced diet. She convinced thousands of miners to join the UMWA and even influenced their children, who refused to play with others whose fathers didn’t join. When the union voted to strike, eight thousand men walked off the job. They set up picket lines outside the mines.

  Pennsylvania’s mounted Coal and Iron Police were so notoriously brutal, miners nicknamed them Cossacks. In Russia, Cossack soldiers hired by the czars massacred people and burned villages to put down peasant uprisings and destroy Jewish communities.

  Mine operators vowed to break the union. They advertised for workers willing to cross the picket line. Hicks and the other owners hired guards, passed out guns, and sent men to patrol company boundaries.

  Everyone in Black Valley tensed, like soldiers waiting for battle. Fannie didn’t flinch. It was rare for a woman to do this kind of work, but she walked the picket lines with the men and rallied strikers to stick it out. She tried to keep peace while the miners and guards heckled one another and often came to blows. During one scuffle, a company guard assaulted Fannie. She pressed charges but lost in court. Luckily, her injuries were not life threatening.

  The strike staggered on for weeks, months, nearly a year. Mining families scratched out a living any way they could, with the union providing strike pay from dues paid by members in other parts of the country.

  Company guards threatened, thrashed, and sometimes shot striking miners. Miners drummed up guns and shot back. Homemade bombs exploded at the houses of nonunion men and wrecked company buildings and machinery. The sheriff and local judges enforced the law only when it suited the coal companies. Fannie knew the sheriff’s deputies doubled as Lewis Hicks’s armed thugs.

  Hicks’s men knew Fannie, too. They didn’t want her kind of troublemaker around. Rumors spread that the deputies joked about killing her. Fannie must have wondered if it was time to quit.

  All these years, she had believed that if workers stuck together, they’d win a fair share of the money made by their muscle and sweat. The struggle had taken nearly half her life. Her children had grown and had children of their own. Still the fight went on. The courts, local lawmen, and state and national troops all lined up against the union organizers. Maybe her dream was impossible.

  * * *

  FANNIE’S DREAM LIVES ON

  BLACK VALLEY, PENNSYLVANIA, 1917

  When Lewis Hicks could not hire enough local strikebreakers, he went south, offering jobs to people who didn’t know what it was like in the Black Valley. Black sharecroppers, cotton pickers, and miners making even lower wages in Alabama jumped at the chance. They boarded a train in Birmingham, and the guards locked the doors of the cars to keep union organizers from getting to them. Hicks didn’t tell the eager-for-work men that he paid low wages. He didn’t tell them about the strike. And he didn’t tell them that people in the Alle-Kiski Valley might try to kill them for taking their jobs.

  Union men bunched together outside the mine. They had heard about the train carrying scabs and were ready to face down the strikebreakers. If they didn’t stop these Southerners from working the mines, the strike would fail. The union would be crushed again.

  But Fannie had a plan. She waited at a railroad signal outside town where the train would slow and maybe stop. If she could speak to the men on the train, she hoped to convince them to join the union.

  Early-1900s Pennsylvania railroad locomotive, similar to the one that Fannie Sellins intersected as it carried strikebreakers to Lewis Hicks’s mine in the Alle-Kiski Valley.

  She had succeeded in St. Louis. She had succeeded in West Virginia. But the mine operators in Black Valley seemed more dangerous. Men with guns guarded the train whenever it stopped, the same men who had threatened to kill her.

  Still, when the train came into view, steam engine hissing, pistons hammering, Fannie picked up her skirts and ran alongside the train cars, shouting at the men inside.

  They stared at the woman scrambling over the rugged ground with her hairpins falling out, and opened the windows to hear what she was hollering about. “Don’t break the strike!” she called to them. “Support the union.”

  Could it be true, they wondered? Had they traveled all this way to help bust a union?

  “Why else have they locked us in here?” one said.

  “That’s right. No other reason for it,” said another.

  More windows came down. Men inside the locked cars pounded on the doors. “We can’t get out!”

  Fannie shouted, “Workers, unite! Power to the union!”

  One man climbed out a train window and dropped to the ground. Those left behind cheered. Up and down the track, men climbed from the windows and jumped to the ground.

  Fannie shook the hand of every man who fled the train and then marched with them down the tracks. One hundred men from Alabama crossed a bridge and paraded into town, where union families lined the street, clapping and cheering. If a man wanted to go home, the union gave him a ticket on the next train back. Those workers who wanted to join the strike were welcomed into the union.

  The strikers held fast at Hicks’s mines, but world events intervened. On April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. To support the country’s war effort, the striking miners gave up many of their demands and went back to work. Under new wartime regulations, the United States government brokered a wage deal with coal-mine operators across the nation, and Lewis Hicks agreed to give miners a 50 percent pay raise.

  Coal miners’ and steel workers’ efforts produced war materials like these three-inc
h shells at a Bethlehem Steel Company factory. To free up men to fight the war, women were trained to manufacture munitions. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, c. 1918.

  The war ended in November 1918, and soon after, the mine operators nixed their end of the contract, in which they had recognized the United Mine Workers Union. Miners in Western Pennsylvania lost what little leverage they had gained and any hope of a new pay increase to cover the spike in prices over the last few years.

  By the following summer, Fannie had committed the full force of her personality to buck up the UMWA in Black Valley. In late July 1919, miners walked out at Allegheny Coal & Coke in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, demanding the company recognize the union. Strikers picketed on public roads near the mine. The sheriff swore in extra deputies, passed out rifles, and sent the men to patrol company boundaries. These were not impartial law enforcement officers. They were thugs and riffraff, deputized at the whim of industrial corporations in the valley.

  A tense peace lasted five weeks until an argument broke out between deputies and striking coal miners. On the afternoon of August 26, Fannie arrived in the neighborhood of Abe Roth’s grocery shop in Natrona, just a short walk from the mine entrance in Brackenridge. She hoped to convince miners coming off shift to join the strike.

  The grocery store was where women gathered to socialize, and children came along hoping for a few pennies for a treat. That muggy summer afternoon, the strikers and deputies exchanged insults, sparking gunfire along the route from the store to the mine. A woman in the crowd suggested that the miners arm themselves for protection.