9
The Striking Years
Zeph and Maud had moved into the mining camp of Castle Gate in search of opportunity. In Sunnyside, Zeph had proved his supervisory skills as a boss driver, the man responsible for all the movement of the coal along the tracks within the mines. Maud, after years in the classroom, was an expert at encouraging potential in others. Her confidence in Zeph gave him the courage to apply for the open position of foreman of the Castle Gate mine, the top post in mining hierarchy under company management. In 1921, he was placed in charge of several hundred men—the American-born, Welsh, Scots, Greeks, Italians, and Slavs—just a year before they walked out on their jobs.
It is impossible to build an accurate picture of mining in the early twentieth century without mentioning the strikes. Welshman, for all their historical abuse and small reputation in England, were the among the first coal miners to unite for better working conditions in Britain. Before Evan and Magaret Thomas were born, Merthyr Tydfil experienced its most dramatic miners’ revolt in the Merthyr Riot of 1831, where the whole town rose up against the ironmasters for rights and higher wages.
Zeph, unlike his Welsh predecessors, was not a union man, but he respected the right of workers to strike for better salaries. Union sentiment had begun to take hold in Utah before the turn of the century, and unions continued to attract members throughout the following years. A year after the Winter Quarters explosion in 1901, coal prices dropped, and Utah miners refused for the first time to take up their picks and enter the mine. By this time, Zeph was somewhere between Oregon and Alberta and no doubt felt the ripples of strike sentiment in those coalfields as well. The major strikes in Utah mining history correspond with the strikes across the United States. Coal prices varied according to the worldwide economy, much as energy prices do today. In Winter Quarters, Evan would probably have been in the forefront of the picket line with his younger sons, imposing the full force of his just over five foot frame and demanding fair wages in his hotheaded eloquence. He was a man with a clear sense of dignity and had little tolerance for mistreatment. Zeph had inherited some of this from his father, but he learned how to accomplish more with a few well-directed words than with the whole fountain of his father’s fury.
After the Thomas family had moved to Cleveland, Utah, unionizers from the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), an organization founded by British immigrants in 1890, began to infiltrate the state and recruit members, mobilizing the men for the strike of 1903–4. Strikes bore an ironic similarity to holidays: all the restless energy bottled up from working long hours underground burst out into songs and demonstrations. Miners organized parades to emphasize their demands. During the 1903–4 strike, the Italian brass band led a march in Castle Gate. Violence always simmered under the surface, and both the company guards and the miners were wary of making good on threats, lest the collective agitation of so many idle men combust and mayhem break out. The strikers hoped to outwait the company, and the company strove to outwait the strikers. Typical miner aggression involved no more than turning over vehicles and blocking the paths of coal trucks and strikebreakers. The company responded by throwing the miners out of their homes and hiring others to fill their jobs. In 1904, the tension reached such a pitch that the governor of Utah ordered the National Guard to maintain order in Carbon County.
According to J. L. Ewing, a sergeant in the Nephi Company who was sent to Castle Gate, many of his fellow militiamen went to the mining camps in support of the company and returned with reverse sympathies: “The striking miners are just as much in need of protection from the hired guards of the trust, as the company property and men are in need of protection from the striking miners … We have but little sympathy for the miners out there, and we have still less sympathy for the coal trust. In the first place, if the trust is paying $3.00 to $8.00 a day to miners as they claim, or an average of $3.50 to $3.75 a day, they have no need to hire Finns or Dagos [a derogatory term for Italians or unassimilated people]. They can get the best miners in the country for such pay.”
During this unrest, a handful of colorful labor leaders found their way to the remote mountain ranges of Utah. Charles Demolli, an Italian immigrant who had escaped from prison in Italy for counterfeiting charges, drifted among Western mines and Italian newspapers until he found himself at the head of the labor movement in Carbon County, stirring up his countrymen. Just as Salt Lake City upper crust gossip made headlines in Carbon County newspapers, the news of mining union activity was a hot topic in the city two hundred miles away. The Salt Lake Herald nicknamed Demolli “the silver tongued” and asserted that “his appearance is far from being the wild-eyed anarchist he is pictured by his enemies. A tall handsome man in appearance, dressed in rough chinchilla jacket, flannel shirt, corduroy trousers, and laced boots of a miner, he has a handsome face, typically Italian with a small sloping moustache.”
In 1904, the UMWA brought in Mary Harris (Mother) Jones, an Irish immigrant who lost her husband and three children in a yellow fever epidemic in Tennessee. She was introduced to the conditions of the working class in Chicago, where she supported herself as a dressmaker. After her shop was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1871, she became involved in the workers’ movement, helping to found the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World). She emerged as one of America’s most powerful labor leaders when she brought the issue of child labor to the national agenda by organizing a demonstration of Pennsylvanian children who worked in the mills and mines. They marched through the streets of Washington, D.C., chanting: “We want time to play. We want to go to school.” They strode right up onto the lawn of the White House, where newly elected President Roosevelt refused to step out on his porch and acknowledge them. This stunt earned her the title of the Most Dangerous Woman in America.
An ample, kindly-looking woman of seventy-four, she chose to announce her presence in Carbon County in characteristic style by descending on the best hotel in Helper. After her meal, when the waitress brought out a finger bowl for her to wash her hands, Mother Jones proclaimed: “Take it away my girl. Such things are not for me, they only give some poor overworked girl extra work at washing dishes.” This denunciation, surely meant for the wealthier community members who dined around her, was passed from mouth to mouth among the miners all through Carbon County and deemed a noble declaration. Gossip of Demolli and Mother Jones would have reached the Thomas home in Cleveland, and I wonder what my great-great-grandmother Margaret thought of her times—if she was caught up in the crusading spirit of the fight for workers’ rights, or if she watched with wonder and uncertainty the conflict between the company and the workers, led by these larger than life personalities.
From the Helper hotel, Mother Jones moved to a tent colony, rooming with an Italian family among the strikers, keeping up their spirits. In the dry lands of central Utah, conditions in the strikers’ colonies were terrible. Average precipitation in the region is between five and ten inches per year, which would have forced residents to haul water from deep wells and springs. The Utah Fuel Company had a near monopoly on the stores in the area, and the mining towns were, for the most part, far from farming communities. The mountains that provided a suitable climate for brush and pine would have supported little provender for foraging. Deer and jackrabbits would have been the most available food source, aside from the company’s canned and bagged goods.
Such a hotbed of squalor made local law enforcement nervous. The arrival of Mother Jones only promised to heighten the strikers’ determination, so the sheriff of Carbon County organized a posse of forty-five men to raid the strikers’ colony and drive the troublemaker out of town. Mother Jones wrote in her journal: “Between 4:30 and 5 o’clock in the morning … They descended upon the sleeping tent colony, dragged the miners out of their beds [without time] to put on their clothes. Shaking with cold, followed by the shrieks and wails of their wives and children, beaten along the road by guns, they were driven like cattle.”
Mother Jones had gotten word of the raid and convinced the Italian miners to bury their guns to prevent any bloodshed. As a consequence, 120 Italian miners were forcibly taken from their lodgings. The miners made no resistance, and contrary to Mother Jones’s account, the men who had been pulled from their beds in their nightclothes were allowed to return to their tents and change. Their families were driven from their tents, and the women and children shivered in the night while soldiers searched their homes for munitions. The men were loaded into a boxcar headed to Price City, their wives and children running and screaming after the departing train. The Price City jail could not hold so many men. Consequently, company employees erected a makeshift bullpen around a warehouse used to store carriages, herded in the Italians, and put up armed guards to keep them there. Meanwhile, Mother Jones remained behind to comfort the women. Two days after the raid, she reported: “The stone that held my door was suddenly pushed in. A fellow jumped into the room, stuck a gun under my jaw and told me to tell him where he could get $3,000 of the miner’s money or he would blow out my brains.”
Mother Jones handed over the fifty cents in her pockets, saving her brains and little enriching this “fellow,” who turned out to be Gunplay Maxwell, a pardoned bank robber who had been sworn in as a deputy. He was the bodyguard of company lawyer Mark Braffet.
A photograph from the time shows both Maxwell and Braffet standing watch over the bullpen of Italians, who hang their arms at their sides. The prisoners gaze directly at the camera. Their faces in the photograph are too small to discern whether their eyes are glaring—ordered to attention by the men stationed with rifles on the roof above—or if they are posing, aware even in their extremity of the need to capture such a historical moment. Many union members were held here for trial, some detained as long as a month. Local hotels and residents were asked to cook meat for the prisoners, and the local Mormon bishop gathered food from among his parishioners. Italian women would wander to the site, carrying food and pleading with the guards in broken English to free their men.
Zeph would have been familiar with these stories, reading them in the newspapers and hearing them by word of mouth from his coworkers. Certainly there were similar episodes in Cleveland. Likely members of Zeph’s immediate family participated, cajoling him to throw his support behind the union. Zeph always declined because he valued order and refused to negotiate by means of violence.
In the years that followed, strike activity continued, but it was poorly organized due to competition among the unions. In 1914 World War I started, increasing the average wage of the miners in tandem with the increasing demand for coal. After the war, the expansion of the mining industry glutted the market, and both the demand for and price of coal plummeted. It was in these troubled times that Zeph took up the position of foreman at the Castle Gate mine. In April 1922, over twenty thousand coal miners prepared for the largest strike in American history up to that time.
I can only imagine the interchanges between Zeph and the company in the early days of that month. He spent his time among the men and was likely familiar with the labor agitators who moved among them. His living conditions were only slightly better than those of his fellow miners, and he knew what a pay cut would mean to their families. Zeph’s job was to run the mine and supervise the workers, but the company was solely concerned with making a profit. Despite the threats of the miners, the Utah Fuel Company reduced wages from $7.25 to $5.25 per day. Zeph would have been the harbinger of this bad news. As a result, in solidarity with the coal miners across America, 70 percent of Utah miners walked out.
The Utah Fuel Company responded with intractability. The striking miners were evicted from their houses, although it was early spring and there was still snow on the ground. They were given five to ten days’ notice, and the belongings of the miners who refused to leave were tossed out of their homes. In Sunnyside, as company officials attempted to dispossess a woman in labor, the company doctor stood on her porch, threatening to shoot any who dared. Reports in newspapers villainized the foreign-born, who were represented as being the agitators of the turmoil, and racism was the momentum behind the recruitment of strikebreakers. In order to counter this negative press, Hideo Kazuta, a Japanese immigrant who served in World War I, wrote the following to one of the local newspapers: “I love America. I love the state of Utah and especially Carbon County … I stand against lower wages in order to save Kenilworth where I was working … from utter misery, and to protect the businessmen and farmers of Carbon Counties where the workers’ wages are the barometer of prosperity. Every genuine American I feel is opposed to the present tendency to change our standard of living in our beloved country by lowering wages to that of other lands where kings and a few followers have the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth and happiness.”
Zeph Thomas (second from left) posing with his coworkers in Castle Gate, circa 1924
Striking miners formed tent colonies in the severe early spring conditions, supplied with materials that had been shipped from Wyoming by the UMWA. Squatting on tracts of lands just outside the mining camps, miners would do what they could to interfere with mining operations. The company officials responded by erecting wire fences to close off the communities. During the workday, children would entertain themselves by climbing the fences to throw rocks at the strikebreakers. Small shootouts among the adults were common, with a handful of men wounded on both sides. In Scofield, teachers would keep children in the schoolhouse after their lessons, instructing them to lie on the floor to avoid stray bullets. The first man killed in 1922 was John Htenakis, a Greek miner, who was shot by Deputy Sheriff Lorenzo H. Young.
This event polarized the conflict. Young claimed he shot Htenakis in the chest in self defense, a statement that was supported by the company doctor. The Helper doctor sided with the Greeks, who maintained Htenakis was shot in the back. At his funeral, the Price band played as his casket was trailed by seven hundred Greeks, carrying their blue and white national banner.
Not long afterward, the Utah Fuel Company brought in a train car full of strikebreakers from Colorado, and miners set up an ambush around the tunnel between Castle Gate and the neighboring mining town of Standardsville. Company guard Arthur Webb had volunteered to shovel coal into the engine to keep the train going. When the train passed by the ambush site, the strikebreakers and the miners exchanged fire; one miner was hit in the shoulder, and Webb was killed. The death of Arthur Webb settled the score of John Htenakis as far as the miners were concerned, but it prompted the governor of Utah to call in the National Guard and establish martial law. The miners’ guns were confiscated, and machine guns were positioned above the strikers’ tent villages. At ten o’clock, the miners were ordered to extinguish all their lamps, and the darkness of the canyons of central Utah was cut only by searchlights sweeping over the tent cities through the night.
Bill, Bobby, and Boyd, circa 1922
My grandfather Robert remembers these times vividly. He was a boy of four, but the general air of agitation terrorized his early memories. In his personal history he writes: “One does not easily forget the probing searchlight, which turned my bedroom into garish day many times at night during the strikes at the mine. My father told us honestly (he answered all our questions honestly) that the company was afraid someone might set fire to our house, but that we really had nothing to worry about because the strikers were our friends and neighbors.”
As the foreman of the mine, Zeph was placed in the precarious position of being the company’s representative to the miners while he felt sympathetic to the workers’ cause. The company issued him a .38-caliber pistol for protection and insisted he’d need it.
Zeph laughed and said, “I think I had better go down and talk to the miners.”
“You can’t step into that tent city. They’ll kill you,” they countered.
Zeph drove down from Castle Gate two miles to the strikers’ camp, bringing his boys along for the ride. He walked out among the tents and talked to the people. Self-effacing and a patient listener, Zeph was a quiet man. He had worked his way up from the bottom, and the miners knew he was one of them. Although he had to maintain his loyalty to the company and had little sway over wages, he listened to the workers’ complaints. From inside the car, his sons likely watched the children of the striking miners chasing each other, making mischief out of boredom and rumbling bellies. In the end, the miners held their ground for five months, without work or pay, before the Utah Fuel Company gave in to their demands.
Bill was seven and Bobby was four. I don’t know if they stepped out of the car with their father. There were few amenities in the tent colonies. The human smell of bad sanitation, the noise, and the agitation must have terrified them. Zeph wouldn’t have brought the two boys just to spite the company, and even less to ensure his own safety; there must have been something he wanted his sons to understand. I suspect it might have been the fact that Zeph knew they were not destined for lives bound by coal—the family was not in the same desperate state financially as the striking miners. Maud had been a schoolteacher. The boys were bright and eager learners, and their mother kept their minds active. Bill became a chemist, Bobby a scholar, and Boyd, the youngest brother, a judge, but none forgot the mining camps of their early years.