The issue in this strike was a living wage, a wage whereby you could support
your family. The average miners were making about $400 a year and I don't know
what that is exactly translated into 1999, currency, but it wasn't nearly
enough to support a family. Consequently, child labor is common practice.
When you were nine-ten years old you were drawn from school, pulled out of
school really, whether you like it or not, and off you went into the work
force. The boys went into the mines and the girls went to work in the textile
industry that begin to locate itself in the region around 1900. It moved
outside of New York and over to the coal regions and young girls 14, 15, and 16
years old worked there. When Louis Hine went up to photograph the miners
around this time, Louis Hine, the famous documentary photographer, he
photographed these children and expected to, in a sense, go after the
conscience of the nation. But the workers themselves resented his efforts.
They needed the work of their children and they would forge false birth
certificates, lying and saying in a sense that their child was 16, rather than
13 or 11. In my own investigation of the anthracite region around 1900, I
found that as much as a third of a family's income came from children under the
age of 15.
By 1900, the big thing is that many of these Eastern European and Italian
miners finally had something to lose. They had come over here, by and large,
in the beginning of the 1880s as, single men had come first, young men between
the ages of 18 and 22 and 23 years old, lived in boarding houses, saved their
money, worked in some boarding houses they would have 16-17 guys in a room.
Say, if there was 18 there, they'd have nine beds. Nine guys would have one
shift, get up, go to work, and the other nine would come in and take their
beds. They'd save, save, save, send the money back to the home country, bring
their families over. Sometimes they'd send for a wife. Their mother would
secure a wife for them. She'd send them a tin-- little tin type with a
photograph of it. And sometimes these guys would go to New York City when the
immigrant boats were unloading and they'd look at the tin type and scan the
crowd looking for their wives. They'd bring them into the region. They had a
family to raise now. They had homes of their own through constantly saving,
and the Slavic people especially, you know, save like crazy. They were able to
be the second largest home owners in the region by 1900. The Polish were by
1900. So they had homes. They had families. They had built churches and they
invested so much emotionally and financially in the erection of these churches,
which were community centers as well. The parish priest sent letters back to
the home country. They had a whole structure of community life and they had
benevolent societies of their own. And so this is a strike that is, in a
sense, fought out for very conservative reasons. These are not radical people.
They're fighting for a piece of the American action. They're fighting for a
piece of the American pie. They're fighting for home and stability and church
and country. They're citizens now and this makes it so unusual, the strike, in
a sense. They're not anarchists. This isn't a Haymarket Riot led by
anarchists in the 1880s. These are people who are now Americanized and are
very conservative in their politics and their social mores. And this is why
during the strike public opinion, and again in the 1902 strike, public opinion
swung rather quickly, once the strike broke out, to the side of the miners.
Because they were fighting for, in a sense, so little, a decent living wage so
they could continue to support their churches, support their communities and
support their families.
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