The United Mine Workers

Few American workers faced harder or more dangerous labor than the coal miners who dug the fuel of the industrial age, and few unions fought more bitterly on their behalf than the United Mine Workers of America. Founded in 1890, the UMW organized the men who worked the mines of Appalachia and the Midwest, workers often trapped in company towns, paid in company scrip, and threatened daily by cave-ins, explosions, and the slow suffocation of black lung.

The struggle to organize the coalfields turned violent again and again. Company guards and state militias clashed with strikers in a series of episodes that read like a war: the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, in which company forces killed striking miners and their families in Colorado, and the West Virginia mine wars that culminated in 1921 at the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed labor uprising in American history. The coalfields were among the bloodiest battlegrounds of the labor movement.

Under the towering, combative leadership of John L. Lewis, the UMW became one of the most powerful unions in the country. Frustrated that the craft-based American Federation of Labor would not organize the great mass-production industries, Lewis broke away in 1935 to found the Congress of Industrial Organizations, using the miners as the base from which industrial unionism spread to steel, auto, and beyond.

The union's fortunes fell with the coal industry it depended on, as mechanization, cheaper fuels, and the decline of coal shrank its ranks from their mid-century peak. But the UMW left a deep mark, winning safety laws, black-lung benefits, and pensions, and standing for generations as a symbol of the militant, dangerous, and consequential fight to organize American labor.