In 1897 the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company founded Windber as
a company town for its miners in the bituminous coal country of
Pennsylvania. The Miners of Windber chronicles the coming of
unionization to Windber, from the 1890s, when thousands of new
immigrants flooded Pennsylvania in search of work, through the New
Deal era of the 1930s, when the miners' rights to organize, join
the United Mine Workers of America, and bargain collectively were
recognized after years of bitter struggle.
Mildred Allen Beik, a Windber native whose father entered the
coal mines at age eleven in 1914, explores the struggle of miners
and their families against the company, whose repressive policies
encroached on every part of their lives. That Windber's population
represented twenty-five different nationalities, including Slovaks,
Hungarians, Poles, Italians, and Carpatho-Russians, was a potential
obstacle to the solidarity of miners. Beik, however, shows how the
immigrants overcame ethnic fragmentation by banding together as a
class to unionize the mines. Work, family, church, fraternal
societies, and civic institutions all proved critical as men and
women alike adapted to new working conditions and to a new culture.
Circumstance, if not principle, forced miners to embrace cultural
pluralism in their fight for greater democracy, reforms of
capitalism, and an inclusive, working-class, definition of what it
meant to be an American.
Beik draws on a wide variety of sources, including oral
histories gathered from thirty-five of the oldest living immigrants
in Windber, foreign-language newspapers, fraternal society
collections, church manuscripts, public documents, union records,
and census materials. The struggles of Windber's diverse working
class undeniably mirror the efforts of working people everywhere to
democratize the undemocratic America they knew. Their history
suggests some of the possibilities and limitations, strengths and
weaknesses, of worker protest in the early twentieth century.
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