Coal, Labor, and the Downstate Wars

Beneath the fields of central and southern Illinois lies one of the largest coalfields in the United States. The coal seams run from the Indiana border west toward the Mississippi, and for a century their extraction shaped the culture of a dozen downstate counties. By nineteen hundred, Illinois was one of the top coal-producing states in the nation, and the men who mined it had built one of the most powerful labor organizations in American history, District Twelve of the United Mine Workers of America.

The labor history of the Illinois coalfields was not peaceful. In October of eighteen ninety-eight, at the Virden mine near Carlinville, the Chicago-Virden Coal Company attempted to import African American workers from Alabama to break a union strike. On October twelfth, a train carrying the replacement workers pulled into Virden. Waiting on the platform were armed mine guards. Union miners had assembled to stop the train. Shooting broke out. When it ended, five company guards and eight miners were dead. Illinois Governor John Tanner refused to provide state militia protection for the imported workers, effectively ending the attempt to break the strike. The Virden Massacre, as it became known, was a turning point in Illinois labor law and in the organization of the coalfields.

A worse event came in Herrin, in Williamson County, in June of nineteen twenty-two. During a nationwide coal strike, a strip mine owner named William Lester imported replacement workers and guards. On June twenty-first and twenty-second, union miners and their sympathizers stormed the mine. Twenty-three people were killed, including three union miners and twenty strikebreakers and guards. The Herrin Massacre shocked the nation, produced a grand jury investigation, and resulted in no convictions. Williamson County's juries would not convict their neighbors.

The coalfields declined through the latter half of the twentieth century as natural gas and western coal competed. The communities they left behind, from West Frankfort to Benton to Zeigler, carry the weight of that history in closed storefronts and union halls that have not changed since nineteen sixty.