Jerome was the scene of several
unionization efforts by the
United Mine Workers Union. An important and the longest of these efforts was the strike that began on Good Friday morning, April 14, 1922, led by local miner George Gregory, with the assistance of outside union supporters. Rumors of strikes at non-union mines, such as Jerome at that time, had been circulating for several weeks. Indeed, the General Policy Committee of the United Mine Workers Union issued a call on March 24 for the nation's 200,000 non-union miners to join a planned nationwide strike on April 1, to coincide with the expiration of the current union contract. Organizers slid past armed company police to circulate pamphlets and leaflets, as seen here and here , to encourage the miners' walk out.
Hillman Coal's viewpoint For its part, Hillman Coal and Coke believed it provided a willful benevolence within Jerome and
Boswell, its two coal towns in Somerset County, although miners under Hillman tutelage disagreed, as the strike would show. To be sure, Hillman ran these towns with an iron fist; simply entering Jerome by car required inspection by a gauntlet of armed private police, for instance. But Hillman also built Boswell with a number of extra amenities, such as a high school, central business district, and brick construction for its patch housing. And in Jerome, the Company built a community center including a YMCA, pool hall, bowling alley, butchery, greengrocer, theater, and post office, in addition to the Hillman Supply Company store. In October 1921 Hillman established the First National Bank of Jerome for its workers. It allowed for the construction of a streetcar line from Johnstown in 1921 (as noted above), which made travel easier and more frequent than could be provided by the railroad. Hillman even engaged in a significant capital re-investment at Jerome, rebuilding a brick new community center after the initial structure was destroyed in a spectacular, wind-driven fire on April 2, 1922. However, demand for coal nationwide dropped precipitously and continually for several years after World War I. In response, Hillman closed its mines at Ella and Patterson, Allegheny County, and at Naomi, Fayette County, but maintained production at Boswell and Jerome. By mid-1921, the Company told its shareholders in its annual report, “…the demand [for coal] became so small and the competition from non-union fields so severe that it was evident that the non-union mines of your Company could not continue to operate unless wages were readjusted. As a result of this condition, wages were reduced…at your Jerome Mines on July 16, 1921.”) On all its coal operations, including Jerome and Boswell, Hillman Coal and Coke reported an operating profit of approximately $925,000, on revenues of $8.225 million in 1919, and an operating profit of approximately $336,000, on revenues of $4.475 million in 1921. But Jerome was seething. Hillman Coal & Coke cut miners' wages a second time during the deflation of 1921 and working conditions remained hard and strict, to miners' perception. Additionally, mine owners had recently ceased payment and expected miners to do for no pay "dead work", which was the removal of non-bituminous soils, slate, and rubbish from the mines. Gregory and local miners held several secret pre-strike rallies at the "Sokolniapolskawjerom", the Jerome Polish Falcons Hall, although one wonders how secret they were, given over 600 men attended one meeting. Sensing trouble, Hillman suddenly increased its armed guard patrolling the town at the end of March 1922. Hillman police also were stopping all autos before entering Jerome. Scattered walkouts began at smaller non-union mines—in St. Michael, Cambria County, a partial strike began on April 1 and gained momentum through April 5, and at Mine 36, near Windber, Somerset County, a walk-out on April 6.
Powers Hapgood and his work On April 11,
John Brophy, president of United Mine Workers Union District 2, asked
Powers Hapgood, a 23-year-old Harvard graduate, who had given up his silver spoon to live and work as a miner, if he would volunteer to help organize Somerset County non-union mines. Hapgood began at Jerome and Boswell. The gentle-looking Hapgood, nephew of the U.S.’s ambassador to Denmark, at first evoked much derision among some Union officials, although apparently not among miners, with whom he worked shoulder-to-shoulder deep in the mines. Four decades later, Brophy wrote of Hapgood, "He was sincere, friendly, and courageous to the point of foolhardiness. By that, I mean that he would sometimes drive ahead in a situation without considering sufficiently what he was up against. As a result, he got some pretty hard knocks at times." In Jerome, Hapgood linked up with Gregory. While more acquainted with the rough-and-tumble than was Hapgood initially, Gregory himself—who went by the nickname "Praying George," because of his frequent and vocal prayers during workers' rallies—was a strict teetotaler, who had been deputized by the local sheriff for a Prohibition squad. In idealism and social vision, Gregory and Hapgood were kindred spirits. The two became lifelong friends. In addition to direct work as a miner, Hapgood relied on three approaches to organize the Somerset coalfields –
civil disobedience, litigation, and publicity. First, in pioneering methods evocative later of
Mahatma Gandhi and
Martin Luther King Jr., Hapgood depended heavily on peaceful, civil disobedience. Coal towns were the wholly owned private property of corporations at the time, and so, in the eyes of these companies, simply walking the street uninvited was deemed to be trespassing. Hapgood in Somerset County was arrested more than a dozen times on the
picket line and at the head of marches, as the strike unfolded. (Hapgood, Gregory, and others also took picketing directly to various corporate headquarters on Wall Street, where they did not invite arrest but achieved considerable positive publicity and access.) Hapgood’s arrests then gave him a venue to the judicial system, where Hapgood insisted on his – and the miners’ – procedural and Constitutional rights. Indeed, an important part of the Somerset County coal strike played out in the courtroom of Somerset County Judge John Berkey, where mine owners sometimes, but not always, prevailed under Judge Berkey’s often even-handed rulings. Hapgood, as the strike continued, then made sure that the plight of Somerset County miners remained front-page news across the United States. From the strike's beginning, Hapgood, Brophy, Gregory, and other union leaders understood the powerful role public opinion could play; The men engaged in what, even by today’s best practices, would be seen as a sophisticated public relations program. In New York City, the program sparked sympathetic press coverage, generally effective public affairs, the intervention by the mayor of New York on the miners' side, direct public appeals in the subways, and even the support of mine owners, such as
John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose family owned strike-bound Somerset County coal mines in Gray,
Jenners, Acosta, Ralphton and Randolph. Gregory and other miners later traveled to Washington to meet with President
Warren G. Harding.
The strike at Jerome begins On April 14, Jerome miners dressed for work and gathered at the shaft head, but refused to enter the mine. Blankenhorn, in his history of the strike, wrote, "The super began a conciliatory speech of promises of good treatment, 'What's the good of that? We've heard that bull for ten years,' cried Gregory.....'If you don't go to work, I'll shut down this mine till the grass grows over the drift mouth,' [the super responded]...A boy miner, DiGiancomo, shouted back, 'I'll eat that grass before I'll scab." And the strike was on. The men marched through Jerome, with an accordion player in the lead, to a mass rally that was still going strong when union organizers arrived around noontime. The mine owners were thunderstruck; never before had they been hit by a successful universal rebellion against their rule. The Jerome action lit the fuse; the strike spread to non-union mines in Hiyasota, Kelso,
Boswell,
Jenners, Listie, Acosta, Gray, and elsewhere the next days; within one week a regional non-union coal work stoppage was in full force. The Jerome strike was significant in that it was among the first and the largest non-union site in the region to join in the nationwide strike called by the United Mine Workers Union, thus providing tipping-point momentum for the strike, or as Blankenhorn expressed it in his book's table of contents, "Jerome's Explosion." The 1922 strike became the largest action in United Mine Workers Union history; at its peak, more than 500,000 union and non-union miners, in the bituminous and anthracite fields, had walked off their jobs. Jerome was turned into an occupied camp by a strike that lasted sixteen months. By mid-May 1922, for instance, 29 Somerset County sheriff's deputies patrolled Jerome, alongside a much larger contingent of company police and a unit of the Pennsylvania State police. The State Militia arrived a few months later. During this period, Hillman Coal systematically began to evict miner families from company-owned housing. According to Hillman records, quoted by Blankenhorn, 192 families in Jerome were set out into the street, about one-third of Hillman's employment at the mine at the time. A 'tent city' was established for homeless strikers and their families on the nearby lands of sympathetic farmers. These evictions here and elsewhere in Somerset County sparked an unusual swell of public sympathy. A commission appointed by the mayor of New York City, which got its coal to run subways from various Somerset County coal mines, found "hundreds of strikers evicted and suffering from the cold", "saw in tents, hen-houses, stables and other improvised homes women and children whose feet were bare and bleeding" and declared that living and working conditions "were worse than the conditions of slaves prior to the Civil War."
John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose family owned several Somerset County coal mines, but not Jerome's, wrote, "I believe that the underlying grievances of the miners in this district are well founded, and I have urged with all the sincerity and vigor at my command that the present labor policy of the operators, which seems to me to be both unwise and unjust, be radically altered." The strike held together, despite its length and brutality; the Company said later that, of the approximately 750 miners on strike at its beginning, only about 100 broke ranks and returned to work early. In the last days of the strike in 1923, a number of buildings, railroad bridges, and other property were destroyed by dynamite in acts of sabotage. A gunpowder or dynamite blast destroyed a shelter for homeless striking families. Dynamite destroyed a 200-foot steel railroad bridge spanning the
Stonycreek River near Jerome on July 19, 1923. Somerset County Sheriff J.W.Griffith told writer Blankenhorn that both strikers and company employees held responsibility for explosions. "There are guards who want to keep their jobs going and strikers who have been making threats," Sheriff Griffith said.
Results of the strike at Jerome While the strike caused significant hardship, and even decayed into violence frequently from both sides, not all was grim. Blankenhorn, who was a writer for the magazine "The Nation", relayed the adventure of one young student and
union organizer from Pittsburgh, named Viscosky, who convinced Hillman to hire him as a guard just prior to the strike. Blackenhorn wrote, Viscosky "used his very special opportunity to line them [the miners] up for a strike. The only man whom he reported to the company was one who refused to have anything to do with the 'union,' the company faithfully discharged that one." Later, when Viscosky thought it prudent to disappear from Jerome before Hillman caught on, he convinced police officials to give him free conduct pass through checkpoints, "so he could visit his sister in Jenners." In August 1922, union miners agreed to a new contract that did not include non-union miners. The miners at Jerome and other Somerset County mines, left out of the contract, continued on for another twelve months, agreeing on August 14, 1923, to return to work "[C]oal mining families....[lived] within a social, economic and political system of profound autocracy thinly veiled by shallow, pragmatic paternalism." After the strike, Jerome emerged with the beginnings of an increasingly strong, tolerant social fabric, which remained tight-knit for several generations and still provides important unifying elements today. ==Environmental impact of coal mining activities at Jerome==