What It Means to Be "A Tad Radical"

The United Mine Workers, Mother Jones, and you.

Oct 14, 2024

At noon yesterday I stood with a few hundred people in a tidy cemetery on the edge of Mt. Olive, Illinois, an hour’s drive north of St. Louis. It was the 125th anniversary of the Union Miners Cemetery, where the great labor activist Mother Jones is buried, along with many union mine workers of the past.

The keynote speaker at the ceremony was Cecil Roberts, the West Virginia native who has been the president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) for nearly 30 years. There are many union presidents in America, but only a few of them can give a good speech. Roberts is one of them.

The UMWA is a union whose fortunes have risen and fallen with the power of organized labor itself. It is a union with more than a century’s worth of struggles against the power of money, including a number of shooting wars with coal companies and their public and private allies. Roberts’ own family history stretches back to the early days of the union. Hundreds of current and retired coal miners in camouflage UMWA t-shirts sat in folding chairs around the Mother Jones memorial to hear him shout his message over the sound of the whipping winds.

I meet many people today who hold progressive values, who feel sympathetic to the goals of the labor movement, yet feel adrift and disconnected from its reality, and who feel anxious about our nation’s political future. I thought that Cecil Roberts’ words would be good for all of you to hear. Below is a transcription of some of his remarks yesterday. The spirit of Mother Jones lives.

Remarks by Cecil Roberts

When you hear some rich person, some CEO, some Chairman of the Board, talk about the patriotism of their company, or the patriotism of their board, understand something—forgive me for what I’m about to say, but that’s pure bullshit. That’s what that is.

Sometimes, we forget about the blood that flows through our body. The blood that flowed through Mother Jones. Those that went on the Blair Mountain march, knowing full well that they were going to either prison, or they were gonna die on that march. Flows through your blood. I know we’re not as militant, because if we tried to be, you’d be locked up and the key thrown away pretty quickly. But I want you to understand something. I am as proud today of our membership, which is shrinking because of the elimination of coal. It goes like that every year. And don’t let any former president say he saved the coal industry. That didn’t happen.

Every single year for 25 years, less and less and less coal, and it’s devastated some of these communities. I have spoken out against this with our friends, our enemies, and everybody in between. Because you shouldn’t eliminate an economic benefit from any peaceable people in this country, any location in this country, unless you’ve got what they all say they want: a just transition. Where are our jobs that we have demanded?

Let me say something to you. I am so proud of [our] retirees. It is true that beginning in 2012, and ending perhaps never, there’s been over 60 bankruptcies. I want you to understand what bankruptcy law entails. The CEO that ran the company into the ground goes to a judge and files bankruptcy on behalf of this corporation. He gives the judge a list of people that are really important to the company, and asks the judge to give them a raise. Remember, they just bankrupt this company.

The judge says, “Yes, we can’t afford to lose these people.” The next day they say, “We can’t afford to pay these miners what we been paying. We can’t pay for their pensions any longer. Even though they earned them, your honor, this company can’t afford them any more.”

All right—do away with that. The worst one of em, and everyone here knows this—every one of you knows somebody that was on the verge of death, either from black lung or some other illness, when all this started—and that judge said, “Cut their health care off.” And guess who got handed that bill? The United Mine Workers. And all of our members are looking at me saying, “What are you gonna do about this?” And the answer to that was, “I don’t know. But we will not give up our pensions or our health care we’ve earned without a fight.”

The biggest abuser of this was Peabody and Arch and Patriot. All of them conveniently located in St. Louis. We started getting on buses, and people here rode those buses. We went to St. Louis over, and over, and over again. Just like Mother Jones would have had us do, we got a little bit militant. And at the end of every rally, when I finished speaking, somebody went to jail. Either eight, nine, twenty, whatever we felt needed to be done. People said, “Why would you go to jail?” You can make all the speeches you want. Nobody cares. But when you go to jail, every newspaper in every state and all around the world writes about it.

Eventually, Peabody yielded. They said, “We’ve got money for you, if you’ll just stop coming here.” I’ll tell you how desperate they were to get rid of us. We’ve got people here today, we left them there to picket while these negotiations with Peabody were going. And we signed an agreement with Peabody for millions and millions of dollars to provide health care to 22,600 people. Peabody’s general counsel called our general counsel. We had six retirees, 70 or older, walking around their building. And they said, “If you’ll get rid of them by six o’clock, we’ve got another ten million dollars for you.”

Don’t tell me the blood of Mother Jones, and John L. Lewis, and all those great leaders don’t flow through your veins. I know it does. […]

Let’s go back a little bit, and I’ll wrap this up. I’m gonna be just a tad radical here for a few minutes. Anybody opposed to a tad radical here?

Mother Jones leads a march in Colorado, 1913.

My Great Grandmother Blizzard in 1902 supported the United Mine Workers. Her husband Timothy supported the United Mine Workers. Do you know what they got for that? The Baldwin-Felts thugs came to their company house, went into their house, and put everything they owned out in the road. Even took the dinner they were about to eat off the stove and threw it out in the yard. One of Mother Blizzard’s daughters said, “They even took the taters and threw it out in the streets!”

Now that’s a young kid watching this. Nobody should experience that. But I want you to understand something. That happened thousands and thousands of times wherever the union was being formed. And if you were on strike, understand something: You were not only unemployed, you were homeless. So when you struck, they kicked you out of the house. When you supported the union, they kicked you out of the house.

But they had to pay a price for what they did to my great grandfather and great grandmother. Remember, our last name is Blizzard. That was my mother’s grandparents. Ten years later, Cabin Creek and Paint Creek went on strike. What happened? Evicted em all. They had no place to go. But my great grandmother had her own property—the only place on the 15 mile road that was not owned by coal company. “Put your tents on my property.”

Mother Jones got wind of this, and to Cabin Creek she went. 1912. She looked around, and they wouldn’t let her walk on the roads. The coal companies owned the roads. “Get in the creek if you want to walk.” Mother Jones got in the creek, and walked to my great grandmother’s house and collaborated with her.

Understand, now you’ve got two mad, angry, radical, militant women. Mother Jones looked this over. [The companies] had machine guns mounted. They brought in scabs, and Mother Jones called for a rally. And six thousand people came to that rally.

This is what she said: “You men ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You all are a bunch of cowards, letting those scabs take your jobs. You ought to go operate the cooking and watch the kids and let the women run this strike.” Talk about chastising somebody.

Then she said this—not advocating this today, by the way— “Go up Cabin Creek, go up Paint Creek, and arm yourselves. And you kill every one of them sons of bitches. You burn their tipples, and you’ll win this strike.” Guess what? That is exactly what the miners did when they got there. The Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike turned into the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek mine wars. And guess whose side the federal government was on? It wasn’t ours. The state didn’t support us. The state sympathized with the coal companies. Sound familiar? The federal government supported the coal companies. Martial law was declared, and the strike ended.

In [1914], the UMWA called a strike in Colorado. I don’t know how many of you ever heard of the Ludlow Massacre, but that’s the worst part in this country in its history of labor relations. Those mines and steel mills were owned by John Rockefeller. All of the strikers, by the way, were immigrants. The journal of the UMWA was printed in 25 languages.

They came out on strike because they were tired of dying in those coal mines. The most dangerous mines in America. Owned by John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the country. His man came to him and said, “I believe those miners are willing to die for what they believe.” And that was true. Do you know what Rockefeller’s response to that was? “Well, if they’re willing to die for what they believe, I’m willing to kill them for what I believe.”

The Baldwin-Felts thugs made their way to Colorado. Mother Jones was hot on their heels… they began shooting into these tents. A twelve year old boy stood up and they cut him in two with their machine gun in the middle of the day. Oh, we think we’ve had it hard, right? We think it’s tough to strike. And it is. But we have it nothing like they had it.

But that wasn’t even enough. They walked up that hill with kerosene, and they burned every tent. Babies, mothers, burned alive. The strike ended there.

Mother Jones gathered everybody together. Thousands of people. The strikers, their wives, their kids, their babies, their neighbors, their friends, their aunts, their uncles, their grandparents. All they wanted was the American dream.

Imagine Mother Jones looking at this crowd. And this is what she said: “Sure you lost. Sure you lost. But they had bayonets. And all you had was the Constitution of the United States. And let me assure you that any contest between bayonets and the Constitution, the bayonets will win every time.”

“But. But. You must fight. You must fight and win. You must fight and lose. But beyond all else, you must fight.

“You must fight.”

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What It Means to Be "A Tad Radical"

The United Mine Workers, Mother Jones, and you.

Remarks by Cecil Roberts

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