Policing the "Negro Eden": Racial paternalism in the Alabama coalfields, 1908-1921

IN EARLY MARCH 1919, Alabama-based representatives of the War Labor Board forwarded two urgent memorandums to the Division of Negro Economics in Washington. The reports warned of an increasingly volatile industrial situation in the Birmingham District. Both observers agreed that the stage had been set for "the bitterest and most dangerous kind of conflict between labor and capital." The crisis at Birmingham was rooted in a deep and long-standing antagonism between organized labor and the area's leading industrialists, recently aggravated by the employers' celebrated defeat of a workmen's compensation bill in the state legislature at Montgomery. Industry lobbyists had raised the stakes in that dispute when, at the eleventh hour, they resorted to an "appeal to racial prejudice," managing to "align solidly against the bill practically every employer in Southern Alabama" by the mere "mention that negro workmen would also be beneficiaries."'

The turn of events at Montgomery was symptomatic of an increasing tendency on the part of the state's leading employers to engage in racial manipulation. The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI), the leading force in Birmingham's powerful open-shop movement, had responded to the United Mine Workers of America's (UMW) attempt to reorganize the Alabama coalfields after 1916 with a flagrant strategy of racial divide-and-rule. According to Labor Department officials, company executives sensed, in the postwar situation, an opportunity to "entirely . . . disrupt [the miners'] union" by "get[ting] the negroes out of the [UMW]," after which "negroes would rapidly and entirely displace white labor in the mines."2

The incisive observations of Labor Department officials in early 1919 reflect the complex labor relations system built up by Alabama coal operators over the previous quarter century and point to a conspicuous omission in some of the recent historical literature on southern labor. In their exclusive focus on hostility between black and white workers, detractors of the "new southern labor history" have almost completely overlooked the role that industrial employers themselves played in perpetuating racial divisions: Racial antagonism in the coal camps did not develop in a vacuum but in a context where, particularly after the defeat of the 1908 strike, "the operators. . . had things their own way" and miners-black or white-were powerless to impose demands of any kind upon their employers. The operators' ability to maintain such a state of affairs depended primarily on the success of their elaborate strategy of racial paternalism, based both on the exploitation of cheap black labor and on the cultivation of blacks as a barrier to union organization. In the Birmingham District, the most advanced model of welfare capitalism was grafted onto the region's tradition of racial subjugation and became the key factor in the operators' ability to withstand attempts by the UMW to establish a foothold in Alabama.4

What seems remarkable about relations between black and white miners during the first two decades of the twentieth century is not the animosity between them but their ability to maintain some level of interracial cooperation in the face of the mine owners' steady provocation. The shift to a predominantly black labor force in the Alabama coal industry had been underway for some time and was not wholly attributable to premeditated action on the part of area operators. Blacks had worked in Alabama mines from the beginning of the industry in the 1870s; by 1900 they constituted the largest ethnic component in the coalfields, and at the outbreak of the First World War they formed an absolute majority.5 The changes in the racial composition of the workforce resulted from complex pressures. Defeat in a series of hard-fought strikes at the turn of the century had spurred an exodus of skilled union miners-disproportionately white-seeking better conditions in the northern fields. The abandonment of early attempts to attract European immigrants to the Birmingham District, compounded after 1915 by labor shortages resulting from the war, reconciled operators to recruiting labor closer to home.6 Most important, however, the steady stream of impoverished blacks arriving in Birmingham from the Black Belt regions of Alabama and Mississippi proved to be an attractive labor force, as owners believed "cheap docile negro labor" afforded an "immunity from labor disturbances."7

TCI's attempt to supplant white mine labor with black after World War I was part of a "careful, long-range policy to keep Negro and white workers apart" that had evolved in the District over at least twenty-five years. Ever on their guard against labor agitation in the coalfields and appreciative of the disruptive power of racial antagonism on unionization efforts, individual mine owners continually adjusted the racial composition of their work crews, seeking a racial mix that optimized their control. The preeminence of race in the operators' antiunion arsenal was epitomized by coal pioneer Henry F. DeBardeleben's strategic turn to black labor in 1894, when he established an all-black "Negro Eden" to counter labor unrest at his Blue Creek mines.8 By 1908, UMW sympathizers suspected a conspiracy to "drive every poor white laboring man from the State," and such complaints multiplied during the war years. The vice president of the Alabama Federation of Labor observed in June 1916 that District operators were taking advantage of the fact that "the Negro Miner . . . usually works a little cheaper than the White Miner" to "keep down the wage [and] to lengthen the hours of labor." A Lehigh miner reported later the same month that employment notices in local newspapers were beginning to include the qualification "MUST BE COLORED" alongside customary skill requirements. Union officials protested that companies were using medical examinations to disqualify white miners from employment, and their suspicions were confirmed by dissident company officials, who testified that the operators were taking on "only such whites as [could] not be gracefully thrust aside."9

To their credit, UMW officials were astute enough to discern that the operators based their hiring policy on antiunionism rather than newfound preferences for black workers. The displacement of white labor was only the most conspicuous feature in a comprehensive effort to rid the mining camps of union sympathizers, both white and black. In April 1916 the labor press reported the "discharge of several good miners" after a superintendent from Gulf States Steel presented the operator of an independent mine with a list of men tied to the UMW organizing effort. President J. R. Kennamer of Alabama's UMW District 20 wired the Labor Department in August 1917 after TCI discharged over five hundred suspected union sympathizers. Of 345 miners blacklisted in the first seven months of the year, 129 were black. An internal TCI document obtained by the UMW revealed that blacks made up nearly half of the thirty miners discharged for "insubordination" and "agitation" over a three-week period in July, and the purge of suspected union sympathizers was complemented by a policy of closely scrutinizing those left behind in the camps. A black TCI employee from Belle Sumter who "hat[ed] to see [his] race don [sic] so bad" wrote the Labor Department, complaining that the company was forcing black miners to sign "affidavits" promising to work through any industrial dispute that might arise.10

The mine owners worked tirelessly to inoculate black miners against unionism. Federal agent H. P. Vaughn reported that the "greatest bone of contention" among UMW officials was the fact that "all of the Negro preachers had been subsidized by the companies and were without exception preaching against the negroes joining the unions." The most prominent figure involved was Dr. P. Colfax Rameau, head of an organization known as the Southern Afro-American Industrial Brotherhood and the publisher of a newspaper called The Workmen's Chronicle. Operators reportedly brought this paper "by the wagon loads and distribut[ed] it free of cost to all the colored men in the mines and mills." Rameau and other black clergymen toured the mining camps, speaking to mass meetings in company-owned halls in a heavyhanded effort to steer black miners clear of the UMW, which they designated "the white man's union." 11

Previously vilified by public officials and area employers for their policy of interracialism,12 UMW officials found this aspect of the operators' campaign especially frustrating; they considered it a deliberate attempt to inject "race antipathy" into a situation where "an industrial fight" was the real issue. Field agent Vaughn, who had lived in the Birmingham area himself for over thirty years, could attest that "the miners' Union has been taking in colored men ever since it was organized, and their officials are practically divided equally between white and colored."13 Birmingham's business community vilified the union for its bold affront to southern racial sensibilities, even as black middle-class spokesmen charged that the union lured black miners into the union with false promises of industrial brotherhood. Thus, while navigating the treacherous waters of Alabama racial politics, the UMW was hard-pressed to construct a policy that offered black miners the potential for tangible improvement of their working lives.

If the UMW faced a difficult predicament, the operators' position was not so impregnable as it might seem. Paternalism itself rested upon a number of volatile contradictions. Touted by its most avid promoters in the Alabama Coal Operators Association (ACOA) as an enlightened, generous, even bold attempt to redefine southern racial custom, the system showed itself over time to be eminently compatible with racial subordination and a regime of harsh exploitation.l4 Although operators accommodated a certain brand of racial pride and even separatism among their black employees, their apparent tolerance belied a solid commitment to traditional, reactionary assumptions about black racial inferiority, and the limits of "racial uplift" in the coal camps were subordinated to profitability. The explicit objective of racial paternalism from the beginning was to cultivate a relatively defenseless black workforce as a wedge against union organization, thereby maintaining the operators' hold on the "greatest, best and cheapest labor market in the United States."'5 Anything that threatened that goal was a liability to them, and they would meet it with force.

The brazen measures adopted by Birmingham District coal operators to check the UMW's influence after 1916 seem, at first glance, to bear all the attributes of invincibility. In reality, they were manifestations of collective panic, of a system of labor relations in an advanced stage of disarray. Company paternalism seldom succeeded in generating universal satisfaction in the coal camps; even at the best of times, the system produced resentment and discontent. During the war years, the operators' capacity to absorb that discontent, to contain miners' grievances within the framework of welfare capitalism, began to falter. The provocative resort to racial manipulation after 1916 represented a raising of the stakes on the part of operators, a risk they considered necessary to maintaining their hegemony in the mines. Racial paternalism had been the key to consolidating that hegemony. Moreover, the operators' elaborate system of welfare capitalism began to unravel in the changed conditions of wartime Alabama, laying the basis for a reemergence of interracial unionism in the coalfields.

The use of black laborers as a check against white southerners' attempts to improve wages and working conditions was not peculiar either to the Birmingham District or to the period following Reconstruction. Even prior to emancipation, observers noted the tendency among scattered southern manufacturers to deliberately pit slave labor against free. Just after Reconstruction, an English visitor to the South observed that among "leading men" of the region there was a "disposition greatly to rely on black labor as a conservative element, securing them against the dangers . . . arising from the combinations and violence of the white laborers in some of the Northern States."16 Between 1877 (when the threat of black domination had been safely removed from regional politics) and 1901 (when blacks were legally disfranchised in Alabama), advocates of a return to the old order moved energetically to reassert their authority over an overwhelmingly black labor force. The array of legal and extralegal restrictions against labor mobility was the centerpiece of this effort. The resurrection of the paternalist ethos, which placed a premium on black laborers' access to "the friendship and confidence of a good white man, who stands well in the community," was another. Black Belt planters directed many of these activities, viewing them both as means of restoring their control over an unruly workforce and as vital assets in warding off the Populist threat. Wade Hampton's counsel before a black audience in South Carolina, that "the old slaveholders" were "the best friends of the colored men," was typical of the paternalist rhetoric of the time.'7

The paternalist system-and the subordination of black labor upon which it was based-had deep roots in antebellum society and was a vital component in southern agrarian relations after Reconstruction. It was no less important to the emerging industrial order. Whatever the discontinuities between the sleepy, agrarian spirit of the antebellum regime and the wide-awake, dynamic industrial order taking root in the New South, they shared two pivotal features: a dependency on cheap labor for competitive advantages and a willingness to lean on traditional structures of racial subordination to secure it. As the premier industrial city of the New South, Birmingham showcased this continuity between old and new more brazenly than its neighbors. Although historian George Leighton is mistaken when he sees development of the Birmingham District as evidence that "the planters, depending on outside capital, ruled the roost once more," his assertion that labor relations in the District combined "all of the pestilent inheritances" of slavery with "the worst excesses familiar to Northern industry" is clearly on the mark.'8

While Alabama blacks saw their political rights being increasingly restricted-and legislative restrictions were commonly backed up by harsh extralegal violence-individual coal employers sought the loyalty of black labor by promising them a haven from discrimination and white hostility. The proclamation issued by Henry F. DeBardeleben at his Blue Creek mines in 1894 illustrates the adaptability of traditional racial paternalism to the new requirements of the coal industry:

Ajob at Blue Creek is a desirable one. This is a rare chance for all first class colored miners to have a permanent home. They can have their own churches, schools and societies, and conduct their social affairs in a manner to suit themselves, and there need be no conflict between the races. This can be a colored man's colony.

Colored miners, come along; let us see whether you can have an Eden of your own or not. I will see that you will have a fair show. You can then prove whether there is intelligence enough among colored people to manage their social and domestic affairs by themselves in such a way as to command respect of the people at large. It is not likely that you will have another such chance to demonstrate to the world that you are capable of governing your social affairs without the aid or interference of the white race.l9

DeBardeleben's appeal prefigured the comprehensive approach to black labor adopted by Alabama coal operators after 1908. Significantly, the establishment of DeBardeleben's Negro Eden coincided with a strike launched by the United Mine Workers of Alabama. The overture to black workers, ostentatiously presented as an act of benevolence, was a calculated attempt to use black miners as strikebreakers.2"' Equally significant, DeBardeleben's pledge to act as guarantor of a "fair show" for blacks and to ward off the "interference of the white race" demonstrates the continuity between antebellum planter rhetoric and the new order. But the proclamation contained one feature that set it apart from oldstyle paternalism and marked it clearly as a product of the post-Reconstruction Era. While white racial attitudes were hardening throughout the region and Alabama blacks were increasingly excluded from political life, DeBardeleben's Negro Eden offered black miners a measure of autonomy and self-government. Deliberately wrapped in a challenge to black racial pride, Debardeleben attempted to put the best face on the newly ascendant doctrine of "separate but equal" and harness it to the benefit of coal operators.

The Blue Creek proclamation represented an early example of what one historian has described as a "deliberate policy of flattering the Negro workers" and "exalting [them] as competitors of the whites."21 The policy resonated among black miners in proportion to the hostility they faced from their white coworkers. Although Birmingham's labor movement had never exhibited a monolithic attitude toward black workers, and by some accounts represented "one of the few glimmers of racial liberalism" in the state, relations between blacks and whites in the coal camps no doubt reflected the resurgence of popular racism in the years following the end of Reconstruction.22 Consequently, black miners occasionally failed to distinguish between the relatively egalitarian policy of the mine unions"3 and that of the labor movement generally, which "was not only neglecting to organize Negro workers, but . . . was following a deliberate policy of exclusion."24 A liberal newspaper of the time asked "if nonunion men are not permitted to work and colored men are not permitted to join the union, where does the colored man come in? Or does he stay out?"25 DeBardeleben's answer, increasingly adopted by operators throughout Alabama, was that the black man "comes in" under the benevolent protection of his employer. And to the extent that the union fell short of establishing full equality in its ranks, the operators' formula won adherents among black miners.

The most remarkable feature of racial paternalism was not the success it enjoyed among black miners but its inability to hold their allegiance in the face of an interracial challenge. Its most outspoken proponents among blacks were not the miners themselves but members of Birmingham's small black middle class preachers, businessmen, newspaper publishers, and the heads of black fraternal orders. Employers promoted members of this group as the natural spokesmen for black racial progress, often supporting them materially for their efforts to promote antiunionism. For example, Rameau's predecessor in the Southern Afro-American Industrial Brotherhood, a conservative black Democrat named H. C. Smith, claimed to have made his living by doing "welfare work" for the "mining interests of Birmingham and vicinity." Operators rewarded Smith's efforts to "fight the organization of the Negro workers" with contributions sufficient to relieve him from having to "worry for [financial] support."26 Although the various strands of coal industry paternalism were well in place from the 1890s onward, Birmingham District operators did not develop a unified, comprehensive strategy until after 1908. Three key developments combined to generate a uniform approach to labor relations. First, the expansion of Birmingham's steel and iron industry, and the accompanying increase in demand for coal, produced chronic labor shortages. Second, the need to attract European immigrants and restrain black and white skilled miners from emigrating nudged employers toward improving conditions in the District. Finally, the purchase of TCI by U.S. Steel in 1906 brought the experience and capital of an industrial powerhouse to bear on the labor problem. "The main thing we are driving for in the South," explained TCI president John Topping in the same year, "is to get good men, skilled labor. To do that . . . we have first to present such advantages as will attract the higher order of workingmen. Living conditions at our mines and plants must be improved, and new tenements and schools built."27 TCI began an ambitious program of constructing "complete industrial and housing units, fitted with hospitals, welfare centers, and schools," by which it hoped to train and hold a disciplined labor force to its operations.28

TCI's lead in revolutionizing labor relations may eventually have filtered down to smaller mining operations in the Birmingham District, but the catalyst for broad application of the new management methods was the operators' rout of the UMW in the bitter 1908 strike. Both sides described the stakes involved in that dispute in apocalyptic terms. UMW organizer W. R. Fairley warned miners at the outset that the "destiny of labor in the South depends on whether victory or defeat shall crown us at the close of our fight." The operators viewed the conflict in similar terms but, unlike the UMW, received the full support of public officials, who considered the interracial strike a direct threat to white supremacy. "This is a white man's country," one county sheriff proclaimed, "and we will have no nigger domination here." Governor Braxton Bragg Comer roused the public with the specter of "nine thousand idle niggars [sic]," and the strike collapsed when he ordered the state militia to cut down the tents erected by striking miners.29

The defeat of the UMW gave operators the freedom to reconstruct labor relations without the risk of instability. Two days before the strike ended in early September 1908, leading operators met to form the Alabama Coal Operators Association (ACOA); their first order of business was to purge the coalfields of any remaining UMW sympathizers. The ACOA contracted with the Austin-Robbins detective agency to "keep a close watch and . . . prevent further organization of unions."30 Several operators warned that the bitterness evident in the mining camps could lead to another strike as early as Christmas, and officials ordered "a report to be made of the number of loyal [union] men in different camps."3l By October 1909 the ACOA felt confident enough to discharge all but one of the detectives, and two months later company officials received a report that UMW membership in the District had dwindled to under three hundred members, from a high of nearly twenty thousand at the peak of the strike.)' In his 1910 annual report, ACOA President W. A. Green expressed his satisfaction that the Alabama fields had been "singularly free from labor troubles for the past year," a finding confirmed by federal officials, who reported that the 1908 strike had left the Alabama fields "peculiarly under the control of the employers."33

In the short term, however, their victory in 1908 exacerbated the labor problems faced by Birmingham operators. Walter Moore of the Red Star Coal Company reported to the ACOA after the strike that one-third of the miners in the Warrior field-many of them skilled men-had left "for union territory," and operators throughout the District experienced similar losses."4 The resulting labor shortage was aggravated by the operators' practice of raiding each other's labor supply and by the freedom of individual miners to move about the District seeking higher wages. In response to this situation the ACOA appointed a committee "to regulate [the] movement of men from camp to camp" and organized a Central Labor Bureau that would dispatch an agent to the "boll weevil district" in Mississippi to recruit black mine labor.35 Additionally, the operators pressured Birmingham railroad officials "to refrain from running negro excursions out of this district," arguing that they "would have a tendency to disrupt the working force and in many cases carry the labor out of the district permanently."36

It is significant that the earliest collective actions of the ACOA focused on recruiting and controlling labor. Although company-sponsored social welfare in the Birmingham District cannot be understood simply as a sinister maneuver to ward off union organization, neither was it a philanthropic exercise on the part of the coal companies. The primary motivation behind their new departure, TCI officials later acknowledged, was to "make money for . . . stockholders."37 The "peculiar control" enjoyed by Alabama operators in the wake of their 1908 victory over the UMW was the cornerstone of the paternalist project.

TCI took the lead by embarking upon "a much more extensive range of programs. . . than was developed at any other subsidiary or possibly at any other industrial concern in the nation."38 The comprehensive overhaul initiated by TCI and others provided real material benefits to employees, white and black, and no doubt helped to ease tensions between miners and their employers. Driven in part by its forced abandonment of convict labor, in 1911 TCI commissioned a major study of "sociological conditions" in Alabama mining camps, embracing "sanitation, housing, hygiene and amusements."9 The final report challenged the notion that "any kind of shack, giving crude shelter, was good enough for the laborer." Consultant Morris Knowles warned that the prevailing view that giving "any consideration whatever" to conditions in the camps amounted to "coddling the workmen" would have to be discarded before proper employee relations would take hold in the Birmingham District.4' Knowles's report served as the keynote address at the annual meeting of the ACOA in July 1911; it was later published and distributed to ACOA members, along with a series of pamphlets that promoted improved sanitary conditions ("Swat the Fly! Soak the Mosquito!"), welfare ("The Home Garden"), and mine safety.41

By 1913 even the Birmingham Labor Advocate, ordinarily no friend to the coal operators, was compelled to acknowledge that TCI had "improved wonderfully the conditions of the employees of the company. Bath houses for employees, larger and better homes, more room between homes," and a number of other features meant that "no prettier residences can be seen than in [the best of the] mining camps." The writer noted that the TCI example had spread to Marvel, where the Roden Coal and Coke Company had constructed "an ideal camp of this character," and there are indications that company-sponsored social welfare had begun to take hold at Henry T. DeBardeleben's Sipsey Mine as well, where a "ramshackled, one-room" schoolhouse was replaced with a modern, well-equipped building that became a "source of pride to all the people in the area."42

In addition to improving the physical infrastructure of the camps, the larger operators launched ambitious educational, athletic, and recreational programs to attract stable, family-oriented, skilled miners. A number of camps organized competitions around everything from dental hygiene to mine safety. Elsewhere companies advanced the funds to start up brass bands and singing groups, and an intercamp baseball league was established that produced a number of stellar players. B. F. Roden boasted that the Saturday night moving picture show at his Marvel camp typically attracted three hundred or more.43 Operators hoped that such programs would curtail the miners' ritual weekend sojourn into Birmingham, where they might find less-wholesome entertainment.44 Though not completely successful in relieving camp life of its stark monotony, company-sponsored recreation seemed to improve morale. More significant for the operators was the discovery that in these camps "where the work . . . progressed to any extent, the output and number of working days per man . . . increased, and the number of accidents decreased."45

The need to attract and hold skilled labor, white and black, sometimes led ACOA members and other industrial employers to take positions on political issues in opposition to the more conservative, fundamentalist forces in the Birmingham District. For example, an industry-sponsored advertisement in the Birmingham dailies opposed prohibition because "new labor, such as we need, w[ould] not come to a prohibition district. "46 The operators were the central force in the drive for vocational public education in the Birmingham District and favored public education for blacks as a preventative to black emigration.47 Enthusiastic supporters of immigration, they were embarrassed by the rise of the nativist "True American" movement and, later, the Klan.48 The ACOA maintained that "one of the main reasons why the district was unable to obtain labor in sufficient quantity" was "the cheapness of human life in this section." Consequently, they attempted to launch a publicity campaign aimed at "develop [ing] a sentiment against the indiscriminate shooting and arresting of people by . . . officers of the law" and pushed for an amendment to the state constitution which would regulate the much-abused fee system in Jefferson County.49

The effects of such initiatives on daily life in the coal camps should not be overestimated. Although the example set by TCI began to filter through the Birmingham District after the turn of the century, the majority of coal operators probably followed traditional labor relations practices into the 1930s. While TCI and others vaunted their progressive approach to education and wholesome camp life, many others followed the example of a Walker County operator who tried to ward off labor agitation by "hiring no one who knew how to read." He failed, he said, because "there weren't enough illiterate niggers to go around."51

Editor's Note: The second part of this two-part article will appear in the October 1998 issue.

t H. P. Vaughn to (,eorge Haynes, "Memorandum for Mr. Haines [sir] on the Birmingham

Race Situation," March 5, 1919; "Special Problems-Birmingham"; Ntmerical (Corresponder 1ce Files. 1907-42; Records of the Chief (Clerk; (General Records of the Departtnettt of Labor, 1907-86, Record Group 174 (RG 174); National Ar-chixes, Washington, D.C. (NA). Quotation from Edwin Newdick, "Bitter and Dangerous Alignnment-Emplo)sex-s Foster Race Prejudice," February 24, 1919, "Special Problems--Birmingham," RC; 17,1. 2 Newdick, "Bitter and Dangerous LMignment," RG 174. ; Herbert Hill faults the UMW for "not obtain [ing] equal treatin nt for Negroes in the allocation of job opportunities" but neglects to mention that the operators themselves had far more control over the division of labor in the mines than the union ever enjoyed. In Alabama the UMW fi)light consistently against the notorious "suh-contracting system" that kept black miners at the bottom of the pay scale. See Hill, "Myth-Making as Labor Histor Herbert Glitman and the United Mine Workers of America," Intenxntiorz..al Jouirot of Polltifs, fCultut .Sore; atnd Socie( 2 (Winter 1988): 135. Similarly, in hl his recent st.tdy of the Birtnigham iron and steel indtstis, Henry M. McKiven, Jr., rejects "the argument that employers and otlher dominant grps, tearing a vInified working-class clLIllentge to their hegemony, skillf`ully used the ideologS of white supremacy to blind white workers to their long-term interest in tniting with black workers." Instead, McKiven asserts, white steelworkers cot)sidered

themselves "the equals of the men who owned the companies for which they worked" and "played a primary role in the institutionalization of Birmingham's industrial color bar," "construct[ing] an ideology of white supremacy to secure and to justify their power and status." The extent of that power was apparently lost upon contemporary observers (including employers), who commented almost universally upon the weakness of trade unionism in the Birmingham District. See Henrv M. McKiven, Jr., Iron and Steel: (Class, Race and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC., 1995), 2, 27, 168, 115-17

4 Quotation on operators' hegemony after 1908 from John A. Fitch, "The Human Side of Large Outputs: Birmingham District Labor Conseration," Sunjet, January 6, 1912, 1538. See also James S. Moran, Paul J. Paulson, and E. T. Fitzgibbons, "Report of the Committee

on Conditions in the Alabama Coal Mines," 1913, cited in Philip Taft, Organizing Dixie: Alabama 1'orkers in the Industrial Era, rev. and ed. Galy Nf, NI. Fink (Westport, Conn., 1981), 190, n. 5; and "Report on District 20 14th Annual Convention," June 12, 1911, in Philip Taft Research Notes on Alabama Labor Histoly,, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Birmingham Public Library (hereafter DAM-BPI,). Horace Mann Bond argues that "the peculiar racial situation of the Alabama workers permitted the development of a paternalism unmatched elsewhere in the countlv"; see Bond, Negro lS,docalion in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel (New York, 1969), 241. On the scope of TCI's welfare programs, see also Marlene Hunt Rikard, "An Experiment in Welfare Capitalism: The Health Care Se-ices of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company" (Ph,D. diss., University of Alabama. 1983), 5.

5 Carl V. Harris, Politis,al Power in Birmingham: 1871-1921 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1977), 108; Daniel Letwin, "Interracial Unionism, Gender, and `Social Equality' in the Alabama Goalfields, 1878-1908," Journal of Southern History 61 (August 1995): 523, n. 6. ' "President's Report to the Stockholders," March 1919, Sheffield Steel and Iron Company Records, DA!vI-BPL; see also Horace B. Davis, Labor and Steel (New York, 1933), 147; William Warren Rogers, Tie One-Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865-1896 (Baton Rouge, 1970), 80-90.

/J. D. Kirkpatrick, "Testimony Before the Kilby Commission," March 4, 1921, Alabama Coal Operators Association/Alabama Mining Institute Records, 1908-1984 (hereafter ACOA/AMI Records), DAM-BPI..

8 Bond, Negro Education, 142. The operators' deliberate cultivation of racial antagouism has been heavily documented. See Davis, Labor and Steel, 147; John W. DuBose, Mineral Wealth of Alabama (Birmingham, 1886), 109; C.J. Fuetter, "Mixed Labor in Coal Mining," Coal Age, July 22, 1916, 137; Paul D. Richards, "Racism in the Southern Coal Industry, 1890-1910" (master's thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1969), 14, 31-41. On experimentation with workforce racial composition, see Letwin, "Interracial Unionism," 530, n. 29. 9 Birmingham Labor Advocate, September 4, 1908, June 3, 1916; Newdick, "Bitter and Dangerous Alignment," RG 174.

lS Birmingham Labor Advocate, April 15, 1916; J. R. Kennamer to U.S. Department of Labor, August 8, 1917, "Alabama Coal Strike," Dispute Case Files, 1913-48, Records of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, 1913-69, Record Group 280 (RG 280), NA; "Exhibit 'M': Evidence Before the Kilby Commission," July 25, 1917, Gov. Thomas E. Kilby Administrative Files, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomeny; "List of Men Permanently Dismissed,"July 25, 1917, in Van Amburg Bittner Papers, West Virginia Regional History Collection, University of West Virginia, Morgantown; M. Gay to Department of Labor, August 20, 1917, "Special Problems-Birmingham," Records of the Chief (`Icl-k, 1907-42, (;eneral Records of the Department of Labor, 190746, RG 174.

lx H. P. Vaughn, "Memorandum for Mr. Haines [sic]," RG 174. IY For a sample of the Birmingham business community's objection to the UMW's interracialism, see Frank Evans, in the Birmingham Age-Herald, September 24, 1908. See also Dorothy Autrey, "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama, 1913-1952" (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1985), 51, 66. ls H. P. Vaughn, "Memorandum for Mr. Haines [sir]," RG 174.

14 See, for example, Milton H. Fies, "Industrial Alabama and the Negro: Speech Before the Alabama Mining Institute," October 31, 1922, ACOA/AMI Records 15 TGI president George Gordon Crawford, cited in George R. Leighton, Five Cities: The Story of Their Youth and Old Age (New York, 1939), 129.

16 "Slave Labour vs. Free Labour," National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 1, 1847, in Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia, 1978), 1:106-7; Herbert Aptheker, The Labor Movement in the South During Slavery (New York, 1954), 19-20; Patricia A. Schechter, "Free and Slave Labor in the Old South: The Tredegar Iron Workers' Strike of 1847," Labor History 35 (Spring 1994): 165-86; quotation from Sir George Campbell, White and Black: The Outcome of a Visit to the United States (London, 1879), 143.

17 Booker T. Washington, "The Negro and Labor Unions," Atlantic Monthly, June 1913, 756. Wade Hampton cited in C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 79. On restrictions against black and white labor after Reconstruction, see also Michael R. Hyman, The Anti-Redeemers: Hill-Country Political Dissenters in the Lower South from Redemption to Populism (Baton Rouge, 1990), 177-81. 18 Leighton, Five Cities, 110, 116.

sy Robert.]. Norrell,james Bowron: The Autobiography of a New South Industrialist (Chapel Hill, 1991), 128.

Zf) The UMW of Alabama was independent of the national UMW until 1898, when the national union established District 20 and negotiated its first contract with local operators.

See Ronald L Coa! M*iRal is in Amer' FW C - , CGass end Commeniip in AO &mCm d syunit Co#*, 178 tIBU(g^,Ky. 1987).41.

Yl Davis, Labor and Steel, 147.

22 Paul B. Worthman, "Black Workers and Labor Unions in Birmingham, Alabama, 18971904," Labor History 10 (Stmmer 1969): 376; Robert D. Ward and William Warren Rogers, Labor Revolt in Alabama: The (real Strike of 1894 (Tuscaloosa, 1965), 41. zs Labor historians remain sharply divided over the character, significance, and limitations of intex-racial unionism, and over the UIW's record on race in particular. The main lines of this debate were established a decade ago in Herbert Hill's critique of Herbert Gutman's 1968 article on "The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America." Where Gutman attributed the UMW's relatively enlightened racial policy to the union's tradition of "evangelical egalitarianism," Hill disputed the "myth of the UMW's benevolence towards the black worker" and argued that where the union did organize black miners, it did so out of a sense of self-preservation rather than racial altruism. The debate has continued along these lines and has influenced much of the recent scholarship on race and the labor movement. My own reading of the Alabama materials suggests that although Hill is correct in insisting that white workers typically opened their unions to blacks out of necessity rather than principle, his own framework ignores the much more significant question, raised by Stephen Brier, of what happens when "white miners, whose attitudes if not their behavior towards blacks are on the whole racist," are compelled to link arms with them in defense

of common interests. See Herbert G. Gutman, "The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America: The Career and Letters of Richard 1.. Davis and Something of Their Meaning: 1890-1900," in Julius Jacobsen, ed., The Negro and the American Labor Movement ((Garden Citv, N.Y., 1968), 49-127, quotation from 83; Herbert Hill, "Myth-Making as Labor Histo-'," 132-200, quotations fiOm 136, 187; Stephen Brier, "In Defense of Gutiman: The Union's Case," International Jourrxl of Politi(:s, (olture, and Societ?! 2 (Spring 1989): 382-95, quotations h-on 389. Brier's rejoinder was one of a series of contributions to appear in a wide-ranging symposium on the "Hill-Gutman" debate in the Spring 1989 issue of the same journal.

For useful reviews of the vast literature on interracial unionism produced over the ensuing decade, see Herbert Hill, "The Problem of Race in American History," PiniEl/M in Ameri

can History 24 (June 1996): 189-208; Eric Arnesen, "Following the Color Line of l.abor: Black Workers and the Labor Movement Before 1930," Radical History Reviezu no. 55 (Winter 1993): 5'87; and Rick Halpern, "Organized Labor, Black Workers, and the Twentieth-Cenmtiir South: The Emerging Revision," in Melvyn Stokes and Halpern, eds., Race and Clic.ss in the American South Since 1890 (Oxford, 1994), 43-76. On race and labor in Birmingham, see, in addition to McKiven, Paul B. Worthman, "Black Workers and Labor Unions in Birmingham, Alabama, 1897-1904," Labor History IV (Summer 1969): 375-407; Paul B. Worthman and James B. Green, "Black Workers in the New South, 1865-1915," in Sos Issues in the Afro-American Experience, ed. Nathan 1. Huggins, Martin Kilson, and Daniel M. Fox (New York, 1971), 2:47-69; RobertJ. Norrell, "Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabama," Jottnal of American Ilistorw 73 (Fall 1986): 669-94; Hol-ace Huntley, "Iron Ore Miners and Mine Mill in Alabama: 1933-1952," (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1977); and Alan Draper, Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954-1968 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994). On Birmingham coal miners, see Daniel 1.. Letwill, ihe Challenge of Inter-racial ilnionism: Alabama Coal ,Yliner.s, 1878-1927 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Lewis, Black Coal Miners; Brian Kelly, "`Up Against It': Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-21," (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis Uiziversity, 1997). 24 Philip Taft, Organized Labor in American History (New York, 1964), 670. 2 Foner and lI.cwis, eds., "Black Coal Miners and the Issue of Strikebreaking," Black 1R'or-ker, 4:200.

26 Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (1931; reprint Port Washington, N.Y., 1966), 137.

27 Quoted in Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (1910; reprint New York, 1973), 511.

28 Bond, Negro Education, 240-41.

29 Quoted in Richard Straw, "The Collapse of Biracial Unionism: The Alabama Coal Strike of 1908," Alabama Historical Quarterly 34 (Summer 1975): 114; United Mine Workers'Journal (hereafter UMW), August 15, 1908; Straw, "Collapse of Biracial Unionism," 112.

30 "Minutes of the ACOA Executive Board" (hereafter "ACOA Minutes"), February 11, 1909, p. 39, ACOA/AMI Records.

31 "ACOA Minutes," September 24, 1908, p. 19, ACOA/AMI Records. sZ "1909 President's Annual Report,"June 7, 1910, p. 83, ACOA/AMI Records; Straw, "Collapse of Biracial Unionism," 114.

33 1909 President's Annual Report,' June 7, 1910, p. 82, ACOA/AMI Records; Senate, Report of the Federal Commission on Immigrants in Industries: The Bituminous Coal Mining Industry in the South, 61st Congress, 2nd Session, 1910, S. Doc. 633, 363. 34 "ACOA Minutes," September 24, 1908, pp. 19-22, ACOA/AMI Records.

3 See "ACOA Minutes," September 24, 1908, p. 23; "ACOA Minutes," November 6, 1909, p. 57, ACOA/AMI Records.

36 "ACOA Minutes," April 9, 1912, p. 121, ACOA/AMI Records. 37 In this respect, at least, there was nothing exceptional about welfare capitalism in the Birmingham District. See Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (1960; reprint Baltimore, 1966), 187; and Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism: 1880-1940 (Chicago, 1976), 32. Quotation from Bureau of Safety, Sanitation and Welfare, United States Steel, "Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Bulletin," 1926, cited in Davis, Labor and Steel, 170.

38 Rikard, "Experiment in Welfare Capitalism," 5.

39 "ACOA Minus," June 6, 1911, p. W, ACOA/AMI Records. 40 Morris Knowles, Zelaln of the Operator to Sanitary and Social Improvements,' Pub of uic AOA, 190816 ACOA/AMI Rcrds. 41 "Table of Conteats,'-'uiao of Gontents, qf AfhOA le ACOA, 190816: ii-iii, ACOA/AMI Records

42 Birmingham Labor Advocate, October 31, 1913; Milton H. Fies, The Man with the Light on His Cap (Jasper, Ala., 1960), 10, 5-6.

43 B. F. Roden, "Value of Improved Sanitary and Living Conditions in Mining Camps," Publications of the ACOA, 1908-16: 34, ACOA/AMI Records. 44 Marion Whidden, `"The Importance of Recreation for Employees," Publications of the ACOA, 1908-16: 29, ACOA/AMI Records.

45 "1912 President's Annual Report,-July 12, 1913, p. 162, ACOA/AMI Records.

4h Birmingham Ne's, September 18, 1907; Bin,gham Age-Herald, August 25, 1907, cited in Harris, Political Power, 193-94. 47 Harris, Political Power, 173.

48 For an important qualification to this statement, see James Bowron's remarks on his attitude to the Klan in Norrell, James Bowron, 246. William R. Snell reports that during World War 1, Birmingham's Robert E. Lee KlaI>ern of the KKK issued leaflets warning that they were "on the lookout for alien enemies, for the disloyal, and for the fellow who is seeking to begin a strike." The Klan was also known to be involved in a number of physical attacks on labor organizers. See Snell, "The Ku Klux Klan in Jefferson County, Alabama: 1916-1930" (master's thesis, Samford University, 1967), 15. See also Blaine A. Brownell, "Birmingham, Alabama: New South City in the 1920s,"Journal of Southern History 38 (February 1972): 39-40; (Glenn Feldman, "The Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, 1915-1954" (Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1996); and "Trying to Drive the Union Out of Alabama," UMI, February 25, 1921, 13.

49 "ACOA Minutes," September 7, 1910, pp. 89, lOt), ACOA/AMI Records. 50 See IN. David Lewis, Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District: An Industrial Epic (Tuscaloosa, 1994), 322. Four major operators, including Sloss-Sheffield, resigned from

the ACOA in early 1912 over related issues. See "ACOA Minutes," January 27,1912, p. 116, ACOA/AMI Records.

51 Fitch, "Birmingham District Labor Conservation," 1532.

Brian Kelly completed his doctorate in history at Brandeis University in 1997. He has taught as an adjnict instructor in histon at Suffolk University and Florida International University.

The autior thanks Eric Are.esen, Michael fol(ney. Jacqueline Jones, and Alex l,ichtenstein for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, and Michael Pearce and

Jody Swann for their generous hospitality during an extended stay in Birmingham. Thanks also to the anonymous Alabama Review referees for their useful comments and criticism.

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