Over fifty years ago, in 1933, Utah coal miners were organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and an agreement was negotiated with coal operators marking the first official recognition of the right of Utah miners to organize. Residents of Utah’s coal region and others interested in Utah history have assumed that no union existed in Utah until President Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed John L. Lewis to send UMWA organizers to the state. However, the recognition of the Utah coal miners was not the spontaneous result of the New Deal. Rather, it was a reaction to the deaths...

Union-organizing efforts in the Utah coal fields took place in a state well known for its anti-union attitudes and where class tension and labor discord existed. Although the state’s economy was founded on agriculture, commerce as well as mines, railroads, and developing cities constituted its future. Utah’s leaders recognized that agriculture provided only a subsistence life while mining and manufacturing offered a prosperity that farming and ranching could not equal. As the long, hard-fought battles over polygamy and over church political control receded, a wave of aggressive capitalism swept over the state in the 1890s as Mormons and non-Mormons closed...

On May 1, 1900, at least 200 men lost their lives in what was then the most disastrous mine explosion in the history of the United States.¹ The explosion at the Winter Quarters mine—located in a narrow, remote canyon more than eight thousand feet above sea level, and a mile west of Scofield in Utah’s Carbon County—affected the course of labor not only in Utah but also in other parts of the country. The disaster clearly reminded workers of the ultimate sacrifice they might be required to make for their employer. The aftermath brought intense human suffering to...

The tragedy of the Winter Quarters mine disaster was a primary cause of Pleasant Valley labor unrest, which in 1901 erupted in an open confrontation between miners and the Pleasant Valley Coal Company when a strike was called.

The Winter Quarters disaster worked in two ways to promote labor unrest. First, it illustrated the high costs in human life and suffering demanded by the coal industry and the type of sacrifices coal miners were called to make for mine owners. Bishop Lawrence Scanlan, leader of Utah’s Catholics, asked coal company owners to extend their efforts in every way possible to...

The first years of the twentieth century were a time of tremendous growth for the labor movement in the United States.¹ In 1900, nationwide union membership was 868,500, and by 1904, it had more than doubled to 2,072,700.² Unionism moved forward on two fronts: an increase of membership in already existing unions and an increase in the number of new unions. Recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were the important elements in the burgeoning labor movement. In the coal fields of Carbon County, Finnish, Slavic, and Italian miners provided the strength behind Utah’s most serious labor confrontation to that...

The controversial end and bitter aftermath of the 1903–4 strike angered Utah coal miners about the role of the UMWA. This hostility and the union’s preoccupation with other issues halted all UMWA activity in Utah until 1918. Nevertheless, worker unrest continued in the Utah coal fields as the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) attempted to salvage the 1903–4 strike for organized labor, and as newly arrived Greek immigrants molded themselves into a new type of Utah coal miner.

The WFM was organized in 1893 in Butte, Montana, by forty delegates from western metal-mining camps. The catalyst for the...

A new and dynamic era of growth began in 1916 bringing with it the opportunity for important shifts in the labor relations of the coal fields. The demands for coal caused by the Great War in Europe were enormous. Coal was needed to fuel warships and transport ships and to run the railroads; it was essential for manufacturing the steel used in armaments. In addition to the wartime need for coal, a severe winter in 1916–17 led to increased demands for fuel by consumers. By May 1, 1917, the price of coal had increased from $2.40 to $3.50 a...

The American coal industry did not prosper during the 1920s. New mines, opened to meet the demands of World War I, glutted the market as the peacetime need declined. Competition was intense, and coal production shifted from union mines in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio to the nonunion mines in western Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama. Wages were reduced in the nonunion mines; and although wildcat strikes occurred and attempts were made to organize the workers in these areas, John L. Lewis insisted that men under contract honor their agreements and refrain from any sympathetic or protest strikes.

Nevertheless, with contracts...

The men who answered the work call in Castle Gate on Saturday, March 8, 1924, considered themselves fortunate. Theirs was only the third eight-hour shift to work during the month. The miners were, for the most part, married men and older employees who had been given work over younger, single men in the No. 2 mine when the No. 1 mine closed March 1 because of reduced coal orders.

At 7:30 a.m., within an hour of entering the Castle Gate No. 2 mine, the entire work force of 171 men was dead; the men were victims of two violent explosions...

Throughout the remainder of the 1920s, union efforts in Utah coal fields were subject to much the same intolerance and reaction that characterized the rest of the country. In the first legislative session to be held after the 1922 strike, a Right-to-Work Act was passed and signed by Governor Charles Mabey that guaranteed workers the right to employment without union affiliation even though a majority of the shop or industry workers had become organized. Moreover, union leaders and members were prohibited from almost any attempt to encourage their fellow workers to join the union.

Persons violating the law were guilty...

John L. Lewis is credited with immediately realizing labor’s potential under Section 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act and with carrying out the organizing campaign that dramatically reversed the downhill course American labor had followed since 1919.¹

In assessing the significance of the National Industrial Recovery Act, Lewis declared, “From the standpoint of human welfare and economic freedom, we are convinced that there has been no legal instrument comparable with it since President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.”² At a later point in his address to the delegates of the 1934 UMWA International Convention, Lewis outlined the vigorous nationwide organizing campaign...

With the organization of the American coal miners virtually completed, John L. Lewis announced in 1935 his more ambitious goal to “organize the unorganized.”¹ The vehicle for this expanded effort was to be the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO), established in 1935 under the principal leadership of John L. Lewis, who was elected the organization’s first president. The CIO set its sights high, and by 1938 it organized the important auto and steel industries.

Paralleling the national aims of John L. Lewis through the CIO, in June 1936, union leaders in Carbon County organized the Carbon County Central Labor Council,...

Speaking to the delegates of the Western Federation of Miners at their Sixteenth Annual Convention held in Denver, Colorado, Roderick MacKenzie remarked “the average native of Utah is ... the hardest biped to unionize in all America.”¹ Although MacKenzie’s perception was accurate, especially for 1908, it did not consider the complex issues that essentially validated his judgment. As suggested in the previous pages, the long and protracted struggle for union recognition in the Utah coal fields was the product of an intricate combination of factors whose strength ebbed and flowed in response to economic, political, and other issues. Nevertheless, Utah’s...