Introduction

The metal miners of the Tri-State district (Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma) opposed social democratic unions and government regulation for nearly a century. Historians of organized labor in the United States have neglected workers like these, opting instead to focus on workers who joined unions. This introduction outlines how this study of the non-union and anti-union miners of the Tri-State district changes the field of labor history. The story of the Tri-State miners shows how some American workers rejected the protections of working-class solidarity because they inherited and embraced a faith in capitalism, white supremacy, and aggressive masculinity.

Red-Blooded, Rugged Individuals

World War I made the Tri-State district more productive and profitable than ever before. War industry demand for lead and zinc raised prices and wages, and led to the dramatic expansion of mines in the Oklahoma part of the district. Wartime nationalism also supercharged the risk-taking masculinity of the district’s miners who asserted their racist claims to the piece rate with new fervor that further undermined the appeals of union organizers and government health and safety reformers. But in the 1920s miners found their employers, who had grown bigger and stronger during the war, newly reluctant to pay them high wages. This stand-off created new opportunities for union organizers in the district, but Tri-State miners ultimately rejected solidarity in favor of the economic advantages they believed loyal, white American men deserved. By the 1920s, their working-class communities were organized around a faith in capitalism, violent masculinity, and white racism now transformed during the war into a staunch white nationalism. Having abandoned organized labor, Tri-State miners found themselves without allies as mining companies moved in the late 1920s to constrain their risk-taking behavior through new health controls aimed to eliminate silicosis and damaged men from the district.

Finding’s Keeping

This chapter explains the discovery of lead mineral deposits and development of lead mining in southwest Missouri in the 1850s. Far from markets and transportation networks, working miners discovered and claimed rich deposits of lead mineral in this isolated region in the midst of a national market revolution that made lead more profitable than ever. Their discoveries soon attracted the attention of lead-starved smelting companies from St. Louis and elsewhere that tried to take control of the mineral wealth from the miners, most of whom were white men. The miners resisted corporate control because they believed that the mines rightfully belonged to them by virtue of discovering and developing them. By the time of the Civil War, miners and the smelting companies had negotiated a compromise based on leasing. Miners worked leasehold mines and sold their lead mineral to smelting companies for favorable prices, thus preserving the rights and privileges of the men who discovered the lead, and also creating good opportunities for miners who moved to the area. While the war devastated mining in the region, the companies rebuilt the mining district after the war by reinstating the favorable terms for working miners.

Back to Work

As the Great Depression crushed the mining industry, Tri-State miners looked for ways to restore their standing as hard-working-white men and their faith in capitalism. The New Deal offered hope but brought labor unions back into the district. Some miners, but not a majority, looked to organized labor as the best way to roll back the power of the companies. This chapter explores their 1935 strike to regain what they had lost and the ways the New Deal labor regime was too weak to protect them. While strikers waited for allies in the nascent Congress of Industrial Organizations, the mining companies organized the majority of the district’s nonunion miners into a back-to-work movement that became a company union. This group rallied around old promises of racial superiority and high pay for loyal, hard-working white men who were willing to destroy the CIO union. The CIO, with the help of New Deal officials, eventually won this dispute in court, but it could not overrule the reactionary commitments in the hearts of the majority of Tri-State miners as a new world war brought the mining economy to life again.

The Favorite of Fortune

This chapter shows how southwest Missouri miners maintained their pursuit of market opportunities as industrial capitalism foreclosed those opportunities nationally in the 1870s. They did this by mining and marketing zinc, once a worthless by-product of lead mining. Their zinc mining created a profitable new market that partially freed working miners from the control of smelting companies. At a time of national economic depression, this development made the mining region famous as a poor man’s camp where capital-poor but hard-working men could work on their own account, as independent owner-operator miners, and possibly make considerable sums of money. When smelting companies looked to take control of zinc, some miners turned to antimonopoly politics, but most miners responded as before, by searching for mineral discoveries as prospectors on undeveloped land in Missouri and now in Kansas. By seeking new opportunities to enter the market again as independent producers rather than fight the smelting companies, as workers forming unions elsewhere did, these miners kept alive their faith in capitalism and risk-taking work.

Epilogue

This epilogue concludes the narrative by examining the effects of World War II on the Tri-State mining district. The National War Labor Board ultimately facilitated the unionization of most district miners in the CIO. As federal support waned at war’s end, however, the district rapidly collapsed. Although now unionized, Tri-State miners opted for the conservative, anti-Communist unionism of the American Federation of Labor. But no union could stop the closure of the mines by the late 1950s. Rather than go into mining, young working-class men. such as the district’s favorite son, Mickey Mantle, now chose other occupations. The epilogue also surveys the books core arguments and reiterates its historiographical significance.

The American Boy Has Held His Own

This chapter examines how Tri-State miners developed a faith that strong, white men could profit from risk-taking wage labor by transforming the job of hand-loading, or shoveling, into high-paying work through extreme physical exertion. They did this by insisting on a share of the profits of mining by working according to a piece rate that tracked the market price of metal. Tri-State miners justified this demand by appealing to their sense of privilege as white American men. This new culture of reckless work drew upon and fueled an aggressive expression of working-class masculinity that further alienated them from the safety and security of union solidarity. But it also set them in opposition to their employers. To back their demand for a share of profits through the piece rate, Tri-State miners appealed to white supremacy and American nationalism and rebelled by strikebreaking, changing jobs, suing for injuries, and by staging their own wildcat strikes without union allies. Their insistence on the piece rate also began to destroy their physical health by exacerbating a local silicosis epidemic.

The Joplin Man Simply Takes His Chances

The district’s miners faced permanent wage labor as growing zinc-mining companies closed off opportunities for them to develop their own independent operations as they had in the past. Caught between their expectations and a new reality, they found new opportunities that appealed to their tradition of risk-taking work for financial premiums: breaking a strike in Colorado by the Western Federation of Miners. This chapter explores how Tri-State district miners embraced strikebreaking with justifications based on their sense of privilege as native-born white American men. They also justified themselves with a new vilification of unions as radical, foreign-born threats to their privileges that drew on intensifying nativism and xenophobia, and expressed through an aggressive masculinity that encouraged violence against foreigners and radicals. Tri-State miners accommodated themselves to permanent wage labor through the experience of strikebreaking, which they interpreted as a lucrative new way for loyal, white, American men to claim the benefits of capitalism and realize the promise of their tradition.

Nothing but His Labor

The working miners who turned to zinc production in the 1870s transformed the fundamental nature of the district in the 1880s. This chapter explores how their zinc producing operations encouraged gradual increases in the scale of mining that used more machines and a new reliance on wage labor. Although these changes threatened the continuation of the poor man’s camp, most working miners continued to expect the future to be like the past, to expect that they too could succeed in capitalism like the miners before them. These expectations frustrated organizers from the era’s biggest labor union, the Knights of Labor. Miners rejected the solidarity of the Knights, which included calls for government regulation of the mines, particularly regarding health and safety, and instead continued to pursue risk as the best chance at working-class prosperity.