The miners of Windber: Class, ethnicity, and the labor movements in a Pennsylvania coal town, 1890s-1930s
Immigrant miners, the subject of this community study lived, worked, and struggled in an important bituminous coal town located in central Pennsylvania. Windber, a transposition of Berwind, was founded as a company town in 1897 by the Berwind White Coal Mining Company, a leading coal corporation. Most of the labor force, 4,000 to 5,000 miners, were recent arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. At least 25 different nationalities were represented in the town's population of 10,000. The company established an autocratic type of control in the workplace and the community. It was opposed to unionization by the United Mine Workers and operated an open-shop until the New Deal. The broad struggle of the miners and their families to end this autocratic control and by that get greater control over their lives and work in the nonunion period is the raison d'etre of this study. Sources used include oral histories, census, union files, church records, Slovak fraternal society papers, borough council records, organizers' papers, company employment records, printed documents, and rare newspaper collections. Part One is devoted to a social history of work and community. Topics covered include the company's labor, ethnic, and governing policies; the nature and composition of the social structure; the organization of work; the importance of the family economy; the functioning of immigrant communities within the larger American setting; and the competition for ethnic community leadership. The most important theme concerns the relationship of ethnic city to class formation and working class struggles. Windber's historic example shows that ethnic communities were not homogeneous entities but arenas of class conflict. Part Two is narrative presentation of the major struggle in which Windber mine participated.
- Research Organization:
- Northern Illinois Univ., Dekalb, IL (USA)
- OSTI ID:
- 7125604
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: Thesis (Ph. D.)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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