"All for One and One for All"

On April 2, 1906, as many as 5,000 Windber-area miners publicly demonstrated their desire to become members of the United Mine Workers of America when they joined an orderly parade of the district's union miners through town. Their fellow miners had come to Windber to call upon them to join the union themselves and support the national organization's collective efforts and current strike. Their conscious decision to join the union was an important one that, once taken, they knew would inevitably and immediately commit them to going out on strike against their adamant, antiunion employer, the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company. They eagerly and quickly made this decision. In the process, this large group of primarily immigrant miners--Slovaks, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Carpatho- Rusyns-- simultaneously defied the coal company and the public's ethnic stereotypes. New immigrants were neither docile nor disinterested in the American labor movement.

Ever since the founding of Windber and the opening of the mines, Berwind-White's miners had had many grievances both at the workplace and in the community-at-large. The lack of checkweighmen, indeed the company's weights and weighing system which they considered grossly dishonest, along with the compulsory company-store system and arbitrary dismissals, were the specific grievances that they cited most frequently, but they mentioned many others. Most of all, they disliked the company's autocratic rule, the lack of civil liberties and democratic rights that they experienced in a company town in a state known for the Liberty Bell and Revolutionary fervor, in a country that prided itself on its legacy of freedoms. Yet, neither immigrant nor American-born miners had any voice whatsoever in major decisions that affected their lives at work or in the local community-at-large. For this reason, to the ordinary miner and members of his family, unionization always meant far more than higher wages or solutions to specific grievances, although these were important, too.

Readers can learn more about the ongoing grievances and specific struggles of Windber-area miners in the list of works at the end of this pamphlet. This short brochure is only a brief introduction to the aspirations and participation of these miners in the 1906 strike for union, one of the most significant happenings in 100 years of the town's history. Its purpose is to make readily available a few select rare documents about the aspirations and participation of these miners in an important strike which received prominent, and often scandalous, national attention. The occurrence of the local strike and its effectiveness, the leading role and mass participation in it by an immigrant work force, a massacre of four people by the coal company’s hired guards, and the armed occupation of the town by the state police were spectacular instances of overt class conflict in a company-town setting in industrial America.