It Is Union and Liberty: Alabama Coal Miners and the UMW. (Book Reviews).

It Is Union and Liberty: Alabama Coal Miners and the UMW. Edited by Edwin L. Brown and Colin J. Davis. (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, c. 1999. Pp. [xii], 184. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8173-1000-2; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8173-0999-3.)

The United Mine Workers of America (UMW) once stood as a large and powerful force in the American trade union movement. Founded in the late nineteenth century as a broad-based industrial union in the age of narrow craft unionism, the UMW opened its doors to immigrant workers from a wide range of European countries and to African Americans at a time when most other unions barred theirs. The five essays in this short but highly engaging and readable volume trace the history of the now century-old District 20 of the UMW in the Birmingham coal mining district of Alabama. While they convey "the struggles, against enormous odds, that Alabama coal miners fought" over the last century, they also reconstruct "the world that these miners, both black and white, made" (p. 10).

When successful in achieving union recognition and negotiating contracts, the UMW made a dramatic difference in Alabama workers' lives. Miners objected to the dominance of the company store, unsafe working conditions, low pay, the leasing of convicts, and their employers' sometimes near total power to discipline and discharge. During periods of union influence in the opening years of the twentieth century, as Daniel Letwin shows in his contribution, wages rose, labor subcontracting was eliminated, and new work rules protected union miners. But unionization never produced a permanent entente with coal operators. The 1908 Alabama strike witnessed the temporary destruction of the UMW and the beginnings of welfare capitalist programs designed to secure a docile (and often black) labor force, as Brian Kelly's excellent essay demonstrates. Despite opposition from companies and black elites, black miners poured back into the UMW during World War I, only to see their organizational hopes crushed again in the postwar years. Labor's upsurge during the Great Depression of the 1930s was embraced again by Alabama's black and white miners, who, as Peter Alexander shows, engaged in a running war against operators and the state government, affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and ultimately organized much of the district (resulting in a tripling of mining wages by 1941). There were limits, however, to union success. Glenn Feldman demonstrates that coal mining after World War II remained characterized by dangerous working conditions, occupational diseases like black lung, and persistent poverty. But the drop in demand for bituminous coal in the late 1940s and 1950s led to mine closings, layoffs, and shortened work weeks. Mechanization and the spread of strip mining reduced substantially the number of Alabama miners, with black workers being disproportionately affected. In the book's final chapter Robert H. Woodrum examines the remarkable rank-and-file militancy during the 1960s and 1970s against not only coal operators but a corrupt union leadership as well.

In recent years the UMW has attracted considerable attention from historians intent on analyzing its relative openness to African Americans in various places. The Alabama union's history, argue editors Edwin L. Brown and Colin J. Davis, "stands as a counter to much of the contemporary orthodoxy that characterizes the trade union movement in the South as exclusionary and racially fragmented" (p. 5). Indeed, in Alabama, the UMW (and its predecessors in the 1870s and 1880s) embraced both black and white miners as members. While it hardly advocated social equality, challenged the broader contours of southern segregation, or granted blacks equal representation among its officers, the UMW fought against racial disparities in pay, encouraged black leadership in union locals and on mine committees, and promoted an interracial collaboration rare in southern labor. On the issue of race, the essays firmly establish that the union's reputation for racial openness and interracial collaboration in the pre-World War II period, however imperfect, is nonetheless deserved.