Life of coalminer, father, poet celebrated for Labor Day
Charlie Cole was a coal miner from Coal Hill, fittingly enough. At age 12, Charlie entered the coalmines, where he spent his life working in subterranean gloom until leukemia outraced his blackened lungs to kill him at 60.
“He had no childhood, no real home life,” said his late daughter Loma in 1979, describing her father’s time on earth. “His education was possibly the equivalent of third grade, yet he supported his father and brother all of their lives.”
Charlie Cole grew up and married Ida May Brundege, and together they raised a family of nine boys and three girls in their home at Coal Hill, not far from Braznell. Charlie and Ida were particularly fond of the letter “L,” an devotion displayed a dozen times when they dubbed their offspring Lawrence, Lloyd, Lewis, Leoda, Laird, Lester, Lincoln, Leona, Logan, LeRoy, Leonard and Loma.
Charlie spent most of his life in the dark. He began many workdays before dawn, descending into the bowels of the earth and emerging only after the sun had disappeared. He led a bleak life of toil, of being the family’s provider. Yet despite years of cheerless drudgery in dust-choked gloom, Charlie enjoyed rare moments of leisure above the surface. When he wasn’t at work in the mine or tending to the demands of his dozen children, there was one particular pastime in which he indulged himself.
Charlie Cole, the miner with a third-grade education, wrote poetry.
It isn’t certain when Charlie began to write about his life experiences, but it was probably around 1910 when he was nearly 40. Where he wrote his poems, and when he found the time to write, no one now living knows, but Charlie wrote enough verse to fill a book. During the two decades before leukemia claimed his life in 1931, Charlie wrote in rhyme about the news of the day, his boyhood memories, the first World War, the coal field strikes and whatever other topics struck his fancy. He even intended for some of his verse to be sung to familiar tunes, because some of his poems included a “chorus” to be sung after each of the stanzas.
Charlie did not allow his third-grade education to handicap his self-expression as an observer of daily life around Brownsville during the 1910s and 1920s. A reading of his straightforward verse, which his daughter Loma published in 1979, carries the reader back to the rugged 1920s – years when coal was king in the Brownsville area, and when the United Mineworkers Union was stumbling as it struggled to gain a foothold in this valley.
Tomorrow is Labor Day, a day on which we recognize the social and economic achievements of generations of workers who have made America strong and prosperous. One American worker who joined the battle to strengthen the UMW in its clashes with the coal operators was coal miner Charles T. Cole.
Charlie was proud of being a union man, and in the years when he was toiling in the mines, the coal miners’ battle to establish a union in southwestern Pennsylvania precipitated some of the nation’s most violent labor strife. In his writings about the turbulence in the coal fields, Charlie left no doubt about how he felt about the coal operators and their hired guns. These were not the musings of a professional writer trying to imagine the feelings and sentiments of a coal miner. These words came directly from the soul of a coal miner himself, straight from his heart to his writing tablet.
In 1922, with post-World War I demand for coal declining, coal mine operators drastically slashed their employees’ already meager wages. In response, some miners sought factory work, but others clung desperately to the hope that the trend would reverse. In the end, it took more than hoping.
It took the mother of all strikes.
The terrible coal strike of 1922-23 in southwestern Pennsylvania, which began in April 1922, was a violent year-long life-and-death struggle for union recognition. The UMW, which was desperately trying to gain strength in the coal fields of southwestern Pennsylvania, led the fight. Only after many months of standoff marred by Coal and Iron Police evictions of families from their coal patch homes, leaving them to spend a frigid winter living in tents, was some degree of success finally achieved.
Through it all, Charlie Cole wrote his poetry. Below are his words, penned 81 years ago. As you read them, remember what these workers went through in 1922-23. Some of those miners may have been your ancestors, and what they did three generations ago has led to the standard of living many Americans enjoy today.
The Great Coal Strike of 1922
Twenty weeks of the Great Coal Strike have almost past and gone,
And the public loudly cries for coal and is wondering what is wrong.
Kind friends give me your attention, listen to what I have to say,
And I humbly ask your sympathy for the miners that are out on strike today.
They are shot, starved and beaten and driven from their homes,
By the iron hands of the coal barons, whose only god is gold.
But the younger generation is getting wise of late,
They want some of the profits that their labor does create.
Now friends just take an automobile ride and visit the various mines,
The cause of the strike you will plainly see, it isn’t hard to find
At every mine that is trying to work you will see, the iron hand of monopoly,
Men, women and little children are thrown out in the rain,
By the company they made millions for, these tyrants have no shame.
The deputies employed to guard the mines are the lowest type of earth,
And I sure to God am sorry for the women who gave them birth.
We wonder where they came from and if the good Lord did create
A man as low as a deputy, that the world has learned to hate.
Now they should be deported to the wilds of Africa or on some isolated isle,
That is infested with poisonous reptiles and everything that’s vile
And keep them all together there for humanity’s sake,
For everybody knows that a deputy is more poisonous than a snake.
A snake once bit a deputy, it was a copperhead,
And just ten seconds later that copperhead was dead.
It was poisoned by the deputy; it met an awful fate,
Those are the kind of reptiles that infest our Keystone state.
The Operators through selfishness, hatred, greed and lust,
Overlooked the interest of others and tramped humanity in the dust,
If they could only overcome that awful greed for gold,
And be satisfied to give a small percent of their profits to the men that mine
the coal.
And be friendly to one another and not stand in each other’s light,
For the Lord smiles on the miners’ cause of justice and of right,
Now a warning to all miners, to your Union be true,
There are brighter days in store for you, cheer up and don’t be blue.
The dark clouds are passing over and the sky is getting clear:
A few more weeks will win the strike, have confidence, don’t fear,
For all we want is justice; we ask for nothing more,
So place your trust in the Lord above, He will guide our ship to shore.
The strike dragged on through summer and fall, until it became clear that the mine operators would challenge the fortitude of the striking miners and their families to make it through the cold winter without a job or a home.
Since the coal companies owned the houses in which the miners had lived, all striking miners had been evicted from their homes. Some of the houses were turned over to “scab” laborers brought in from the South to break the strike.
Furnishings and personal belongings were callously dumped in the street as the Coal and Iron Police, the “deputies,” supervised the evictions. As autumn leaves fell in October 1922, after seven months of striking against the unyielding coal operators, the miners refused to knuckle under and re-enter the mines. Instead, they and their families moved into canvas tents to shelter themselves against the coming winter winds and snow.
To bolster his own spirits and to preserve this amazing scene for posterity, Charlie Cole took pen in hand and set to describing the circumstances he and his fellow miners faced as winter approached. In next week’s article, Charlie Cole will vividly portray this gritty battle for labor solidarity in his poem, “The Miner’s Tent Colony.”
Glenn Tunney may be contacted at 724-785-3201 or by writing to 6068 National Pike East, Grindstone, PA 15442. Comments about these weekly articles may be sent to Mark O’Keefe (Managing Editor – Day), 8 – 18 East Church Street, Uniontown, Pa. or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com . All past articles are on the Web at http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~glenntunneycolumn