Word: coal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Submerged Problems. Despite all this, the American labor movement in 1964 is haunted by anxiety about the future and by a conviction that prosperity has only succeeded in submerging, not eliminating, its nagging problems. Organized labor considers automation a constant threat, particularly in such declining industries as coal and shipping. At the same time, there is the prospect of a vastly increasing influx of teenagers, whose unemployment rate has reached 15%, into a job market that is already crowded. Age is also a problem in the unions, where labor leaders have grown old, tired and divided, generally failing to groom...
...century ago, terror stalked the coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania. Men were gunned down on the open road and even in their own parlors. Informers had their ears cut off and their tongues torn out by the roots. Dynamite destroyed mine tipples and derailed freight trains. In one coal-mining county alone, there were 142 unsolved murders in 13 years...
...beside the collieries and worked in the mines for wages as low as 50½ a day. On the other were the absentee mine owners in Manhattan and London, who fought the battle through their mine superintendents-usually of English or Welsh origin-and their own private army, the Coal and Iron Police...
Agent Provocateur. The man who broke the Molly Maguires was Franklin Benjamin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Co., whose ancestors had come from Ireland's Protestant north; and he used another Irishman to penetrate the Mollies. His choice for the job was James McParlan, a gifted, gabby little Pinkerton detective who was as ready with his fists as with his wits...
Violence in the coal fields was actually diminishing at the time when Pinkerton Agent McParlan, posing as a murderer on the run from Buffalo police, wormed his way into the high councils of the Molly Maguires. It was later charged that McParlan acted as an agent provocateur and deliberately whipped up bloodshed. The attacks also changed character: from reprisals against brutal or dishonest mine bosses, the Mollies turned to capricious, Mafialike assaults on anyone who offended one of their band...