Word: coal
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That earnest prayer for the 165,000 striking coal miners was offered by Monsignor Charles Rice at a labor rally in Pittsburgh last week. His words perfectly reflected the miners' own mood in this long, three-month walkout: religious fervor, intense solidarity, a degree of self-righteousness, and a hint of violent passions as deep and often as murky as the mines themselves...
There was at least a faint light at the end of the darkened coal tunnel...
...Attorney General Griffin Bell argued the case for the Government. The only significant opposition came from Harrison Combs, the U.M.W.'s veteran general counsel. Reminding the court that this was his third defense of the union in a Taft-Hartley proceeding, Combs pointed out that coal is still being exported, that substantial stockpiles exist and that negotiations between union and management had resumed. (Later he admitted that the talks were only preliminary. "We were just cussing each other as usual.") Combs said the union leadership would do whatever the court ordered. "But I can't speak...
...obedience to Washington's decrees ranks low in the miners' scale of values. The U.M.W.'s redoubtable President John L. Lewis once thundered: "The public does not know that a man who works in a coal mine is not afraid of anything except his God, that he is not afraid of injunctions or politicians or threats or denunciations or verbal castigations or slander, that he does not fear death." With due allowance for rhetoric, the autocratic ruler of one of the world's unruliest unions was not exaggerating. Flouting Taft-Hartley is about on the order...
Such fighting words echoed through the snow-covered hills and hollows of coal country last week. Increasingly the miners were taking aim at Carter; they had voted for him, and now they felt betrayed. In a bar by the deserted railroad tracks in West Frankfort, Ill., a group of miners listened to Carter's midweek press conference. Groans, snorts, scoffing. Said Rocky Morris, president of Local 1591: "Come 1980, Carter's going to be picking peanuts again in Georgia...