Class-Conscious Coal Miners

Alan J. Singer is Professor of Education at Hofstra University. He is the author of New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth and New York's Grand Emancipation Jubilee: Essays on Slavery, Resistance, Abolition, Teaching, and Historical Memory, both also published by SUNY Press.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsGlossary for General ReadersIntroductionPart I: Bituminous Coal Industry 1. Ideological and Structural Conflict in the United Mine Workers of America2. Chaotic Production and the Inadequacies of the Business-Unionist Program3. Ethnic Division in the Coalfields4. Coal-Patch CommunityPart II: Rank-and-File Miners 5. Rank-and-File Miners Challenge Business Unionism6. John Brophy and the "Miners' Program"7. Combating the Open-Shop DrivePart III: Nanty Glo 8. Nanty Glo, Pennsylvania9. Nanty Glo versus the Open ShopPart IV: Save the Union 10. 1926 UMWA Presidential Campaign11. Save the Union CommitteePart V: Revival and Collapse 12. New Deal and World War II13. Aftermath: Communities in DistressBibliographyIndex

"A fine-grained social history of the rebellious miners in Central Pennsylvania in the 1920s, Alan Singer's Class-Conscious Coal Miners brings us significant insights about radicalism and repression. Singer shows why miners have more in common with today's precarious workers, why mining communities in the coal fields were incubators for alternative views on political economy, and why they rebelled not only against coal operators but against their own union. In Singer's telling the 1920s become an incubator for the rebellious 1930s." — Rosemary Feurer, author of Radical Unionism in the Midwest 1900–1950"Alan J. Singer has written a highly readable and original book that makes a major contribution to the history of its field and US history in general. Although a number of scholarly works exist about labor-related events that took place in central Pennsylvania during the 1920s, none do what he has done or ask the questions he has. His goal was not simply to relate detailed information but to clarify how and why existing conditions created a working-class-conscious movement that potentially challenged business unionism, the structure of the nation's coal industry, and the direction of the country."—Mildred Allen Beik, author of The Miners of Windber: The Struggles of New Immigrants for Unionization, 1890s–1930s