The United Mine Workers on Strike

In the spring of 1977, Carter’s energy advisers were looking optimistically at the possibility of doubling yearly domestic coal production within ten years, with coal replacing OPEC oil as fuel for American power plants. The “major pitfall” they had identified threatening this forecast was the United Mine Workers of America, a unionized force organized in 1890 that was currently mining about 54 percent of the nation’s coal supply. The UMWA was comprised of (according to one contemporary journalistic assessment) the most militant workers in all of American organized labor, and their contract was due to be renegotiated.^{Footnote 4} The UMWA had a long tradition of combining militant strikes and sabotage with coordinated national bargaining every three years to pressure the coal industry during contract negotiations. A likely strike during this round of negotiations would interrupt the Carter plans to convert American utilities to burn coal instead of oil.

It should be noted here that there is a distinction between industrial militancy and political radicalism. Through most of its history, the UMWA has pursued the former as an organizing strategy, but has eschewed the latter. While using strikes and violence to put pressure on employers during contract disputes, it has largely avoided a radical politics of economic redistribution, instead focusing on reliable wage increases and retirement protections for workers. The UMWA in the 1970s, though, was different in one particular way from previous eras, namely, the capability of the UMWA’s head to channel militant impulses into a productive negotiating position. Longtime UMWA boss John L. Lewis had well understood his workers’ confrontational tendencies, harnessing his workers’ militancy to keep pressure on the government and the Bituminous Coal Operators Association (BCOA), an alliance of several powerful mine operators who had organized themselves in 1945 to coordinate bargaining with the UMWA.^{Footnote 5} Current 1970s UMWA chief Arnold Miller was not nearly as savvy at mobilizing his workers’ militant tendencies, bringing a new complication to government and business efforts to negotiate the UMWA’s labor contract.

First elected as UMWA chief in 1972, Miller’s troubles had begun as early as 1974 amid accusations of financial mismanagement of the union’s assets, which continued to dog him through 1975, 1976, and into 1977. Much of his administrative difficulties owed to his meteoric rise (his only other executive position had been running a local with numbers in the dozens), which, while impressive, had also left him unprepared to lead an organization with tens of thousands of members scattered across the eastern half of the country. Suffering from black lung disease himself, Miller’s sympathies certainly lay with rank-and-file miners, but his inexperience left him reticent to combat the union’s enemies head on and predisposed him to seek compromise instead of conflict. Local union leaders came to see the UMWA boss as too willing to give in to corporate and government demands at the expense of miners’ rights and financial security.^{Footnote 6}

There was indeed good reason for Carter’s policymakers to worry as 1977 contract negotiations approached. The resolution to the 1974 negotiation served as a grim harbinger for his domestic policy staff. It had failed to bring lasting peace to miner-employer relations, with wildcat strikes (strikes originated by the rank and file and not sanctioned by union leaders) continuing afterward. Strikes during negotiations were routine for the UMWA; strikes after a contract’s ratification were not and indicated the UMWA’s dissatisfaction with its central leadership, especially Miller. Wildcat strikes in anticipation of the contract renegotiation three years later exploded in late April and early May 1977, shutting down a number of mines in West Virginia and Ohio. Roving pickets soon extended the shutdown to some fifty mines employing fifteen thousand workers. National UMWA officers acted to try to get strikers back to work but were met with resistance in the coalfields. At the same time, a tight three-way struggle for control of the union was in progress with an election set for June. The result, which saw Miller earn a second term, would have stark implications for the union’s internal coherence in the very near future. (Miller won the three-way race with a mere 40 percent of the vote, hardly a ringing ratification of his first five years in office.)^{Footnote 7}

As expected, the following winter the UMWA as an institution went on strike during the contract negotiation. On December 7, 1977, one hundred and sixty thousand members walked off the job in protest of the BCOA’s proposed terms. The BCOA had offered the union wage increases of about 27 percent over the span of a proposed three-year contract. Carter had recently called on the nation’s industries to keep wage and price increases to a minimum in order to combat inflationary spirals, and BCOA’s offer followed in this spirit. Macroeconomic worries mattered little to miners understandably concerned first and foremost with feeding their families, and the union demanded a 44 percent increase. Wayne Horvitz of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which was helping to facilitate negotiations, pointed skeptically to this “very wide gap” between the UMWA and the BCOA. Financial concerns, however, were secondary to the miners to the right to strike itself. In response to the wildcat strikes of 1974, this new contract pushed by the BCOA would have given the coal operators wide latitude to fire wildcat strikers immediately. This was a provision that miners refused to accept.^{Footnote 8} As miners came to distrust their leaders’ motivations and general competence, wildcat strikes stood as a last resort in labor negotiations. There is little evidence that the UMWA specifically exploited Carter’s calls to increase domestic coal production as a bargaining chip to extract higher wage gains; the issue of wildcat strikes stood at the center of the UMWA’s objections.

The first strong pressure for government intervention appeared at the end of January, about seven weeks into the strike, as Midwestern and Appalachian states suffered the brunt of a particularly cold winter and feared the impact that a coal shortage would have on their ability to stay warm. In early February, recognizing that no quick settlement was in sight, Carter instructed his administration to plan for cutbacks in electric power and coal supplies, saying that he did not plan, at this point, to invoke portions of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which gives the president power to intervene in strikes that constitute a “national emergency.” Carter knew that short strikes during negotiations were routine, and he hoped this walkout might likewise end in the near future. The president’s orders for the moment included suspending some air-quality regulations in Ohio for thirty days, asking all federal facilities in the area to reduce power consumption to a minimum, and directing the EPA to “speedily review” any requests for temporary relaxation of Clean Air Act regulations.^{Footnote 9} (In West Virginia, where the strike was based, miners mainly produced “soft,” or bituminous, coal. Relaxing environmental regulations was meant to speed the burning of nonunion “hard” or anthracite coal from northeastern Pennsylvania, which was more carbon-dense and generated greater atmospheric pollution.)

Just a few days later, though, Carter’s tone changed dramatically. On February 14, he demanded that the two sides convene at the White House immediately to resume “serious negotiations.” In a statement at the White House, the president began by speaking of the “increasing hardships” that the strike was causing and declared emphatically that “it cannot be allowed to continue.” Asked if he was ready to invoke Taft-Hartley, he replied tersely, “That’s one of the options available to me, yes.” Attorney General Griffin Bell, no particular friend to organized labor, did not rule out the use of federal troops in ending the strike, which had traditionally been done only during a wartime emergency. “I will have no choice but to resort to stronger measures” if the strike did not end, threatened Carter, and instructed Labor Secretary Ray Marshall, a pro-labor union sympathizer, to participate more directly in the negotiations.^{Footnote 10} The change in Carter’s tone likely had much to do with the emerging news that the strike was exacting a broader toll on the nation’s economic health, especially in the Midwest.

The nation’s automakers predicted production cuts and some resultant plant closings by the end of February if the strike did not end soon, due to expected power shortages in Ohio and Indiana. General Motors (GM), for example, expected a mandatory 50 percent reduction in the electric power supplied by Ohio Edison Company, which would reduce production or force closures entirely at seven GM plants employing twenty-seven thousand hourly workers. To make matters worse, GM said that some of the plants in question were the only source of specific parts, meaning that the closings of only a few scattered plants could halt the production of entire cars if a key piece or two was no longer being made. It also warned that a “serious interruption” of supply could close GM’s operations completely, which would generate layoffs of more than three hundred thousand employees. Chrysler predicted a closedown of all of its U.S. and Canadian auto and truck assembly facilities by early March, which would idle about one hundred and fifty thousand employees.^{Footnote 11} The UMWA’s strike thus threatened to soon generate broader ripples across the U.S. economy.^{Footnote 12} (Despite the negative impact the UMWA strike was having on the auto industry, the United Auto Workers did not blame the coal miners for hurting their trade. In fact, in an act of labor solidarity, they pledged $2 million to a relief fund for the families of UMWA workers.)^{Footnote 13}

There were several options available to Carter, and none of them seemed good. He could still invoke Taft-Hartley, but the consequences of doing so were impossible to predict. The law had been used against the UMWA only three times before (all under Harry Truman) and not since 1950. The first two invocations had been met with miner defiance and eventual federalization of the mines, and Truman had broken the last Taft-Hartley impasse in 1950 only by threatening to seize the mines again. Invoking the law would have damaged Carter’s already tense relationship with organized labor with no guarantee that it would yield any practical result.^{Footnote 14} But the disastrous status quo was no better choice. Carter was looking weaker and weaker to the general public every day he could not resolve the conflict. It was no small wonder, then, that he continued to urge the UMWA to reach agreement on the labor contract as soon as possible. Unfortunately for the president, his aides had failed to reach management bargainers before Carter’s February 14 announcement, and thus the first the bargainers heard of the demand to resume negotiations was over national television, along with the rest of the country. “Stung” and embarrassed by the unexpected demands, the operators’ association rejected the proposed meeting, but soon realized the public relations disaster that would ensue from appearing intransigent and relented.^{Footnote 15}

The Strike Turns Violent

Carter soon had even more to worry about. Drawing on a long tradition of sabotage and violence to strengthen its negotiating position, the UMWA was engaging in aggressive acts against nonunion coal producers on a daily basis. Chaos spread across the Southeast and Midwest. The violence was meant to impede coal from being mined or moved anywhere until the strike was resolved. Some of the violence directly targeted nonunion producers themselves. A few days after the strike began in December, for example, UMWA strikers formed a caravan of more than a hundred vehicles and drove northward from Kittanning, Pennsylvania. They stopped en route at several mining operations and ordered each to close down until the strike had been resolved, and each site unsurprisingly complied with the armed miners and their demands. At some sites, the roving miners inflicted damage to equipment or buildings. A firebomb was believed responsible for a January 6 blaze at Boonville, Indiana, that destroyed two independent coal-hauling companies, with total damage estimated at $500,000.^{Footnote 16}

UMWA members also targeted railroads to stop coal that had already been mined from getting to its intended destination. On January 3, a bomb destroyed a section of the Norfolk and Western Railroad tracks at Ada, West Virginia. On January 16, an L&N train en route from Loyall to Corbin received gunfire while traveling over the Emerling Bridge. On January 23, reports indicated that a bridge carrying a section of track leading to the Tennessee Valley Authority plant at Paradise, Kentucky, was on fire, and about two weeks later, this bridge was set ablaze again. On February 8, in Pikesville, Kentucky, a basketball containing fifteen pounds of dynamite was thrown at a loading dock of the Elkhorn Fuel Company, but the fuses burned out and the bomb did not explode. These examples represented only a small portion of the union violence. FBI reports from December 8 to March 5 record four incidents of bodily assault, thirty-four bombings, and seventy-two incidents of “disruption,” which were mainly forced closings of mining operations.^{Footnote 17}

The night after Carter’s tense speech, on February 15, the two sides did indeed convene at the White House to continue talks. The coal operators, who had (in the White House’s view) been the most vehement holdouts, returned at the behest of what White House press secretary Jody Powell graciously called a “concern for the general welfare.” Another senior White House aide, though, cited a rumored public denunciation that Carter was prepared to make against the operators, blaming them for the crisis, if they spurned his request to return to the bargaining table. Five days later, the talks fell apart again. This set of talks hinged on three-way negotiations among the UMWA, the government, and the Pittsburg & Midway Oil Company, a subsidiary of the Gulf Oil Corporation. Although the P&M was not part of the Bituminous Coal Operators Association, the government hoped that if the P&M and the UMWA could come to an agreement that seemed reasonable, one or more other independent operators would support it. The government believed that subsequent combined public and corporate pressure would force the BCOA to retreat from its perceived hard-line position. But the talks came apart when the P&M itself worried that it was being used for “pattern-setting” by the government and that the BCOA members might end up with a more favorable deal than the P&M. Also not helpful to a resolution were the whispers of secret caucuses among UMWA officials opposed to union president Arnold Miller, as well as rumors of a “conscious effort” among federal mediators to bypass him. With the coal operators unlikely to budge and the UMWA fractured and disorganized, hopes for a resolution remained dim as ever.^{Footnote 18} Miller’s shaky control of his organization (and seemingly endless conflicts with his top lieutenants) did little to alleviate an already-tense situation.

Two days after the talks resumed, on February 17, Secretary Marshall received a confidential memorandum from Mary Lawton, a high-ranking official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The memo was in response to preliminary inquiries into the possibility of federal seizure of the mines if the issues could not be resolved. Marshall’s general sympathies clearly lay with unions, and there was a strong chance that threatening to seize the mines would compel the BCOA to compromise and offer the miners a more favorable settlement. Lawton was skeptical about the idea, noting that previous presidents had only seized industrial facilities in times of war. The president had no authority to seize an industry in a strike situation, Lawton noted, if Congress had provided alternative means of settling the strike, which the Taft-Hartley Act and other legislation obviously provided. On February 24, Assistant Attorney General John Harmon (also from the OLC) wrote members of Carter’s domestic policy staff to warn against seizure. The government had to decide at the outset just how far it was willing to go if it encountered resistance to seizure, Harmon said. “Would the government be willing to nationalize the mines on a permanent basis if either the operators or the mine workers refuse to comply with a seizure law?” he asked. Was it prepared to dismiss miners who refuse to work, and to staff the mines with government personnel? Could it use the Army as miners until a settlement was reached? “Is the President prepared to call out troops to protect the mines” against militant workers? These were questions that Harmon seemed to hope the administration would not have to consider.^{Footnote 19}

On the night of February 24, Carter scheduled a 9 p.m. television appearance to announce “drastic and unsatisfactory legal action” to end the strike, presumably meaning Taft-Hartley. At 7 p.m., though, the president made an unannounced appearance in the White House press room to discuss a last-minute proposed settlement, and warned that he would follow through with the promised “drastic steps” if it fell through. Carter’s about-face was due to his confidence in his own intense two-day effort to push the settlement through, which included getting the governors of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky to phone company executives and urge them to accept an agreement.^{Footnote 20} Carter’s maneuvering gave him cautious optimism that a breakthrough was imminent, but the margin for error was slim.

Most commercial customers had three-month stockpiles of coal when the strike had started, which they had believed would be ample. (Having been accustomed to regular work stoppages of varying length every three years as the UMWA renegotiated its labor contract, commercial customers had learned to keep excess coal on hand.) The 1974 strike had lasted a mere twenty-eight days, but this particular walkout would reach its three-month anniversary on March 7, which was only days away. Because of the strike’s unexpected duration, electrical utilities and other industries dependent on coal were running dangerously low in the states of Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. Utilities and industries in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Michigan were not far from the point of panic either. In the meantime, P&M had also relented in its opposition and had finalized a separate agreement with the UMWA, after the company dropped controversial provisions giving management the power to punish all workers in a mine if they participated in a wildcat strike. The New York Times seemed cautiously optimistic about the settlement, but it was also was sure to note that the agreement had been negotiated by the divisive Arnold Miller, a man with increasingly less influence within the union. Even more damagingly, the union’s thirty-nine-member bargaining council was not consulted and apparently learned of the “break-through” by watching television, a major insult to the rank and file. Nevertheless, Carter urged the union members to ratify the agreement immediately.^{Footnote 21}

Even as it appeared that the strike might be coming to an end, national media took a decidedly pessimistic tone about the broader prospects for the coal industry moving forward. As the New York Times reported, ending the strike in this way would do nothing to effect wider reform of the coal industry’s “volatile” labor relations. The idea that labor tensions could erupt again (seemingly at any time) would be a major impediment to Carter’s continued efforts to convince the nation’s industries to switch from oil to coal. Administration economists also worried that the strike would set a pattern, and that the Teamsters, for example, might see the coal strike as a sign that they themselves could get a more generous contract simply by waiting until a trucking shutdown created a national crisis as well.^{Footnote 22}

Carter’s economic advisers, namely, Council of Economic Advisers chairman Charles Schultze and special inflation adviser Alfred Kahn, were also concerned that sizable wage increases in the industry of such an essential economic input as energy would generate broader inflation, believing that the pay increases for the rank and file contained in the compromise contract would lead to substantial price increases for coal and thus electric power. These costs, they argued, would eventually “work their way” through to higher prices for a “broad spectrum” of goods and services.^{Footnote 23} (Schultze would made a similar argument about a 1978 labor law reform bill proposing to weaken the power of Taft-Hartley, claiming that an increased number of strikes leading to higher wage settlements would yield deleterious macroeconomic consequences.)^{Footnote 24} It was of the utmost importance to these officials that the situation be brought under control as soon as possible before further damage occurred. Just what “control” would imply, though, still seemed elusive. Both the BCOA and the UMWA seemed unwilling to budge from their respective positions.

Sporadic Progress

Administration officials began making contingency plans in case the miners rejected the deal. Wayne Horvitz, the federal official leading the negotiations, wrote to Labor Secretary Ray Marshall (who was decidedly more pro-labor than Schultze and Kahn) on March 1 to warn against the possibility of seizure legislation. The miners would not return to work under a Taft-Hartley injunction if they knew that seizure legislation was in the works and they thought they would receive a better deal under seizure than under Taft-Hartley, he argued. If Marshall decided that seizure was necessary, Horvitz said, the legislation should not spell out the specific conditions of employment that federal control would mean for the UMWA. Rather, miners should be told as little as possible about how their working conditions might compare between seizure and the proposed contract, as the uncertainty of the former might lead to resigned acceptance of the latter. Marshall agreed with this analysis, and Stuart Eizenstat, a senior domestic adviser to the president, wrote to Carter two days later to outline the consensus view. A simple Taft-Hartley injunction was the “step most likely to get coal moving immediately,” Eizenstat said, and legislation was premature since Taft-Hartley alone might end the strike. “Taft-Hartley satisfies the need for action without involving us in a legislative imbroglio and the unknown but certainly unpleasant consequences of owning the mines.”^{Footnote 25}

Furthermore, any legislation seemingly too generous to the miners, Eizenstat said, would likely generate intense controversy among (and opposition from) pro-business members of Congress. Eizenstat feared that alienating pro-business conservatives would jeopardize Carter’s other (unrelated) pieces of legislation under consideration on Capitol Hill. The administration, he said, had already exerted “great pressure” on the industry to accept a contract that it already viewed as a sellout. “We cannot credibly turn around and force them to back off even further under threat of seizure.” Eizenstat also believed that the miners could not hold out much longer, predicting that the strikers “will surely seize upon the government order as an excuse to return to the work they so desperately need.”^{Footnote 26}

Eizenstat was immediately proven wrong. On March 5, a Sunday, Press Secretary Jody Powell appeared in the White House press room to proclaim that Carter had called both a Cabinet meeting and a bipartisan meeting with congressional leadership, since the mining rank and file had voted overwhelmingly against the settlement. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, the “restrained euphoria” of the tentative settlement had transformed into a “mood of grimness” pervading the White House. Although the miners seemed to be generally satisfied with the wage provisions of the contract, many apparently objected to dropping free medical care in favor of a deductible on all medical costs, provisions implementing the operators’ demands to punish leaders of wildcat strikes, and the “strike-baby clause,” which deprived miners’ families of maternity benefits for children conceived while the strike was going on.^{Footnote 27} To the miners, preserving broad latitude to strike in the future was still much more important than an immediate resolution that would put them back to work earning paychecks. They refused to be lured with the promise of imminent relief to the detriment to their long-term bargaining position.

Relying on welfare payments and food stamps, as well as loans from relatives, many miners had apparently decided to hold out longer to get a contract they liked better, one that preserved their right to mobilize wildcat strikes when deemed necessary. Union leaders predicted “chaos and bloodshed” in the coalfields if Carter tried to invoke Taft-Hartley. As one West Virginia miner said of the prospects of forcing miners back to work, “No doubt in my mind, it’s going to cause violence.” David Forms, the former head of a UMWA local in West Virginia, told Time magazine: “You’ve got $250,000 pieces of equipment in each of these mines, and it wouldn’t take much to tear them up. I’m not making any threat. That’s just the way it is.”^{Footnote 28} The UMWA would go back to work on its own terms, and its terms only. Given the violence and sabotage that had already occurred, the accompanying threats otherwise were certainly not idle warnings.

The next day, on March 6, Carter formally invoked the law, which obligated the president to name a fact-finding panel to report on the impact of the strike before taking action. On the basis of that report, he could ask a federal court ordering the strikers back to work for an eighty-day “cooling-off period.” Taft-Hartley also required the resumption of collective bargaining. Three days later, Carter received the panel’s written report (which was a mere formality, as Carter was clearly by this point determined to force the miners back to work by any means necessary). It predictably indicated the prospect of “little chance” for prompt settlement, and Carter directed Attorney General Griffin Bell to enjoin the strike immediately. The resulting formal temporary restraining order issued by a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia directed that UMWA halt the strike and commanded that the union’s officers instruct all members to “resume normal employment.” It also ordered that the UMWA return to the collective-bargaining table “in all good faith.”^{Footnote 29}

Although the threatened violence in response to this order largely failed to materialize, it also had little immediate impact, as miners returned to the coalfields in no significant numbers. Instead, they simply ignored it. Although fines and jail terms could have been imposed on miners and union officials who sought to actively incite support for continuing the strike, the government could do nothing to punish those who simply stayed home. On March 8, Doug Huron, Senior Associate Counsel in the White House Counsel’s office, again broached the possibility of seizure legislation. “We had earlier decided to defer seizure until we had firm evidence whether the miners were returning to work under Taft-Hartley,” he noted, and “it seems relatively certain that only a small percentage will go back.”^{Footnote 30}

On the surface, the UMWA treated the order to return to work disdainfully and took steps to preserve absolute resistance to the injunction. The Christian Science Monitor told the story of Robert White, a miner from Ohley, West Virginia, who, although his wife supported their family sufficiently during the strike by working at an insurance company, simply wanted to go back to work. Although White invoked the memory of his father and grandfather in proclaiming that “I’m fighting for their beliefs and my beliefs in getting a decent contract,” he also had a more practical reason for resisting the urge to return to the mines. “I got a call saying if I went back to work, my home would be blown up and everything in it.” At a rank-and-file meeting of UMWA Local 9111 in Sesser, Illinois, Barney Beard sarcastically proclaimed that “as local president I have to ask you to go back to work.” Amid laughter at Beard’s sardonic command, one member shouted, “And we can tell you to go to hell.” On March 13, the first Monday after the injunction was ordered, fewer than a hundred of the striking one hundred and sixty thousand miners returned to the mines.^{Footnote 31}

But there were other things happening behind the UMWA’s fierce facade. That same Monday, both the coal operators and senior union officials had reported “some progress” in talks. The shift likely had something to do with the fact that the Carter administration planned to cut off food stamps for strikers, which, in another act of interunion support, drew the threat of a court action from AFL-CIO president George Meany. Many of the UMWA strikers’ savings and family support were by this point also running low, and they could hold out for only so long. Furthermore, nonunion mines, especially in the West, had been steadily increasing production to take advantage of the shortages of union coal coming out of the Southeast and the Midwest. The longer the strike went on, the UMWA was beginning to realize, the less important eastern coal would become in the long run, and thus the more the UMWA was putting its own future livelihood in danger.^{Footnote 32} The realities of the unfolding situation meant that the UMWA’s position was not as secure as its workers’ rhetoric of fierce defiance may have indicated.

The next day, negotiators for both the UMWA and the BCOA announced that they had reached agreement on a new contract proposal, one that was expected to win rank-and-file approval. The new three-year agreement would boost miners’ wages and fringe benefits by about 39 percent (significantly more than the 27 percent increase under the rejected contract, and only slightly less than the 44 percent that the miners had originally demanded). The new settlement also scaled back changes to health and pension benefits. (The rejected proposal would have instituted a deductible of $700 a year for each miner and his family, and the new one reduced it drastically to $200.) Most important for the miners, the new contract virtually eliminated the crackdowns on wildcat strikes. On the seventeenth, the Justice Department, anticipating the ratification of this new contract, asked Judge Robinson to extend the temporary restraining order for another two weeks rather than issue a final Taft-Hartley injunction, which would have cut off food stamps to strikers. This extension would allow the status quo to prevail until the scheduled March 24 ratification vote.^{Footnote 33}

Though the Carter administration’s key players worried that they might be in for yet another surprise from the confrontational miners, the UMWA rank and file voted 57 percent in favor of the agreement on the twenty-fourth, effectively ending the strike. By March 28, the Los Angeles Times happily reported that miners were returning to work and operations “were beginning to return to normal.” Other periodicals blamed the miners for the crisis and took a more pessimistic tone. A Washington Post headline spoke of Carter’s relief at the strike’s end, but worried that the final agreement did not contain earlier industry demands for curbs on wildcat strikes and other “labor-stabilizing” measures. Though the immediate strike had ended, the paper implied, the possibility for future upheavals was still very much present. Other observers agreed. “Restlessness” within the UMWA, the Christian Science Monitor opined, “could continue to block operations in the hills and tunnels where coal is dug” and “where the nation’s energy future lies in rich, black veins.”^{Footnote 34}

Carter and his staff seem to deserve some of the blame for the duration and severity of the strike. As John Dumbrell has noted, Carter was a “populist” in one sense of the term: thinking of himself as “tribune of the people,” he saw himself as a champion fighting against “special interests” and “inside deals.”^{Footnote 35} Wary of concentrated power in any form, he considered the BCOA, an alliance of private businesses, and the UMWA, an organized group of well over one hundred thousand miners, as each a “special interest” in its own right.^{Footnote 36} He was thus reluctant to intervene on behalf of one or the other in their disagreements, instead preferring to continually urge both to return to the bargaining table after every break-off in negotiations. Shortly before taking office, President-elect Carter and Ray Marshall had decided that, in the likely event of a coal strike, collective bargaining should be allowed to run its course and coercive government intervention would be only a last resort. But there was an obvious downside to this strategy. By the time Carter threatened to invoke Taft-Hartley, the miners had already prepared themselves for an extended struggle.

Historian Burton Kaufman describes the strike as an event “over which [Carter] had little or no control.”^{Footnote 37} To be fair, the government had played a minimal role in coal bargaining ever since Truman’s last invocation of Taft-Hartley in 1950. Yet Carter had failed to anticipate that the intractable disagreement between the BCOA and the UMWA over wildcat strikes, combined with the precarious position of embattled UMWA chief Miller, might lead to a prolonged and protracted battle. It did. The coal replacement plan was such an integral part of his energy security plan that Carter’s apparent cluelessness about the UMWA’s internal strife brings his political acumen into question, especially when his own domestic policy staff had specifically warned him in mid-1977 about the possibility that the fractured UMWA might affect his coal-conversion plans.

The strike has significant historiographical implications. Existing scholarship on this strike casts it as yet another episode in the UMWA militancy that began in the early years of the twentieth century, a discrete point in a decades-long stream of coal miner violence and defiance.^{Footnote 38} Such a broad chronological approach ignores the way in which the 1973 oil crisis (and Carter’s engagement with it) affected the way Carter approached the strike. Carter’s troubles in getting the miners back to work made him appear politically weak and contributed to his declining public image of competence, as analysts of the strike have already argued.^{Footnote 39} But Carter’s desire to improve his standing in the electorate’s eyes was not the only reason for his frantic approach to the strike’s resolution. The deteriorating relationship between the UMWA leadership, miners, and the BCOA also served, according to the administration, as a significant roadblock in the way of securing the nation’s long-term energy future. Even if nonunion coal received greater emphasis going forward, the UMWA, still mining a majority of the nation’s coal supply, would play a significant role for years to come.^{Footnote 40}

The strike thus revises our understanding of labor history in the late 1970s. A sizable body of historiography has cast the 1970s as a period in which the political power of organized labor fell off precipitously, owing largely to the United States’s decreasing dependence on its manufacturing base, as well as corruption and malfeasance by union leadership. Judith Stein, for example, has recently argued that national Democrats in the late 1970s abandoned their direct support of organized labor, “replac[ing] the assumptions that capital and labor should prosper together with an ethic claiming that the promotion of capital will eventually benefit labor.”^{Footnote 41} At the same time, public opinion turned against the perceived greed and corruption of union members, symbolized most viscerally by the shocking murder by UMWA boss Tony Boyle of his rival Jock Yablonski (and his wife and daughter) in 1969.^{Footnote 42}

Certainly, in some ways, this narrative is accurate. Political leaders, including the historically labor-friendly Democrats, paid less attention to the demands of labor’s highest-ranking officials in the 1970s than they had in decades before. Much scholarship on Carter’s labor policy focuses on his deteriorating relationships with AFL-CIO head George Meany and United Auto Workers chief Leonard Woodcock due to the president’s perceived anemic labor initiatives.^{Footnote 43} But turning attention to how Carter’s labor policies intersected with his signature domestic priority of energy security yields a different view of labor’s agency in the Carter years. As the UMWA strike shows, simply because labor leaders wielded less influence in Washington’s halls of power did not mean that the rank and file did not hold alternative ways of making their dissatisfactions known. In this era, the United Mine Workers of America paid little attention to the wishes of its ostensible spokesman Arnold Miller anyway. Its acute ability to disrupt a major domestic priority of the incumbent administration must give pause to analyses that cast the early 1970s as the effective terminus of organized labor’s power in American politics. While UMWA’s leader Miller found himself marginalized within his own organization and ignored by high-ranking federal officials, the rank-and-file miners proved feisty and combative opponents for both the coal mining companies and the Carter administration alike.^{Footnote 44} Even though scholars have ably documented the deteriorating public image of unions and the growing perception that they were corrupt and dishonest, these developments thus seemed to have little actual impact on the substantial political and economic power of the UMWA.