June 18, 2024 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, hear the story of American immigrants - men and women - who helped haul up standards of decent work from dark coal seams beneath Kansas.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we're back with our American stories. For many of us,
some of our best memories come from listening to the
stories told by family members who have lived life much
longer than us. For Linda Canol, one of those such
stories centered down a rabbit hole to discover a riveting
and quite overlooked piece of American history. Here's Linda sharing
(00:32):
the little known story of the Amazon Army of Southeast Kansas.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Growing up in Southeast Kansas, a good deal of my
early history education came from the stories that my grandmothers
would tell about their journey from the old world to
the new. They were often full of adventure. They would
interweave the difficult in the tragic a lot of times
with the humorous and the delightful. And like the quill
(01:06):
pieces that they would piece together, they connected their personal
stories with what was going on nationally and locally around
them during the coal mining days. And as a young girl,
I look forward to hearing about these stories in the
Kansas history books, and so in my eighth grade history
book in the mid sixties, I looked for the stories
(01:26):
that I grew up hearing, and I didn't find anything.
To my surprise, there was nothing mentioned on coal mining.
Jeane de Grisson was also enthralled with the stories that
he heard as the son of a coal miner. Jane
was a renowned special collections curator at Pittsburgh State University,
(01:46):
and he wrote a book called Goats House, and then
it had poems and stories of the Cherokee and Crawford
County coal camps in the coal fields. And Gene gave
me his book and kind of highlighted a poem that
he had written for his mother. He clements. It was
called Alien Women. So I happened to have this poem
with me when I was visiting and having lunch with
(02:07):
my eighty eight year old grandmother, Maggie Belliza Onelio, and
so I read her the poem and it was about
this woman's march. And she turned around and manufacturily said
while she was stirring up a sauce for the RIGATONI
she said, well, Linda, I was in that march. And
I said, well, no, no, no, you never told me. And
she laughed and she said, well, you never asked. And
(02:28):
so from that point on she kind of gave me
her recollections of this really amazing event. And what I
found was a treasure trove of stuff buried just beneath
the surface of things, basically having to find the history
out ourselves, going right to its sources or its roots.
And so what I found was a fascinating story of
(02:49):
how we started the coal mining business here. The first
whole chef mine was actually discovered in eighteen sixty six
in Cherokee County, but the real national supplier of coal
when it became big, was in eighteen seventy six when
Franklin Plater was approached in Joplin by two leaden Zeke
(03:11):
developers and they wanted him to build a railroad, his
railroad from their lead and zinc fields through the coal
fields of Southeast Kansas. And Franklin thought that was a
pretty good idea. But you know, in order to do that,
they needed laborers, you know, to dig out this call.
So it was Franklin Plater's idea to begin a concerted
(03:32):
effort to bring cheap labor really from Europe. And soon
he developed these beautiful broadsides that would say Paradise on Earth,
come to Southeast Kansas and mine coal. Those broadsides or
posters were taken through all the steamship companies. They took
them on little villages. They tacked them on the square
village walls, and soon huge waves of immigrants came to Kansas.
(03:57):
From eighteen sixty to nineteen sixteen, we had an immense
amount of people come to Kansas to the prairie raally
to mine coal. Included with that group was my grandfather,
my maternal grandfather, John Pollin. He was from Austria. He
was seventeen years old, and he came over here by
(04:19):
ship through Amsterdam across the Atlantic or which they called
the Big Pond. Now, when the immigrants traveled at that time,
the late eighteen hundreds in the early nineteen hundreds, a
lot of times that steamships would be half sail ships
and half steam, and so therefore it could take weeks
to get across the ocean. The immigrants who came over
(04:41):
on steerage basically were crowded into as as small as
space as only two feet between you and your next
patron on the ship. It was a rather rough and
tumble kind of waited to be transported across the ocean.
My grandfather came to Ellis Island, like so many other
immigrants did. They also came into Pennsylvania and some even
(05:04):
into New Orleans, but he came through Ellis Island. He
at that time was given what appeared to be like
dog tags, but they were, you know, a little necklace
with a which showed exactly where he was supposed to go,
which coal companies he had been assigned to, and those
were in Southeast Kansas while he was at Ellis Island.
(05:25):
In order to make his name a little bit more understandable,
he dropped a V in his last name, so he
became Paul and that way, and a lot of immigrants
would do that, they would change their names. In fact,
my grandmother Maggie, when I was interviewing her, she was
one of the marchers later and I said, well, Grandma, said, now,
(05:45):
is your real name Marga Reid or Margaret And she said,
well neither. She said, Linda, it's Dominica. And I said, well, Grandma,
you've never told me that, and she said, oh. When
we went to school the first day, my brother Dominic
and and I came home crying to my Popeye, and
I said, Papa, we don't want to go back to
school because the teacher cannot spell or pronounce our names.
(06:08):
So he said, don't worry tomorrow you go to school,
you're Maggie and you're tom At Geez. She said. That's
how they were for the rest of their lives. My
grandfather then would be picked up and taken to Golfield.
He would mind for forty years, and he would be
a Franklin resident his entire life, and he would never
see another member of his family again, although he did
(06:30):
send letters and he would send money to them. Syrian, Bohemian,
Scandinavian and English could be heard around Market Square at
Fort Scott as early as eighteen eighty five. This settlement
of such diverse people from so many nationalities would really
give credence to the fact that this was the Americanization
(06:52):
process in action, and the melting pot was alive and
well dismissed by some, but it was operating here in
Southeast Kansas. More than fifty nationalities would immigrate here from Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Yugoslavia,
and the British Isles, Greece, Canada. I could name many,
(07:12):
many more that came here to mine coal. And as
a rule, the immigrants who came to these camps didn't
stay in their own little segregated little pods they mixed in,
so you would have these mixed of nationalities in all
these different camps. There were hundreds of camps by the way,
names like the Yale, Chicken Ridge, red Onion, Dunkirk, Radley, Papeldo,
(07:37):
West Mineral, Chicapeae Weir, and in scores of other camps.
So at one time the inhabitants of Southeast Kansas would
mine a third of the nation's coal, and from that
coal would be smelted lead and zinc or in such
quantities the Kansas became an industrial giant, second only to
the nation of Belgium in the production of smelter. The
(08:01):
immigrants who came over here did not find the eaten
described on the broadsides. However, the job was brutal. You
went to work before the sun came up ten to
twelve hours on your hands and needs, or lying on
your side. The Cherokee Crawford coal scene was only two
(08:22):
to three feet thick, so the men had to do that.
They had to work on their sides or lie on
their knees. First of all, they had to dynamite the
rock to get to the coal, and then they had
to pick it by hand with their picks and take
that resource then and either push it with carts or
it would be pulled by donkeys to the hole, and
(08:43):
the risk were real. It was well known that the
mules that lived underground and would pull the carts of
coal up the hole were treated as more valuable to
the company than the men.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Well.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
The saying was, you could always get another miner, but
well trained well, they were expensive and hard to come by.
Helpless mining families would lose their husbands, sons, brothers, sweethearts,
sometimes the first day they reported to work. Mining accidents
and injuries just happened recurrently. This was the nature of
(09:17):
the job. People would say goodbye to their loved ones
in the morning, sincerely not knowing if they'd see them again.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
And you've been listening to Linda Kanol and she's been
sharing this story, the little known story of the coal
mining region of Southeast Kansas. Fifty nationalities had come to
this part of Kansas to do this while backbreaking grinding work.
Wherever mining occurs, it's backbreaking and its grinding. When we
(09:47):
come back, more of the story of the coal mining
country in Southeast Kansas. The story of the Amazon Army
here on our American stories, and we returned to our
(10:10):
American stories and to Linda Canol sharing the history of
coal mining in America and in Southeast Kansas, and the
story of a stirring mass march led by the wives
of these miners. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
By nineteen forty, over one hundred mines and over ten
thousand men would deliver eight and a half million tons
of coal, a third the nation's total. Considering the working conditions,
it was not surprising that Southeast Kansas became unionized early
and decided to fight the coal companies, not just in
matters of wages and working conditions, but also in such
(10:49):
things as patronage at the company's store. You had to
buy everything at the company store, your tools, your dynamite,
your clothes, your food, and they'd charge it twice had
of beans would cost you anywhere else. Now. The mine
beans who invested in here were many. At one time,
Crawford County had more multi millionaires per capita than any
(11:10):
county of the nations. But Pittsburgh, Kansas, and these surrounding
comtowns were booming. Pittsburgh had five major railheads and an
electric passenger streetcar line that came out to all directions
and all these small towns, you know, every twenty minutes.
Some of these camptowns, including Franklin, had their own post offices, hotels,
sometimes picture shows. You know, life was really booming, but
(11:32):
the miners were not feeling the wealth of that. Not
only was it dangerous, but it also became unattainable or untenable,
if you will, just to exist in this situation. And
the women would listen always for those four long whistles
that would pierce the air saying that you know, there
might have been a disaster in the mines. You know,
(11:55):
these women, their physical labor, the amount of labor they
had to do was more like our colonial sisters. Then
it was like the flatfirs of the twenties. When they
washed this filthy black clothing. They would almost on a
weekly basis, putting new padding into the knees of their
men's trousers because of the wear and tear that they
had to spend so much time on the ground. In fact,
(12:17):
when men got together and socialized, if they had worked
in the mines a long time, they tended to just
sit down on their haunches and talk, just like if
they were down in the mine. They had spend so
much time in that position. They you know, they fixed
the men's dinner buckets. They had to carry the water.
They were lucky if they had a while close to them.
They had to carry their coal. You had to buy
(12:39):
your own call. It was called house coal. They were
really appropriately called shacks because the companies owned them, and
they were rickety things. They were very drafting. You know,
they could take a house if they wanted to move
to another shaft or down the road. They just wouldn't
move these houses for these For these immigrants, the rent
was like between eight and ten dollars a month, so
(12:59):
they they were small affairs that were being charged quite
a bit. Now when you look at comparison to what
a miner would make at that time, they were making
about a dollar sixty for a ten hour shift. So
that was the out of balance situation that these people
were faced with, and so they were quite ready to
(13:20):
take a stand and try to say, you know, can
this be a little bit more fair. There are few
places on Earth where the struggle between labor and capital
were more intense than in Southeast Kansas during the twentieth century.
The miners were in a constant battle at this time
to achieve workers' rights, and it was pretty much always
(13:40):
against insturmountable odds. Labor strikes were numerous, and so in
nineteen nineteen one of the worst probably strikes that happened
where even college boys from like Ku were called down
and the National Guard in order to take the places
of these striking miners. And at that time the Kansas
Ledges made national news by saying that they were going
(14:03):
to pass, which they did, the Court of Industrial Relations Act,
which outlawed strikes you couldn't strike. The climax, though, occurred
in nineteen twenty one, when the colorful and pretty much
controversial president of the miners here in District fourteen, Alexander Howitt,
called a work stoppage over three hundred men because they
(14:25):
were not paying this young worker. How it went out
anyway with his miners, and he was immediately jailed and
they disbanded District fourteen officers, and how it was ready
to take a stand, he said, not one ton of coal.
She'll be mined by the miners of Kansas until this
Industrial Court Act is scratched from the statue book and
(14:46):
that's where it lay how It in jail, and then
months would pass, and of course people who were starving
in the first place, they were getting no help from anybody,
you know. All the miners who were out on strike
money became. Most of the men wanted to be loyal
to how It, but had to get back to work,
you know, because of their starving families. So by December
(15:09):
of that year, tensions were high. Teachers would report that
there was a lot of fighting between striking miners and
those families and the boys that you know, where their
fathers were going back to work. A harsh winner at
the stage for what was to come. Sunday, December the eleventh,
nineteen twenty one, five hundred women appeared at the Franklin
(15:33):
Union Hall and decided to state their case that they
were the wives of the loyal union men of Kansas,
and they were against the Industrial Chord Act, and they
wanted to stand by their men in this endeavor that
they were working for a good cause. They decided what
they would do is that they would get pit buckets.
They would sing and drum on pit buckets and go
(15:55):
to every single mind chap and stop the scab workers
from working. They decided to meet the next day. March
Or Mary Scubitz, was a woman who was from Slovenia.
She spoke five languages, and Mary wrote a journal. In
her entry December thirteenth, nineteen twenty one, she talked about
(16:15):
making her way to the front of the crowd because
she saw the sheriff there and law enforcement, and to
tell them, hey, you know, we want you to stay
here in case there is any violence. But all we
want to do is just to talk to these men
and convince them that they're doing the wrong thing. We
want them to be with us and be true, good
union men. But Mary said, for the most part, they
had large flags, these fifteen foot long and six foot
(16:37):
wide flags. Just for the most part, we would just
lay those down in front of the entrance, and men
would walk by her in their cars. They would honor
the fact that they weren't going to work. And so
she was very proud that that first day, she said,
no arrests remain. Despite the straightforward nature of this event,
the newspapers across the nation seemed to construct the narrative
(16:58):
of this margin strikingly different ways. The New York Times,
the Tapeka State Journal, the Pittsburgh Daily Headlight. They really
stressed that this was a very not only unusual, but
of very violent protests from the sides of the women.
Newspaper headlines were all towards using military terminology Amazon Army.
New York Times dubbed them that, and that particular nickname
(17:21):
went all the way across to the l A Herald.
It made national news. There was a picture in the
Tapeka State Journal of a young woman sitting in a
car with a flag, and the headline would read General
Annie Stovitch, the Joan arc of the Amazon Army. While
even Bayonets couldn't stop these highly temperamental foreign women. Actually,
(17:44):
that particular girl was a fourteen year old young girl
just having me sitting in the car, and she was
with her mother. A Wichita newspaper described them as using
teeth and claws like Tigris's. They called them guerrillas terrorists.
The Kansas City, Kansas said that they were actually using
(18:05):
dyna white and igniting minds, you know, I mean, it
was sensationalism, but this just kind of took a life
of its own. Mary on December of the fourteenth, five am,
she said, oh my goodness, eight and ten women now
from different camps war coming in. She said, No one's left,
and everybody has kind of joined in. These are American women.
They're all different nationalities and they're all there. Ethnic differences
(18:28):
don't seem to at all figure in here. They all
seem to be united in this. The next day worth
six thousand strong, she says, And it's miles long now
and we're getting ready to march. Mary's last entry into
her diary is quiet for a day or two. Then
the militia came.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And you've been listening to Linda Kanoel tell the story
of the Southeast coal mines and the Amazon Army, and
now you know what that term means. One hundred minds,
ten thousand men, one third of the nation's total coal production,
and of course the usual problems that came with coal mining.
And five hundred women appeared at the Franklin Union Hall,
(19:12):
letting the bosses know and management know that the ladies
weren't happy, but they were there to protect their families
and their husbands. When we come back, more of the
story of the Amazon Army of Kansas here on our
American stories. And we returned to our American stories and
(19:40):
to Linda Canol sharing the story of the women who
newspapers of the nineteen twenties labeled the Amazon Army. When
we last left off, the militia had been sent to
get these women under control. Back to Linda with the
rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Women were told that the militia was coming. These women
said they would just stand in front of the militia.
They wanted their kids to have a little bit more
food to eat and something warm to wear, and they
would stand there and fight the militia. Mary said, you know,
cooler heads needed to prevail. And on December fifteenth, three
days after the disturbances began, three troops of Kansas National
(20:22):
Guard Cavalry came pounding down the county roads from Topeka,
and they were stationed you know a certain places like Ringo, Franklin,
and Wallberry. The city of Lawrence would send a machine
gun detachment. They brought a couple of machine gunners down
for that. The local county sheriff decided to deputize a
thousand men in the area in case the Amazons were
(20:42):
going to come to Pittsburgh. It didn't seem like, you know,
it disturbed of the enthusiasm of the women, and at
that point the arrest started happening. There were all until
forty nine women whom the sheriff would arrest on unlawful
assembly sault. Among those would be Mary Scubas and her
mother Julia, and she'd be arrested a couple of times.
(21:06):
Interestingly enough about the arrest reports, they were given charge
seven hundred and fifty dollars instead of the normal average
rate of two hundred. The warrants would go out to
the husbands. They never went to the to the women themselves.
The warrants would go to the husbands. The husbands have
to take them in and they usually would do it
late in the afternoon, so the women would have to
(21:26):
spend the night in jail. But my favorite newspaper article
was three women actually got a bond set at a
thousand instead of that even the high seven fifty. And
when the reporter asked the judge, well, why or honor,
why such a high you know, you know bond, and
he's the judge as well. It's the alleged seriousness of
(21:47):
their offense. So the reporters said, what is that your honor? Well,
for using profane language against the union boss at one
of the local mind shafts. So you could see the
out of balance of power of how much their actions
were so out of sync with what society expected of them.
They couldn't even cust somebody, and they were considered you know, evens.
(22:11):
I mean, that was what those women were charged with.
It was funny almost some of the newspaper articles. One
of them. I mean, here they are, you know, they're
they're they're chastising these women and calling them names, and
they say, oh, in this I forgot the Italian woman's name,
but oh, she's very well dressed and she seems like
she's an important part. And they just talked about how
nicely she was dressed. But then then they would go
(22:33):
back to saying, you know, they were heathens, and they
were guerrilla fighters. They were, I mean they really weren't,
you know, they had no weapons. The county attorneys were
exasperated because there wasn't one man who came forward, not
one see they did, who would press any charges. They
did this all on their own, you know, like okay,
unlawful assembly. But there wasn't one guy out there that said, oh, yeah,
(22:57):
you know, they really treated me badly, very quietly. The
mine Inspector. The State Mine Inspector issued a report, never
really got too much press, but in it it said that,
you know, there were three thousand working miners prior to
the Amazon's march, and it really after it was launched
(23:19):
there were less than seven hundreds. So it looked like
the march really did kind of make a difference that
that really wasn't known. Victory for how it and victory
for them would happen in about a year when the
US Supreme Court would strike down the Industrial Court Act,
primarily because the Compulsory Arbitration Act, you know, that was
(23:42):
that was unconstitutional. You had the right to strike, but
that wasn't the case really in that January thirteenth at
that time, right then after this march defeated both by
the local opposition in the union, how it ordered everybody
back to work and you know, we failed, but you
got to go back to work. When the when the
(24:02):
men came back, they were charged a ten dollars initiation fee.
They had no voice or vote. They'd never get a
voice or vote in the union. Again, that was where
they stood. The state Attorney General issued an edit that
if there was work available, you had to work and
if you didn't, if you did not comply with that law,
then you would have ten to thirty days of hard labor.
(24:25):
So that's where the situation was. Right after this, there
was a lot of angst in the air when we
look at this symbolically. You know, the women used the
American flag because they were they thought they were American citizens.
Most of them at this point were American citizens, or
they were naturalized or whatever, and they you know, they
(24:46):
banned it together. And you know, it's a little sensitive
issue because just right at nineteen twenty, it was when
the nineteenth Amendment was passed, you know, they just got
that particular right to vote. They did go to their
weapons for red pepper, and they by emptying dinner buck,
they wanted to send the message that we are now
taking away the food and everything we'd always given. We
feel this is entirely unfair. These immigrants faced poverty, discrimination,
(25:12):
and even death, and they as a group, they fought
for their rights and so many of the social reforms
that we enjoy today, like the eight hour work day,
equal pay for equal work, minority rights in child labor,
we're all fought for early on. And you know, in
in Southeast Kansas, Mary Scubats. Mary had one son, Joe,
(25:36):
Joe Scubets. Joe would become a US Congressman. I mean,
he was well educated. Mary believed, like so many of
these people in education, we still have a tradition of
honoring education. And Joe graduated from Pittsburgh State. He went
on to Washburne Law School. He graduated finally from Georgetown
Law School. He became a US Congressman. Joe as part
(25:58):
of the eighty eighth Congress, was possible for the Black
Lung Reform Act, which gave a lot of these miners
than the healthcare that they needed they hadn't had prior.
Joe also worked on the Mind and Health and Mind
Safety Act again to try to make conditions in the
minds you know, of course a lot better. Reclamation Act.
(26:20):
He supported the Kansas Reclamation Act because we had forty
two thousand acres of our land disturbed on the top
from all the you know, our big machinery that was
being used in after the mines dried up down below,
and you can see the results of those things. My grandmother,
when when she was about ninety years old and talked
(26:43):
about some of these times that she had told me
about years. Hence she said, you know, without struggle, there
is no progress. And she said, you just have to
keep going forward. She had a very much a positive spirit,
which most of those people did, positive hard work spirit.
But you know, it was just such a risky life.
(27:05):
I mean, you know you had to you really just
had to have a lot of hope, you know. And
what the hope I think was was for their children.
How those women came together like they did, think about
with no they have telephones, most of them did have,
of course, to afford a newspaper even I mean you
(27:25):
know Late's share some snoozepaper. How did that happen that
you said? I think it was just I think it
was that from camp to camp, it had to be
you know what I mean, pretty soon they were getting
more and more. You know, months went by. How it
was in jail, and so that was kind of it.
I think it was just the the anguish of it
(27:48):
and the unfairness of it got to them and they
just started, I guess communicating. Because how that happened really
even today, I don't think you can get unless it's
a football camp. Maybe you know, I have to get
a thousand or a five hundred thousand people together. I
mean wow. I like I said, there was nothing in
the history books when I was growing up about are
(28:10):
coal mining. When I came back from Chicago in nineteen
eighty to teach teach seventh grade history, now Kansas history,
I checked out the seventh grade history books and there
was nothing about Southeast Kansas history on coal mining. Ten
years later to nothing. Two thousand and five, I got
(28:31):
a message, a short note from the Kansas Historical Society.
They were coming out with a new book called Kansas Journeys,
and in that there was a whole section on Southeast
Kansas coal mining and a paragraph on the Amazon Army.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
And a terrific job by the production editing and storytelling
by our own Katrina Hind and Madison Derricott. And a
special thanks to Linda Canole who gave us a beautiful rendition,
a beautiful glimpse into the coal mining country of Kansas.
And by the way, the women who organized on behalf
(29:08):
of their husbands fought on behalf of their husbands for
basic voting rights and free speech rights of workers. And
this union history has a long one in America. There's
some good things, some bad things you decide. We don't
get into that here on this show. But my goodness,
these women were organizing and helping their husbands organize on
(29:28):
behalf of their families and for better lives. And my goodness,
the National Guard was called out on these women. Heck,
in Lawrence, Kansas, we had machine guns ready for these
tough ladies, and they prevailed. And by the way, let's
remember that law that was passed in Kansas that essentially
said union members can't organize. Well, the Supreme Court whacked
(29:51):
that and put it down, and that actually was a
good thing. And I don't think you're going to get
many people to argue about that. A little bit of
history here on our American Stories, Kansas history, coal mining history,
women's history, and so much more here on our American
Stories
And we're back with our American stories. For many of us,
some of our best memories come from listening to the
stories told by family members who have lived life much
longer than us. For Linda Canol, one of those such
stories centered down a rabbit hole to discover a riveting
and quite overlooked piece of American history. Here's Linda sharing
(00:32):
the little known story of the Amazon Army of Southeast Kansas.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Growing up in Southeast Kansas, a good deal of my
early history education came from the stories that my grandmothers
would tell about their journey from the old world to
the new. They were often full of adventure. They would
interweave the difficult in the tragic a lot of times
with the humorous and the delightful. And like the quill
(01:06):
pieces that they would piece together, they connected their personal
stories with what was going on nationally and locally around
them during the coal mining days. And as a young girl,
I look forward to hearing about these stories in the
Kansas history books, and so in my eighth grade history
book in the mid sixties, I looked for the stories
(01:26):
that I grew up hearing, and I didn't find anything.
To my surprise, there was nothing mentioned on coal mining.
Jeane de Grisson was also enthralled with the stories that
he heard as the son of a coal miner. Jane
was a renowned special collections curator at Pittsburgh State University,
(01:46):
and he wrote a book called Goats House, and then
it had poems and stories of the Cherokee and Crawford
County coal camps in the coal fields. And Gene gave
me his book and kind of highlighted a poem that
he had written for his mother. He clements. It was
called Alien Women. So I happened to have this poem
with me when I was visiting and having lunch with
(02:07):
my eighty eight year old grandmother, Maggie Belliza Onelio, and
so I read her the poem and it was about
this woman's march. And she turned around and manufacturily said
while she was stirring up a sauce for the RIGATONI
she said, well, Linda, I was in that march. And
I said, well, no, no, no, you never told me. And
she laughed and she said, well, you never asked. And
(02:28):
so from that point on she kind of gave me
her recollections of this really amazing event. And what I
found was a treasure trove of stuff buried just beneath
the surface of things, basically having to find the history
out ourselves, going right to its sources or its roots.
And so what I found was a fascinating story of
(02:49):
how we started the coal mining business here. The first
whole chef mine was actually discovered in eighteen sixty six
in Cherokee County, but the real national supplier of coal
when it became big, was in eighteen seventy six when
Franklin Plater was approached in Joplin by two leaden Zeke
(03:11):
developers and they wanted him to build a railroad, his
railroad from their lead and zinc fields through the coal
fields of Southeast Kansas. And Franklin thought that was a
pretty good idea. But you know, in order to do that,
they needed laborers, you know, to dig out this call.
So it was Franklin Plater's idea to begin a concerted
(03:32):
effort to bring cheap labor really from Europe. And soon
he developed these beautiful broadsides that would say Paradise on Earth,
come to Southeast Kansas and mine coal. Those broadsides or
posters were taken through all the steamship companies. They took
them on little villages. They tacked them on the square
village walls, and soon huge waves of immigrants came to Kansas.
(03:57):
From eighteen sixty to nineteen sixteen, we had an immense
amount of people come to Kansas to the prairie raally
to mine coal. Included with that group was my grandfather,
my maternal grandfather, John Pollin. He was from Austria. He
was seventeen years old, and he came over here by
(04:19):
ship through Amsterdam across the Atlantic or which they called
the Big Pond. Now, when the immigrants traveled at that time,
the late eighteen hundreds in the early nineteen hundreds, a
lot of times that steamships would be half sail ships
and half steam, and so therefore it could take weeks
to get across the ocean. The immigrants who came over
(04:41):
on steerage basically were crowded into as as small as
space as only two feet between you and your next
patron on the ship. It was a rather rough and
tumble kind of waited to be transported across the ocean.
My grandfather came to Ellis Island, like so many other
immigrants did. They also came into Pennsylvania and some even
(05:04):
into New Orleans, but he came through Ellis Island. He
at that time was given what appeared to be like
dog tags, but they were, you know, a little necklace
with a which showed exactly where he was supposed to go,
which coal companies he had been assigned to, and those
were in Southeast Kansas while he was at Ellis Island.
(05:25):
In order to make his name a little bit more understandable,
he dropped a V in his last name, so he
became Paul and that way, and a lot of immigrants
would do that, they would change their names. In fact,
my grandmother Maggie, when I was interviewing her, she was
one of the marchers later and I said, well, Grandma, said, now,
(05:45):
is your real name Marga Reid or Margaret And she said,
well neither. She said, Linda, it's Dominica. And I said, well, Grandma,
you've never told me that, and she said, oh. When
we went to school the first day, my brother Dominic
and and I came home crying to my Popeye, and
I said, Papa, we don't want to go back to
school because the teacher cannot spell or pronounce our names.
(06:08):
So he said, don't worry tomorrow you go to school,
you're Maggie and you're tom At Geez. She said. That's
how they were for the rest of their lives. My
grandfather then would be picked up and taken to Golfield.
He would mind for forty years, and he would be
a Franklin resident his entire life, and he would never
see another member of his family again, although he did
(06:30):
send letters and he would send money to them. Syrian, Bohemian,
Scandinavian and English could be heard around Market Square at
Fort Scott as early as eighteen eighty five. This settlement
of such diverse people from so many nationalities would really
give credence to the fact that this was the Americanization
(06:52):
process in action, and the melting pot was alive and
well dismissed by some, but it was operating here in
Southeast Kansas. More than fifty nationalities would immigrate here from Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Yugoslavia,
and the British Isles, Greece, Canada. I could name many,
(07:12):
many more that came here to mine coal. And as
a rule, the immigrants who came to these camps didn't
stay in their own little segregated little pods they mixed in,
so you would have these mixed of nationalities in all
these different camps. There were hundreds of camps by the way,
names like the Yale, Chicken Ridge, red Onion, Dunkirk, Radley, Papeldo,
(07:37):
West Mineral, Chicapeae Weir, and in scores of other camps.
So at one time the inhabitants of Southeast Kansas would
mine a third of the nation's coal, and from that
coal would be smelted lead and zinc or in such
quantities the Kansas became an industrial giant, second only to
the nation of Belgium in the production of smelter. The
(08:01):
immigrants who came over here did not find the eaten
described on the broadsides. However, the job was brutal. You
went to work before the sun came up ten to
twelve hours on your hands and needs, or lying on
your side. The Cherokee Crawford coal scene was only two
(08:22):
to three feet thick, so the men had to do that.
They had to work on their sides or lie on
their knees. First of all, they had to dynamite the
rock to get to the coal, and then they had
to pick it by hand with their picks and take
that resource then and either push it with carts or
it would be pulled by donkeys to the hole, and
(08:43):
the risk were real. It was well known that the
mules that lived underground and would pull the carts of
coal up the hole were treated as more valuable to
the company than the men.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Well.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
The saying was, you could always get another miner, but
well trained well, they were expensive and hard to come by.
Helpless mining families would lose their husbands, sons, brothers, sweethearts,
sometimes the first day they reported to work. Mining accidents
and injuries just happened recurrently. This was the nature of
(09:17):
the job. People would say goodbye to their loved ones
in the morning, sincerely not knowing if they'd see them again.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
And you've been listening to Linda Kanol and she's been
sharing this story, the little known story of the coal
mining region of Southeast Kansas. Fifty nationalities had come to
this part of Kansas to do this while backbreaking grinding work.
Wherever mining occurs, it's backbreaking and its grinding. When we
(09:47):
come back, more of the story of the coal mining
country in Southeast Kansas. The story of the Amazon Army
here on our American stories, and we returned to our
(10:10):
American stories and to Linda Canol sharing the history of
coal mining in America and in Southeast Kansas, and the
story of a stirring mass march led by the wives
of these miners. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
By nineteen forty, over one hundred mines and over ten
thousand men would deliver eight and a half million tons
of coal, a third the nation's total. Considering the working conditions,
it was not surprising that Southeast Kansas became unionized early
and decided to fight the coal companies, not just in
matters of wages and working conditions, but also in such
(10:49):
things as patronage at the company's store. You had to
buy everything at the company store, your tools, your dynamite,
your clothes, your food, and they'd charge it twice had
of beans would cost you anywhere else. Now. The mine
beans who invested in here were many. At one time,
Crawford County had more multi millionaires per capita than any
(11:10):
county of the nations. But Pittsburgh, Kansas, and these surrounding
comtowns were booming. Pittsburgh had five major railheads and an
electric passenger streetcar line that came out to all directions
and all these small towns, you know, every twenty minutes.
Some of these camptowns, including Franklin, had their own post offices, hotels,
sometimes picture shows. You know, life was really booming, but
(11:32):
the miners were not feeling the wealth of that. Not
only was it dangerous, but it also became unattainable or untenable,
if you will, just to exist in this situation. And
the women would listen always for those four long whistles
that would pierce the air saying that you know, there
might have been a disaster in the mines. You know,
(11:55):
these women, their physical labor, the amount of labor they
had to do was more like our colonial sisters. Then
it was like the flatfirs of the twenties. When they
washed this filthy black clothing. They would almost on a
weekly basis, putting new padding into the knees of their
men's trousers because of the wear and tear that they
had to spend so much time on the ground. In fact,
(12:17):
when men got together and socialized, if they had worked
in the mines a long time, they tended to just
sit down on their haunches and talk, just like if
they were down in the mine. They had spend so
much time in that position. They you know, they fixed
the men's dinner buckets. They had to carry the water.
They were lucky if they had a while close to them.
They had to carry their coal. You had to buy
(12:39):
your own call. It was called house coal. They were
really appropriately called shacks because the companies owned them, and
they were rickety things. They were very drafting. You know,
they could take a house if they wanted to move
to another shaft or down the road. They just wouldn't
move these houses for these For these immigrants, the rent
was like between eight and ten dollars a month, so
(12:59):
they they were small affairs that were being charged quite
a bit. Now when you look at comparison to what
a miner would make at that time, they were making
about a dollar sixty for a ten hour shift. So
that was the out of balance situation that these people
were faced with, and so they were quite ready to
(13:20):
take a stand and try to say, you know, can
this be a little bit more fair. There are few
places on Earth where the struggle between labor and capital
were more intense than in Southeast Kansas during the twentieth century.
The miners were in a constant battle at this time
to achieve workers' rights, and it was pretty much always
(13:40):
against insturmountable odds. Labor strikes were numerous, and so in
nineteen nineteen one of the worst probably strikes that happened
where even college boys from like Ku were called down
and the National Guard in order to take the places
of these striking miners. And at that time the Kansas
Ledges made national news by saying that they were going
(14:03):
to pass, which they did, the Court of Industrial Relations Act,
which outlawed strikes you couldn't strike. The climax, though, occurred
in nineteen twenty one, when the colorful and pretty much
controversial president of the miners here in District fourteen, Alexander Howitt,
called a work stoppage over three hundred men because they
(14:25):
were not paying this young worker. How it went out
anyway with his miners, and he was immediately jailed and
they disbanded District fourteen officers, and how it was ready
to take a stand, he said, not one ton of coal.
She'll be mined by the miners of Kansas until this
Industrial Court Act is scratched from the statue book and
(14:46):
that's where it lay how It in jail, and then
months would pass, and of course people who were starving
in the first place, they were getting no help from anybody,
you know. All the miners who were out on strike
money became. Most of the men wanted to be loyal
to how It, but had to get back to work,
you know, because of their starving families. So by December
(15:09):
of that year, tensions were high. Teachers would report that
there was a lot of fighting between striking miners and
those families and the boys that you know, where their
fathers were going back to work. A harsh winner at
the stage for what was to come. Sunday, December the eleventh,
nineteen twenty one, five hundred women appeared at the Franklin
(15:33):
Union Hall and decided to state their case that they
were the wives of the loyal union men of Kansas,
and they were against the Industrial Chord Act, and they
wanted to stand by their men in this endeavor that
they were working for a good cause. They decided what
they would do is that they would get pit buckets.
They would sing and drum on pit buckets and go
(15:55):
to every single mind chap and stop the scab workers
from working. They decided to meet the next day. March
Or Mary Scubitz, was a woman who was from Slovenia.
She spoke five languages, and Mary wrote a journal. In
her entry December thirteenth, nineteen twenty one, she talked about
(16:15):
making her way to the front of the crowd because
she saw the sheriff there and law enforcement, and to
tell them, hey, you know, we want you to stay
here in case there is any violence. But all we
want to do is just to talk to these men
and convince them that they're doing the wrong thing. We
want them to be with us and be true, good
union men. But Mary said, for the most part, they
had large flags, these fifteen foot long and six foot
(16:37):
wide flags. Just for the most part, we would just
lay those down in front of the entrance, and men
would walk by her in their cars. They would honor
the fact that they weren't going to work. And so
she was very proud that that first day, she said,
no arrests remain. Despite the straightforward nature of this event,
the newspapers across the nation seemed to construct the narrative
(16:58):
of this margin strikingly different ways. The New York Times,
the Tapeka State Journal, the Pittsburgh Daily Headlight. They really
stressed that this was a very not only unusual, but
of very violent protests from the sides of the women.
Newspaper headlines were all towards using military terminology Amazon Army.
New York Times dubbed them that, and that particular nickname
(17:21):
went all the way across to the l A Herald.
It made national news. There was a picture in the
Tapeka State Journal of a young woman sitting in a
car with a flag, and the headline would read General
Annie Stovitch, the Joan arc of the Amazon Army. While
even Bayonets couldn't stop these highly temperamental foreign women. Actually,
(17:44):
that particular girl was a fourteen year old young girl
just having me sitting in the car, and she was
with her mother. A Wichita newspaper described them as using
teeth and claws like Tigris's. They called them guerrillas terrorists.
The Kansas City, Kansas said that they were actually using
(18:05):
dyna white and igniting minds, you know, I mean, it
was sensationalism, but this just kind of took a life
of its own. Mary on December of the fourteenth, five am,
she said, oh my goodness, eight and ten women now
from different camps war coming in. She said, No one's left,
and everybody has kind of joined in. These are American women.
They're all different nationalities and they're all there. Ethnic differences
(18:28):
don't seem to at all figure in here. They all
seem to be united in this. The next day worth
six thousand strong, she says, And it's miles long now
and we're getting ready to march. Mary's last entry into
her diary is quiet for a day or two. Then
the militia came.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And you've been listening to Linda Kanoel tell the story
of the Southeast coal mines and the Amazon Army, and
now you know what that term means. One hundred minds,
ten thousand men, one third of the nation's total coal production,
and of course the usual problems that came with coal mining.
And five hundred women appeared at the Franklin Union Hall,
(19:12):
letting the bosses know and management know that the ladies
weren't happy, but they were there to protect their families
and their husbands. When we come back, more of the
story of the Amazon Army of Kansas here on our
American stories. And we returned to our American stories and
(19:40):
to Linda Canol sharing the story of the women who
newspapers of the nineteen twenties labeled the Amazon Army. When
we last left off, the militia had been sent to
get these women under control. Back to Linda with the
rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Women were told that the militia was coming. These women
said they would just stand in front of the militia.
They wanted their kids to have a little bit more
food to eat and something warm to wear, and they
would stand there and fight the militia. Mary said, you know,
cooler heads needed to prevail. And on December fifteenth, three
days after the disturbances began, three troops of Kansas National
(20:22):
Guard Cavalry came pounding down the county roads from Topeka,
and they were stationed you know a certain places like Ringo, Franklin,
and Wallberry. The city of Lawrence would send a machine
gun detachment. They brought a couple of machine gunners down
for that. The local county sheriff decided to deputize a
thousand men in the area in case the Amazons were
(20:42):
going to come to Pittsburgh. It didn't seem like, you know,
it disturbed of the enthusiasm of the women, and at
that point the arrest started happening. There were all until
forty nine women whom the sheriff would arrest on unlawful
assembly sault. Among those would be Mary Scubas and her
mother Julia, and she'd be arrested a couple of times.
(21:06):
Interestingly enough about the arrest reports, they were given charge
seven hundred and fifty dollars instead of the normal average
rate of two hundred. The warrants would go out to
the husbands. They never went to the to the women themselves.
The warrants would go to the husbands. The husbands have
to take them in and they usually would do it
late in the afternoon, so the women would have to
(21:26):
spend the night in jail. But my favorite newspaper article
was three women actually got a bond set at a
thousand instead of that even the high seven fifty. And
when the reporter asked the judge, well, why or honor,
why such a high you know, you know bond, and
he's the judge as well. It's the alleged seriousness of
(21:47):
their offense. So the reporters said, what is that your honor? Well,
for using profane language against the union boss at one
of the local mind shafts. So you could see the
out of balance of power of how much their actions
were so out of sync with what society expected of them.
They couldn't even cust somebody, and they were considered you know, evens.
(22:11):
I mean, that was what those women were charged with.
It was funny almost some of the newspaper articles. One
of them. I mean, here they are, you know, they're
they're they're chastising these women and calling them names, and
they say, oh, in this I forgot the Italian woman's name,
but oh, she's very well dressed and she seems like
she's an important part. And they just talked about how
nicely she was dressed. But then then they would go
(22:33):
back to saying, you know, they were heathens, and they
were guerrilla fighters. They were, I mean they really weren't,
you know, they had no weapons. The county attorneys were
exasperated because there wasn't one man who came forward, not
one see they did, who would press any charges. They
did this all on their own, you know, like okay,
unlawful assembly. But there wasn't one guy out there that said, oh, yeah,
(22:57):
you know, they really treated me badly, very quietly. The
mine Inspector. The State Mine Inspector issued a report, never
really got too much press, but in it it said that,
you know, there were three thousand working miners prior to
the Amazon's march, and it really after it was launched
(23:19):
there were less than seven hundreds. So it looked like
the march really did kind of make a difference that
that really wasn't known. Victory for how it and victory
for them would happen in about a year when the
US Supreme Court would strike down the Industrial Court Act,
primarily because the Compulsory Arbitration Act, you know, that was
(23:42):
that was unconstitutional. You had the right to strike, but
that wasn't the case really in that January thirteenth at
that time, right then after this march defeated both by
the local opposition in the union, how it ordered everybody
back to work and you know, we failed, but you
got to go back to work. When the when the
(24:02):
men came back, they were charged a ten dollars initiation fee.
They had no voice or vote. They'd never get a
voice or vote in the union. Again, that was where
they stood. The state Attorney General issued an edit that
if there was work available, you had to work and
if you didn't, if you did not comply with that law,
then you would have ten to thirty days of hard labor.
(24:25):
So that's where the situation was. Right after this, there
was a lot of angst in the air when we
look at this symbolically. You know, the women used the
American flag because they were they thought they were American citizens.
Most of them at this point were American citizens, or
they were naturalized or whatever, and they you know, they
(24:46):
banned it together. And you know, it's a little sensitive
issue because just right at nineteen twenty, it was when
the nineteenth Amendment was passed, you know, they just got
that particular right to vote. They did go to their
weapons for red pepper, and they by emptying dinner buck,
they wanted to send the message that we are now
taking away the food and everything we'd always given. We
feel this is entirely unfair. These immigrants faced poverty, discrimination,
(25:12):
and even death, and they as a group, they fought
for their rights and so many of the social reforms
that we enjoy today, like the eight hour work day,
equal pay for equal work, minority rights in child labor,
we're all fought for early on. And you know, in
in Southeast Kansas, Mary Scubats. Mary had one son, Joe,
(25:36):
Joe Scubets. Joe would become a US Congressman. I mean,
he was well educated. Mary believed, like so many of
these people in education, we still have a tradition of
honoring education. And Joe graduated from Pittsburgh State. He went
on to Washburne Law School. He graduated finally from Georgetown
Law School. He became a US Congressman. Joe as part
(25:58):
of the eighty eighth Congress, was possible for the Black
Lung Reform Act, which gave a lot of these miners
than the healthcare that they needed they hadn't had prior.
Joe also worked on the Mind and Health and Mind
Safety Act again to try to make conditions in the
minds you know, of course a lot better. Reclamation Act.
(26:20):
He supported the Kansas Reclamation Act because we had forty
two thousand acres of our land disturbed on the top
from all the you know, our big machinery that was
being used in after the mines dried up down below,
and you can see the results of those things. My grandmother,
when when she was about ninety years old and talked
(26:43):
about some of these times that she had told me
about years. Hence she said, you know, without struggle, there
is no progress. And she said, you just have to
keep going forward. She had a very much a positive spirit,
which most of those people did, positive hard work spirit.
But you know, it was just such a risky life.
(27:05):
I mean, you know you had to you really just
had to have a lot of hope, you know. And
what the hope I think was was for their children.
How those women came together like they did, think about
with no they have telephones, most of them did have,
of course, to afford a newspaper even I mean you
(27:25):
know Late's share some snoozepaper. How did that happen that
you said? I think it was just I think it
was that from camp to camp, it had to be
you know what I mean, pretty soon they were getting
more and more. You know, months went by. How it
was in jail, and so that was kind of it.
I think it was just the the anguish of it
(27:48):
and the unfairness of it got to them and they
just started, I guess communicating. Because how that happened really
even today, I don't think you can get unless it's
a football camp. Maybe you know, I have to get
a thousand or a five hundred thousand people together. I
mean wow. I like I said, there was nothing in
the history books when I was growing up about are
(28:10):
coal mining. When I came back from Chicago in nineteen
eighty to teach teach seventh grade history, now Kansas history,
I checked out the seventh grade history books and there
was nothing about Southeast Kansas history on coal mining. Ten
years later to nothing. Two thousand and five, I got
(28:31):
a message, a short note from the Kansas Historical Society.
They were coming out with a new book called Kansas Journeys,
and in that there was a whole section on Southeast
Kansas coal mining and a paragraph on the Amazon Army.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
And a terrific job by the production editing and storytelling
by our own Katrina Hind and Madison Derricott. And a
special thanks to Linda Canole who gave us a beautiful rendition,
a beautiful glimpse into the coal mining country of Kansas.
And by the way, the women who organized on behalf
(29:08):
of their husbands fought on behalf of their husbands for
basic voting rights and free speech rights of workers. And
this union history has a long one in America. There's
some good things, some bad things you decide. We don't
get into that here on this show. But my goodness,
these women were organizing and helping their husbands organize on
(29:28):
behalf of their families and for better lives. And my goodness,
the National Guard was called out on these women. Heck,
in Lawrence, Kansas, we had machine guns ready for these
tough ladies, and they prevailed. And by the way, let's
remember that law that was passed in Kansas that essentially
said union members can't organize. Well, the Supreme Court whacked
(29:51):
that and put it down, and that actually was a
good thing. And I don't think you're going to get
many people to argue about that. A little bit of
history here on our American Stories, Kansas history, coal mining history,
women's history, and so much more here on our American
Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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