coal-fired reforms: social citizenship, dissident miners, and the great society

Coal-Fired Reforms:Social Citizenship, Dissident Miners,and the Great Society

Robyn Muncy

In spring 1963 memos zipped among federal offices in Washington, D.C., watning of po-tential violence in eastern Kentucky. The unlikely tatgets were state-of-the-art hospitalsin Hazard, Harlan, Middlesboro, and Whitesburg that had been erected by tbe UnitedMine Workers of America Welfare and Retirement Fund in the 1950s. Tlie alleged threatcame from coal miners outraged that the hospitals might shut down for lack of operatingcapital. "Social unrest taking the form of violence to the hospitals is a real possibility,"concluded one ominous assessment. Some "violence has already occurred"; unless thefederal government acted fast, the country could expect "more dangerous and seriousacts." Indeed, "not only the economic development of the region but also its basic socialstability is intimately involved with the future of the Miners' Hospitals."'

Between fall 1962 and summer 1964, federal officials tried desperately to stave off vio-lence among coal miners in Appalachia by finding a way to keep the hospitals open. Thefacilities had provided health care to miners for nearly a decade, and the possibility of los-ing them produced roving pickets and the dynamiting of mining sites. So pressing wasthe threat of sustained violence that one congressman said in April 1963, "There hasn'tbeen a week gone by that the problem has not been discussed among Cabinet officials."President John F. Kennedy created a task force to try to save the hospitals. After severalnail-biting episodes of "chicken" played by federal officials and the United Mine Work-ers' (uMw) Welfare and Retirement Fund, the hospitals were spared. By making a grantthat enabled a nonprofit agency to purchase die hospitals, the federal Area Redevelop-ment Administration maintained hospital care in the hill country. And that was only tbebeginning of the federal response to the miners. Eventually, the U.S. government createdan economic development program for Appalachia that spanned the rest of the century;passed safety and health legislation specifically for coal miners; and provided governmentprotection of private old-age pensions. Indeed, even the Economic Opportunity Act of

Robyn Muncy is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Coline Park. She wishes to thankAngela Cavallucci, Edward Berkowitz, Gary Gerstle, Paul Gibson, Marie Gottschalk, Clare Lyons, Edward Linen-thai, Sonya Michel, Richard Mulcahy. Meredith Muncy, Salim Yaqub, and che anonymous readers for ihe Journal ofAmerican History for their invaluable comments. Thanks, too. to the faculty/sludent seminar at Catholic Universityand the class of 2007-2008 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Indeed, for generous supportboth financial and incellectual during the revision process, deepest gratitude to the Woodrow Wilson InternationaJCenter for Scholars.

Readers may contact Muticy at rmuncy(2)umd.edu.

' "lustification for ARA As.sistance for Purchase of UMW Hospitals," [1963], Regional Hospital Corpotaiion File.box 5, Mixed Subject and Programs Files, 1961-63, Officeof Assistant Administrator tor Area Operations, Recordsof ihe Area Redevelopment Administration, RG 378 (National Archives, College Park, Md.).

72 Thejournalof American History • June 2009

Miners, Social Citizenship, and the Great Society 73

Two miners wait together in the outpacienr clinic of Becklcy Memorial Huspii.il in htxklcy.West Virginia. 'l"he United Mine Workers Welfare and Rcrirement Fund, which built andmaintained the hospital and used this 1959 photo in public relations materials, was clearlyproud that its facilities were racially integrated. Photograph ©FredJ. Maroon. Courtesy RobertKaplan Papers, Manuscripts and Archives. Yale University Library.

1964, a broad set of antipoverty initiatives, was conceived in part as a response to desper-

ate coal miners in Appalachia.-^

Ulis essay traces connections among private welfare provision, labor unrest, and the

Great Society of the 1960s. It places private welfare provision in the context of a "welfare

regime," defined as an interlocking system of public and private policies, institutions,

and programs that aim to promote social welfare. {The narrower term "welfare state" here

refers to the public, governmental component of the regime.)' The essay argues that agi-

tation among rank-and-file members of the labor movement played a larger role in the

social upheavals of the 1960s than historians have imagined and that some ofthat unrest

^ Rep. Carl Perkins, quoted in Elmer Hall, "U.S. Officials Seek to Help Hospitals," Louisville Courier-Journal.April 19, 1963, clipping. Miners Memorial Hospitals File, box 9, Subject Files, 1961-65, Officeof the Administra-tor, ibid: "Statement by the President," [1963], ibid; Eileen Boris, "Contested Rights: The Great Society betweenHome and Work," in The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur(Amherst, 2005), 123.

' I use "Creat Society" to refer not only to the domestic programs established by Lyndon B. Johnson's adminis-tration, some of which originated under John F. Kennedy, but also tbeir elaboration in the 1970s. For asimilar un-derstanding, see Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Miieur, "Preface," in Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism.cd. Milkis and Mileur, xvii; Hugh Heclo, "Sixties Civics," ibid, 58; and R. Sbep Melnick, "From Tax and Spendto Mandate and Sue: Liberalism after the Creat Society," ibid., 387-405. Costa Esping-Andersen, The Three Worldsof Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990), 26-29. For more complex notions of the welfare regime, see Julia Adamsand Tasleem Padamsee, "Signs and Regimes: Rereading Feminist Work on Welfare States," Social Politics, 8 (Spring2001), 1-23; LisaD. Brush, "Changing the Subject: Gender and Welfare Regime Studies,"/¿/i/., 9 (Surruner 2002),161-86; and Tasleem Padamsee and Julia Adams, "Signs and Regimes Revisited," ibid, 187-202.

74 The Journal of American History June 2009

sprang from the peculiar workings of the public/private welfare regime that emerged dur-ing the post-World War II period.

When historians identify social movements that helped make the Great Society pos-sible, they generally list the struggle for racial justice and the student movement. Some-times organized consumers, environmentalists, and women or welfare rights advocatesalso appear on the list, but the labor movement is conspicuously absent. When labordoes appear, it is as a supporter of civil rights initiatives (the United Auto Workers, forinstance, helped to fund the March on Washington in 1963) or as a contributor to sec-ond-wave feminism (union women were largely responsible for Kennedy's PresidentialCommission on the Status of Women)."* These cameo appearances in the explanation forthe Great Society involve a few progressive unions and only their leadership. Labor's ordi-nary constituents generally appear in the Great Society story only as a brake on progres-sive reform, rather than a promoter of it. Worried that the Great Society was handing outbenefits to people who would not work for them and expanding the state into areas whiteworkers thought they should control—neighborhood schools, privately owned houses,workplace seniority lists and hiring practices—unionized workers enter the story as partof the backlash that elected Richard M. Nixon in 1968 and ended the progressive era onceand for all with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.^

The behavior of coal miners in the eastern United States during the postwar periodsuggests that the relationship of rank-and-file workers to the Great Society was more com-plex. Many coal miners determinedly took part in protests, including violent ones, thatgalvanized officials in Washington to expand federal responsihilities. The actions of thoseminers help explain the emergence and shape of the Great Society. Most important, theydemonstrate that at least some blue-collar workers participated in the active dissent thatproduced the third and final burst of progressive reform in twentieth-century America.

In addition, attention to dissident miners revises the usual representation of Appala-chians in the Great Society story. In the current literature, Appalachians enter the tale aspoverty-stricken white people who touched the conscience of John F. Kennedy duringhis presidential campaign in I960. Michael Harrington's The Other America supposedlyreinforced the president's commitment to hill folk. Appalachians thus appear as passiveobjects of presidential sympathy. Indeed, one administration official later insisted thatAppalachian miners were "neither radical nor in any significant way restive" and, moregenerally, that "the American poor, black and white, were surprisingly inert."*^ This es-

•* Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the ¡960s (New York, 2004), 85-150;William H. Chafe, The Unfinished fourney: America since World War ¡I (New York, 1999), 221-Í6; Sidney M. Mil-kis, "Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society, and the 'Twilight' of the Modern Presidency," in Great Society and the HighTide of Liberalism, ed. Milkís and Mileur, 4; Jill Quadagno, One Nation. Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No NationalHealth Insurance (New York. 2005), 210-13; Brian Balogh, "Making Pluralism 'Great': Beyond a Recycled Uistoryof the Great Society," in Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, ed. Milkis and Mileur, 157; Nancy MacLean,Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (New York, 2006), 65; Dorothy Sue Cobble, TheOther Women's Movement: Workplace fustice and Social Rights in Modem America {Pñnceton, 2004), 145-79.

' On the role of labor in the backlash against the Great Society and the rise of conservatism, see Thomas ByrneEdsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and 'laxes on American Politics (New York,1991), 77; Jonathan Rieder, "Tlie Rise of the 'Silent Majorit>-,"' in The Rise and Eall of the New Deal Order. ¡930-¡980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, 1989), 234; Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Raceand Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996), 265-67; and David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policyand White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago, 2007), 382-99. A major exception to this representation ofblue-collar workers is MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough. 96-100, 309-10. On the support for the Great Society byrank-and-file members of the United Farm Workers of America, see Jtilie Leininger Pycior, LBJ and Mexican Ameri-cans: The Paradox of Power (Austin. 1997), 179, 185, 204.

'' On Appalachians, see, for example, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., .^ Thousand Days: fohn E Kennedy in the White

Miners, Social Citizenship, and che Great Society 75

say will show that Kennedys administration and its successor cared about Appalachiansnot only because they were pathetic but also because they were threatening. In fact, theywere well organized and blowing up the tipples where newly dug coal was unloaded fromfreight cars. What sparked unrest among coal miners in the 1960s was the threat of losingbenefits from their union's health and pension plan, and so this essay proceeds as a casestudy of the UMW Welfare and Retirement Fund from its inception in 1946 to its funda-mental renovation in the 1970s.

Because the UMW Welfare and Retirement Fund was part of the postwar welfare regimein the United States, its history illuminates that larger social security scheme as wellas the timing and shape of the Great Society. After World War II, the United Statesdeveloped a social security arrangement that depended as much on benefits providedby employers as on those funneled through the state. Historians call this mixed sys-tem America's public/private welfare regime, and a rich literature analyzes the privatestream of this system.' This essay joins that analysis by documenting one characteristicof the private stream that has gone unnoticed; social welfare benefits flowing from pri-vate sources split into two channels just as those coursing through the public stream did.Some benefits paid through private sources were construed by providers as entitlementsand others as charity.

Scholars have long accepted the argument that a distinction between entitlements andcharity structured the public sector of the U.S. welfare regime. The Social Security Actof 1935, the founding legislation of the public system, based some benefits on employ-ment and others on need. Tliose benefits perceived as earned by employment constitutedentitlements (or social insurance); the others, charity (or public assistance). That distinc-tion explains why some programs created by the Social Security Act were consistently un-derfunded and why their beneficiaries were suspected of laziness or fraud, whereas otherprograms created by the same legislation had a history of routine increases in benefitsand their beneficiaries were admired for their contributions to the nation. Insurance pro-grams such as old-age insurance and unemployment compensation enjoyed the status ofentitlements, whereas the public assistance programs, which were means tested, sufferedthe stigmata of charity.^ We have not yet recognized that the private sector of the social

House (Boston, 1965), 1005-12; and Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the1960s (New York, 1984), 100-101, 119-20. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States(New York, 1962); Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Eeasihle Misunderstanding: Community Action in the Waron Poverty (New York, 1969), 25, 24.

Beth Stevens, "Blurring the Boundaries; How the Federal Government Has Influenced Welfare Benefits in ihePrivate Sector," in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, ed. Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and ThedaSkocpol (Princeton, 1988), 123-48; Beth Stevens, "Labor Unions, Employee Benefits, and the Privatization of theAmerican Welfare State," foumal of Policy History 1 (no. 3, 1990), 232-60; Marie Goctschalk, "The Elusive Goalof Universal Health Care in the U.S.; Organized Lahor and the Institutional Straightjacket of the Private WelfareSiate," ibid., 11 (no. 4, 1999). 367-98; Sanfbrd M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal{Princeton, 1997); Jacoh S. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits inthe United States (New York, 2002); Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America'sPublic-Private Welfare State (Princeton, 2003); Aian Derickson, Health Security for All: Dreams of Universal HealthCare in America (Baltimore, 2005).

" Before feminist scholars analyzed the U.S. welfare state, policy makers and scholars had identified two types ofprograms at its core: social insurance and puhlic assistance. See Edward Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid, Creating theWelfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform (NewYork, 1988). Barbara J. Nelson, "The Originsof the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mother's Aid," in Women, the State, and We^are,ed. Linda Gordon (Madison, 1990), 123-51; Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History


security regime also created categories of entitlement and charity, and that those catego-ries made a material difference in beneficiaries' lives.

But however great those differences, some private social programs generated in theirtwo sets of beneficiaries a shared expectation of social citizenship. The British sociolo-gist T. H. Marshall first developed the notion of "social citizenship" as a final stage inthe historical unfolding of democratic citizenship. In Marshall's scheme, social citizen-ship followed the emergence of first civil and then political citizenship, and it promisedevery member of a society basic economic security as well as access to other material andcultural resources generated by the society. In the postwar West those benefits generallyincluded some guarantee of income stability, health care, education, and leisure, and theytended to equalize citizens' ability to exercise their civil and political rights, giving theworking class greater parity with the middle and upper classes. Students of welfare stateshave built on Marshall's scheme. Feminist scholars, while critiquing Marshall's failure torecognize that women and men gained access to the various dimensions of citizenship atdifferent times and in very different degrees, have used his categories to sbow both howgender has shaped public policy and how the state has infiuenced gender relations. Be-cause social citizenship refers to a person's relationship to a state, benefits disseminateddirectly by the state have been deemed quintessential evidence of social citizenship. Sincethe United States has depended on the market rather than the state to provide much so-cial security, scholars have considered its tradition of social citizenship relatively "weak." Iwant to suggest that at least some postwar Americans saw benefits emanating from rheirunions and employers as aspects of social citizenship because, whether they explicitly ar-ticulated this relationship or not, their behavior demonstrated that they viewed the stateas ultimately responsible for guaranteeing that the union or employer deliver the goods.''

Having developed an expectation of social citizenship, beneficiaries expressed outragewhen benefits were denied or discontinued, a common occurrence in the postwar era be-cause private benefits constantly fluctuated. Historians have paid little attention to thefiuctuation in benefits, but I argue that such instability plagued private-sector welfareprograms from their very establishment and with significant effects.'" Indeed, the expec-tation of social citizenship and its betrayal created some of the postwar social unrest thatforced the state toward greater responsibility for economic security.

This is not the usual understanding of the relationship between the public and pri-vate sectors of the U.S. welfare regime. Serious study of this relationship began in the1980s, when scholars such as Jill Quadagno insisted that private-sector benefits must bepulled into theories of welfare state development. The goal of this scholarship was often

^ {Cambridge, Mass., 1994); Premilta Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: Tf)e Welfare Rights Movement in the UnitedStates (New York, 2005), 4-5. Cf. Ellen Reese, Backlash against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present {Berkeley, 2005).

' T. H.MAK\\Ú\, Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays {\^'iQ;<Z3mhúá%e, Eng., 1992), 8, 14-17,27-43; Carole Pateman, "The Patriarchal Welfare State," in Democracy and the Welfare State, ed. Amy Gutmann (Prince-ton, 1988), 231-60; Ann Shola OrloiF, "Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship; The Comparative Analysis ofGender Relations and Welfare States." American Sociological Review, 58 (June 1993). 303—28; Birte Sum, "Engen-dering Democracy: Social Ciliz.ensbip and Politica! Participation for Women in Scandinavia," Social Politics, I (Fall1994), 286-305; Alice Kessler-Harris, "In the Nation's Image: The Gendered Limits of Social Citizenship in theDepression Ï-ÎA" Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1251-79; Evelyn Glenn, "Citizenship and Inequality;Historical and Global Perspectives," Social Problems, Al (Feb. 2000), 1-20, esp. 8.

'" For an argument that emphasizes the solidity of the basic framework of the public/private regime, in spite ofchanges in specific benefits, see Hacker, Divided Welfare State. 57, 150—52. For one that studies instability in ben-efits from the 1980s, see Gottschalk, "Elusive Goal of Universal Health Care in the U.S.," 375-76. For a referenceto the inadequacy and patchiness of benefits, but not the Buctuation of benefits for individuals chat is crucial to myargument here, see Klein, Eor All These Rights, 8.


to explain the tardiness, stinginess, or patchiness of public social security programs in theUnited States, and it found at least part of the explanation in the vitality of the privatesector. Yet, ironically, the robustness of the private sector was dependent on public policy.Recent scholarship demonstrates that public policy encouraged private-sector social secu-rity measures as surely as it created public disability insurance and Medicare. Tax breaksto employer-provided pension funds provide only one example. But, as the political sci-entist Jacob S. Hacker has argued, the reliance of the private sector on the state has beenobscured. In fact, so invisible has this public foundation of private benefits been that,according to the historian Jennifer Klein, workers in the postwar period saw employerstather than the state as the source of their economic security."

The present essay depends on these insights, especially the conceptualization of thestate as underpinning both public and private benefits. The essay veers away from existingwork, however, in maintaining that some beneficiaries of private programs held the stateultimately responsible for their economic security and in identifying dynamics in the pri-vate sector that encouraged growth in the public sector of the U.S. welfare regime.'^

Case Study: The United Mine Workers Welfare and Retirement Fund

The UMW Welfare and Retirement Fund was created in the aftermath of World War IIthrough contentious negotiations involving the union's fiery leader, John L. Lewis, thecoal industry, and the federal government. The process bears out historians' claims thatthe private stream of the U.S. welfare regime fundamentally depended on state support.Although the Social Security Act had in 1935 established old-age insurance for manyindustrial workers, stipends remained inadequate through the 1940s, and proposals forgovernment-sponsored disability and health benefits were sidelined by opposition fromdoctors, the exigencies of world war, and an increasingly conservative Congress. Anti-communism intensified by an emerging Cold War delivered the final blow to hopes thatthe postwat era would fulfill reformers' dreams of a social-democratic welfare regime.Against an ever-strengthening wall of opposition, the labor movement and its allies con-tinued after World War II to push for state-sponsored health and disability insurance andexpanded provisions for retirement, but they also sought such benefits through collec-tive bargaining. By 1950 employer-funded retirement and health plans became routineexpectations of the most powerful unions, and with unions enrolling a full third of the

' ' Jill Quadagno, The Transformation of OU Age Seairity: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State (Chica-go, 1988), 2-3,77, 171, 185-86; Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, ¡945-1968 [hh^cà,1995); Nelson Lichtenstein, "From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of So-cial Democracy in the Postwar Era," in Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Frascrand Gerstle, 122-52; NelsonLichtenstein. State of the Union: A Century of American Labor {Princeton, 2002). 117-26; Nelson Lichtenstein, TheMost Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reu ther and the Eate of American Labor (New York, 1995), 276-88; Alan De-rickson, "Health Secutity for AH? Social Unionism and Univetsal Health Insurance, \93'i-'\958." Journal of Ameri-can History. 80 (March 1994), 1333-56; Stevens, "Blurring the Boundaries," 133-41; Stevens. "Labor Unions.Employée Benefits, and the Privatization of the American Welfare State"; Gottschalk. "Elusive Coal of UniversalHealth Care in the U.S.," 371-72. For emphasis on the relentless growth of the public sector over the private, seeMartha Detthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, 1979). Hacker. Divided Welfare State, xiii; Klein.EorAllVieseRights. 7, 15.

'- Quadagno. Transformation of Old Age Security, 185-86; Hacker, Divided Welfare State, xiii; Klein. Eor AllThese Rights, 4, 15. For demonstrations that beneficiaries ol some public social programs developed a sen.sc oí" en-titlement that motivated them to pressure the state to expand social supports, see Rhonda Y. Williams. The Politicsof Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York, 2004); Annclisc Orleck. Stortnin^Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Eought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston, 2005); and Gordon. Pitied but NotEntitled, 244-48.


nonagricultural labor force, such benefits represented a significant element in the postwarpolitical economy.'^

More suspicious of government than many other labor leaders in the 1940s and lead-ing a work force unusually at risk for injury and illness, Lewis was especially determinedto win welfare benefits for his constituents through collective bargaining. In 1946 Lewisdemanded that coal companies, or operators, create a welfare fund for miners by payingroyalties on each ton of coal mined. The operators balked; Lewis called a strike. Withthe country dependent on coal for home heating and industrial production and with thegovernment still exercising wartime powers. President Harry S. Truman's secretary of theinterior, Julius Krug, seized the mines. Krug and Lewis then negotiated a contract thatincluded a health and retirement plan.''*

Because of continuing disputes between the union and the operators and dramaticallyunsettled labor law, the Krug-Lewis agreement was never enforced in its original form,but it brought the mine operators to accept some responsibility for miners' health andretirement. In 1947 operators agreed to establish a welfare and retirement fund run bythree trustees, one each representing the operators, the union, and the public. Full andcontinuous operation of the fund began in 1950, after the courts determined that fringebenefits were subject to collective bargaining and Lewis joined the coal operators in sign-ing the National Bituminous Wage Agreement. The contract settled the operators' royaltyat $.30 a ton and stipulated that the "neutral," or public, trustee at the fiand would beJosephine Roche.'^

Anything but neutral, Josephine Roche was an experienced progressive reformer longdevoted to organized labor and deeply involved in creating blueprints for the U.S. welfarestate. Daughter of a western coaJ operator, Roche graduated from Vassar College in 1908and spent the next twenty years as an itinerant reformer in the social settlements of NewYork, the juvenile courts of Denver, and the Children's Bureau in Washington, D.C. In1927 Roche's father died, leaving her heir to his holdings in the Rocky Mountain FuelCompany (RMF), a coal mining concern in Colorado. Instead of living contentedly off theproceeds, Roche accumulated enough shares to become majority stockholder, kicked outthe sitting management, and hired several progressive friends to run the company withher. She then invited the UMW to organize the miners at RMF. Her attempt to operate thecoal company as a progressive industrial enterprise attracted such widespread attentionthat soon after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president, he appointed Roche assistantsecretary of the treasury, from which position she oversaw the Public Health Service. Shealso served on the administration's Committee on Economic Security, where she helped

" For general histories of the Welfare and Retirement Fund of the United Mine Workers Union (UMW) or itshealth program, see Richard P. Mulcahy, A Social Contract for the Coal Fields: The Rise and Fall of the United MineWorkers of America Welfare and Retirement Fund (Knoxville, 2000); and Ivana Krajcinovic, From Company Doctorsto Managed Care: The United Mine Workers' Noble Experiment {\U\AC3. 1997). Mulcahy s meticulous work has beenespecially helpful to me. On the paltriness of old-age insurance stipends, see Berkowitz and McQuaid, Creating theWelfare State, 177. On unions' pursuit of benefits through collective bargaining, see note 11 ahove; and Paul Starr,The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry(NewYork, 1982), 310-20.

'•" Coal mining was more dangerous than serving in World War II, according to "Labor Rights Essential to De-mocracy," Labor's Monthly Survey Qune 1946), folder 1, box 53, Jcsephine Roche Collection (Norlin Library, Uni-versity of Colorado, Boulder). On the 1946 contract, see Melvyn Dubofskyand Warren VanT'ine, John L. Lewis: ABiography (New York, 1977). 454-61.

''* National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement of 1947. file 8, box 65, Roche Collection. On unsettled laborlaw, sec Stevens, "Blurring the Boundaries," I4l; and Hacker, Divided Welfare State. 129—32. The royalty went upto $.40 in 1952; see Mulcahy, Social Contrait for the Coal Fields, 2-3.


Josephine Roche, pictured in this 1955 photograph, a progressive reformer since the 1910s, wasdirector of the United Mine Workers Welfare and Retirement Fund from 1948 to 1971 and atrustee of the fund beginning in 1950. In the early 1960s, faced with declining revenues, shecut benefits and sparked revolt among miners and their families. Photo hy Chase Photography,Bethesda, Maryland. Courtesy the George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, Maryland.

shape the Social Security Act; participated in FDRS "little cabinet" with other left-leaninglaborites, and, most important, chaired the Interdepartmental Committee to Coordi-nate Health and Welfare Activities. The Interdepartmental Committee devised a nationalhealth plan that captured the national imagination in 1938 and was imperfectly imple-mented in piecemeal fashion over the next three decades as Congress provided funds forcommunity hospitals, expanded Social Security to include disability benefits, and eventu-ally created Medicare and Medicaid.'^

By the 1940s Roche had soured on government. Social democracy remained her ideal,but she did not see the U.S. government as a promising source of immediately expandedsocial programs. When Lewis asked her to direct the mine workers' welfare fund in 1948,

"• Robyn Muncy, "Josephine Roche," in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Susan Ware(Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 548-49; Elinor McGinn, A Wide-Awake Woman: fosephine Roche in the Era of Reform(Denver, 2002).


she jumped at the chance to create a private welfare system that would supplement whatshe saw as meager state-sponsored social services and ultimately serve as a model for thestate. True to early twentieth-century Progressive ideals, she imagined her new work inthe private sector as an experimental program that might carve a template for, or becomea component of, state-run social services. When coal operators accepted Roche as one ofthree trustees for the fund, they ceded control to the Roche-Lewis team, which woulddominate the fund until Lewis's death in 1969.'

Although the UMW'S health program was part of the trend toward employment-re-lated health plans in the postwar period, it was unique in many ways. Most commonly,employer-provided health care benefits comprised insurance that paid part of the costof hospitalization—and little else. Some exceptions existed. The "Treaty of Detroit," afive-year contract signed by the United Auto Workers in 1950, promised impressive so-cial welfare benefits. For eligible workers they included Blue Cross and Blue Shield, withBlue Cross providing complete coverage for hospital expenses and Blue Shield reimburs-ing workers for doctors' bills. More often, though, even powerful unions like those in theelectrical industry could win no more than partial cash indemnities for hospitalizationand surgery.'"

The program developed by Roche and her colleagues at the UMW Welfare and Retire-ment Fund was the most comprehensive private health plan in the postwar period. Itoperated in twenty-five states, from Ceorgia to Alaska; enrolled over a million benefi-ciaries in the mid-1950s; and cost miners nothing more than the labor they had alreadyspent digging coal. Miners paid no premiums, and for all procedures covered by the plan,they made no outlay of their own money. To receive care, they simply presented theirUMW health cards to approved providers, who billed the fund. Eligibility was liberal; Thehealth plan covered any miner employed by signatories to the coal wage agreements; un-employed miners who were last employed by a signatory; disabled miners; retired min-ers receiving pensions from the fund; and dependents, including wives, children to ageeighteen, and parents of the miner or his wife if they lived with the miner and had beendependent on him for a year. Dependents continued to receive health care after a minersdeath. Unlike Insurance companies, the Rind took responsibility for the quality of care itsbeneficiaries received. The medical director of the fund divided mining regions into tenareas, each assigned its own administrator. Each administering doctor identified practitio-ners and facilities that provided care that warranted support from the fund. The selectedproviders then billed the fund directly for all care given to those eligible For benefits.''

The fi.ind paid all costs for hospitalization, outpatient care by specialists, select drugs,and rehabilitation services. Because so many miners received routine health care from spe-cialists and because diagnostic tests were conducted in hospitals, the fund covered routinemedical care for many miners. During tbe 1950s and 1960s, the fund pioneered managedcare arrangements that explicitly provided preventive and all routine health care. Perhapsmost impressive, when fund administrators discovered that many areas of Appalachia had

' ' On Josephine Roche's appointment to head the fund, see "Josephine Roche to Direct Pension Plan in NewPost," United Mine Workers Journal, May 15. 1948, p. 4, clipping, file 3, box 48, Roche Collection; "Miss Roche,Mine Fund Head," Baltimore Sun, May 1, 1948, clipping, file 4, hox 53, ibid.; and "UMW Welfare Fund DirectorKnows Her Joh," New York Herald Tribune. June 13, Í948, clipping, file 5, ibid. On the fund as a model for state-run social services, see Mulcahy, Social Contract for the Coal Fields, 35.

'* Klein, For All Viese Rights. 230-40; V.\c)\x.enitt\n, Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. 276-81.''' See yearly reports of the LTMW Welfare and Retirement Fund: annual report, June 30, 1958, file 2, box 52,

Roche Collection; annual report, June 30, 1954, ibid.


no decent hospitals and that good doctors refused ro locate where hospitals were substan-dard, they built a chain of state-of-the-art hospitals themselves.-"

Surveys of health care in Appalachia jolted the fund into this major construction proj-ect. Miners referred to some local hospitals as "butcher shops," and doctors investigatingfor the fund found the nomenclature entirely justified. In one Kentucky hospital, investi-gators found "an accumulation of rubbish and filth in the hallways and rooms, unwashedwindows dark with grime, and . . . even an accumularion of dust on a microscope." "Bed-clothes are soiled and gray from long use without washing." One patient reported goingnineteen days without a change of bedclothes. In another hospital much used by miners,doctors discovered an operating room cooled by a large electric fan situated just outsidea doorway. "When the fan blows, it picks up dust and dirt from a manure pile locatedabout twenry feet away. The air is blown across the floor of the operating room and shoulda patient be on the operating table, fatal contamination would be a natural consequence."A hospital in West Virginia sterilized one of every ten women insured by the flind whowere admitted for childbirth.-'

Responding to such reports, the trustees in 1951 approved construction of an inte-grated system often health care centers in Appalachia. Trustees dedicated the hospitals tothe memory of miners killed or disabled in the course of their work. Seven of the min-ers' hospitals were built in the Kentucky towns of Harlan, Hazard, South Williamson,Pikeville, McDowell, Middlesboro, and Whitesburg; two in Beckley and Man, West Vir-ginia; and one in Wise, Virginia. The hospitals operated as one system with centralizedbilling and ordering. Three of the hospitals were large, multipurpose cenrers; the otherswere conceived as satellites to the larger facilities. The chain sponsored outpatient clinics,health education programs, well-baby clinics, and specialized care. Eventually, it sent mo-bile health units into more rural areas.^^

in sharp contrast to the priorities of commercial insurance companies, the first im-pulse of the fund was to serve those miners whose care was most onerous and expensive.While the union and operators were still wrangling over control of the fund in the late1940s, administrators moved ro treat the most disabled miners. They sent representativesof the fund to remote cabins in Appalachia to locate miners who, because of mining ac-cidents, had not walked for twenty-five years. The fund's staff arranged to have some mencarried on stretchers down steep mountain paths to ambulances that took them to char-tered pullman cars, which transported them to the finest rehabilitation facilities in thecountry. Between July and November 1948, the fund hospitalized 99 disabled men, andnearly 500 others awaited treatment. By late summer 1949, 431 paralyzed miners wereunder care, about half of whom were increasingly mobile. In 1953, the fund was treating800 paraplegics.^^

'^° For services covered and che decision to build hospitals, see "Four Year Summary," June 30, 19^1, file 4, box51, /¿/i^.; annual report, June 30, 1954. file 2, box 52, ;W.; annual report, June 30, 1959. ;¿/Í^.; and .staff conferenceminutes, Dec. 20, 1956, April 2, July 24, 1957, and July 12. 1962, file 2. box 55 , /W. On physicians who managedhealth care for individuals, see conference notes, July 12, 1962. file 3, box 55, ibid.

-' Statement. . . Concerning Necessity of Additional Hospital Facilities in Coal Mining Areas," Oct. 8. 1951,file 2, box 65, ibid: "Report of the Third Conference on Medical Care in the Bituminous Coal Mine Area," Hun-tington, West Virginia, Oct. 23-24, 1954, file I, box 53, ibid.

" Supplement to Chronology." Jan. 1960, file 3, box 51, ibid; "John Lewis's 250'Mile Chain of Hospitals,"U.S. News and World Report. Oct. 7, 1955, clipping, file 1, box 53, ibid.

'̂ Josephine Roche. "Progress Report for Trustees." Nov. 10. 1948. box 1, Director's File, Trustees Correspon-dence, West Virginia Collection, United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Fund Archives (Uni-versity Libraries, University of West Virginia, Morgantown); Josephine Roche, "Testimony before the Senate Com-


Ed La Rossett, pictured here in 1946 with Dr. Pierce Martin, broke his back in 1941 workingin the coal mines of Kentucky. In the postwar period, the United Mine Workers Welfare andRetirement Fund rehabilitated such disabled miners, supplementing or replacing home visitswith care in state-of-the-art medical facilities. Photo by Russell Lee. Courtesy National Archivesand Records Administration, photo no. 245-MS-2333L.

By 1956 the fund was winning awards. That year, the fund received the prestigiotis Al-bert Lasker Award from the American Public Health Association "for brilliant and dedi-cated scientific planning which has created a model program of health services for a mil-lion and a half workers and theit families." Congress found the fund to be "honestly andwell administeted; in feet, the medical program is outstanding" and the general program"of incalctilable benefit to the beneficiaries." In 1958 the Harvard School of Public Healthused the fund as a "case study in our required Public Health Practice course." Accordingto a faculty member, "It seems an ideal case fot our students to study." In 1959 the UnitedStates Information Agency presented the fund as a point of national pride, extolling it intwo hundred local publications outside the United States. '̂*

minee on Banking and Currency," Aug. I, 1949, file 5, box 53, Roche Collection; Ruth Q. Sun, "Mine WorkersServed by Unique Health Plan," CP, 7 (May 1953), 93, clipping, file 9, box 63, ibid. On the fund's use of ambu-lances and pullman cars, see Ira Wolfen, '"The Miners' Fund: A Tribute to Good Management," Reader's Digest, 68{Sept. 1956). reprint in file 1, box 53, ibid. See also Edward Berkowitz, "Growth of the U.S. Social Welläre Systemin the Post-World War II Era: Tlie UMW. Rehabilitation, and the Federal Government," Research in Economic His-tory. 5 (1980), 2 3 3 ^ 7 , esp. 238.

" Supplement to Chronology," Jan. 1960, file 3. box 51, Roche Collection; Subcommittee on Welfare andPension Funds, Einal Report on Welfare andPeruion Plans (Washington, 1956), file 4, box 54, ibid,; Hugh Leavell toJosephine Roche, Sept. 26, 1958, file 5, box 64, ibid.; Robert J. Myers, "Further Experience of the UMWA Welfareand Retirement Fund," Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 14 (July 1961), 556-62, file I, box 52, ibid.; Roche


Two Tiers Emerge

In addition to health services, the fund initially sponsored a broad program of incomesupport. In that program especially, two tiers emerged. The program of income supportincluded retirement pensions, income replacement for disabled miners, aid to miners'widows and dependent children, and a death benefit. In 1952 it came to include emer-gency payments to victims of mine disasters.̂ ^

The only income replacement program that was not means tested was the retirementpension for miners, which at its inception was among the most generous in the country.Beginning in 1947, the pension program paid $ 100 per month to retired coal miners whowere sixty-two years of age and had been working in the coal industry for twenty yearswith a year of employment in a signatory mine just before retirement. In 1949 the trust-ees lowered the retirement age to sixty. Other income the retiree received did not affectthe pension. Only returning to work in the mines cut off eligibility. Both miners and ad-ministrators of the fund considered the retirement pension an entitlement. As one minersaid, "This is not a privilege—it is a right earned by years of hard work."̂ "̂

The death benefit paid to a deceased miner's family was nearly as straightforward.When a miner died, the fund paid an immediate $350 to cover funeral expenses and$650 over the next twelve months. The fund called that $650 a survivor's benefit. In itsearly years the fund provided survivors not only such forms of income replacement butalso health benefits. Widows and dependent children of a deceased miner continued toreceive medical care from the fund. Only remarriage cut the widow out of the health caresystem, and coming of age ended benefits for the children.̂ ^

Other income replacement benefits were stingier than retirement pensions, and theywere means tested and thus outside the category of entitlements. After receiving the fullsurvivor's benefit, some widows qualified for additional support. Widows over fifty couldapply for an ongoing stipend of $30 a month; they received an extra $10 for each de-pendent child; widows under fifty who had dependent children qualified for stipends ofthe same amount. But widows under fifty who had no children living at home were noteligible for the ongoing aid. As of 1951 any other income received by widows or their de-pendent children was deducted from their UMW aid. Given the extraordinary lack of em-ployment opportunities for women in mining communities—a problem of which Rochewas well aware—these policies threatened women with extreme poverty if they were un-able or unwilling to join another wage-earning man's household.̂ **

The construction of widows and dependent children as objects of charity was clear inthe differing stipends paid to retired miners and to widows and in means testing. Thebureaucratic requirements of means testing further marked widows as less worthy of aidto P. R,, Jan. 12, 1959, and attachment, box 11, UMWA Correspondence, Director's File, United Mine Workers ofAmerica Health and Retirement Fund Archives.

'"' Annual report, June 30, 1953, file 2, box 52, Roche Collection; "Supplement to Chronology," Jan. 1960,file 3, box 51,/¿/W.

''• Styles Bridges to John L. Lewis, July 15, 1948. box 1. Trustees Correspondence, Director's File, United MineWorkers of America Health and Retirement Fund Archives; Roche to Lewis, March 30, 1949, ibid.; [JosephineRoche], press release, April 8, 1949, ibid; annual report, June 30, 1952, file 2, hox 52, Roche Collection; "MillerSupports Pension Increase," VMWJournal, Sept. 1, 1972, p. 29.

''' Staff meeting minutes, Nov. 26, 1952, Ring Binder, Directors File. United Mine Workers of America Healthand Retirement Fund Archives; "Supplement to Chronology," Jan. 1960, file 3, hox 51, Roche Collection.

-* Annual report, June 30, 1951, file 2, box 52, Roche Collection; Roche to All Supervisors, May 18, 1951,Ring Binder 5, Staff Meetings, Directors File, United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Fund Ar-chives.


In the late 194ÜS and early 1950s, the United Mine Workers Welfare and Retirement Fundaided thousands of coal miners' widows and orphans, like those pictured here. Cuts in thataid helped ignite miners' fury against the fund and their appeals for support from the federalgovernment. Courtesy West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia UniversityLibraries.

than their husbands had been and thoroughly baffled many. During the 1950s the fund'sfiles filled with letters from desperate women-trying to understand a system created bypeople who wanted to help them—but not too much. Consider the plaint of a minerswidow who had received her death benefit from the fund and did not understand thatongoing widow's aid was a separate program for which she had to apply; her state's publicaid office could not offer money until the fund verified that she would receive no moresupport from its coffers:

Mrs. Josephine Roche Will you please tell me Why that I haven Receaved a nothercheck from the union no 5988 I am working not able and not married I have noother income I am 24 dollars behind In Rent and no food to ate only looking formy check . . . I nead help Bad I can get Public assistance if you will Write . . . helpme so I can ate and have a house to live in.

The widow's need to prove that she was not receiving support from two sources stoodin stark contrast to a retired miner's ability to receive monies simultaneously from thefund and the Social Security Administration. Escaping means testing confirmed a ben-eficiary's entitlement to benefits.'^

'" M. B. to Roche, May 16, 1952, box 1, Director's Correspondence, Director's File, United Mine Workers ofAmerica Health and Retirement Fund Archives. For Roche's request that the district union president help M. B.apply for widow's assistance, see Roche to William Mitch, May 22, 1952, ibi¿L


Widows thus fated poorly in the fund's scheme. While amendments to the Social Se-curity Act in 1939 brought widows and dependent children of eligible workers into thesocial insurance system and thereafter treated the non-means-tested public payments tothem as an entitlement, the fund treated miners' widows with less respect, adding anotherdimension to the gender inequalities inherent in social security arrangements based onemployment.-***

Not all men were treated equally, either. Like widows, disabled miners fell into the cat-egory of charity cases. The history of social support for the disabled suggests that in theU.S. welfare state beneficiaries could begin as objects of charity and move into the cat-egory of those entitled. In the 1930s discussions of the disabled had a different tone fromdiscussions of the aged. American men unable to work due to disability were treated morelike female dependents than like the dignified male workers eligible for old-age insur-ance under the Social Security Act. Indeed, aid for disabled workers did not figure in theoriginal act at all, and only in 1950, after repeated attempts by reformers, did Congressfinally extend public assistance monies to the permanently and totally disabled. The fed-eral system then construed the disabled as recipients of charity, their stipends paltry andmeans tested. But only six years later, disabled workers aged 50—65 were granted federallyadministered insurance monies just as retired workers were. Soon, their dependents wonsupport, and in I960 cash grants were extended to any disabled worker regardless of age.Some disabled workers, then, moved from off the Social Security map in 1935 into thecategory of entitled beneficiaries by 1960."

The fiand's program of income replacement for disabled miners never became an en-titlement program. Disabled men, including those in rehabilitation, were initially grant-ed a monthly stipend of $30 a month with an extra $10 for a wife and each dependentchild. Income from workmen's compensation was subtracted from the grant. The smallerstipend and means testing situated disabled miners squarely in the category of charity re-cipients."

Fluctuation of Benefits for the Needy

The two-tiered structure of the fund was evidenced most painfully in the early revoca-tion of benefits for disabled miners, widows, and dependent children. In late 1953 Rochedetermined that the fund had to cut expenditures to compensate for cost overruns in thehospital program. Not surprisingly, charity cases took the hit. In January 1954 Rocheexplained, "These benefits were never intended to be part of the Fund s long-range pro-gram, whose chief emphasis is on pensions, medical and hospital care, and death benefits

'" Those who devised the 19.39 amendments to rhe Social Security Act (SSA) saw the widow's Old-Age Insurance(oAl) benefitasanentidemeniofthehusbaiidfot his waged work rather than one earned by the widow, thus Stamp-ing even OAi benefits with gender subordination, according to Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women,Men. and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-century America (NewYork, 2001), 130-42. Widows on OAJfared better dian those on Aid co Dependent Children (ADC), a federal-staie program. During the 1950s about halfthe states restricted eligibility for ADC, and in the early 1960s many reduced stipends. See Nadasen, Welfare Warriors.6; and Reese, Backbish against Welfare Mothers. 35-133.

" U.S. Social Security Administration, "Development of the Disability Program under Old-Age Survivors In-surance, 1935-74," http://www.ssa.gov/hiscory/pdf/dibreporr.pdf; Edward Berkowitz and Daniel M. Fox, "ThePolicies of Social Security Expansion: Social Security Disability Insurance, 1951)-)9S6" Journal of Policy History. 1{no. 3, 1989), 233-60; Edward Berkowiiz, "Ihe American Di.sability System in Historical Perspective," inPolicies and Government Programs, ed. Edward Berkowirz (New York, 1979). 16-74.

" Annual report, June 30, 1952; annual report, June 30, 1951.


for the miners and their families." She continued: "Social Security and Federal-Statepublic assistance programs" increasingly provided aid to widows and dependent children"with the result that fewer persons require this type of assistance from the Fund. Majorincreases have also been made by these other agencies in aid to the blind and to the to-tally and permanently disabled." Although miners' widows would continue to receive thedeath and survivor's benefit, the fund would offer no income replacement thereafter norwould it continue health services for the family after the survivor's benefit had been fullypaid. The administrators argued that Social Security's Old-Age Insurance and publicassistance were so regularly supporting these families that the fund was paying out verylittle anyway. Resources could be better spent elsewhere.'^

Roches reasoning for terminating the benefits was disingenuous but illuminating.First, the income replacement programs had not been designated "temporary" when firstcreated. They became temporary only when the fund needed to cut costs. Second, if thefiind had intended to eliminate only programs that duplicated services provided else-where, administrators would not have cut health care to widows and dependent children:No other agency provided comprehensive health care to such beneficiaries. Moreover,the federal Social Security program aided retired miners as well as some disabled minersand widows, but the fiind did not consider eliminating the retirement pensions of minersthemselves. When the fund needed to cut some benefits in order to keep others going atfull throtde, administrators threw out the charity cases in favor of the entitled. Categoriesof aid mattered.

They were also horly contested. For the ensuing fifteen years, miners and widows pro-tested the retraction of support. In 1955 more rhan half the letters sent out under Roche'ssignature to workers or their families responded to inquiries from or on behalf of miners'widows who were certain they should receive benefits from the fiind. The volume of de-mand did not diminish over the next decade. Widows believed they were due aid becausetheir husbands had been loyal union members. Responses to these requests became in-creasingly defensive over the years as many a widow endured scolding for using the term"pension" to refer to the benefits she believed she was owed. In 1958 one miner's widowappealed to the fund, insisting, like so many others, that she was due a "widows pension. 'In a curt reply Roche upbraided the widow for suggesting that wives of deceased min-ers ever earned a "pension." "Pension benefits are not available to widows of miners," sheinsisted. "Fund regulations never contained a provision under which a pension could beauthorized a miner's widow." Roche conceded that the "Fund formerly authorized tem-porary Cash Aid Benefits ro eligible widows without income. However, these benefitswere discontinued by the Fund Trustees in March 1954 and are no longer in effect." Suchrebukes revealed the intensity of the fund's attachment to distinctions between the noble"pension" and the pitiable "temporary cash aid," between entitlement and charity.'"*

Widows rejected the fund's categories, revealing their own conviction of entitlementto support. They continued to inquire after disconrinued benefits through the 1960s. In1967 Roche was still responding to demands for "widow's pensions" and repeating that"temporary benefits were discontinued some years ago." Increasingly alienated, widows

' ' United Mine Workers Health and Retirement Fund, press release, Jan. 21, 1954, file 9, box 63, Roche Col-lection.

" Roche to beneficiaries, boxes 1, 3-5, Director's Correspondence, Director's File. United Mine Workers ofAmerica Health and Retirement Fund Archives; Mrs. L. G. co John Owens, Oct. 7, I960, box 11, UMWA Corre-spondence, ibid.\ Roche to Mrs. B. C , Sept. 18, 1958, box 3, ibid.; Roche to Mrs. S. B., July 8, 1958, ibid


in the 1960s sometimes sent inquiries through attorneys or congressional representatives.Active miners also fought for reinstitution of widows' benefits at their annual conven-tions. This category of aid was, however, never restored. Even when the financial fortunesof the fimd improved, administrators reserved their resources for beneficiaries they con-sidered entitled. '̂

In the context of a social security project connected with a union, entitlement stemmedfrom several sources. Generally in the U.S. welfare regitne, entitlement was based onearning through paid employment. Widows and children had not earned their benefitsthrough paid employment and so were "pitied but not entitled," to borrow the historianLinda Gordons elegant phrase. Working miners' benefits were most clearly construed as"earned" and thus most clearly as entitlements. Disabled men occupied an ambiguousposition as many had become disabled precisely by working in paid employment and sowould seem entitled. But, since some disabled men were perceived as loafers and somewere too young to have accumulated the same entitlement as workers who had spent de-cades on the job, disability fell into a gray area.^''

At the fund, entitlement was also connected to the value of a beneficiary to the unionmovement. Because the fund constituted an entity legally separate from the mine work-ers' union, the trustees were legally obligated to run it in the interest of beneficiarieswithout reference to the goals of the union. Nevertheless, union organizers and officersstrove to obscure the fact that miners did not have to be union members to receive ben-efits from the fiind but rather had to be employees of companies that had signed the coalwage agreements. The coal operators, for their part, wanted the fund to be seen as theirgift, not the unions. But miners and their families generally saw the fund as compensa-tion deriving from union membership. One widow wrote in I960 that she deserved atleast the survivor's benefit because her husband had faithfully paid his union dues: "I havemy receipts." Because the promise of a generous health and retirement plan was one of themost compelling arguments for joining the union after 1950, Roche and Lewis privilegedworking miners' benefits above all others.^^

Unreliability of Entitlements

The history of the fund demonstrates, however, that even programs the fund adminis-trators considered entitlements were constantly in flux. Significant changes came, forinstance, in 1960, when the trustees announced a major "tightening of provisions forpensions, hospital and medical care and fuñera! and survivor benefits." Most shocking,this tightening decreased pensions for currently retired miners. What had begun as agenerous retirement program in the late 1940s succumbed to the decline of coal and therising costs of medical care in the late 1950s.'^

'"'' Roche to John J. Duncan, June 28, 1967. box 5, Director's Correspondence, Director's File. ibid. Such let-ters abound in boxes 4 and 5, ibid. Proceedings of the 44th Consecutive Constitutional Convention of the UMWA, vol.II, Resolutions (Washington, 1964), 96, file 3 , box 50, Roche Collection. For the eventual increase in the survivor'sbenefit, see "Widows and Survivors Benefits," United Mine Workers Journal, Sept. I I , 1972, p . 17.

-"' See Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston, 1962),273-300.

'" Conference notes, April 13-14, 1960, file 2, box 55, Roche Collection. For evidence that miners and theirfamilies believed they paid union dues directly into the fund, see, for example, Roche to R. B. W, Oct. 21, 1958,box 3, Director's Corre.spondence, Directors File, United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement FundArchives; and other correspondence in boxes 3 and 4, ibid.

'" "Supplement to Chronology," Jan. 1960, file 3, box 51, Roche Collection.

The Journal of American History June 2009

In some ways the miners' pension system copied Social Security's Old-Age Insurance.Roche rejected actuarial accounting measures that would have required the fund to offermodest benefits sustainable over the life of each pensioner; she preferred the Social Secu-rity system's pay-as-you-go program, basing the fund's payments at any time mainly onthe money then flowing into it. (The trustees set up a reserve fund but did not route intoit enough money to guarantee that each retiree who started receiving a pension wouldreceive that pension until he died.) In the late 1940s, with the coal industry booming,the pay-as-you-go system looked like a reasonably good bet. But as the number of retiredminers increased during the late 1950s and the amount of coal mined decreased, the fundsuffered. In 1960 retirement pensions to current beneficiaries were reduced from $100 to$75 per month.''^

Medical coverage also changed. In 1952 payments for dental services and tonsillecto-mies were discontinued. Two years later the fund denied coverage to injured miners whentheir employers opted out of their state's workmen's compensation program. The fundwas trying to pressure employers with this move, but the effect was to punish miners fordecisions over which they had no control. Moreover, once the miners' hospitals were con-structed, miners could no longer expect coverage for hospital cate nearer their homes. Asa way to furnish the best care and to control costs, the decision made sense, but to minerswho had to travel farther for care, the new requirements sometimes seemed oppressive.Some patients checked Into the memorial hospitals but missed their families so much thatthey checked out early and later returned even sicker. As the fund increasingly convinceddoctors to form group practices working in outpatient clinics, miners and their familiessometimes had to give up family doctors and learn to make appointments for health care.That may seem a small thing to those of us used to a corporate medical system, but minersand their families were accustomed to drop-in visits to local doctors' offices and to homecare. They had to be trained to make appointments at the bustling clinics that offeredthem what was no doubt better care but required new disciplines of everyday life.'"'

Just as miners made these adjustments, further changes discombobulated them. In1960 medical care for unemployed miners was limited to one year, and those who hadmoved into mine management were cut off entirely. At least 59,000 people lost heiilthcoverage as a result. A fiarther reduction in 1962 ended benefits for employees of coaloperators in Kentucky and Tennessee that were delinquent in their royalty payments tothe fund. This move immediately eliminated benefits for at least 3,900 workers in nearlyseven hundred companies. All told, between 1962 and 1966, about 7,000 beneficiarieshad their medical benefits summarily canceled when employers became delinquent inroyalty payments.^'

-" On the introduction of pay-as-you-go to OAI in the 1939 amendments to the SSA. see Roche to Lewis, May20, 1948, Feb. 28, March 30, 1949, box 1, Trustees Correspondence, Director's File, United Mine Workers ofAmerica Health and Retirement Fund Archives; Mulcahy, Social Contract for the Coal Fields, 42-4i; and "Supple-ment to Chronology," Jan. 1960, file 3, box 51, Roche Collection.

•"̂ "Supplement to Chronology," Jan. I960, file 3, box 51, Roche Collection; spiral notebook, March 29. 1954,box 46, /éíí¿; spiral notebook, Sept. 17, 1957, /¿ii/.; spiral notebook, Oct. 24, 1957, i¿¿¿; spital notebook, Nov. 8,1957, ibid; conference notes, Feb. 4-5, Feb. 24-26. 1959, file 2, box 55, ibid

'̂ Conference notes, April 13, 1960, file 2, box 55, ibid.; "Supplement to Chronology," Jan. I960, file 3, box51, ibid; conference notes, Aug. 13, 15-16, 24, 29, 1962, file 1, box 56, ibid.; annual report, June 30, 1963, file3, box 52, ibid.; memorandum of evening telephone conference, Lewis and Roche, Sept. 19, 1963, West KentuckyCoal Company folder, box 3, UMWA Correspondence, Director's File, United Mine Workers of America Healthand Retirement Fund Archives; Roche to Lewis, Nov. 14, I960, ibid.; conference nores, Aug. 20. 1963, WesternKentucky Coal Company folder, box 3, UMWA Correspondence, Director's File, United Mine Workers of AmericaHealth and Retirement Fund Archives; Judge Gesell, "Memorandum Opinion," April 29, 1971, file 6, box 59,


Predictably, miners and their families were furious about every diminution of benefits.They inundated both the fund and the union with letters protesting against the reduc-tions in pensions, terminations of medical coverage, and changing eligibility require-ments for both. They picketed union locals and districts. They issued protests at nationalconventions of the UMW. Resolutions proposed at national conventions demanded thatminers directly elect their representative to the fund's board of trustees. At the 1964 con-vention, members of Local 8588 from Biggs, Kentucky, offered a resolution that "mem-bers should have a vote on who runs and takes care of the fund." Members from Osage,West Virginia, offered a resolution that two "rank and file men" should serve on the "Wel-fare Board and have them reelected every four years.'"'^

On behalf of the trustees and administrators of the fund, Roche defended the reduc-tions. Declining revenues caused by the recession in coal in the late 1950s and the in-ability or refusal of small mine operators to pay their royalties required belt tightening.At one restive convention, she explained, "While we want to do more about benefits, youmust keep in mind that there is no greater disservice, no greater evil chat could befall youand your members and all the beneficiaries of the Trust Fund than for us to lack the cour-age to constantly go on assuring the preservation of your trust. We will not let it becomeinsolvent."'*'

Such explanations did not assuage the miners. By the mid-1960s, dissatisfaction withthe fund converged with other issues to produce a movement to democratize the UMW.When John L. Lewis died in 1969, that movement fully erupted in the campaign of Jo-seph "Jock" Yablonski for the UMW presidency. His platform emphasized greater attentionto mine safety, rank-and-file democracy, and, especially, increased benefits from the fund.Yablonski lost the election, but when he, his wife, and his daughter were brutally mur-dered .shortly after it, dissident miners won a court-mandated replay of the vote. At thetop of the reformers' agenda was an increase in retirement pensions and the reestablish-ment of aid to disabled miners and widows. This time, in December 1972, the reformerswon.

Having developed a sense of entitlement to benefits from the fiind, many miners andtheir families protested, organized, and fought at the union polls to gain economic secu-rity they believed to be theirs by right.

Pressitig for State Expansion

But miners did not restrict their protests to the union and the fund. They simultaneouslyagitated for intervention by the federal government. Employing tactics that ranged from

Roche Collection. On the funds continued payment of medical expenses uncovered by Medicare, see annual report,June 30, 1966, file 3, box 52, ibid.

•'- Spiral notebook, July 6, 1960, hox 46, Roche Collection; spiral notebook. July 29, 1960. ibid.-, conferencenotes, Oct. 1, 1962, file 1, hox 36, ibid.: Proceedings of the 43rd Consecutive Constitutional Convention of the UMWA,vol. 11 (Wa.shington, 1960), 34-35, file 3, hox 50, ibid.\ Proceedings of the 44th Consecutive Constitutional Conven-tion of the UMWA {2 vols., Washington, 1964), 1. 240-41, II, 7, 60-63. 80-81, 96-97. ibid.

"" Proceedings of the Hth Consecutive Constitutional Convention of the UMWA. I. 240-41. file 3, hox 50, ibi^.^^ Mukahy. Social Contract for the Coal Fields. 148-49; "Order and Opinion of Judge Bryant in Election Case,"

üMWfournal, July I, 1972, p. 2; "Ask Arnold Miller."/¿iW., Aug. 1. Î972, p. 20; "Miller Supports Pension Increase,"/¿/i^.,Sept. !, 1972, p. 29; "Can Pensioners Afford Another Five Years ofTony Boyle?," í¿/V., Sept. 15, 1972, p. 24;"Some Plain Talk jhout Pensions." ibid, Oct. I, 1972, p. 20; "District 17 Pensioners TTiink It's Time for a Change,"ibid. Oct. 15̂ , 1972, p. 21; "Close A.ssociate of John L Lewis Endorses Miller-Trhovich-Patrick," ibid.. Nov. 15,1972, p. 28; "Retired Miners and Widows Win Benefits They Earned," jW/weri Voice. 3 (Winter 1973). 4.

90 IKe Journal of American History June 2009

roving pickets and arson to alliances with other social movements to conventional lob-bying, electoral politics, and lawsuits, indignant miners exerted pressures that expandedthe federal state. Sometimes, the miners' efforts resulted in direct federal action in theirbehalf; at other times, tbe discontent roiling aggrieved miners contributed to a largersocial unrest that included the civil rigbts struggle and the student movement. In fact,some miners reached out directly to those movements and imagined their struggles asakin. Rank-and-file workers thus contributed to the upheaval that opened opportunitiesfor state expansion well beyond miners' specific grievances. Their protests helped createthe Great Society.

Miners' discontent eventually contributed to state expansion in three areas: antipov-erty programs, including regional economic development and relief in Appalachia; federalprotections for private old-age pensions; and health care/workplace safety. Brief narrativesof the three suggest the historical significance of the sense of entitlement miners devel-oped from their experience in a private health and retirement program.

Antipoverty Programs

John F. Kennedy swept into the presidency with Appalachian coal miners already on hismind. The president's concern about joblessness put Appalachia on his radar in I960 asthe region suffered an unemployment rate more than twice the national average. Oncein office, Kennedy wrangled from Congress a program that provided about fifty thou-sand Appalachian workers with job training and education. But the immiseration of coalminers involved more than high unemployment. Those lucky enough to be employedincreasingly worked under conditions that recalled the 1920s. In response to the reces-sioti in coal in the late 1950s, some smaller operations began to subcontract their minesto non-union operators who did not pay a union wage or send royalty checks to the fundand who hired so few workers that they did not have to comply with federal mine safetyregulations. Men used to earning $25 a day labored instead for $3-10, lost their eligibil-ity for pensions and health benefits, and faced greater risk of physical injury.̂ ^

The fund threw the matches that set this tinderbox aflame. The first was the 1960 de-cision to cut health benefits for those unemployed for more than a year; the second andthird came in quick succession during the autumn of 1962, when the fund cut off healthbenefits for miners whose employers were delinquent in royalty payments and the nextmonth announced that the memorial hospitals in Kentucky would close if no communitygroup purchased them.'̂ ^

Miners' responses to these provocations took several forms. In I960 they began flood-ing Congress with letters of protest. In September 1962, when the fund canceled healthbenefits because of delinquent royalties, four thousand miners converged on their hospi-

*̂ On jFKs early interest in Appalachia, see Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands. xi. On the effects of JFK'Sfint jobs program, see Harrington, Other America. 58. On unemployment rates and conditions in the coalfields, seeHomer Bigari, "Aid Drive Pushed for Appalachia," New York Times. Nov. 19, 1963, p. 16; "Recommendation to theAdministrator," June 18. 1963, Regional Hospital Corporation File, box 9. Records of the Assistant Administratorfor Program Development, Files of Other Federal Agencies. Records ol the Area Redevelopment Administration;"Statement of the President at the Joint Meeting of the Advisory Policy Board to the ARA and the Conference ofAppalachian Governors," April 9, 1963, White House File, ibid; Committee for Miners, "Eastern Kentucky Back-ground Sheet" [1963]. Committee for Miners File, box 9, Records of the Administrator, Subject Files, 1961-65,ibid

'"' "Supplement to Chronology," Jan. 1960, file 3, box 51, Roche Collection; subsequent addenda, ibid.


Hazard Memorial Hospital, in Hazard, Ktniucky. pictured here ¡n a March 27, 1959, pho-tograph from the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader, was one of the ten state-of-the-art hospitalsconstructed by the United Mine Workers Welfare and Retirement Fund. In September 1962,four thousand miners organized roving pickets to protest the proposed closing of their hospi-tal. Courtesy West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries,

tal in Hazard, Kentucky, and decided to strike their mines until operators resumed roy-alty payments. When, a few weeks later, the fund threatened to close the Kentucky hospi-tals, miners created roving pickets to shut down non-union mines, set tipples ablaze, anddynamited buildings, bulldozers, and coal trucks. To explain why the fund's action con-verted the miners' misery into a "burning crisis," one clergyman in Kentucky explained,"Some of those miners worship that hospital card more than anything else." Upon hear-ing that the hospitals might close, one miner warned, "If they do, the people around herewould be destroyed. They're our only hope." Reporters explained that "miners living inthe areas look on the hospitals as their personal property." No clearer statement of en-titlement could be made. The crisis in the coalfields stemmed most immediately from theminers' sense of entitlement betrayed.'*''

Berman Gibson, leader of the roving pickets, claimed that he and his fellows were try-ing to draw federal resources to relieve their desperate situation. Administrators at thefund sought the same goal. In December 1962 the United Presbyterian Church expressedinterest in buying the hospitals, but it had no capital. The fund approached the federalgovernment for money. As it did so, eastern Kentucky exploded. Roving pickets blewup equipment at non-union mines; miners battled law enforcement officials; operatorsevaded promises they had made in truces negotiated by the governor. By spring 1963Gibsons group was discussing a "miners' march on Washington for jobs and unionism inSoutheastern Kentucky." President Kennedy, already worried about plans for a march onWashington by civil rights activists, created both a cabinet-level task force to figure outhow the federal government might help save the miners' hospitals and a commission on

"'' Congressional Record, 87 Cong., 2 sess., Feb. 7. 1962, pp. 2010-15; Bigart, "Aid Drive Pushed for Appala-chia," 16; Marjorie Kester, "The Miners' Memorial Hospitals in Eastern KY," April 19, 1963, Regional HospitalCorporation File, box 5, Mixed Subject and Programs Files, 1961-^3, Office of Assistant Administrator for AreaOperations, Records of the Area Redevelopment Administration; "The Miners' Movement Background Details"[Feb. 1964], Committee for Miners File, box 9, Subject Files, 1961-65, Office of the Administrator, ibid; "Com-mittee for Miners," ibid.\ "ASplendidandChristian Act of Mercy," Aï'iéj'/fr/iïnii/F, Aug. 1. 1963, clipping, MinersMemorial Hospitals File, ibid.; and Julius Dutscha, "U.S. Set lo Help Church Save UMW Hospitals," WashingtonPost, April 27. 1963, dipping, ibid.

92 IKe Journal of American History June 2009

Appalachia to prepare a "comprehensive program for the economic development" of theregion. Only after coal miners engaged in violence and rhetorically linked their dissentwith the black freedom struggle did JFK move toward a massive federal response to Appa-lachian distress, Appalachians were not simply the "beaten people, sunk in their povertyand deprived of hope," represented in The Other America; they were not merely objectsof pity; they were agitators demanding that the federal government make good on theirsense of entidement to social support.""^

In June 1963, only two days before the scheduled closing of the hospitals, the AreaRedevelopment Administration (ARA) delivered a grant of $3.9 million to the Presbyte-rians so they could purchase some of the hospitals, including the one in Hazard. A yearlater, tbe ARA proffered another $4.1 million for the rest of the miners' hospitals. Theycontinued to operate as a chain and served as centers for economic development of the

49

region.Neither the miners nor administrators at tbe fund argued that the federal government

should own or operate the hospitals, Tliey had hoped that the hospitals might becomecommunity institutions. But the extreme poverty of the communities blocked that planand led to their purchase by a nonprofit using federal funds. That outcome did not trans-fer an obligation for social welfare from the private to the public stream of the U.S. wel-fare regime. It did, however, reveal that miners and administrators at the fund both sawthe federal government as ultimately responsible for ensuring miners' access to modernhospital care, and it succeeded in getting the federal government to fulfill that obliga-tion.

Saving the hospitals did not end the miners' movement. Determined to bring furtherfederal resources to the region, Berman Gibson's group entered electoral politics. In elec-tions during summer 1963, the miners tried to unseat officials who refused to press forfederal aid, but that effort failed. Local authorities arrested Berman and other dissidentson election day, charging them with conspiracy to blow up a bridge. With local powerarrayed against them and despairing of help from the UMW, the miners reached beyondtheir usual base. In November 1963 they approached the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) during its annual convention; inspiredcreation of an allied organization in New York to support their cause (Committee forMiners); and even drew college students to Appalachia. They eventually won publicityFrom the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Accentuating connections be-tween the miners' struggle and the struggle for racial justice, Gibson proclaimed that theminers "are just going to have to get out on the streets like the colored people."^"

•'*' Comtnittee for Miners, "Press Release," Nov. 18, 1963, Committee for Minets File, box 9, Subject Files,1961-65, Office of the Administrator, Records of the Area Redevelopment Administration; "Miners' MovementBackground Details," ibid.\ "Statement by President," Feb. 15, 1963, Miners Memorial Hospitals File, ibid,\ JohnWhisman to Gordon Reckord, Feb. 15, 1963,/¿;Í^.; "Statement of the Ptesident." April 9, 1963, White House File,box 9, Assistant Administrator, Program Development, George Reckord, Files of Other Agencies, ibid.: annual re-port, June 30, 1963, file 3, box 52, Roche Collection; Harrington, Other America, 41.

'''' "Special Discussion of the Ptoject Review Committee," May 10, 1963, Regional Hospital Corporation File,box 5, Mixed Subject and Programs Files, 1961-63, Office of Assistant Administrator for Area Operations, Re-cords of the Area Redevelopment Administration; "Recommendation to the Admini,'itrator," June 19, 1963, ibid.:Marjorie Kester to Mr. Williams, May 9. 1963, ÍÍ'/Í/.; Whisman to George Reckord, Feb. 15, 1963, Miners Memo-rial Hospitals File, box 9, Subject Files, 1961-65, Office of the Administrator, ibid: Robert Giles to Franklin D.RooseveltJr.,May29. 1963,/¿ÍÍ/.; Arthur Nash to John F Kennedyet al.. June6, 1963, ibid.: Franklin D. RooseveliJr., press release, June 4, 1963, ibid.; Ben A. Franklin, "Appalachia Hospitals Need $2 Million to Go On," New YorkTimes. Dec. 20, 1964, p. 52.

'" See Committee for Miners File, box 9, Subject Files, 1961-65, Office of the Administrator, Records of the


During this year of engagement with dissident coal miners, Kennedy asked his eco-nomic adviser, Walter Heller, for a broad antipoverty program to put forward in 1964.The president toyed with the possibility of such a program to accompany a tax cut thatwould relieve more affluent citizens but leave the poor unaffected. Scholars usually chalkup this interest in poverty to the president's anxieties about retaining the black vote in1964 or to his exposure to Harrington's Other America. All have missed the activism ofAppalachian coal miners, who were literally up in arms at the time, organizing, reachingout to potential allies, making demands. Officials in Hellers Council of Economic Ad-visors later confirmed that the two crucial contexts for Kennedy's decision in November1963 to go forward with a major new antipoverty program were the civil rights move-ment and the situation in "eastern Kentucky—and the fact that the president took aninterest in that." The president, according to his advisers, "got all excited" about the situa-tion in eastern Kentucky, and within the White House, it "got everyone all stirred up.'"''

As the miners drew public attention to their plight and anxieties about another win-ter of violence circulated in fall 1963, Kennedy's administration shifted into overdrive.Theodore Sorensen, special counsel to the president, called a secret meeting of admin-istration officials to discuss a "crash program" of emergency aid for eastern Kentucky aswell as progress on a larger antipoverty program. In November 1963, President Kennedy'scommission unveiled its plan for long-range economic development in Appalachia, andduring the APL-CIO convention, Kennedy sent a request to Congress for emergency aidfor eastern Kentucky. In addition to calling for a quick expansion of existing programs,including school lunches, food distribution, and aid for housing and health care, thepresident asked Congress to appropriate money for a new public works program to helpminers get through the winter." '̂

After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson determined to pursue JFK'S hopefor an antipoverty program. Miners traveled to Washington to urge him to continue hispredecessor's efforts on their behalf. Johnson complied. In his State of the Union addresson January 8, 1964, Johnson not only famously declared "unconditional war on poverty,"but singled out Appalachia for "a special effort." Some who then worked on the legisla-tion that became the centerpiece of the War on Poverty, the 1964 Economic Opportu-nity Act, insisted later that if any single group had motivated their work, it was Appala-chians.* '̂

In April 1964 President Johnson also initiated legislation directed more specifically atdissident coal miners. His proposal called for a federal-state Appalachian Regional Com-

Arca Redevelopment Administration. See also Appalachian Volunteers First Report, March 30, 1964. Poverry/East-ern Kentucky [Jan. 21, 1964-Aprit 30, 1964] File, box 37, Subject Files, 1961-64, Theodore C. Sorensen Papers(John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass.).

'̂ ' For the influence of other works, such as those by Harry Caudill and John Kenneth Gdbraitb, on JFK'S in-lerest in poverty, sec Schlesiiiger. Thousand Days, 1010; and Isserman and Kazin, America Divided, I I I . WilliamCapron, in discussion by "Poverty and Urban Policy Panel." conference on Kennedy administration urban povertyprograms, Florence Heller School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare, Brandéis University, June 16-17, 1973.unpublished conference transcript, p. 168 (Kennedy Library).

" 'iheodore C. Sorensen to Murphy et al., confidential memo, Oct. 28, 1963, Poverry/Eastern Kentucky File,box 37, Subject Files, 1961-64, Sorensen Papers; "Roosevelt Jr. Sees Appalachia Delay," New York Times, Nov. 15,1963, p. 22; "House Unit Kills Aid to Kentucky," ibid, Nov. 16, 1963, p. 11; Bigart, "Aid Drive Pushed for Ap-paiacKia," p. 16.

" Committee for Miners, "Eastern Kentucky Background Sheet," Committee for Miners File, box 9, SubjectFiles, 1961-65, Office of the Administrator, Records of the Area Redevelopment Administration; "Jobless MinersAssuredon Aid to Kentucky," A'fw y¿r¿ 7ïwo. Jan. 9, 1964, p. 2; "State of the Union," ;¿ÍÍ/., pp. 1, 16;AdamYar-molinsky, in "Poverty and Urban Policy Panel," 69, 162-63-


mission to oversee the economic development of the region over five years. Johnson's billembodied the plan developed by Kennedys commission and included the controversialpossibility of building Tennessee Valley Authority-inspired steam plants to supply elec-tticity to the power-starved region. In March 1965 the president finally signed the Appa-lachian Regional Development Act, which supported a pared-down two-year plan wonh$1.2 billion for roads, water and sewer systems, airports, libraries, hospitals, and schools;the program was easily renewed in 1967, and it continued through the remainder of thetwentieth century. The disappointed expectation of social citizenship among rank-and-file miners contributed to this dramatic expansion of federal responsibility for social wel-fare.^"

The Road to ERISA

Miners' protests also helped widen federal responsibility for retirement pensions. Begin-ning in the early 1960s, furious miners deluged Congress with protests against denials,revocations, and reductions of their retirement pensions. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., chairof the House Committee on Education and Labor, received so many complaints fromminers in 1961 that he referred to them in defending amendments to the Welfare andPension Plans Disclosure Act. Tlie amendments, signed into law in 1962, gave teeth toearlier legislation that sought to protect beneficiaries of private pension plans by makingthe financial dealings of the plans public. Those amendments proved an opening wedgefor ongoing public discussion of private pension plans. Miners' complaints helped keepdiscussion alive. In fall 1962 congressmen threatened to investigate the termination ofbenefits to miners, and Kennedys administration formed a committee to study privatewelfare plans with an eye to legislation to protect workers' security. Pressures from minersand disappointed potential beneficiaries in other industries led to numerous hearings andto proposed laws shoring up private-sector benefits throughout the 1960s.̂ '̂

Eventually, miners dramatized the cause. In 1970 the U.S. Senate opened a highlypublicized investigation into the UMW'S 1969 presidential election because dissidents al-leged that Tony Boyle had manipulated miners' pensions in order to defeat the reformcandidate, Yablonski. Televised Senate hearings featured damning testimony from Jose-phine Roche. Boyle's malfeasance fueled the Senates campaign to extend public controlsover private pension plans, a campaign that resulted in the Employment Retirement In-come Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). ERISA established federal standards for vesting in, andfiinding of, private pension plans and required employers to support a reinsurance fund,the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, to insure payments of private pension ben-efits. Although some unions and many employers had for over a decade opposed such fed-eral intervention, other unions (such as the United Auto Workers) and some workers in

*̂ "Transcript of the President's Press Conference," Neiv York Times. April 26, 1964, p. 64; "Appalachia WorkBegun in 2 States," ibid.]\Ay7. 1965, p. 20; "Appalachia Fund Expected to Cain," ibid..}¿n. 8, 1967. p. 61; U.S.Congress, Senate, Committee on Environment and Puhlic Works, Field Hearing before the Subcommittee on Trans-portation and Infrastructure, 106 Cong. 2 sess., Aug. 8, 2000.

" Congressional Record. 87 Cong., 2 sess., Feh. 7, 1962, pp. 2010-15; James Wooten, The Employee RetirementIncome Security Act of ¡974: A Political History (Berkciey, 2004), 42-43, 77, 82-83; Conference Minutes, Nov. 6and 7, 1962, file I, box 56, Roche Collection. For miners' delegations requests for federal protections of pensionplans, sec U.S. Congress, House, Suhcommittee on Lahor, Hearings on Private Welfare and Pension Plan Legislation.91 Cong., 1 and 2 sess., 1969-1970. Such requests indicate that grassroots protests helped keep proposals from the1962 hearings alive, despite the contrary claim in Wooten, Employee Retirement Income Security Act, 2-3.


unions opposing the intervention (such as miners in the UMW) wholeheartedly supportedit. By the early 1970s, the labor movement generally supported most provisions. Hereagain, the sense of entitlement to benefits among beneficiaries in the private sector helpedcreate a demand for expanded public responsibility for economic security.̂ ^

Health and Workplace Safety

Miners also prodded the federal government to take greater responsibility for health careand workplace safety. The revocation of health benefits for unemployed miners, widowsof miners, and some retirees prompted many of the miners' loudest complaints, and thatdiscontent surely helped open political space for enactment of Medicare and Medicaidlegislation in 1965. In a press conference in spring 1964, Lyndon Johnson reported that atrip to Appalachia had convinced him of the urgency of his medicare bill as well as otherelements of his poverty program. But miners also made more specific demands. They sawthe courts, state legislatures, and Congress as means of leveraging a broadened systemof social benefits. Organized in 1967, the Association of Disabled Miners and Widowspressed for changes in eligibility requirements for pensions and health coverage from thefund. In August 1969 the group—with more than four thousand members—filed suitagainst the UMW and the fund, alleging that the eligibility requirements for benefits werecapricious and arbitrary. That same year. Disabled Miners of Southern West Virginiainspired a series of strikes to change eligibility requirements at the fund. Simultaneously,West Virginia miners formed the Black Lung Association, to demand workmen's com-pensation for victims of the disease. The group eventually sponsored wildcat strikes insupport of state legislation to that effect and won. Moreover, the group's militancy helpedwin passage of a temporary federal compensation program for victims of black lung aswell as broader safety measures for miners, encapsulated in the Coal Mine Health andSafety Act of 1969. The miners' insistence that the federal government was responsiblefor workplace safety may well have paved the way for the broader federal responsibilitylater embodied in the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970).̂ ^

Conclusion

Explaining the reignition of progressive reform in the 1960s is a huge undertaking thatrequires attention to the reverberating effects of World War II and the Cold War as wellas the social movements they shaped and strengthened. A full analysis would also explore

•* Wooren, Employee Retirement Income Security Act, 151 -89, 241. For Roche's testimony, see stenographic tran-script of hearings before the Subcommittee on Lahor, U.S. Senate, March 17, 1970, vol. 3, pp. 263-64, 277-95,folder 8, box 58, Roche Collection, For labor's support for the Employment Retirement Income Security Act, seethe testimony of Andrew Biemiller, Wilbur Daniels, and I. W. Abel in Subcommittee on Labor, Hearings on PrivateWelfare and Pension Plan Legislation. 102-37, 695-714, 592-96.

''' "Tran.script of President's News Conference on Foreign and Domestic Matters," New York Times, April 26,1964, p. 64. See "The Suit against rhe tiMW," Washington Post. Aug. 6, 1969, p. A22; Robert Maynard, "Miners'Suit Says UMW Misuses Fund," ibid. Aug. 5, 1969, p. Al; "UMW Rebellion Erupts in Wildcat Strikes," ibid., Aug.10, 1970, p. A3; "Mines Closed," ibid, June 23, 1970, p. A6; "Pensioners Close 16 Mines in Dispute with uMWUnion," ibid. July 14, 1970, p. A4; and "Wildcat Coal Strike Idles 150 Mines," ibid,}u\y 23, 1970, p. A9. "U.S.Aid Urged for Miners Hit by 'Black Lung,'" ibid, Aug. 15, 1969, p. A12; Don Oberdorfer, "Nixon to Sign MineBill despite Some Misgiving," ibid. Dec 30, 1969, p. Al; "Schlick Explains Work of Mines Bureau," United MineWorkers Joumal, Nov. 1, 1972, p. 11; "Social Security Explains Features of New Black Lung Law," ibid., Sept. 15,1972, pp. 6-7; "Federal Standards Are Needed for Workmen's Compensation Laws," ibid., Aug. 15, 1972, p. 13;"Information for Widows on Getting Black Lung Benefits," ibid., Nov. 1, 1972, p. 9.


the proclivities of elected officials and government experts. This essay adds another di-mension: the opening to reform resulted in part from private-sector experiments in socialprovision conducted earlier in the postwar period, which created an expectation of socialcitizenship that the private sector then failed to fulfill.

Great Society programs of the 1960s included some things old and some things new.Newest were the genuine guarantees of civil and political rights that finally closed the eraof racial apartheid in the U.S. South and the requirement that citizens affected by socialprograms participate in planning them. Alongside those departures, the Great Societyincluded programs that built directly on existing legislation or finally brought to frui-tion ideas germinated decades earlier. The social ferment that expanded the state alongthe older paths—in health care, pension reform, workplace safety, and economic devel-opment—was produced by the sense of entitlement to social support created by privatesocial security plans and then betrayed. The coal miners' story helps explain these strainswithin the Great Society.

In addition, the miners' story speaks to multiple issues in postwar labor history. Itconfirms recent skepticism about the labor-management accord that in the estimationoí some observers ruled labor relations between 1947 and 1973. Coal miners were notat peace with employers or even with their union during much of the period. Moreover,miners' dissatisfactions with the fund contributed to the postwar "erosion of the unionidea" identified by Nelson Lichtenstein.^" The miners' history, furthermore, revises thecommon wisdom on the relationship between blue-collar workers and the postwar wel-fare regime. Historians generally maintain that unionized workers, satisfied with the pri-vate benefits they won through collective bargaining, lost interest in expanding publicsocial programs after World War II. Although coal miners did not clamor for a full-blownsocial democratic state, in the 1960s they certainly demanded more expansive public so-cial programs than yet existed. Their experience with private-sector benefits did not leavethem holding their employers responsible for social security; they clearly saw the state asthe ultimate guarantor of their social and economic welfare.

Finally, when historians analyze the emergence of social citizenship, we usually empha-size the new benefits to which citizens gained entitlement. But the miners' story suggeststhat equally important to fulfilled social citizenship was the right to participate in mak-ing decisions about those benefits. Miners outraged by the changing policies of the funddemanded elected representation on the board of trustees. Even when the beloved JohnL. Lewis served as official representative oFworkers, many union locals lobbied for electedrepresentation instead. In the conflagration following Lewis's death, rank-and-file dissi-dents demanded both democratic decision making and better benefits. For them, socialcitizenship entailed diminishing inequalities of both wealth «W power.

Appalachian coal miners did not represent the whole of the U.S. working class or eventhe unionized third of the nonagricultural labor force, but they were not alone in havingexpectations of social citizenship created and then left unfulfilled by private-sector socialprograms. The postwar period created a significant pool of disappointed beneficiaries. Fa-mous incidents of plant closings in the auto industry—for example, by the Studebaker-Packard Company in 1964—put thousands of auto workers in the same predicament asmany coal miners, and those were just the most spectacular examples of a trend that per-

'̂' Lichtenstein, State of the Union. 98-177. See also Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA\ Seventy-Year Quest forCheap Uborilùiid, 1999), 5-6.


sisted through the rest of the century. Although the Great Society unfurled amid econom-ic growth and expanding private benefits for many Atnericans, workers in some unionizedindustries—autos, electrical appliances, and coal, for instance—experienced instabilitiesproduced by automation and by employers' propensity to close plants in union strong-holds in order to relocate where unions had no purchase. The historian Tliomas J. Sug-rue has revealed that process well underway in the auto industry in the 1950s; JeffersonGowie in electrical manufacturing in the 1960s. Other historians have shown that duringthe recession of the late 1950s, dozens of unionized plants closed and relocated where la-bor was cheaper. Automation afFected the storied longshoremen of the West Goast, whosenumbers declined dramatically in the 1960s-—even as their union won terrific benefitsfor those workers who remained employed. Wherever a plant trimmed its payroll by au-tomating or closed to escape union wages, workers who had developed a sense of entitle-ment to benefits in the private sector felt betrayed. As Berman Gibson recognized, "what'shappening to miners in Kentucky , . . it's going to happen soon to the whole of labor."^^

Most unions and workers did not—even when disappointed by their private-sectorbenefits—advocate the dismantling of private plans in favor of universal public socialsecurity programs.''" In general, they pushed for public prograins to fill in where privateplans were absent or to shore up private plans where they were weak. Those measuresthemselves, however, constituted expansions of public responsibility for social welfare,and the sense of entitlement developed among disappointed beneficiaries in private wel-fare plans helped create such expansions. Moreover, the impulse to call on the state asbackup revealed an implicit assumption that government was ultimately responsible foreconomic security.

in some cases the sense of entitlement and betrayal did lead workers to demand theelimination of private-sector social provision in favor of universal public programs. Sotumultuous was the rancor of the miners and their families in the late 1960s over thediscontinuance of health care for widows and unemployed and disabled miners that theUMW began lobbying in 1970 for government-sponsored universal health insurance. Thateffort attracted support from a broad swath of the labor movement that had enjoyed pri-vate health insurance throughout the postwar period.'''

The relationship between white rank-and-file workers and the Great Society was thusmore complex than historians have generally thought. White workers often appear in nar-ratives of the Great Society as spoilers. Ihey turn up as a part of the "counterresponsc" tosocial change in the 1960s and practitioners of the "politics of resentment" against poorerpeople and especially black Americans who, they believed, derived unfair advantages fromGreat Society programs and implementation strategies such as affirmative action,''"^ With-out question, some white workers did play that role. But it was not the only relation ofblue-collar workers to the Great Society. Some workers were part of the widespread social

'" Harrington, Other America. 28-29; Sugrue, Originsofthe Urban Crisis. 136, 145-46, 125-52; Hacker, Di-vided Weljare State, 148; Cowie, Capital Moves: Lichtensiein. State of the Union, 129. 133-34; "Press Release," Nov.18, Î963, Committee for Miners File, box 9, Subject Files, 1961-05, Office of the Administrator, Records of theArea Redevelopment Administration.

*"" \\3LcV.tf, Divided Welfare State. 125, 144, 151; Stevens, "Labor Unions, Employee Benefits and the Privatiza-tion of the American Welfare State"; Gottschalk, "Elusive Coal of Universal Health Care in the U.S."

''' "UMW Endorses legislation for National Health Insurance," Dominion News, Sept. 29. 1970, clipping, file 5,box 57, Roche Collection; "For Release Noon, Tuesday. July 28, 1970," UMW News, ]\i\y 2&, 1970, ibid.

"^ Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 336, 414.


upheaval that produced some Great Society programs, and they often remained great sup-porters of at least those programs.

"The history of the UMW Welfare and Retirement Fund, then, raises new questionsahout the U.S. welfare regime in the postwar period and its relation to the Great Society.We need to learn more ahout the benefits those covered by private programs received,how they changed over time and why, what distinguished union-negotiated plans fromthose in non-union firms, and how beneficiaries interpreted their experience in the var-ied plans. Answers to those questions will help us understand not only the Great Societyand the U.S. welfare regime in the late twentieth century but also the history of citizen-ship itself.

coal-fired reforms: social citizenship, dissident miners, and the great society

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