Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America

But as the subtitle boldly states, intra-union struggles can also end in homicide.  In a short prologue, Bradley sets the stage on the last day of 1969 for the final assassination of a decade that saw Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy murdered.  This time the victim is Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, a top official in the United Mine Workers of America, who not only threatens to defeat the union’s authoritarian president, W. A. “Tony” Boyle, in an election, but to publicly expose the corruption that runs through the UMWA.  A long-time member of the union, and a one-time special assistant to legendary UMWA president John L. Lewis, Boyle had a reputation for using the “rough stuff.”  This time it meant murder.

Bradley has written a fast-paced, accessible, true crime book embedded in the history of a once mighty union that had become authoritarian, top-heavy, corrupt and disconnected from the real needs of its members. The assassins set out to kill Yablonski seven times, but for a variety of reasons don’t carry it out. When they do murder him in his Clarksville, Pennsylvania home on the eighth try, they not only kill Yablonski but his wife and daughter also.

Not the typical writer of labor history, Bradley does have a Master’s degree in history from Oxford, but has worked as a criminal defense lawyer, a US Dept. of Justice attorney, a CIA intelligence officer, and currently serves as Director of Information, Security Oversight, Office of the National Archives and Records Administration. He became interested in writing Blood Runs Coal when he noticed 26 boxes of Yablonski legal cases (with an unbroken seal) at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. He broke the seal and, given his interest in history and crime, proceeded to read the materials and continue his research.

One of the major characters in the early part of the story is John L. Lewis, who held the presidency of the UMWA for over forty years, since 1919, and ruled it with an iron hand.  Lewis had played the most important individual role in the formation of the CIO in 1937 and with a sense of power emanating from a fearsome gaze, he was undoubtedly America’s most recognized labor leader during the 1930s and 1940s.

Now, in 1960, eighty years old and in poor health, Lewis resigns his UMWA presidency and turns over the top job to his vice president, Thomas Kennedy.  In a final show of power, and a step that would have devastating consequences, Lewis hand-picks Tony Boyle to serve as Kennedy’s vice president.

He could have chosen Jock Yablonski, an experienced field operative and president of District 5, a vital post in southwestern Pennsylvania.  Bradley speculates that Lewis “always governed by his enormous ego, preferred to turn the union over to a lesser man rather than risk being overshadowed by a dynamic successor.”  Yablonski, well-regarded in his district, and a talented and popular speaker, was Polish, and the author argues that top positions in the UMWA historically went to miners whose ancestry was British and Irish.  Here Boyle had the right background, and though a boring, plodding speaker, was a long-time loyalist to Lewis, willing to engage in “rough stuff” for the union.  When Kennedy died of cancer on January 19th, 1963, Boyle ascended to the presidency.

The reality for coal miners had changed drastically since the mid-20th century.  In the early ‘50s, Lewis negotiated an agreement with the leading coal operators association, promising them labor peace and acceptance of rapid mechanization of the mines in return for an increase in pay and higher royalty payments to the union’s Welfare and Retirement Fund.

In the following years, mechanization meant a loss of more than 300,000 jobs and a migration of miners and their families, particularly from a more impoverished Appalachia.  Between 1950 and 1969, over three million people left the area for the upper Midwest.  The union, now smaller, had a stake in increasing production, and enhancing the union fund.  But what would happen to safety?

The federal Bureau of Mines, a captive of the industry, employed only 250 inspectors to oversee some 5,400 mines and from 1952-1968, the government had fined a total of one operator. As for the UMWA, their safety division consisted of one man.

With this history as background, an explosion in Marion County, West Virginia, at the Consolidation Coal Company’s Number 9 mine, killed 78 miners on November 19, 1968. The company, the number one producer of bituminous coal in the US, already had a dismal safety record. Not surprisingly, its top public relations official called the tragedy “something we have to live with,” a sentiment basically in accord with the words of the Department of Interior’s assistant secretary and the governor of West Virginia.

“But the most astonishing performance was that given by [UMWA President] W.A. ‘Tony’ Boyle…[who] stunned many of those who had gathered to hear his expected words of sorrow and outrage by instead…praising Consolidation Coal Company’s safety record and its history of cooperation with the union. He reminded the families, as if they did not already know it, that coal mining was a very dangerous way to make a living.”

Jock Yablonski watched Boyle’s speech on television and responded to “that son of a bitch Boyle. With those people dead in the mine, how could that bastard stand up and praise the company’s safety record the way he did?”  West Virginia Democratic congressman Ken Hechler responded as well, castigating the union, and demanding Congressional action to reduce the levels of coal dust in the mines.  A young Ralph Nader, at the height of his popularity for his work on consumer protection, spoke to three thousand miners at the Black Lung Association’s first meeting statewide.  He minced no words, criticizing Tony Boyle and calling on the union members to elect a new leader.

Nader wrote and spoke out about the corruption in the union and in the spring of 1969, met with Yablonski, and asked him if he would run against Boyle in the upcoming December UMWA presidential election. Nader pledged his “all-out support.” Yablonski, not ready to commit himself, responded, “If I do run, Ralph, they’ll try to kill me.”

He met with Nader nine more times, received encouragement from his wife and daughter, though his sons, Chip and Ken, both attorneys familiar with the UMWA, expressed more caution. At one point, Ken told his father, “either you will destroy them or they will destroy you.”

Yablonski seemed energized by the social movements of the sixties, had supported Senator Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and spoke at an SDS May Day anti-war rally in Pittsburgh just two days before meeting Nader for the first time. Moreover, he knew that John L. Lewis now realized that backing Boyle was, reportedly, “the worst mistake I ever made,” and Boyle wouldn’t receive his support. Yablonski tried to meet with Lewis to garner his endorsement, but the 89-year-old labor icon was too ill and died soon after.

Finally, on May 29th, Yablonski publicly declared his candidacy, pulling no punches in criticizing Boyle, and committing to democratize the union, expand its safety division, and use the UMWA’s resources to improve Appalachian schools and social services, while building credit unions. He also criticized the big coal companies for not paying enough taxes and for polluting coal country’s environment.

Less than a month later, after a union board meeting, Boyle gave the order to two of his high-ranking loyalists to have Yablonski killed. Over the next seven chapters (interrupted by “The Most Dishonest Election in American Labor History”), Bradley, almost day by day, details how the order is passed down, how two of the assassins, both amateurs in need of cash, are chosen, and how they try, again and again, sometimes with a third accomplice, to carry out Boyle’s order. It makes for intriguing, page-turning, if depressing, reading.

Throughout the election campaign, Yablonski and his supporters implored the Departments of Justice and Labor to investigate union embezzlement and election irregularities, but to no avail. It took the killings of Yablonski, his wife, and daughter to get the Feds involved.

During one of the killers’ “unsuccessful” attempts to murder Yablonski, they drove to his house and, when he came to the door, they couldn’t pull the trigger, but gave him some non-credible story of needing work in the mines. His suspicions aroused, Yablonski later jotted down their license plate number. After the murders, the FBI found that slip of paper and the hunt quickly progressed. Within three weeks, one of the killers had written a complete 21-page confession.

Richard Aurel Sprague, considered to be the best prosecutor in the state, took charge of the case, determined to take it right to the top. Refusing plea deals, he obtained first-degree murder convictions against the three assassins, and then did the same moving up one, then another level, until he reached Tony Boyle. Finally, four years after the criminal proceedings began, the jury found Boyle guilty of three counts of first-degree murder, becoming the first (former) labor union president to be so convicted.

At the same time that the trials were commencing, angry rank-and-file miners had founded the reformist Miners for Democracy and the independent Miner’s Voice.  They chose Arnold Miller, a dedicated Yablonski ally, to run for president, and with the help of thousands of younger miners, many of them Vietnam vets, Miller defeated Boyle (not yet jailed for murder), in the December, 1972 election.

Under Miller, the union moved to district autonomy, democratic elections, and rank-and-file contract ratification. Stronger negotiations with the coal companies also brought higher wages, more sick leave, and improved pensions. In an epilogue, Bradley states that “[t]he Miners for Democracy’s successful revolt and their reforms inspired grassroots revolts in the United Steelworkers of America and in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.” That claim might well be true, but, unfortunately, the author adds only a few sentences of support, and one will have to go elsewhere to flesh out that history.

Bradley ends his book: “Today, cheap natural gas, nonunion strip-mined coal, global warming, and hollow political promises are much bigger threats to the UMWA, and the men and women who rely on it, than fraud, extortion, beatings, dynamite, and murder.”

Well aware of his union’s diminished membership and the bleak future for coal, UMWA President Cecil Roberts supports a “just transition” for coal miners. He has recently criticized long-time ally Senator Joe Manchin for not backing the Build Back Better legislation, including a tax credit that would provide incentives for new clean energy jobs and a child tax credit provision, which “has been a savior to a lot of people who live in poverty.” Finally, Roberts, well-versed in the UMWA’s bloody struggle to achieve democracy in his own union, and a veteran of the Miners for Democracy movement, “strongly encourage[s] Senator Manchin…to do whatever it takes [to pass] voting rights legislation as soon as possible.”