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., warning of potential violence in eastern Kentucky. The unlikely targets were state-of-the-art hospitals in Hazard, Harlan, Middlesboro, and Whitesburg that had been erected by the United Mine Workers of America Welfare and Retirement Fund in the 1950s. The alleged threat came from coal miners outraged that the hospitals might shut down for lack of operating capital. "Social unrest taking the form of violence to the hospitals is a real possibility," concluded one ominous assessment. Some "violence has already occurred"; unless the federal government acted fast, the country could expect "more dangerous and serious acts." Indeed, "not only the economic development of the region but also its basic social stability is intimately involved with the future of the Miners' Hospitals."1	1
Between fall 1962 and summer 1964, federal officials tried desperately to stave off violence among coal miners in Appalachia by finding a way to keep the hospitals open. The facilities had provided health care to miners for nearly a decade, and the possibility of losing them produced roving pickets and the dynamiting of mining sites. So pressing was the threat of sustained violence that one congressman said in April 1963, "There hasn't been 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 several nail-biting episodes of "chicken" played by federal officials and the United Mine Workers' (UMW) Welfare and Retirement Fund, the hospitals were spared. By making a grant that enabled a nonprofit agency to purchase the hospitals, the federal Area Redevelopment Administration maintained hospital care in the hill country. And that was only the beginning of the federal response to the miners. Eventually, the U.S. government created an economic development program for Appalachia that spanned the rest of the century; passed safety and health legislation specifically for coal miners; and provided government protection of private old-age pensions. Indeed, even the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, a broad set of antipoverty initiatives, was conceived in part as a response to desperate coal miners in Appalachia.2	2
Two miners wait together in the outpatient clinic of Beckley Memorial Hospital in Beckley, West Virginia. The United Mine Workers Welfare and Retirement Fund, which built and maintained the hospital and used this 1959 photo in public relations materials, was clearly proud that its facilities were racially integrated. Photograph © Fred J. Maroon. Courtesy Robert Kaplan Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
This 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.)3 The essay argues that agitation 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 of that unrest sprang from the peculiar workings of the public/private welfare regime that emerged during the post–World War II period.	. . .