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

Abstract

In spring 1963 memos zipped among federal offices in Washington, D.C., warning of po tential 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 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, only the economic development of the region but also its basic social stability is intimately involved with the future of the Miners' Hospitals.1 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. The facilities 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 was the threat of sustained 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 Work ers' (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 Redevelop ment 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