Mark A. Bradley - Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America

THE YABLONSKI MURDERS

AND THE BATTLE FOR THE

UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA

MARK A. BRADLEY

Frontispiece: FBI photo of the Yablonski home, January 12, 1970.
(Gordon G. McNeill, JAYLCC MD LOC, Box 24)

Copyright 2020 by Mark A. Bradley

All rights reserved

First Edition

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Bradley, Mark A. (Mark Andrew), 1956 author.

Title: Blood runs coal : the Yablonski murders and the battle for the United Mine Workers of America / Mark A. Bradley.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020016358 | ISBN 9780393652536 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393652543 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Yablonski, Joseph A., 19101969. | Boyle, William Anthony, 19041985. | United Mine Workers of America. | Labor leadersUnited StatesBiography. | MurderPennsylvaniaCase studies.

Classification: LCC HD6509.Y3 B73 2020 | DDC 364.1/523/0924 [B]dcundefined

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016358

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For Anna and Robin

Coal is already saturated with the blood of too many men and drenched with the tears of too many surviving widows and orphans.

John L. Lewis, 1947

Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

BLOOD
RUNS
COAL

I t was just after one oclock in the morning on New Years Eve, 1969. In less than twenty-four hours, it would be time for Americans to say goodbye not just to a year, but to a decade. For many, the 1960s had seemed awash in chaos and turmoil. But for others, these ten years had shepherded in a much-needed cultural and social awakening.

While the country was deeply divided on what the waning decade meant, nearly everyone agreed it had been bloody, especially for civil rights leaders and politicians who called for change. Between 1963 and 1968, assassins bullets cut down Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Crimson images, from a rural Mississippi driveway to a crowded Los Angeles hotels pantry, weighed on the countrys psyche. Americans seemed resigned to the fact of assassination as an unavoidable risk for those brave enough to speak out against injustice and inequality. Maybe the 1970s would be different.

In the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, just across Ten Mile Creek in the soft coal mining borough of Clarksville, the lights of the old stone farmhouse on Bridge Street finally clicked off. From the perch of a hill about a mile away, the three men sitting in a light blue Chevrolet Impala could still see it clearly, even as a cold rain pelted their windshield.

This was the home of United Mine Workers of America insurgent Joseph Jock Yablonski, another man who wanted change. He wanted to purge his labor union of corruption and return it to the coal miners it was supposed to representand that started with ousting W. A. Tony Boyle, the UMWAs despotic president since 1963.

Yablonski shared the eighteenth-century farmhouse with Marg, his playwright wife. Charlotte, their only daughter, had moved back home for a spell after working on her fathers campaign. She was a social worker waiting to start a new job in Washington, D.C.

The men chased sips of Seagrams Seven Crown whiskey from a paper carton with a six-pack of Iron City beer. They had been watching the house from their secluded overlook since early that evening. Yablonski had many admirers and a host of enemies, but these men were neither. One, hunched over the steering wheel, was looking to save his crumbling marriage. The other two were looking forward to a big payday they could spend on cars, women, and booze.

With the temperature falling, the rain turning to slushy drops, and the trios patience running out, their driver shifted the car into first gear. The Impala eased down the slick road and rolled to a stop near a row of firs shielding the house. The fifteen-foot-tall trees made it invisible to the familys nearest neighbor, four hundred yards away.

The men got out of their car and crept closer to the old house. They saw a holiday wreath hanging on the front door and Christmas cards lining the downstairs windows. It took them fewer than ten minutes to cut the outside phone wires, disable the two cars parked in the long winding driveway, unscrew the metal frame from one of the side porchs locked storm doors, and slip inside unseen.

Armed with a stolen .38 pistol and an M1 carbine traded for another pistol and some whiskey at a gun show, the men walked down a short, carpeted hallway and waited. One of them, who had broken into the farmhouse two months before, stepped past the Christmas tree with opened presents still under it, in search of anyone who might be up. When he returned, they took off their shoes and tiptoed up the wide stairs in their stocking feet toward the bedrooms on the second floor. They had come to kill Jock Yablonski and anyone else who got in their way.

T he Yablonski murders are the most infamous crimes in the history of American labor unions. They triggered one of the most intensive and successful manhunts in FBI history.

It took the special prosecutor assigned to the cases nine arrests and five jury trials to prove that Tony Boyle ordered the execution of his rival. Boyle is the highest-ranking American union leader ever convicted of first-degree murder.

Yet the assassinations were much more than the last spasms of a decade that ran red with them: they led to the first successful rank-and-file takeover of a major labor union in modern United States history. Three years after the murders, Yablonskis followers transformed the UMWA into the most democratically run union in the country. Their victory inspired workers in other labor unions, especially in the United Steelworkers of America and in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to rise up and challenge their own entrenched, out-of-touch leaders.

It was no accident that the seeds that led to Yablonskis revolt took root when they did. Nineteen sixty-eight was one of the most tumultuous years in American history. By then, the countrys streets were on fire and its social fabric badly frayed. The year started with the Tet offensive, an appalling surprise that proved to Americans that their government had lied to them about the progress of the Vietnam War. It ended with seventy-eight coal miners killed in a fiery explosion on a cold, windy morning in West Virginia. In between, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, and Richard M. Nixon was elected president.