Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300434
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This was the part of the strike most Virginians didn't see, but the part that may have been most decisive.
Modern strikes aren't fought simply on the picket line or in the courts. They're waged in the court of public opinion - and through the psychological warfare of slick campaigns designed to rattle company officials.
The strike had wreaked havoc in the coalfields. Now the union was going to make Connecticut feel the strike.
\ IN JANUARY 1989, THE UMW WENT SHOPPING FOR SOMEONE to run its campaign in Greenwich. It found 40-year-old Pat Speer, a Catholic layman with a degree in theology and a background in civil rights, anti-war protests and union organizing against J.P. Stevens in North Carolina.
"They had the thought that such a dispute should be as immediate to the executives as to the miners," Speer recalls. His assignment was to make the big boys in Greenwich sweat - at home, at work, on the street, in their churches, everywhere.
Greenwich is one of America's wealthiest cities, a blue-blooded corporate retreat on the edge of New York, the home of Fortune 500 executives, the hometown of President Bush. It certainly didn't seem a place that would be sympathetic to the cause of dust-covered Appalachian miners. "The UMWA didn't have any power up here," Speer says. "There are no mines for 200 miles."
So where to begin?
With God.
Organizing religious leaders on behalf of social causes is nothing new; but usually only the liberals get involved. Speer knew that wasn't a winning formula in Greenwich. "We didn't preach to the choir. We didn't go to the social justice types who we knew we had."
Instead, he talked one-on-one with most of the mainline preachers, priests and rabbis of four towns: Greenwich, Stamford, New Canaan and Darien. He felt out the ones who seemed interested about social issues and prodded those who didn't. He told them a big strike involving a local company was coming and they'd better get educated. He told them this strike would call on them to take a moral stand, that the jobs belonged to the union miners who gave their lives and health for the coal companies. He told them, "Whatever you may think of unions up here, this is a cultural institution to these folks that ranks high," up there with their church. He says he urged all of them to call Pittston and try to get the company's side.
Speer still is amazed at what happened.
The clergy latched on to the strike with a fervor many hadn't seen since the civil rights movement. For most, the hook was simple - Pittston's decision to cut health benefits to widows and retirees was a powerful emotional punch, one that no explanations from the company could ease.
On May 10, the day the stockholders met, 86 clergy in Greenwich and the neighboring towns signed a full-page ad in The Greenwich Time supporting the UMW.
The ad caused a stir. "It's obvious three-fourths of the mainline clergy in four of the wealthiest towns in America are not raving socialists," Speer said. But that didn't stop some people. "The rector from one prestigious Episcopal church lost a $50,000 pledge on a capital campaign." And Monsignor William Genuario of St. Catherine of Siena Church had a parishioner complain. The parishioner happened to be James Hartough, a Pittston vice president, who brought along a public relations man to explain the company's side.
The priest wasn't deterred. "I think [Pittston's] consciousness has been raised and pressure put on them," Genuario said at the time. "They can't deal with this as before. They can't say, `It's not in our backyard.'"
The ink on the newspaper ad was no sooner dry than there the strikers were - in Pittston's backyard.
\ ONCE THE STRIKE STARTED, SPEER HAD COAL MINERS AND THEIR FAMILIES PICKETING almost daily outside Pickwick Plaza, the complex Pittston shared with other big companies. Chairman Paul Douglas' office was on the first floor. "All he had to do was go to his window and look out and he'd see the picketers," Speer says.
At first, their camouflage seemed foreign and militaristic in Greenwich. But soon the sight of the earth-tone spots brought standing ovations when the strikers trooped into community meetings.
In all, some 250 miners, wives and kids went to Greenwich. Most were there a week or so, but some wound up staying in the Howard Johnson's near Genuario's church for two months or more, at UMW expense.
The strikers found other ways to attract attention. When the blood bank came to churches and synagogues, the miners donated, then stood outside with signs: "We bleed for Pittston back home. We're glad to shed some more up here."
Speer got a kick out of watching the cultures clash.
When the first strikers arrived, they wanted to take Speer to dinner. They went through the Yellow Pages and came up with the Boxing Cap, a fancy place. Gail Gentry was there in his wheelchair. The miners in camouflage drew stares. The waitress rattled off gourmet dressings: Dijon vinaigrette and so forth. The miners' eyes glossed over. Finally, one said, "Ain't you got no Thousand Island?' "
Sam and Teresa Hughes of St. Paul and their daughter, Ashley, then 4, couldn't believe the wealth they saw. "I mean, they drive through McDonald's in a limo," Teresa says.
\ ON MAY 10, THE STRIKERS ARRIVED FOR THE STOCKHOLDERS' MEETING. The union owned a sliver of stock and used the opportunity to propose resolutions designed to embarrass the company - such as requiring secret ballots anytime the stockholders vote. The resolutions were voted down, but not by a landslide. The secret-ballot resolution drew support from many institutional money managers whose funds owned the bulk of Pittston stock. Ken Zinn, the UMW official who ran the union's overall corporate campaign, saw that as a turning point that "sent a strong message to the company."
\ THE UMW HAD STARTED ITS OUTREACH PROGRAM, to drum up support from church groups and other unions. The UMW worked the "peace network," rousing almost every left-wing group it could think of to visit the picket line, raise money, publicize the union's cause in alternative publications, or lend a hand in some other way. Before long, a flood of visitors cascaded into Southwest Virginia, giving the strike a tone of moral uprightness.
Curiously, the churches most active in the strike were the Episcopal and the Roman Catholic, neither of which is usually found in the Southwest Virginia mountains, where Baptists and Pentecostals dominate. Yet both bore a strong heritage of crusading for "social justice" - and both were the dominant churches in Greenwich.
In the South, though, one of the most active groups was the Knoxville-based Commission on Religion in Appalachia, a group encompassing 15 denominations. It appealed to politicians, first in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky, to use their influence to bring the union and company together. Executive coordinator Jim Sessions, a Methodist minister, says it wasn't hard to infuse the strike with a sense of spirituality. For one thing, he says, "religion and community and union are so comingled in that area."
Strikers often sang hymns on the picket line. And UMW Vice President Cecil Roberts was forever quoting the Bible and Martin Luther King. The UMW's civil disobedience campaign intrigued religious leaders and made the strike more palatable to be involved with. The churches also helped reinforce the union's message on the picket line, as visiting ministers cited the history of civil disobedience all the way back to the Old Testament Israelites.
Country ministers preached sermons about the strike. Some churches, their congregations of union men and company supervisors divided by the strike, held nightly prayer services to give members an outlet for the tension. A Bible study group at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in St. Paul wrestled with the strike, then finally wrote their top U.S. bishop asking what the church's role should be.
Presiding Bishop Edmund Browning of New York responded - by visiting the coalfields Sunday, May 21, and preaching a sermon. He spoke of empires without compassion. He didn't name names, but he didn't have to. He looked out on a congregation of worshipers wearing symbols of the strike. Camouflage scarves for the women, armbands for the men. "Empires - we can relate [to] this, dear friends - are never built on the basis of compassion," he said. "The compassion of Jesus was not a personal, emotional reaction, but a public criticism in which he dared to react to the social order."
Browning later chatted with miners on the picket line at Carbo and visited a black-lung victim. More importantly, he promised to call Pittston executives and pressure them to come to terms with the union.
On May 24, the union recorded its 2,000th arrest.
At 10 a.m., union leaders pushed the wheelchair-bound Gail Gentry, his legs paralyzed 11 years before in a mine accident, into the roadway at Moss 3. Then they stepped back, as he sat alone to block an approaching coal truck.
Miners fell silent and dropped to their knees. Freddie Wallace, a strike captain and church deacon, offered a prayer. "Thank you for his courage," Wallace said. "Thank you for his conviction."
Women sang "Amazing Grace." The men could be heard sniffling back tears.
News cameras rolled and clicked.
Including the ones from a CBS-TV crew. "48 Hours" had arrived. The strike had gone prime time.
by CNB