United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts is retiring later this week. I’ve covered the coal industry, the mine workers and their leader since before he became union president 30 years ago. In a two-hour interview, we talked about growing up on Cabin Creek, going to Vietnam and coming home, the dangerous life of a miner, and the past and future of West Virginia’s coalfield communities. This is the first part of that interview. Read part two here. Our discussions were edited for length and clarity.
Ward: Thank you for doing this interview. Congratulations, Cecil, on your retirement. This is a big moment for you personally, a big moment for the United Mine Workers of America, for the labor movement. And there’s a lot going on in the country right now.
As I prepared for this discussion, I was thinking a lot about the summer of 1989. You were the vice president of the mine workers and leading a very important strike. And I was a 21-year-old kid who didn’t know much about coal, but somehow stumbled into covering that strike for The Charleston Gazette. So I wanted to start by asking, looking back now, what was the Pittston strike about, and how did it fit in then, with the history of the mine workers’ struggles? What should we think about it, when we think about where the mine workers, the coal industry, coal miners and coal field communities are now?
Roberts: My dad was on strike the day I was born, in 1946, in a company house, in a little company town called Kayford, 15 miles up a holler. And I was born in that house because coal miners didn’t have health care in those days, and my dad was on strike for the health and retirement funds, which I find ironic when I look back on it. Jump all the way to 1989. Pittston had stated to us at the table, and in the public, that they would no longer be part of the health and retirement funds that covered all the retirees. If you let a major coal company out of the funds, what you’re basically doing is you’re gonna let everybody out, so we didn’t have any choice here.
We were making a stand for every retiree and their pensions, not just the ones from Pittston, and their health care and, quite frankly, for Appalachia itself, because think about all the people who have benefited from the pension plan.
So it ended in what I think was a victory for not only the United Mine Workers, but all of our retirees. And I think it was a gigantic step for the labor movement and for the United Mine Workers. There’s been a lot of good things come from that strike — a lot of tactics used in that strike people hadn’t seen since the civil rights movement, in some respects, and then in the sit down strikes in the 30s by the CIO.
Ward: Could you reflect a little bit more on growing up in a place like Kayford, Cabin Creek, in West Virginia, and what from that you carry with you to this day?
Roberts: No one’s gonna know this, but people from West Virginia. At Leewood, the road split. You went left, and that’s where Carbon Fuel operated. You went to the right, at the time I was born, I guess Truax Traer owned those mines. Truax Traer sold to Oglebay Norton, and Oglebay Norton sold to Bethlehem. And Bethelehem eventually just shut the whole place down after a few years.
So when I was old enough to walk out in the yard, there were people everywhere. Most people can’t imagine this. There’s a house everywhere you look. They put these company houses up every dirt road. And the holler I lived in was Shamrock Holler. The reason it was Shamrock Holler was that’s where the mine was, and the name of the mine was Shamrock. That’s where my dad worked.
The only place we ever went to the store was the company store. But you could walk down to the bath house. and they had a Coke machine in there, and you put a dime in a Coke machine and get a Coke, and it was about a six-ounce bottle of Coke. And I could go down, mom would give me 30 cents, and I’d buy three bottles of Coke and walk back up to the house with them.
And then we were told we had to move because Bethlehem was, it might have been Truax Traer at the time, was putting an overhead beltline in coming from the mine. And all the people who lived on that road there, we had to move.
A big deal was when the trains came by. It was always dusty. Mom would wash the clothes on a wringer washer and hang them out on a clothesline, and with the coal dust blowing everywhere, it was really hard to keep things clean after you washed them.
None of us thought we were poor, and maybe we weren’t. I don’t know. But it was not a time when there were a lot of layoffs. But what I didn’t know is, just right after I was born, the coal industry went through a mechanization period and 300,000 coal miners lost their jobs. But we got the health and retirement funds, so the future was brighter in some ways.
But yeah, I never thought I had anything but the best life in the world. Didn’t know any difference. But when we got a television, I started saying, ‘where’s that at?’ And I’m thinking ‘where’s the ocean they have?’ Only rich people go on vacations. Vacation for us, by the way, was we went to my grandmother’s house in Ohio. Or we went to my dad’s uncle Albert’s farm. That was another vacation.
I did make it to Michigan before I got drafted. I was working in the auto industry, got in a bad car wreck, and I had a cast on my foot. When I got over that, I got drafted, went in the Army and ended up in Vietnam.
Ward: Like an awful lot of young West Virginia men, you went to Vietnam for your country, how did that change you or shape you and who you are, who you became?
Roberts: One of the things I remember the most is we had to go to Beckley, those of us being drafted to take a physical. I can still shut my eyes and see this, probably 100 to 150 young men, and they’re just in their underwear, going from station to station to station to station, getting your eyes examined, your hearing examined, and on and on and on.
I think that two years in the United States Army, including the training I received, and having to change my life and dealing with really difficult problems — I was a squad leader for a while in Vietnam, I went out on ambushes. I spent 60-some days on hill number 445, and that’s where I was for my 21st birthday. That’s where I was for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day. And then the Tet offensive hit, and that’s where I was. Then I made my way back home. I never got wounded, but I had some very close calls during that time. I was very thankful to God for getting me back home.
I want to interject something here that everybody should have an appreciation for. I used to say a prayer every night that I would get to see my parents and my family again.
That’s all I asked for. But when I got home, my dad pulled me off to the side and he said, ‘I need a favor from you.’ My dad never asked me for a favor in his life, Ken, that I could recall. I said, ‘Well, sure dad, what do you need?’ He said, ‘I need you to hang around this house.’ He said, ‘Your mother watched this news every night and cried, thinking that’s where you where when five, six soldiers are killed. She just breaks down every night.’”
You never think about the mothers and the dads and wives and the kids that were adversely affected by that war. And there’s like 58,000 names on a wall. We go and clean that wall every year, our union does. And every time I go, I think about, there’s probably somebody on that wall that could have discovered the cure for cancer. Somebody on that wall could have been the greatest singer ever known to man, or somebody on that wall that could have reached the heights that we never think of. But that’s part of that war, and we just lost so many young people that might have been able to be something that this country would never forget.
Ward: Cecil, do you want to talk at all about your own health from your time in Vietnam?
Roberts: Sure. So I was staying in great shape, never had a serious health problem in my life, and I went to physicals every year or two. So I go for the last physical I had. It was like two-plus years ago. The doctor seemed to be looking for something, right? I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
I go to this, in Fredericksburg, hematology, which is cancer treatment. And I pulled in over there, and I thought I was pulling into a WVU football game or something. There’s cars everywhere. There’s cars parked up and down the street, the parking lot’s full. And I told my wife, who was with me, ‘there’s no way this many people have cancer,’ but I was wrong. There are people that you know right now that they haven’t told you they have cancer, but they do.
They started me on this treatment. They put a needle in your arm and some of this treatment for three, four, or five hours. By the way, it costs $10,000 a month, and people don’t know how much this stuff costs. And at the end of taking chemo every single day, a year ago, I was – there’s no such thing as being cancer free. People use that term. You’re in remission, no matter who you are. I’ve been in remission now for a year.
The long and short of this is I believe I contracted that in Vietnam. I did some reading on this, and this type of cancer that I have is either hereditary — no one in my family that I can find had this type of cancer. The other cause is you come into contact with a chemical. And so that kind of narrows it down. Given the fact that this country dumped 11 million gallons of Agent Orange in Vietnam, it’s a wonder that anybody survived. I’ve also come to the realization that there’s been 300,000 people die from this. Got people who lost their legs and arms and came back with PTSD. I’ve told people in speeches, this is the war that never stops killing us, and I guess it won’t until we’re all gone.
One thing I’d like to say, and I hope you can fit it in, is you know, men, I think we’ve got this reputation of not wanting to go to the doctor, thinking we don’t need to go to the doctor. “I feel fine.” If you’ve been to Vietnam, and you haven’t had blood work, and you’re probably anywhere from 65 to 80, I guess, or somewhere in that neighborhood, you should get blood work at least every two years. Because I keep telling myself, I’m healthy, and if you don’t find this soon enough, it will get you before they can give you something to prevent you from dying.
Ward: I felt like interviewing Cecil Roberts without asking him about A.T. Massey Coal Company would be sort of journalistic malpractice. But as I thought about that, I also wondered, is there anything left to say?
Roberts: Well, I would just say this: For years, people would say, Oh, you just don’t like Massey because they’re non union. For years, we said these mines are not safe. I knew it. Anybody that ever entered one of those mines knew it. Even when 29 miners lost their lives, we had the leadership suggesting that that wasn’t their fault. And I’ll leave it at that. I think 29 men died needlessly, many of whom I knew personally. And I think that was the end of Massey as we know it, and it should have been sooner, before people gave up their lives.
Ward: When you go back to January, 2, 2006, and then, Aracoma, and then Kentucky Darby, then Crandall Canyon. And, of course, Upper Big Branch. You all were marching at the Capitol yesterday about the silica dust rule. But if you look at MSHA’s rulemaking agenda, it seems like a whole lot of the same. We don’t need to be so tough with the ventilation rules. Or maybe we don’t need to do this with the district managers’ enforcement capabilities. Haven’t we seen this movie before?
Roberts: We’ve seen it so many times we’ve got it memorized. We’ve seen this over and over again, and if coal companies are abiding by the law, they should never have an Upper Big Branch, and we should never have a Crandall Canyon.
The record is not beautiful here. But that doesn’t mean all coal companies are bad or anything of that nature. It just means that they haven’t been as helpful as they could have been down through the years.
One of my favorite John L. Lewis stories, and it’s a true story. I want you to think about this now, he was the second most powerful person in the United States, okay, only the President was more powerful. But he couldn’t get Congress to pass legislation to protect coal miners. But in one of the tragedies, where 200 or 300 people were killed, I think it was one of the two or three in Illinois, they had this hearing up on Capitol Hill. And it was broadcast live on radio, because there weren’t televisions in those days. And there were all these powerful people who came to testify, like CEOs of all the major coal companies trying to defend the coal industry once again. And they went down the line, and the president of coal company A, like, maybe it’s CONSOL, says, I’m the CEO of CONSOL, and the next, I’m president of Peabody, and Arch. They get down to Lewis. And this is what John L Lewis, the second most powerful man in America, said. He said, Mr. Chairman, my name is John Lewis, and I represent those miners who are still alive. And he sat down, and he stole that whole testimony by just introducing himself. He’s basically saying, I’m here to keep people from being killed, these guys are here to tell you how to make money, and I’m here to represent the miners who are still alive. And that was so powerful.
Ward: Why do you think when this series of disasters, starting with Sago, we started replaying this cable news thing. Here’s the family at the church and all of this. Why do you think that not only those horrible disasters, but these one-by-one deaths, whether it’s from black lung or it’s a roof fall, why is it so acceptable to our society? And I say our society because it’s even worse in other countries. Why is it acceptable for coal miners’ lives to end that way?
Roberts: We don’t have to look much further than the UMWA itself, if you want to do an examination here. When Farmington happened, some people missed this part of the story. Tony Boyle, president of the United Mine Workers, flew down. He showed up with a nice suit on and a flower right here, and he spoke to the press, and he praised CONSOL. So this is one of the best companies we have to work with, and people lost their loved ones, were wanting someone to tell them this is going to be better.
That started what I think was pretty much a revolution in our union. And that’s what prompted Jock Yablonski to say, I’m going to run for president. I don’t think he would have if this hadn’t happened, because I think he was almost to the point of saying you can’t win this election. So when this happened, he thought this opened the door, because people weren’t going to tolerate this any longer.
But he lost the election, and then he lost his life, and his wife lost her life, his daughter lost hers. And that led to a complete overhaul of our union.