The Coal and Iron Police, sent into the small mining towns of Pennsylvania the year after the Civil War, later working with the Pinkerton Detective Agency to break unions. In 1922 alone in Pennsylvania, there were 1, 807 strikes. In Pittsburg there were 5-600 private police, heavily armed with clubs and weighing between 200 and 250 pounds. As far back as the 1860s these brutal overseers would use their horses to prevent women from speaking to each other on the street.

There is no accident that as soon as the agrarian south with its outdated system of agricultural slavery was defeated, that the U.S. Senate began enacting laws to bring back the type of brutal, white slavery that Plantation America had been founded and run on from 1607 through the 1830s. There is quite an irony to the fact that full-blown, race-based black chattel slavery was only in existence, as we are taught it was from 1606 through 1865, for two generations before the war that abolished it. and as soon as this system was abolished the old white slavery was retooled for industry. Police in industrial America were the retooled overseer of the plantation ere, a brutal thug dedicated to bullying the wives of miners and beating and killing the miners themselves. Do keep in mind that these miners were effectively held hostage in isolated mountain villages and not paid, through most of the 70 year period of this trafficking in human families, a period almost precisely as long as the African Chattel period in the south which ran from 1804 to 1865, to give way to the 1865-1933 stage of predominantly white industrial slavery in the north.

It should be noted that the later form of agrarian slavery fed the earlier industrial model, with coal mines and factories in the British Isles devouring about 10,000 men, women and children per hear, through the process of refining the cotton of America in the factories of Great Britain.

The 1922 committee investigating Coal and Iron Police stated:

“…They are very large men; most of them weighing from 200 to 250 pounds. They are heavily armed and carry clubs usually designed as a “blackjack.”

[As late as the 1980s.two white men, brothers I knew, were beaten to death by cops using blackjacks.]

“Everywhere your committee visited they found victims of the coal and iron police who had beaten up and were still carrying scars on their faces and heads from the rough treatment they received.”

The two watershed years in private police brutality against predominantly white ethnic labor were 1866, with laws authorizing companies with police powers over their employees and in 1900 with the increased government backing of industrial interest ties to American imperial aspiration, requiring coal fueled ships of steel.

According two some witnesses of police activity around Pittsburg:

“Deputy sheriffs are simply bums, ward heelers and City Hall loafers.”

“When there was violence Yellow Dogs” [police] with clubs would crack miners on the head and let them lay there.”

Again, the word crack comes to mind, seeming to have alternated meaning from generation to generation in the form of the cracker, first the man who was cracked with a whip or club and then later referring to he who did the cracking. Indeed, in Pennsylvania of 1977, teachers in my middle school beat children with paddles [of the same design previously used to discipline and kill servants] and we called it “cracking.”

Impressions of Moby Dick: Herman Melville and Modern Man?s Transcendental Journey

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