Local Mining Culture and Digital Humanities Methodologies

Issues on the National Level

The backdrop of the Maxwell Collection is centered around the labor strikes that were happening in the early 1920s. This was a postwar economy, and as a result there was a profound problem with inflation occurring after the end of World War I. Unions formed as a result, and there were several groups opposed to this idea. As discussed by the America in Class organization: "The "labor vs. capital" battle pitted industrial workers who demanded higher wages in the postwar inflation economy against the industrialists who rejected unions as the product of foreign-inspired anarchist and Bolshevik (Communist) agitators." 

Towards the beginning of the labor strikes, it would serve to purpose that the vocabulary usage, as discussed in on the Corpus Text Analysis page, would shift from words like "union," to "Kansas" and "district" as the focus shifts inward in order to make up for the huge conflict coming from the national level.

The conflict is even discussed within a few letters in the collection, and most particularly in the circular that was distributed in 1922.
"​The United Mine Workers of America have now been on strike four months. According to information I have at hand, there are more than six hundred thousand miners engaged in this gigantic struggle, which was brought about because of the refusal of the coal operators to meet with the official representatives of the miners, as provided by contract." This line from the circular speaks volumes of the stress the union workers were under, as they struggled to bring back the work environment that they were struggling to bring forward. The members of District 14 had even pushed forward a constitution to promote well being for their workers just a few years before.

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