Lewis Versus Howat: An Analysis of Labor, Education, and Class Privilege in Early Twentieth Century Mining Politics

Morgan Ebbs, Lauren Geiger, Kelly Hentzen, and Matthew Rohner

Using the personal papers and materials from the Hearl Maxwell Collection, this project set out to retrace the heated conflict that occurred between District 14 representative, Alexander Howat, and the President of the United Mine Workers Association, John L. Lewis. By analyzing various correspondence, union circulars, and minutes, in conjunction with relevant historical context, our aim was to showcase how this conflict, as it was represented in the documents, depicts the role of education and class privilege in determining political action.
 

Working-Class Rhetoric: An Exploration of the Mining Rhetoric of Southeast Kansas

Jennifer Katzer, Tara Yarnell, and Glenn Storey

Poverty reduction was a prominent issue for union miners in the 1920s. While the economic conditions made it difficult to control the financial woes, the UMWA leadership and its members did everything in their power, including sharing their last dime, to ensure that no one person or family went without in their times of need. That is why the miners of Southeast Kansas believed so fiercely in the brotherhood of unionship and why they fought so hard for reforms.
 

The United Mine Workers of America as an Exemplar of Union Activity

Jacob Geither

The purpose of this Scalar book is to examine the duties of unions by looking at a collection provided by the Axe Library's Special Collections Department located at Pittsburg State University. This collection is the Hearl Maxwell collection, a group of documents that display letters, bulletins, postcards, circulars, and various other items of interest created by members of the United Mine Workers of America. A description of union duties will be given along with examples from the collection that will be used to illustrate these duties by providing real world situations that the union took part in and documents that were created to organize or report results of those situations. One particular aspect of each situation that will be analyzed is the way that union leaders use rhetoric in their communication with members and external parties. 
 

Local Mining Culture and Digital Humanities Methodologies

Tyler Breedlove

The first impact of the word cloud shows a heavy emphasis on words that orientate around Kansas and the interactions with the larger governmental officials. The documents emphasize words like "Kansas" and "union." While it may seem self-explanatory, the documents also demonstrate a trend within the words when analyzed over the course of the corpus. The usage of words changed from larger scoping words into more local words, and for a extremely important reason.
 

Document Design, Working-Class Rhetoric, and Education in the Hearl Maxwell Collection

Nicole Willoughby

Focusing on the Hearl Maxwell Collection that is based in the early 20th century, there are a lot of document design principles that were in place when conducting information between men and the mining unions involving mining in Southeast Kansas. Documents were drawn up in the form of contracts by unions to give the best possible information to the mining community in case of accidents. Letters and follow up letters were used as a form of communication between the union members from the local chapter to the national chapter regarding incidents that happened throughout the mining community. Using a broader aspect to examine these letters and contracts between the members of the mining community, we can use Robin Williams's document design practice of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (CRAP) to focus on the working-class rhetoric and the educational levels of the individuals involved.