Alexander Howat

Alexander McWhirter Howat, born in Glasgow, Scotland, on September 10, 1876, became one of the most significant European immigrants in Kansas history and a central labor leader in the Cherokee-Crawford coal fields. He emigrated with his parents to Troy, New York, at age three, later moved to Braidwood, Illinois, left school at ten to work as a trapper boy in the coal mines, and after his family settled in Crawford County, Kansas, in 1889, he again attended public schools for several years before working in the mines until age twenty-two. In 1898 he traveled on a cattle boat to Scotland, worked there in the mines for a year, and after returning to the Kansas coal fields became active in the United Mine Workers of America. Elected to the board of District 14 in 1902, he became vice-president in 1904 and president in 1906, and under his leadership Kansas coal miners found a labor leader who unified the diverse ethnic groups of southeast Kansas into a strong economic and political force. In 1918, with President Woodrow Wilson's approval, he served on a labor mission to Europe to build morale among the working class during a critical period of World War I. During the general coal strike of 1919, Howat and District 14 stood firm despite pressure from Governor Henry Allen, whose response the following year was the Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, a system of compulsory arbitration that removed the right of unions to call a strike. Bitterly opposed to the Industrial Court, Howat sought to discredit it, a course that brought heavy fines and three years' imprisonment, while District 14 backed him in calling new strikes in defiance of the law. Ordered by United Mine Workers international president John L. Lewis to call off the strike, Howat refused and was expelled from the union in 1921, an action for which Lewis, seeing in him a viable rival for the international presidency, was largely responsible. Reinstated in 1924, Howat was re-elected president of District 14 in 1928, but in 1930 an insurgent group of miners broke with the Lewis union and chose him as president of the Reorganized Mine Workers Union, leading Lewis to expel him again from the United Mine Workers. When Illinois courts dissolved the reorganized group in 1931, Howat's power was destroyed, and he was never able to regain membership in the union. That same year he was appointed a contract investigator by U.S. Secretary of Labor William N. Doak, but Lewis used his influence to have him removed from that post and from a later position with the State of Kansas as a Port of Entry inspector. Defeated but unbroken, Howat became publisher of the labor newspaper Independent News, later worked as a street sweeper for the city of Pittsburg, and for the twelve years before his death served as president of Pittsburg Local Union No. 312 of the Pittsburg Building and Common Laborers. His death on December 10, 1945, marked the passing of one of the most loyal and faithful friends American labor ever had.

Pittsburg, Kansas · United States