Successful Rebellion

For eight days, miners from Washington State to Appalachia had filed into hundreds of washup shacks to vote--polling places with names like "Bill Shelby's bathhouse at the foot of Chicken Ridge." Many cast their ballots at the end of their shifts, still covered in coal dust. Despite the United Mine Workers' violent tradition, there was no disorder. And despite the membership's habit of following authoritarian leaders, the count last week showed that the men were bent on rebellion. By a vote of 70,373 to 56,334, they ousted W.A. ("Tony") Boyle, 70, their autocratic union president for nine years, in favor of Arnold Miller, 50, the courtly, soft-spoken leader of the union's insurgent reform wing, a man just two years out of the mines.

The Labor Department had taken great pains to make sure the election would be honest, fielding 1,000 federal poll watchers during the balloting and hand-picking those who would do the counting. During the last election, in 1969, there was widespread tampering and intimidation. When it was all over, Boyle's defeated challenger, "Jock" Yablonski, was shot dead along with his wife and daughter.

To a large extent, Miller's victory was a repudiation of the corruption in the Boyle regime. After the Yablonski shooting, two U.M.W. officials, one of them a close Boyle associate, were indicted for conspiracy to commit murder, and Boyle was convicted by a federal jury of handing out $49,000 in union funds to political candidates, among them Hubert Humphrey. But they also mistrusted Boyle for other reasons. He had grown aloof and unreachable. He lived high and dressed fancy, and though he won fat wage increases for his men, he seemed oblivious to the occupational hazards of mining.

Miller, on the other hand, was one of their own. A victim of black lung disease, after 26 years in the pits, he had become the chief spokesman for the miners in their battle to win compensation for black-lung disability. He campaigned on the theme of bringing the union closer to the miners--literally and figuratively. He promised not only to reduce the president's $50,000 salary, but also to relocate the union headquarters from Washington, D.C., to a spot nearer the mines. Miller, who had horrified the traditionalists by arguing for stronger controls of strip mining, credited his victory to the younger miners. "Sixty percent of the work force today are 30 years of age or under," he said, "and they are all very much aware of the issues." His new secretary-treasurer, Harry Patrick, 41, saw it a little differently. He declared: "The men were just plain fed up with the whole crooked Boyle business from top to bottom."

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