Loyal Local

Forty-six years ago, 18-year-old Billy Green put aside his school books at small Coshocton, Ohio and went down into the inky bowels of the Morgan Run Coal Mine to make a living. Like 50 other miners who dug Morgan Run coal, he soon carried a United Mine Workers card in his overalls. When Morgan Run coal was exhausted in 1922, Billy Green was one of the few members of the Morgan Run local who was not thrown out of work. Billy had gone above ground some 20 years before and was rapidly climbing to the top of the Labor ladder with his old Morgan Run local card tucked in a pocket of his business suit. When Samuel Gompers died in 1924, William Green stepped up to the top, became president of the American Federation of Labor. Most of the members of his old local never dug coal again but they kept their local's charter by paying their dues regularly as they worked at other jobs around Coshocton. Brother Hugh Green, who had also dug his living in Morgan Run, got work in a pottery kiln. Ben Mobley, whose Sister Jennie became Billy Green's wife, turned to gravedigging.

Last November President John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, who had come up from the mines to become William Green's great foe as leader of the Committee for Industrial Organization, delivered a grave insult to Coshocton's most famed son. He impudently ordered William Green to show cause why he should not be expelled from the U. M. W. (TIME, Nov. 22). Realizing that under union rules they could try Billy Green if John L. Lewis pressed his expulsion order, the Morgan Run unionists became more interested in their local than they had been for years. They would show Lewis how they regarded Billy Green. But John Lewis withheld his expulsion order. Last week Gravedigger Mobley could wait no longer. Apparently as a challenge to John Lewis, he let the world know that of the Morgan Run local's twelve remaining members, only one, President J. R. McCormick, who is a paid U. M. W. organizer, would vote to expel Unionist Green.

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