Blantyronians Page 3
Philip Murray
Another Blantyre emigreé to the Pennsylvanian coalfields, Philip Murray was born in Blantyre on May 25, 1886, of Irish parents. His father, William Murray, was a coal miner and local union official. His mother, Rose Layden, was a weaver in the cotton mill, who died when her son was only two years old. Murray's father remarried and had eight more children. Philip, the oldest boy, entered the mines at 10 to help support the family. At 16, he and his father sailed to the USA, to Pennsylvania, where they both found jobs as miners. Within a year, they had saved or borrowed enough money to bring the whole family to America.
After he was sacked for fighting with a company weighman he thought was cheating him, 600 miners went on strike to support him. Because of this strike, his father, stepmother and seven of his siblings were thrown from their home into the street. This experience made an indelible impression on the young Murray and he then devoted himself to the union cause. He formed a local branch of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW), and in 1904 Murray was elected local president.
A skillful negotiator with a "guid Scots tongue in his heid", he rose to the vice presidency of the union by 1920. When the CIO was formed (Congress of Industrial Organizations), he became a CIO vice president and headed its successful steel workers' organizing campaign. He broke with John L. Lewis, whom he succeeded as CIO president in 1940. For supporting President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's re-election in 1940, Lewis forced Murray out of the UMW. However, Murray was elected president of the United Steel Workers of America in 1942 when that union was formed. Retaining the presidency of both the CIO and the United Steel Workers of America until his death, Murray was active in expelling Communist-dominated unions from the CIO.
In the 1950s, Murray continued to press for the political, social and economic advance of the working class, leading his last major strike against the steel industry in 1952. Shortly thereafter, he died of a heart attack aged only 66, honoured by millions as one of the giants in the American labor movement.
Workers, Robertson's at Springwell
late 1800's