Floyd Skloot Quotes

The present miner has had his day; he has been oppressed and ground down and denied the right to live as a human being; but there is another generation coming up, a generation of little children prematurely doomed to the whirl of the mill and the soot and the noise and the blackness of the breaker. It is for them that we are fighting.

It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners.

I come from the coal fields.

My grandfather, who brought me up, was a coal miner. I visited the mines with him. I remember it vividly. It was horrible. I'm glad I didn't go into the family business.

Late 19th-century America was basically a plutocratic enterprise while people toiled in mines and died of coal dust poisoning.

I could write about coal miners in Northern Pennsylvania, and people would ask if I was writing about my dad.

I make films about working class people.

My father and brothers were coal miners.

I've commissioned an adaptation of 'The Jungle', by Upton Sinclair, a story of a young immigrant from Lithuania to the meat-packing industry of Chicago in 1904, and the rise of the unions in America.

I'm a novelist - not an expert on coal mining. I'm not a politician with an agenda to push. I'm not a reporter presenting facts, and I'm not a sociologist documenting the last struggling remnants of blue-collar America. I'm simply an author who sets her books in coal country because it's where I come from, and it's what I know.

Oh yeah, I would have been a coal miner, I would think, if I hadn't had tuberculosis when I was 12.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

I grew up listening to my dad, a miner who rose through the ranks to be the mine superintendent in Coalwood, W.V., yelling orders into his black company phone. He wanted to get coal out of the ground and into coal cars and on its way to steel mills.

While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community.

He described how, as a boy of 14, his dad had been down the mining pit, his uncle had been down the pit, his brother had been down the pit, and of course he would go down the pit.

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

Initially, I used to cart coke from the West Melbourne Gasworks -12 tonne a day, 150-pound sacks. I'd come home looking like Al Jolson at the end of the day - white teeth, black face... A good hard day's work.

My great-grandfather was a coal miner, who worked in Pennsylvania mines when carts were pulled by mules and mines were lit by candles. Mining was very dangerous work then.

My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania.

The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class.

The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.

The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.

When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.