Editing Jerome, Pennsylvania (section)

===Results of the strike at Jerome===
While the strike caused significant hardship, and even decayed into violence frequently from both sides, not all was grim.  Blankenhorn, who was a writer for the magazine "The Nation", relayed the adventure of one young student and [[union organizer]] from Pittsburgh, named Viscosky, who convinced Hillman to hire him as a guard just prior to the strike. Blackenhorn wrote, Viscosky "used his very special opportunity to line them [the miners] up for a strike. The only man whom he reported to the company was one who refused to have anything to do with the 'union,' the company faithfully discharged that one." Later, when Viscosky thought it prudent to disappear from Jerome before Hillman caught on, he convinced police officials to give him free conduct pass through checkpoints, "so he could visit his sister in Jenners."<ref>Blankenhorn 1924, p. 60.</ref>

In August 1922, union miners agreed to a new contract that did not include non-union miners.<ref name="Beik_557"/><ref>Ricketts, Elizabeth Cocke. 1996. ''"Our battle for industrial freedom": radical politics in the coalfield of central Pennsylvania, 1916-1920.'' Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Emory University. p. 465.</ref> The miners at Jerome and other Somerset County mines, left out of the contract, continued on for another twelve months, agreeing on August 14, 1923, to return to work<ref name="Beik_557"/> finally having been exhausted by a process that, for them, produced little economic benefit immediately. At Jerome, Hillman Coal offered a general amnesty to most miners, if each returned to work as an individual and not as part of a local union.<ref name="Blankenhorn 1924, p. xx"/> Nevertheless, the solid front displayed by Jerome miners laid the groundwork for the mine's eventual unionization in the 1930s.  Further, as Hapgood, Blankenhorn, Beik, and others point out, the miners themselves felt the 1922-23 strike to be a victory.  Prior to the strike, miners felt atomized, helpless, and hopeless; the coal towns of Somerset County were "visibly split" by ethnic divisions "admittedly...fostered by the coal companies" as a means of social control.<ref>Blankenhorn 1924, p.49. See also, Singer, Alan J. 1988.  "Class-conscious coal miners: Nanty-Glo versus the open shop in the post World War I era." ''Labor History.'' 29.1, at pp. 60-61, which describes, "a period of operator-operated Ku Klux Klan activity that attempted to drive a wedge between...Catholic and Protestant miners [in nearby Cambria County]."</ref> "[C]oal mining families....[lived] within a social, economic and political system of profound autocracy thinly veiled by shallow, pragmatic paternalism."<ref>Ricketts 1996, p.132.</ref> After the strike, Jerome emerged with the beginnings of an increasingly strong, tolerant social fabric, which remained tight-knit for several generations and still provides important unifying elements today.