The Mine Wars A Century Later: Revolutionary Organizing at Work
By: Brendan Muckian-Bates
Tags: Organizing, Unions, Revolution

On August 25, 1921, ten thousand miners with the UMWA marched to Logan and Mingo Counties to liberate arrested union members. That month, the miners’ friend, Sheriff Sid Hatfield, and his companion, Ed Chambers, were gunned down on the steps of McDowell County’s courthouse. Baldwin-Felts agents, a notorious group of private gun thugs hired by coal companies of the time, were angry that Hatfield had been found not guilty in the wake of the Matewan Massacre. On August 1, they took revenge on the only law enforcement officer the miners could trust. Armed miners huddled around Blair Mountain to confront the combined forces of the Logan County Sheriff’s Department, Baldwin-Felts agents, state police, and eventually the US Army. For eight days, the mountain and surrounding area became the site of the largest insurrection in US history since the Civil War.

Today, much of the commemoration centers around the insurrectionary violence itself. However, what the Left broadly misinterprets about the Battle is that violence was both a last resort and a culmination of decades of rank-and-file organizing. Instead of glamorizing the Battle for its Thermopylae-like last stand nature, organizers today would be better served to learn how West Virginia’s coal miners maintained union democracy, took direct action against the coal managers, and won the sympathies of their fellow citizens after being branded as traitors.

Mining Conditions & Miner Solidarity

When the writer Winthrop D. Lane visited southern West Virginia in the early 1920’s, he wanted to best explain the conditions of mining camps for his audience of readers who were rapt with attention about the state immediately following the end of the Mine Wars. Lane explained the makeup of the coal mining towns as such:

The typical coal mining town is not a town in the ordinary sense at all. The place where the town stands is the point at which a seam has been opened, buildings have been erected and machinery has been installed…. The town is the adjunct and necessary convenience of an industry; if the mines should disappear, it, too, would cease to exist. It is not even called a town in the language of the locality. It is called a camp. No one owns his own house; he cannot acquire so much title to property. No one runs a store, operates a garage or sells groceries… to his fellow townsmen. No one amuses them in the movie theater. There is no Main Street of small independent businesses, owned by different people…. There is little if any participation in common, group activities. No body of elected councilmen ever passes on repairs for roads, no group of people ever gets together and decides that the old school house is too ramshackle for the children or that the old church needs repairing. No family physician builds up a successful practice by competing with other physicians. No lawyer settles disputes over property rights among his neighbors. It is not accurate to say that no one does these things. The coal company does them all. It owns all the houses and rents them to the miner. It owns the store, the pool room, the movie theater, and often helps to build the school and the church.

Contemporary journalist Arthur Gleason identified similar issues in the state. “From the cradle to the grave,” he wrote, “they [miners] draw breath by the grace of the sometimes absentee coal owner, one of whose visible representations is the deputy sheriff, a public official in the pay of the coal owner.” In every sense of the word, the lives of coal miners were controlled. Eighty percent of these coal companies that owned rights to the land were from outside of Appalachia. The coal boom in the 1910’s and 1920’s ensured investors a steady stream of income in many of the non-union mines where wages were often much lower than unionized mines. In Harlan County, for example, coal loaders made forty-two percent less than their counterparts in unionized Illinois mines and twenty-four percent less than miners in unionized Ohio mines in 1922.

There was a clear distinction, however, between the miners and their bosses. Whereas the coal managers lived in two-story homes, sometimes referred to as “the white house,” miners lived in hastily-constructed homes that tended to leak when it rained and freeze when it snowed. Coal managers wore three-piece suits while miners wore overalls. A distinction in language was also pronounced. Miners, who spoke a variety of dialects and languages including Italian and Hungarian, found it difficult to understand the mine owners when they talked in complicated business terminology and Northern accents.

Division between classes was stark, but within the miners themselves, divisions of race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality were less so. Up until the 20th century, many mines had little direct supervision. Workers were paid by the tonnage of coal they extracted rather than a daily or weekly wage. Narrow mine shafts and poorly-lit coverings made it challenging for managers to have direct control over their workers. When a fellow miner was scolded by a manager, they could often be found on a pile of slate until that manager apologized to them. “Everybody felt a common kinship,” one miner stated then, “because they all had to work and fare together the same way.”

Another way that miners communicated to others about their concerns was through the use of a common piece of equipment miners carried with them — their dinner bucket. There are few pictures of Appalachian miners that don’t include them holding a bucket that contained their meal for the day. One former miner who visited an historic company town in the early 2000s stated that the “happiest day of my life was when I turned thirteen and all the men on my shift bought me my man bucket.” The bucket was purposeful as much as it was symbolic. In the mine shafts deep underground, rats could eat through any food you brought with you. Having a dinner bucket that kept them out was a practicality few miners could live without. The dinner bucket, however, also acted as an agitation tool. Whenever there were safety concerns on a shift, and the mining manager refused to act, miners would pour fresh water on the ground out of their bucket. “That was always a signal,” the former miner explained, “water poured… meant that no one goes back in the mines until the problems are resolved. Saved a lot of lives that way.”

In southern West Virginia, a large diaspora of Hungarians, Italians, and African Americans worked side-by-side white Appalachians. Indeed, one investigator found that the mining camps were “too simple” and “too socialistic,” since most miners felt that they were on “the same level.” They were not divided by ethnicities or language, but found in one another a common theme of solidarity on their daily working teams. Actions such as sitting on a pile of slate or pouring water out of your bucket cut across linguistic and ethnic barriers to signify that solidarity was needed in that moment.

These mining teams were important components to the composition of the industry in the early 20th century. Pay was individualized and based on the “long ton,” or 2,240 pounds of extracted coal. This was one way that managers sought to divide the miners against each other. As one team was loading coal into their collier, another team could easily take some out for their own cart or simply steal the cart entirely. The darkness of the mines would make it nearly impossible to find out who did this. Miners who left that day with less coal or no collier would go without pay. Instead of competing with one another, however, miners operated under what was called the “square turn.” Pay was standardized by miners themselves to ensure that no one was paid too much or too little, even the mule drivers and coal loaders who worked as auxiliaries to the process. Miners would take turns filling up coal carts equally so that everyone received similar pay and to prevent speed-ups which could endanger their jobs by overproduction.

Given the enormity of their work and the lack of enforceable safety standards at the time, mining deaths were not uncommon in this period. When deaths did occur, coal operators were rarely held liable. Most of the laws that did exist to protect workers had non-enforcement clauses in them, so a dead miner’s family was ultimately responsible for the funeral costs. To ensure that widows and their children would not become destitute in these situations, miners set up rank-and-file controlled funds to cover this. Labor historian James Green said of this time period that, “On one hand, the miners’ discipline and death-defying courage made them ideal industrial soldiers; on the other hand, the qualities the men forged in underground combat with the elements — bravery, fraternal fealty, and group solidarity — hardened them for aboveground combat with their employers.” The combativeness with employers was showcased both in the Battle of Blair Mountain itself as well as the everyday acts of defiance miners would partake in.

Sexual Abuse

In Glen Jean, WV sits an old company store. Justus Collins’ store maintained everything one could expect from a company store, but at the center was an inconspicuous counter manned by a local clerk. That clerk, however, was no mere administrator; he was a Baldwin-Felts agent posing incognito as a clerk. Such stores were central hubs in small towns throughout Appalachia and oftentimes they were one of the few gathering centers where the wives of miners would congregate. The store’s design at Glen Jean was unique. Its high ceilings and walls allowed for any conversation, no matter how low-pitched, to be heard by the clerk seated at the counter.

Mining wives were central to the function of the union. They were privy to many secrets of union activities and would come to stores, such as the one in Glen Jean, to talk amongst themselves about these goings on. Baldwin-Felts detectives could easily gather information seated at the counter and turn over suspected union sympathizers to the mine bosses. The Baldwin-Felts were more than hired guns patrolling the entrances to coal mines; they were local law enforcement, sheriffs the company paid, and occasionally miners themselves. These tactics maintained a panopticon of control at all levels in the coalfields.

That control was exerted against mining wives in more ways than one. Since most companies only offered a form of company script to their employees and prices in company stores were inflated, families had to find ways of surviving when money was tight. One particularly nefarious tactic companies used to control the wives of miners was rape. At stores, a woman would ask to see some new shoes. She would be escorted upstairs to “view” the shoes behind closed doors. There, a company employee would rape her and send her back home with a new pair of shoes. It became an unspoken code that when one woman saw her neighbor had new shoes that she received them through this act. In other situations, wives would visit the superintendent’s office directly to “sort out” arrangements for their destitute situation.

Wess Harris, a primary source scholar of the Mine Wars, interviewed dozens of anonymous descendents of the early 20th century coalfields. One interviewee stated to Harris that, “When miners had big debts at the company store, the bosses would offer them overtime if they could go to the guy’s house and have sex with his wife and daughter. Many a miner raised kids they didn’t father. If a man was fired for missing work due to being drunk, the wife would go to the mine and have sex with the mine boss or bosses to get her husband’s job back.” The ongoing rapes had a term that families became all too familiar with — Esau Script.

Esau Script comes from the story of the Biblical figure Esau who, in Genesis, forgoes his birthright to his brother Jacob for some food. Whenever a miner became too sick or injured to work temporarily, the superintendent of the mine would administer this script to the family. If the miner returned to work within thirty days, the family didn’t have to pay back this “loan.” However, if they did not return, the script acted as a free license for coal company men to rape these women. In this way, these acts of interpersonal violence were intended to do several things. First, it reminded mining families of their unending and complete servitude to the company. They owned every facet of their lives, including their very bodies. Second, it could keep miners docile and working even when suffering unimaginable pain. Lastly, this outlet of violence was done without bullets or strikebreakers, but acted as a psychological bludgeon upon families.

When the Battle of Blair Mountain commenced, it was with the knowledge that coal companies had degraded and stolen the lives of workers, their children, and their spouses for generations. Sexual violence became something which the miners could not prevent through workplace direct action, and thus insurrectionary violence was a last resort in ending such practices.

Strikes & Direct Action

The UMWA’s history in the coalfields of West Virginia was not incredibly revolutionary for most of the early 1900’s. In many ways it stayed within the confines of Samuel Gomper’s conservative trade unionism, fighting for “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.” In 1909, coal operators in the Kanawha Valley forced District 17, which covered most of the southern West Virginia coalfields, to accept a new concession to their contract by adding the “long ton” (2,240 pounds) in lieu of what had previously been the accepted “short ton” (2,000 pounds). District 17 offered a brief protest strike that was called off by the UMWA several days later.

Italian rank-and-file miners, however, continued the strike. Calabrian immigrants, carrying large red and black flags emblazoned with gold letters that read Victoria o Morte, persevered. They closed the mines and prevented Black and white miners alike from returning. West Virginia historian Fred Barkey wrote that, “As if by magic, they produced an amazing supply of rifles they had apparently been accumulating for some time.” Newspapers described the event as a riot, claiming that “the Italian miners acted deliberately by seizing control of the rail line and a blacksmith shop that produced important machinery for the colliery.” The picket line held and the union miners won a return to the “short ton.” This wasn’t an insurrection, but it was a very visible display of worker power.

By 1912, what would later be known as the Mine Wars began in earnest. The Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike kicked off the larger and more violent aspects of the period. The Paint Creek union demanded in a new contract that the operators increase wages to match those in the surrounding area, roughly fifteen cents per miner per day. When the coal operators refused, District 17 called for a strike. Their demands went beyond the pay increase: they wanted all of the various mine owners to recognize the union, recognize the rights of miners to free speech, end the script system and mandatory trading at only company stores, and to install union-controlled scales at mines to weigh tonnage. The pay increase would create a uniform salary for all miners in the region, while the right to free speech would protect miners from eviction for their support of unions or, conversely, their support of the Socialist Party of America (which was popular among many miners). Price increases at the company store and pay in script ensured miners could never save up money and leave the mines.

The UMWA nationally supported the strike at first, believing a successful strike here could lead to unionization all across the southern coalfields, but quickly determined that they did not have the financial means to carry it through. Mine owners called in the Baldwin-Felts to break up the strike on May 10. Around 300 mine guards and agents began arresting, harassing, and evicting miners. Mother Jones, who had only arrived in July, quickly began organizing others to rally and join in sympathy strikes elsewhere. Three thousand miners then marched to the capitol steps in Charleston and read a declaration of war to Governor William Glasscock.

The declaration of war was both metaphorical and literal. Miners attacked Mucklow on July 26, killing four guards but leaving twelve striking miners dead. In September, five thousand miners joined the growing tent city along the Kanawha River. Governor Glasscock declared martial law and sent in over one thousand state troopers to disarm the camp. It became illegal for miners to congregate in large numbers, and those that were arrested faced swift reprisals and biased trials in a military court. Glasscock would end, then reinstate, martial law at least two more times before the end of his term in 1913. When miners attacked Mucklow again in February 1913, Sheriff Bonner Hill retaliated. He sent in an armored car nicknamed the “Bull Moose Special,” which was outfitted with machine guns and rifles. Hill had the car shoot up striker Cesco Estep’s house, pumping hundreds of rounds into his tiny house, killing him. Back and forth violence characterized much of the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike until newly-elected Governor Henry Hatfield imposed a peace deal on the union. The new contract was imposed on the union and, in lieu of a referendum to ratify the contract, the UMWA called a convention with only pre-selected delegates to vote in favor of it. Governor Hatfield had only given the union thirty-six hours to accept this deal, else they would be deported from the state. Soldiers were established at mines to escort workers back inside. The union, seeing no other option but to accept the deal, proclaimed that “the miners place all confidence in Governor Hatfield and leave it to him to see that they will be protected.”

The fighting that was unleashed in the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike was the culmination of months of gridlock and inability to spread the strikes elsewhere. The UMWA’s lack of support meant that many rank-and-file miners felt they had no other option but to match force with force. The Socialist Party, for its part, sided with the UMWA’s and Hatfield’s position that the strike’s conclusion was praiseworthy, nothing that Hatfield had “guaranteed the right of free speech and free press,” despite Hatfield and the UMWA suppressing the Party in West Virginia and forcing upon members this undemocratic contract. Eugene Debs personally oversaw the delegation the Party entrusted with releasing a report about the strike. Because the Socialist Party had, by this time, moved away from the direct action approach of the IWW and towards working to transform the trade unions from within, the report itself said no ill word towards the union or Governor Hatfield. This in turn led to a steep decline in the Socialist Party’s membership within the state and a greater distrust by rank-and-file miners.

One member who dropped his membership was a miner by the name of Frank Keeney. Keeney was close friends with Mother Jones, whom he considered to be a personal ally and close associate. When Keeney realized that the UMWA officials would not be sending any support during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike, he stated, “If you men are afraid to make the trip with me, I will find someone with nerve to go. And I know an old woman who would go up the creek with me.” Jones, who by this time was a paid organizer for the UMWA, worked with Keeney to ensure he had the strategic wherewithal to become District 17’s new, more militant president. In 1916, Keeney took on his new title.

District 17 rapidly increased its membership under Keeney’s presidency. Nearly two thousand new members joined the UMWA, a dozen locals were established, and by the time Keeney’s term came to an end District 17 would have its largest membership base in its existence. The years of organizing before and during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike helped Keeney to understand where his membership wanted the union to progress. The decades of rank-and-file miner organizing kept the union alive when times were tough and Keeney capitalized on this moment to oust the old guard in District 17 to great effect. By 1920, miners had been prepared to stop the Baldwin-Felts agents directly and knew their power lay in their superior numbers. As agents approached a family at Stone Mountain Camp to evict them, Sid Hatfield and Matewan’s miners were there to stop them from leaving. The shootout in Matewan, which precipitated the events of Blair Mountain a year later, were defensive in nature but clear enough to prove to the union members that they had the power to kick out coal company agents once and for all. When the Battle of Blair Mountain occurred, it was Keeney’s district that was responsible for keeping members activated through periodic work disruptions and direct confrontations with Baldwin-Felts agents in the years in between. On the capitol steps of Charleston, Mother Jones pleaded with Keeney and others not to proceed with arms to Logan County, knowing that some faced certain death.

Conclusions

After the Battle of Blair Mountain ended, Keeney dropped his membership in the UMWA, creating his own independent West Virginia Mine Workers Union in 1931. Immediately after founding the union, twenty thousand members went on strike, the largest mining strike in the state since the Mine Wars. However, the new union was quickly repressed by coal operators and the state. The Communist trade unions, such as the National Miners Union, quickly folded as well. State repression and anti-Communist furvor in Appalachia became unsustainable for the more radical unions. William Z. Foster’s “burrow within” philosophy took hold during the Great Depression and Keeney’s independent union never stood a chance. John L. Lewis, who would be the UMWA’s president from 1919 until 1960, was keen to prevent radicals such as Keeney from creating their own union. The UMWA under Lewis, for their part, relied heavily on President Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and later the National Labor Relations Act (1935) to better position themselves as the sole mining union in the United States. These acts and Lewis’ personal relationship with FDR gave the UMWA roughly seventy percent control over labor representation in US mines. Keeney, however, would eventually die as a parking valet in Charleston, betrayed and hated by his former union.

What made Keeney famous was not so much his command leading up to the Battle of Blair Mountain, which was controlled directly by rank-and-file miners and without much of a central command, but his connection to members. Keeney was able to rapidly grow District 17 because he found most members were upset at the poor deal they received and felt that neither the state, nor their union, nor the Socialist Party were on their side. The discontent that had been boiling overflowed in 1921 with the Blair Mountain, but it was due in large part to the power Baldwin-Felts agents and coal barons had to act with impunity in the state. Taking up weapons to free Logan and Mingo counties already had precedent in the minds of many miners, too. It wasn’t the beginning state of conflict, but merely the logical end result the miners felt was their only path forward after industrial organizing had failed to win new contracts.

Though the miners never made it south, Blair Mountain was also not a defeat for the union. After the Battle, insurgents returned back to their homes and kept a code of secrecy among themselves. The state indicted over two hundred participants for the insurrection while thirty men died in the battle that involved over 10,000 miners in the summer of 1921. As the two hundred indictees stood trial in Charles Town, intentionally removed as far as possible to the eastern portion of the state in order to avoid a sympathetic jury, no Baldwin-Felt agent nor coal company representative was indicted. The coal companies, for their part, wanted the miners to face the death penalty for their insurrection. The state was more than happy to oblige, going so far as to allow company lawyers to prosecute the case on their behalf and having the indictments drawn out in coal company offices.

While company officials stayed in fancy hotels outside city limits, the indicted union members found a way of garnering public support — baseball. The state believed that the indictments against these men would be simple enough to get a jury to convict. Fears of a Bolshevik revolution ran deep in more upper-middle class towns throughout the country. Painting the UMWA members as treasonous insurrectionaries in the 1920s would’ve been an easy enough connection to make for these well-paid legal teams. Yet as the trial progressed, UMWA members such as Bill Blizzard made a stark impression on the residents of Charles Town. As they left the train station wearing pink ribbons, which identified them as union members, crowds cheered them on as they marched to the fire station together. These were the friends and family members of the jurors who would have to determine whether the union supporters were indeed dangerous insurrectionists or simply working-class men defending themselves. As Blizzard’s son, William C. Blizzard, relays in When Miners March, “many of the citizens of Charles Town learned that these supposed revolutionists were, after all, not very different from themselves.”

Throughout the duration of the trial, UMWA members made a point to attend local church services and set up baseball games against Charles Town teams. When the union did win, all proceeds were donated to a local hospital. Meanwhile, the coal companies maintained a sense of military occupation in town, going so far as to withhold evidence and witness lists from the defense and keep armed gunmen in the courtroom. Governor Ephraim Morgan said as much in his testimony, as reported in one newspaper, that “a private government, whose army consists of the notorious ‘mine guards,’ exists in his state, and that though opposed to it, he is powerless to end it.” Another newspaper wrote that, “It looks as if the entire machinery of government has been turned over to the coal operators.” As the weeks dragged on, the prosecution’s simple case began to unravel. Witnesses turned out to be paid company informants, unexploded bombs that were dropped on the miners were brought in as evidence. All the while, the union members continued to play baseball with the residents of Charles Town. The dangerous insurrectionists, it seemed, were not the revolutionaries the prosecution was making them out to be.

When Blizzard and the other defendants were acquitted on May 27, 1922, “Cheers resounded throughout the courtroom,” according to Blizzard’s son. No miner was executed for their role in the Battle and those that did face jail sentences were all paroled three years later. Wess Harris agrees that the Mine Wars were a victory for the union, despite the precipitous drop in union membership throughout the 1920s. “The twin event of Blair Mountain and the trials,” according to Harris, “were the furnaces that forged the miners’ steel that got them ready for the 1930s.”

As the Battle of Blair Mountain’s centennial approaches, it’s important for many on the Left to remember these facts about an event they so widely admire. The context for the insurrection is critical and attempts to glorify the battle but not the decades of direct action, on-going organizing, and abysmal conditions obscures the escalating actions that kept the union alive. Adventurism does not properly pay tribute to the miners who died at the battle, nor does it take into account the distinct differences between the early 20th century coalfields and contemporary work for many in the West; company towns, script, armed guards at work, and literal violence towards union members is non-existent. Demarcating features between management and workers are now much more easily hidden by the facade of progressivism companies put to their employees. If we’re going to win a class war, we must fight with the tools available to us. For the miners at Blair Mountain, their tools shifted from slow downs, to sit downs, to strikes, and finally to rifles only as a last recourse.