Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Gun Thugs Rednecks and Radicals A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars by David Alan C Gun Thugs, Red Necks and Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars. Strikes and union battles occurred throughout American industry during the early part of the twentieth century, but none of these stories compare to the West Virginia Mine Wars of 1912 and 1921. These two workers’ rebellions quickly drew national attention to an area known principally for its “black gold,” the coal that was vital for U.S. factories, power plants, and warships of that age. In 1912, miners struck against the harsh conditions in the work camps of Paint and Cabin Creeks and coal operators responded with force. The ensuing battles caused the West Virginia governor to declare martial law, prompting Samuel Gompers to dub the state “Russianized West Virginia [where] the people can be naught but serfs.” There was little improvement in working conditions by 1921, when another army—thousands of union miners—went up against similar numbers of state police, local deputies, and paid company guards. The weeklong Battle of Blair Mountain ended only after President Warren Harding sent 2,000 U.S. troops and a small unit of bombers to pacify the region. Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals tells the story of these union battles as seen by the leaders, rank-and-file participants, and the journalists who came to West Virginia to cover them for papers including The Nation and the New York Times . Union leaders like Gompers, Frank Keeney, Fred Mooney, Bill Blizzard, and Mother Jones discuss the lives and struggles of the miners for their union. The book also contains articles, speeches, and personal testimony heard by two U.S. Senate committees sent to investigate West Virginia’s labor problems. In this testimony, miners and their family members describe life and work in the coal camps, telling why they participated in these violent episodes in West Virginia history. Special attention is given to the role of Huntington’s own radical newspaper, The Socialist and Labor Star , a forgotten monument in the history of American heresy and radicalism. Gun Thugs Rednecks and Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars by David Alan Corbin. Lewis Hine/Library of Congress Workers stand at the entrance to a West Virginia coal mine. In February 2017, Fortune wrote about a viral Twitter prompt from sociologist Eve Ewing: “If you could choose one historical struggle that many people don’t know about and have it be taught in schools, what would it be?” Among dozens of “eye-opening” responses in this “crowdsourced curriculum,” Fortune identified The Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest domestic armed insurrection in the United States since the Civil War (and one waged in the heart of what some now call “Trump Country”). If you’re unfamiliar with the 1921 conflict, you’re not alone. David Alan Corbin, author of Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars , writes that in “a dozen years of public schooling in West Virginia,” he heard “nothing” about the clash or its key figures, despite it being the largest labor uprising in American history and despite him being reared at its ground zero. Lewis Hine/Bettmann/Getty Images West Virginia boys stand near the coal mine in which they work. At the ideological heart of this conflict that few have heard of was, as Smithsonian writes, a battle between “collectivism and individualism, the rights of the worker and the rights of the owner.” Specifically, the Battle of Blair Mountain was 10,000-15,000 West Virginian miners, many armed only with “squirrel-hunting rifles,” against 3,000 coal company supporters, including local police, federal troops, and even a U.S. army bomber (“the only time in history that U.S. air power has been used against American civilians,” according to NPR). What set off such an unprecedentedly messy domestic conflict? Simply put, the miners, facing life-threatening conditions on the best of days, wanted better treatment from the coal companies. Smithsonian elaborates: “The coal industry was essentially the state’s sole source of work, and massive corporations built homes, general stores, schools, churches and recreational facilities in the remote towns near the mines. For miners, the system resembled something like feudalism. Sanitary and living conditions in the company houses were abysmal, wages were low, and state politicians supported wealthy coal company owners rather than miners.” Lewis Hine/Library of Congress Two West Virginia boys at work in the coal mines. Doug Estepp, a local historian who runs tours of the area, told NPR in 2011 that some of the companies had contracts prohibiting and punishing miners trying to organize into the fledgling unions: “They had the yellow-dog contract which said that, basically, if you took a job at this mine, you could not associate with anyone in the union, you couldn’t join. You were basically fired, blacklisted and evicted — and probably beaten on the way out by the guards just for good measure.” In the years leading up to the Battle of Blair Mountain, strikes and attempts to unionize were also thwarted by the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, a private firm hired by the mining companies to keep workers in line. Don’t let the quaint-sounding “Detective Agency” title fool you. Agents were armed with machine guns, Tommy guns, and high-powered rifles, and were known to sweep through strike camps in an armored vehicle known as the “Death Special,” firing on miners and their families. One mother of three later told government officials about one particularly harrowing incident: “Mrs. Annie Hall, who limped into the committee room, told the committee how she shielded her three little children from the bullets by hiding them in the chimney corner of her home at Holly Grove when the armored train made its appearance. She said she had been shot through the feet by a bullet which passed through the Bible and hymnal on her parlor table.” In 1920, this violence begat more violence, and triggered a conflict that ultimately left behind a battlefield as “big and extensive as maybe a World War I battlefield,” according to Kenny King, a prospector, “amateur archaeologist,” and local expert on the Battle of Blair Mountain. A gunfight in the spring of that year between Baldwin-Felts agents and a pro-union group, including Matewan, West Virginia’s police chief, ended with 10 dead, including the town’s mayor. Less than a year later, after the chief was acquitted by a local jury, Baldwin-Felts agents gunned down both him and his deputy on the courthouse steps. This blatant assassination fueled the fire, rallying 10,000-plus miners to wage war on the agents, the coal company, and, when President Harding saw the need, federal troops with leftover World War I munitions. For more than a week, the area felt like a relentless war zone to area residents, according to James Green, author of The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom : “The local doctor, an army veteran, said he heard about as much shooting that day as he had when American forces assaulted Manila in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. And some of the miners told reporters how much the fighting on Blair Mountain resembled the furious woodland combat they waged against the Germans in the dense Argonne Forest of France.” Wikimedia Commons Several miners pose with a bomb that had been dropped on them during the Battle of Blair Mountain. When the smoke cleared on the Battle of Blair Mountain, an estimated 1 million rounds were fired, dozens were killed, and 985 miners were arrested. The uprising was suppressed, but public awareness about the appalling conditions in which the miners were forced to live, work, and raise their families grew considerably. Wikimedia Commons Sheriff’s deputies fight during the Battle of Blair Mountain. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 that the southern West Virginia coalfields were allowed to be properly unionized, with miners bargaining collectively for better conditions without fear of persecution — or execution. In the years that followed, according to Jacobin , the number of mining-related deaths fell by one-third. With all the talk in recent years of the coal industry, its place in U.S. history, and the pros and cons of its revival, learning how miners in West Virginia fought for the still-not-great working conditions they have today is critical if you want to understand class conflict in the United States. Ideally, awareness of the Battle of Blair Mountain and the West Virginia Mine Wars will guard against warping its narrative into an “alternative history,” built on “alternative facts,” a history that masks how the working class has always had to agitate, sometimes successfully, against appalling and sometimes lethal working conditions — and those in power who conspire to foster them. After this look at the Battle of Blair Mountain and the West Virginia Mine Wars, discover the bloody history of labor unions in the United States. Then, have a look at Lewis Hine’s most haunting early 20th century child labor photos. ResoluteReader. The struggle of workers to be in unions, or to have the right to form unions, has never been an easy one. Employers through the ages have fought tooth and nail to prevent the trade union movement getting a foothold. While unionisation means safer workplaces, higher pay and better conditions for workers, it also means lower profits for the shareholders. But in few places could the struggle to unionise be quite so violent as in West Virginia in the early 20th century. Here the coal companies could make enormous profits, and as late comers to the table, they didn't have the same agreements with the mine workers. What this meant in practice, was violent repression of any attempt to unionise and the establishment of company towns which severely restricted the lives of miners. Here people lived in homes owned by the mine companies, ate food at prices set by the companies, sent letters via company post-officers, drank in company bars and were observed and policed by detective agencies paid by the company. Inevitably the struggle to build the union involved violence. Guns were a mainstay of life, and shootouts were not uncommon. The Matewan massacre took place when detectives shot down the Matewan mayor who was trying to maintain a semblance of legal order. Seven detectives died as miners shot back at them, while the miners lost two men as well. The sequel too this was equally horrific, as Sid Hatfield the police chief sympathetic to the miners, was due to speak in court. He was assassinated with his deputy on the stairs of the court, in front of their wives. Their deaths detailed in extraordinary detail in the accounts in this book. But alongside their deaths was a growing political and economic movement. At the heart of the Mine Wars was the Battle of Blair Mountain when up to 10,000 coal-miners marched to protest the conditions and fight for the right to unionise. The army was sent in, but not before the coal-owners had bombed the miners from four aircraft. The troops were sent to maintain order and separate the two sides, but in reality the state intervention served the interests of the mine-owners more than the miners. Indeed, the union itself undermined the miners' own organisation, telling them to return home. The story of the Mine Wars is shocking. This book is mostly documentary evidence of the period. It includes newspaper stories, interviews and accounts of events, particularly those leading up to the Battle of Blair Mountain. There are some famous figures - the elderly, and extremely inspiring Mother Jones, who refused to die until the mines had been unionised, and was imprisoned and kicked out of towns for standing up and speaking. There are also painful accounts of the poverty and life in company towns, as well as the transcripts of the congressional hearings called to examine claims of violence and massacre. Unfortunately, while all this material is fascinating, it is difficult to follow for readers like me who do not have prior knowledge of the period. The book could really have done with a longer, framing essay to give the history and a better time-line of events. Despite these limitations I found the book fascinating. In particular it is always inspiring to hear the words of ordinary people, even if they are describing the violence of company thugs. The book also points the finger of blame, and we can read the confessions of the company spies, union traitors and gunmen who took money to help defeat their fellow workers - their names shall live on in infamy. This book will be invaluable as a supplement to those who already know something about the period, but it also has much for those who like oral and social history. One Million Rounds: The Battle of Blair Mountain. When you think of violent labor disputes, which come to mind? For some, it may be the infamous 1886 Haymarket Affair, 1912 Lawrence textile strike (famously known as Bread & Roses), 1894 Pullman Strike, or something as modern as the 1991 Justice for Janitors police riot. But not many will recall the Battle of Blair Mountain, a week-long civil war that took place in West Virginia during the late summer of 1921. Some 13,000 mineworkers took on 3,000 law enforcement officials, military personnel, and the usual local scabs. Rather than take oppression sitting down, these miners put on their hard hats and geared up for war. However, despite the numbers, the miners suffered a crushing defeat and what resulted was the near collapse of the United Mineworkers of America. But how did it all begin? In the spring of 1912, West Virginian mineworkers, who all lived in small towns near their respective coal fields, attempted to negotiate contracts with the mining companies to give them higher pay raises and union dues that would be automatic. As you might expect, negotiations fell through, resulting in 7,500 workers going on strike throughout West Virginia. Even local supporters who were not mineworkers joined in. This caught the unwanted attention of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, a private police force that was called to the task of using brutality, fear, and intimidation to break up strikes. To really send the message, the agents began evicting miners from their homes, for unionizing with the UMWA. Eventually, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, co-founder of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World, joined the strikers, but was later arrested for her involvement in the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of 1912. In the early months of the year-long said strike, the miners issued their own declaration of war against the West Virginian government. Several instances of guerilla-style conflicts began to explode in Kanawha County, WV. Things got so bad that WV Governor William E. Glasscock placed the region under martial law. After a year of bloody combat, more than 50 people were reported dead. The Paint Creek-Creek Cabin strike was the beginning of a 9-year labor conflict, now famously referred to as the West Virginia Mine Wars. Fast-forward to 1920. The Baldwin-Felts agents were at it again, ransacking homes and evicting miners and their families at the Pocahontas Coalfield in the town of Matewan in Mingo County, West Virginia. This time around, they came face to face with Sid Hatfield, the Matewan police chief and beloved labor organizer. Unlike the vast majority of cops in West Virginia, Chief Hatfield was very outspokenly pro-union, using his position of authority to protect striking workers. He confronted the Baldwin-Felts agents and threatened to arrest them, prompting the agents to brag about their own arrest warrants against Hatfield. Over the years, the circumstances of what happened next have been debated, but according to official court transcripts published in David Alan Corbin’s Gun Thugs, Rednecks & Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars , an eyewitness testified that Cabell Testerman, the mayor of Matewan, said outright that the detectives’ warrants were “bogus,” triggering an angry Albert Felts, one of the heads of the Baldwin-Felts agency, to pull a firearm from his briefcase and shoot the mayor, who died of his wounds minutes later. Immediately after, Hatfield began firing, and a firefight between him and the agents ensued. When the dust settled, one miner, an innocent bystander, seven Baldwin- Felts agents and Mayor Testerman lay dead, while several other townsfolk were wounded in the crossfire. Although Sid Hatfield was now hailed as a hero by local miners, a year and a half later on August 1 st , 1921, he was ordered to stand before a judge for his involvement in what became known as the Battle of Matewan, also sometimes referred to as the Matewan Massacre. Accompanied by deputy Edward Chambers, they arrived at the McDowell County Court House and were greeted at the courthouse steps by several Baldwin- Felts agents. In a cowardly act of vengeance, the agents riddled Hatfield and Chambers with dozens of bullets, killing them instantly. None of the agents involved in the assassination of the chief and deputy were convicted of their crimes. In fact, the Baldwin-Felts agents almost never faced justice for their rampant human rights violations against strikers and their supporters. Their entire purpose was almost exclusively to pick on workers and civilian sympathizers. Horrified and equally fuming at the brazen murder of their beloved fellow organizers, what followed in mid-to-late August were armed patrols by miners in West Virginia’s mountains. They open-carried rifles to ward off Baldwin-Felts agents and scabs looking for a fight. Soon, an estimated 13,000 miners began to march towards Logan County to protest the arrests of union members in the area. The miners were led by their de facto commander Bill Blizzard, a miner and union member. What stood in their way was Blair Mountain, where anti-union sheriff Don Chafin started setting up defensive positions along the mountain to keep the miners from marching further. The siege began on August 25 th , but by August 29 th , the Battle of Blair Mountain was in full swing as miners attempted to overtake the mountains and cross over into Logan County. They didn’t get far; the local gunmen and cops, nicknamed the Logan Defenders, had higher ground and simply shot down anyone in their sights. The Defenders went as far as using a plane to fly overhead and drop a homemade bomb on the miners’ position. One of the planes reportedly stalled in mid-air and crashed into the side of the mountain. President Harding warned the local police that he would send federal troops into Logan County to stamp out the uprising once and for all, which he ended up doing on September 2 nd , 1921. Bill Blizzard told his fellow miners to cease fire. Fearing incarceration for their involvement, many of the miners began to disperse and go home, the majority of them throwing away their weapons in the dense woods of West Virginia to hide their involvement. (More than one thousand guns and bullet casings have been recovered in the decades that followed and have since become collectors’ items.) The miners that weren’t fast enough to retreat, more than 900, were arrested and forced to hand in their firearms. Some were acquitted, while others were thrown behind bars, the last miner being released in 1925. 100 men had died, and it is speculated that a whopping one million rounds were fired between both sides. This crushing defeat nearly ruined the United Mineworkers of America; countless tens of thousands of workers jumped ship, leaving a miniscule 10,000 or less members remaining by roughly the 1930s. Membership however began to climb once more after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted the New Deal in 1933. By 1935, WV miners were fully unionized without incident. Today, the UMWA, led by Cecil Roberts, has more than 80,000 members, a far cry from the declining membership numbers in the early 20 th century. Historians cite the Blair Mountain siege as the largest and deadliest civil uprising since the American Civil War. Many Americans were reasonably disgusted that 3,000 cops and federal troops fired on their own citizens. The battle however sent waves across the country. Labor laws began to change to prevent another armed insurrection and conditions even began to improve for some coalfields. In 2009, the site of the battle was listed for preservation by the National Register of Historic Places. Despite many attempts by court judges to overturn this, Blair Mountain still to this day remains recognized as a historic landmark. In short, the battle may have dealt a blow to the unions, but the hasty response by the government and local politicians have kept similar incidents from taking place today, and the United Mineworkers of America has never been stronger than they are now. Vince Ceraso is an activist and a card carrying member of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World. Show Me the Women and the Black Communists? Examining David Alan Corbin’s Gun Thugs, Rednecks and Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars , and Robin D.G. Kelley’s “Afric’s Sons With Banner Red”: African American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934, they both explore the “languages of class struggle” and “race”, moreover, Kelley’s reading states that the period “employed a highly masculinist imagery that relied on metaphors from war and emphasized violence as a form of male redemption.” (Kelley, 121) Although in the two readings, they both discussed the disenfranchised that existed in the West Virginia Mine Wars, and the “experiences of African Americans”, “blackness”, and the “Cult of True Sambohood”,[1] for the most part, albeit the essays on Mother Jones,[2] are examined through this masculinized world,[3] and only hint at the “‘woman’ question”. Kelley does briefly discuss the plight of women by stating “thus, on the terrain of gender, Communists and black nationalists found common ground—a ground which rendered women invisible or ancillary.” (Kelley, 121) Nevertheless, women are generally mentioned in the nucleus of a familial framework, or passingly as miners “wives [little ladies] and children are being starved!” and furthermore, “undernourished women, and the heart-rendering whines of starving babies” (Corbin, 153, 90). It is interesting to note that the setting of Corbin’s book is during the periods 1912 to 1921—when miners in West Virginia were fighting for rights, better wages and hours, plus better working conditions. It is also the same period in time that women in the U.S. were fighting for the right to vote, which they did not achieve until 1920. Therefore, it is no wonder that the rights of women, and women were still considered second class citizens. Regardless, both readings examine the social, and cultural impact of class struggle and race that existed within these contextual elements: from the atrocious conditions of the West Virginia miners and their families, which Samuel Gompers[4] compared them to be nothing but serfs;[5] to the hierarchical nature of the West Virginia mines, and the battleground of coal; to the fight for rights and the protective nature of labor unions; and the brief frolic with socialism. However, Kelley furthermore discussed the “community of culture merely provided a Marxist justification for black Communists to join the search for the roots of a national Negro culture.” (Kelley, 115) Nevertheless, Kelley points out that a community culture did not exist for black Communists and reiterates “‘the Negros were denied the most elementary rights…but they could sing those [their] songs and were living prophecies of deliverance.’” (Kelley, 117) It is interesting to consider, how can a culture who embraced the theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,[6] which decreed that they wanted to create an egalitarian society, but who did not allow women into their meetings,[7] or propagandize the notion that black Communists were welcomed, only as tokens, be considered as equal? Thus, both readings discussed the marginalized citizens that lived through the West Virginia Mine Wars, and the “experiences of African Americans”, “blackness”, and the “Cult of True Sambohood”, for the most part, are examined through an idiosyncratic masculinized world, and only really alludes to the whole of society. Bibliography and Works Cited. Corbin, David Alan. Gun Thugs, Rednecks and Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars , Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan . New York: International Publishers, 1972. Kelley, Robin D.G. “Afric’s Sons With Banner Red”: African American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934. Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class . New York: Free Press: Distributed by Simon & Schuster, 1996. https://bepl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/default/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ILS$002f0$002fSD_ILS:1640960/ada Retrieved 2017-10-07. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860”. American Quarterly . 18 (2): 151–174. 1966. [1] “The company personnel records, police reports, mainstream white newspaper accounts, and correspondence have left us with a somewhat serene portrait of folks who, only occasionally, deviate from what I like to call the “‘Cult of True Sambohood.’” Southern racist ideology defined pilfering, slowdowns, absenteeism, tool-breaking, and other such acts as ineptitude, laziness, shiftlessness, and immorality. But rather than escape these categories altogether, sympathetic labor historians are often too quick to invert them, remaking the black proletariat into the hardest-working, thriftiest, most efficient labor force around. Part of the problem, I suspect, lies in the tendency of historians to either assume that all black workers lived by the Protestant work ethic or shared the same values usually associated with middle-class and prominent working-class blacks. But if we regard most work as alienating, especially work performed in a context of racist and sexist oppression, then we should expect black working people to minimize labor with as little economic loss as possible. When we do so, we gain fresh insights into traditional, often very racist documents. Materials that describe “‘unreliable,’” “‘shiftless,’” or “‘ignorant’” black workers should be read as more than vicious, racist commentary; in many instances these descriptions are. the result of employers, foremen, and managers misconstruing the meaning of working-class activity which they were never supposed to understand.” (Kelley) “The Cult of True Sambohood” is a take on the 19 th Century concepts of “The Cult of True Womanhood”, which advocated that women’s attributes are “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” [2] To this reader, it seemed like the inclusion of Mother Jones was just a “token”—mostly with a chapter titled “‘Mother” Jones, Mild-Mannered, Talks Sociology. Incendiary Labor Leader Who Terrorized West Virginia Talks of Coming Industrial Peace, and She Says IS Neither Socialist nor Anarchist”—almost like the bizarre headlines of a William Randolph Hearst newspaper. [3] “The language of masculinity, in fact dominated representations of grass-roots organizing and party propaganda, especially in the 1930s.” (Kelley, 114) [4] The founder and first president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers also stated “wealth should serve the needs of men, not enslave them. Freedom cannot exist where human beings are subordinated to things.” (Gompers, 27) [5] Corbin suggests that Gompers was “referring to czarist Russia” (Corbin, 23), but the origins of serfdom in Russia can be traced to the 11th century; however, the term serf, in the sense of an unfree peasant of the Russian Empire. So, in other words Gompers was conveying the concept that the West Virginia miners and their families were still living in a feudal system. An interesting side note is that the great Russian poet, playwright, and novelist Alexander Pushkin’s matrilineal great-grandfather was Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696-1781), who was an Afro-Russian nobleman, military engineer and general. Kidnapped as a child and presented as a gift to Peter the Great, he was raised in the court household of the Emperor, as his godson. [6] Both Marx and Engels began their alliance and then joined the private revolutionary society named the League of the Just. The League of the Just had developed in France in 1837 to sponsor an egalitarian society through the rebellion of the existing governments. (Engels) [7] Both John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor were appalled by the hypocritical nature of Marx and Engels’ call for an egalitarian society, but would not allow women into their meetings. See Mill’s The Subjection of Women , and Taylor’s The Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty , and “The Enfranchisement of Women.”