The Battle of Blair Mountain

A MONTH AFTER the miners’ rebellion collapsed, UMW Vice President Philip Murray gave the union’s national convention a firsthand report on the Battle of Blair Mountain. If the Army had not arrived when it did, Murray claimed, “there would have been very little cause for further complaint from anyone about further activities of Baldwin-Felts mine guards in the state of West Virginia. It was self evident to any casual observer,” Murray added, “that the outcome was inevitable as the citizens army was making a steady advance into the camp of the enemy.” But this was a case not proven. The miners did not overwhelm Chafin’s defenders, and even if they had, it was not clear what they might have gained from such a tactical success. Given what actually had happened in southern West Virginia, the future looked bleak for the union, as Murray tacitly conceded. The Federal troops had restored order, Murray told the UMW convention. But they were bound to withdraw before long, and when they did leave, Murray said, “they are going to leave behind them the source of all this evil. It must become evident to all that a determined effort should be put forward by the labor unions of this country to remove this menacing evil from the lives of our people.” But Murray was just whistling into the wind, a wind that was blowing with gale force against the mine workers in West Virginia and against organized labor throughout the country.

Ever since the Matewan shootout had triggered the crisis in West Virginia, UMW leaders looked for succor to the Federal government in Washington, to the Congress and then to the White House, first when Wilson was in the Oval Office and then when Harding replaced him. And their entreaties continued after the Battle of Blair Mountain, supported by others on the left. In the immediate aftermath of the miners’ surrender, The Nation noted that “the miners have yielded not only to the superior force of the Federal Government, but also apparently to some confidence in its purpose and ability to do justice,” and urged the Kenyon committee to pay heed to the miners’ grievances when the committee resumed its work on September 19, two weeks after the West Virginia uprising’s collapse.

But as it turned out, the Kenyon committee’s three months of labors, which included a visit to the sites of the struggle in West Virginia, produced only a mouse. Unable to get his colleagues to agree on a report that could have pointed the way to the sort of remedies the union had sought, Chairman Kenyon had to settle for a brief statement of his own “personal views.” This did little more than portray the battle in West Virginia as a conflict between “two determined bodies trying to enforce what they believe are rights, which rights are diametrically opposed to one another, and we have the situation of an irresistible force meeting an immovable body. In such case there can be nothing but trouble.” Not surprisingly Congress took no action.

John L. Lewis, who had taken pains to cultivate his ties to the new Republican administration, sought out Harding’s labor secretary, James J. Davis, himself a West Virginian, asking for help. His hope, Lewis told reporters, was that the Federal government would use its troops to disarm agents of the coal operators as well as the miners and then extend the miners the right to bargain collectively. Davis, a glad hander whose main role, a cabinet colleague observed, was to “keep labor quiet,” was solicitous but unmoved. In Washington Samuel Gompers called at the White House to ask President Harding to consider convening a conference of miners and operators to deal with the crisis in West Virginia. Harding listened with “keen interest and sympathy,” Gompers claimed. But sympathy was all that he had to give. His only obligation as president, Harding told Gompers, was to restore law and order in West Virginia, and that had already been done by fiat of General Bandholtz.

Far from helping the union, the Federal government was actively considering action against it. Called upon by Morgan to arrest miners on behalf of Logan County authorities, Bandholtz refused, pointing out that Federal troops cannot act against alleged violators of state laws. But when the governor appealed for action against the miners for violating Federal laws, he found a more supportive listener in Colonel Walter A. Bethel, the legal specialist whom Bandholtz had brought to Charleston to serve as his judge advocate. In a memorandum to the Department of Justice arguing for prosecution, the colonel pointed out that the deadline in Harding’s proclamation, ordering the miners’ army to disband by noon on September 1, had been ignored. Therefore, ipso facto, the miners, by disobeying the president, were guilty of insurrection. Bethel’s view found support within the Department of Justice, where criminal division lawyers recommended a Federal indictment. But President Harding ultimately opposed prosecution, and Attorney General Harry Daugherty let the matter drop. The Justice Department never offered an explanation, but it was evident to one and all that any Federal investigation into the miners’ uprising would inevitably focus public attention on the close ties between the coal operators and the state and local governments, and this was a can of worms that no one in Warren Harding’s government wanted to open. As one assistant attorney general put it: “We are of the opinion that no steps should be taken by the Federal government at this time for it may embarrass the state officials.”

Anyhow, any Federal prosecution would have been a redundancy, because the state of West Virginia was coming down on the union rebels with all its might and main. It was a vengeful Governor Morgan who signaled the state’s purpose hard upon the miners’ surrender. Even Morgan conceded that it would be unreasonable to punish all who participated in the uprising, because some, he noted, had been dragooned into insurrection, against their wills. But, the governor stated, “every effort will be made to punish the guilty leaders, who after inciting their followers to take up arms, sought to escape just punishment and the dangers of conflict by remaining a safe distance from the actual scene of warfare.”

Anticipating legal trouble, even before he and Frank Keeney fled to Ohio, Fred Mooney had helped to establish the Mingo County Defense League to defray costs of those rebels facing criminal charges. Circulars were sent the world around to solicit funds. When the miners’ army gave up the fight, Mooney and Keeney, realizing they faced extradition, returned to Charleston. But they remained in hiding until union officials could work out a plan for them to surrender directly to Governor Morgan. On September 18, 1921, they appeared at Morgan’s office, were taken into custody by Kanawha County deputies and brought to Williamson to face the Mingo County murder charges.

If Lewis believed that the end of the uprising would have led Morgan to a more conciliatory attitude, he was soon disabused of that notion. Morgan responded with a bitter telegram linking the UMW leadership to the Bolsheviks ruling the Kremlin and accusing Lewis himself of complicity in the uprising. “Your silent encouragement of unlawful acts would indicate that Lenin and Trotsky are not without sincere followers in your organization,” the governor declared. “It is a matter of record that you have not lifted your voice in protest against this violence.”

Regardless of Morgan’s accusations, Keeney and Mooney were well looked after by the authorities in Williamson, where they were among Mingo County friends. They ultimately posted bail, pending trial. But by this time they faced even more legal trouble. Along with twenty other miners they were charged with treason against the state of West Virginia. The state might have indicted the miners’ leaders for any one of a number of felonies tied to the insurrection, and certainly would have had an easier time making its case. But instead it chose the charge of treason, a particularly detestable crime, the better to portray the miners the way the coal companies and their allies wanted them seen, as men beyond the pale, outcasts in their own state.

Much as prosecutors would have liked to convict Mooney and Keeney, their absence from the state when the uprising was at its height would have made the case against them hard to make. The state decided it had a better chance against William Blizzard, the so-called field marshal of the insurgents. But making the charge of treason was much easier than making it stick. The treason provision in the West Virginia constitution is narrowly drawn and identical to the language of the Federal constitution as set forth in article three, section three. “Treason against the State shall consist only in levying war against it, or in adhering to its enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Moreover, to make the charge harder to prove, West Virginia’s constitution, like its Federal model, adds the restrictive clause that “No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”

No one could deny that the insurgents had committed violent acts and rejected lawful authority. But the claim that they were trying to make war against the state distorted reality. Indeed, before the march started, the miners sought the intervention of the state, in the person of Governor Morgan, with whom they pleaded to help find a peaceful solution to their problems. If the miners saw themselves as making war against anyone, it would have been against the mine owners, or the Logan County sheriff’s office, a point that drew criticism from observers outside the state. “In West Virginia indictments for treason seem to be thrown about as carelessly as if they were indictments for the larceny of a chicken,” the New York Times declared. Closer to home, John T. Porterfield, prosecutor for Jefferson County, where the trial was to be held, recused himself from the case, contending that the charge treason was improper, adding that he regarded the trials as “a waste of scarce resources and mean-spirited vendettas.” That left the chief counsel for the coal operators association, Anthony M. Belcher, in charge of prosecuting the case for which the companies later billed the state $125,000. UMW District 17 lawyer Harold W. Houston headed the defense team, roughly replicating the order of battle for the Matewan shoot-out trial in Williamson the year before.

Union lawyers had sought the shift of the trial to Jefferson County, in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle, to avoid the hostile atmosphere of Don Chafin’s Logan. The change also made for a striking historical coincidence. Only sixty-three years before, the same courthouse in Jefferson’s county seat of Charles Town, where Blizzard’s fate was to be decided, had served as the stage for another dramatic legal confrontation with profound political overtones. This was the trial of treason defendant John Brown, the abolitionist zealot whose raid on the Federal arsenal at nearby Harper’s Ferry was one of the sparks that ignited the Civil War.

“Every violent opposition to the execution of the laws of the state, every resistance by force and violence to the officers of the state in the performance of their duties is not treason,” Wood declared. Rioters might conspire to commit unlawful acts, and with intent to use violence, and yet, that would not necessarily be treason. But unlawful acts committed by an assemblage of individuals would not amount to treason “unless their purpose is by force and violence to commit some act or some acts, which if successful will subvert the government in whole or in part.” To Blizzard’s jury, whatever the union rebels had done, or intended to do, none of it seemed intended to subvert the government. They voted for acquittal on May 25, 1922.

Public sentiment among the citizens of Charles Town had all along favored Blizzard, and some of his more ardent backers reacted to the verdict by parading through town, carrying the alleged traitor on their shoulders. Their jubilation was premature. The state was not yet prepared to give up. Blizzard was then charged with murder, in the killing of Gore and his deputies, but was freed when the jury could not reach a verdict. When the jurors were released, they stood ten to two for acquittal.

Blizzard’s escape from punishment was a bitter pill for the mine operators, one they refused to swallow without a fight. They still wanted a treason conviction. If they could not get one against Blizzard, they would settle for another rebel miner, by the name of Walter Allen. He was such a minor figure in the rebel army that even the prosecution’s witnesses could testify to nothing more damaging than that he had been seen “with the armed forces” in Logan County, had carried a gun and distributed ammunition. But by this time the legal tide had turned against Allen and the miners. Judge Wood again presided, as he had in the Blizzard trial, but his handling of this case suggested that the mine operators and their allies had made clear to him that they had lost patience with his independence.

The change was evident during the voir dire. When the defense challenged jurors who admitted to a bias against unions, as it had done successfully in the Blizzard trial, Judge Wood overruled it until eventually the defense gave up on challenging. When the defense asked for instructions to the jury that would make clear how limited Allen’s involvement was, Judge Wood rejected their motions and instead told the jurors that if they believed Allen was part of the miners’ army, “the said Walter Allen was guilty of treason.”

After the jury brought in the guilty verdict that seemed inevitable under the circumstances, Wood gave the defense one concession by agreeing to release Allen on bail pending appeal. Allen disappeared and all efforts by local authorities to track him down were in vain. The state dropped charges against the other twenty men charged with treason. Also abandoned was the murder charge against Mooney. The murder prosecution against Keeney went forward but the trial resulted in his acquittal.

Sunday employed a picturesque rhetoric whose extravagance recalled the tirades of Mother Jones, though of course from the opposite side. Of union organizers he said, “I’d rather be in hell with Cleopatra, John Wilkes Booth and Charles Guiteau, than to live on earth with such human lice.” Shedding his coat and tie and rolling up his sleeves, he added, “If I were the Lord for about fifteen minutes,” the evangelist declared, “I’d smack the bunch so hard that there would be nothing left for the devil to levy on but a bunch of whiskers and a bad smell.”

These insults only added to the injuries the union had suffered in the state’s legal system. The net result of the rebellion and the legal sequel was to inflict a devastating blow on the UMW in West Virginia. The West Virginia local’s treasury was drained as a result of the heavy spending to support the strike and wage the subsequent legal battles. Nor was there much hope of help from national headquarters because the UMW landscape everywhere else was almost as gloomy.

The fundamental problem was that the artificial demand for coal stimulated by the Great War had vanished, but new mines that had opened to meet that demand still remained. John L. Lewis picked the moment to stage a new nationwide strike. Circumstances could hardly have been worse. Coal supplies were abundant, which meant that the strike would cause no hardship to the public and thus no pressure on the operators from the government to give ground to the union.

Under these circumstances, the best Lewis could do was to wring an agreement from major producers to continue existing pay scales. But even that was too generous for the producers of West Virginia. They demanded that the union agree to give back the most recent $1.50-a-day pay increase, if they were to continue to recognize the union. Keeney and Mooney were willing to go along, however reluctantly, in the interest of “the perpetuation of the union.”

They took the offer to Lewis, who during the dark days of the Blair Mountain march and the legal struggles that followed had been a steadfast ally of District 17, even briefly taking a seat at the defense table during Blizzard’s treason trial. But now with the UMW in serious trouble, and with his own hold on its presidency in danger, Lewis proclaimed a draconian strategy not to yield any of the recent hardfought gains the UMW had won. “No backward step,” was Lewis’s motto and under that rubric there was no room for the bargain Mooney and Keeney proposed.

As Mooney later bitterly wrote: “No backward step was taken but the ground lost by the union became a landslide into the gutter for the union.” In West Virginia the miners signed contracts for tonnage rates far below the prewar levels, membership tumbled from 50,000 to a few hundred while nationally the UMW’s membership declined from about 600,000 to fewer than 100,000 by the end of the decade. It was a ghastly time for organized labor on every front. Spurred by a postwar economic slump, corporations mounted a nationwide drive for the open shop, under the rubric the “American plan,” which set unions back on their heels and thinned their ranks. From 1920 to 1923 the AFL lost two million workers, or nearly 25 percent of its total membership. And courts seemed to be ready to issue strikebreaking injunctions almost for the asking.

Meanwhile Mooney and Keeney were forced out of the union by Lewis, bitter at their attempted mutiny. Keeney soldiered on for the cause, leaving the state to plunge into the nascent drive for industrial unionism and returning there at the onset of the Great Depression to make one last stab at organizing the miners. After that failed he finished his life as a parking lot attendant in Charleston, discredited by the union to which he had devoted his life.

The years were even less kind to Keeney’s comrade-in-arms, Fred Mooney. He briefly entered politics, losing two races for the state legislature, on the Republican ticket in 1922 and 1924, then divorced his wife, and with his three sons moved to New Mexico, where he worked as a carpenter. The next years were spent drifting in the Southwest and the Far West. In 1934 he returned to West Virginia and found work in the mines as a superintendent and section foreman. In 1952, following a period of severe depression, he killed himself with a pistol shot to the temple.

It took the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt to rescue Lewis’s union and the rest of the American labor movement from near oblivion. Lewis abandoned his caution of the 1920s to break with the AFL and find in industrial unionism and the CIO a more aggressive and effective template for the labor movement in the turbulent 1930s. He helped break new ground for labor by vigorously supporting the auto workers’ union sit-down strike against General Motors. It was the boldest venture for American organized labor since the miners’ march on Blair Mountain. When the auto workers occupied GM’s huge complex in Flint, Michigan, police assaulted the buildings but were driven back by a barrage of auto parts dropped from second-story windows. The sit-downs were enormously successful, too much so to suit the middle-class ethos. As Lewis’s CIO swept to new victories against the steel and auto industries, many Americans recoiled. “Property minded citizens were scared,” notes New Deal historian William Leuchtenberg.

It was a scathing put-down, but it did Lewis and labor little good. The success of the sit-down strikes was not to be repeated. The New Deal succeeded in enacting only one more piece of pro-labor legislation, the Wages and Hours Act of 1938, a measure so riddled with compromises and exceptions that one Congressional critic offered a facetious amendment requiring the secretary of labor to report to Congress “whether anyone is subject to this bill.”

In sum, both the aftermath of the miners’ march in West Virginia and the auto workers’ sit-downs in Michigan served to remind trade unions that in the land of the free, working-class gains can be made only by playing by middle-class rules, rules that demand respect for property and profit. But the larger truth is that these rules were generally accepted by workers, with the qualification that they were understood to be part of a larger compact with their country governing their rights as citizens of the United States. It was this compact, with its balance of responsibilities and protections, requiring the respect for law and property in return for fair treatment and equal opportunity, including the right to organize, which had been betrayed by the coal operators of West Virginia and the auto makers of Michigan. The mine workers’ allegiance to this compact not only inspired the great armed uprising in the West Virginia coalfields but also restricted it and contributed to its failure.

No sooner had the armed miners begun their ill-fated march on Blair Mountain in the violent summer of 1920 than apparatchiks of the newly formed Communist Party of the United States sprang into action, grinding out leaflets with a call to arms. “Help your struggling brothers in the mines of West Virginia,” the broadsides urged. “To your task! All as one in the name of working class solidarity! The miners’ fight for a union must be made the fight of all organized labor and all workers of America.”

It was easy to understand why the Communists had been galvanized. Every day front-page headlines in newspapers across the country shouted the astounding story of this huge uprising, on a scale that dwarfed other insurrections. Class warfare in America, long only a metaphor and daydream for Marxists had at last been transformed into reality, etched in blood and bullets. The time had come for American workers to rush to the barricades.

Then suddenly, before the ink had hardly dried on the Communist summons to the barricades, the revolution was over. It was not crushed; rather it simply expired. Once the Federal troops arrived, the miners laid down their arms, without a shot being fired in anger. It was not only the strength of the Federal intervention but what it represented that sapped the fervor and the fury from the rebels. “We wouldn’t revolt against the national guv’ment,” one miner told General Bandholtz when he arrived in strife-torn West Virginia.

A look back at the Battle of Blair Mountain, and the long months of violence that led up to it, illuminates the economic and political struggle that shaped the power structure of modern America. The mine owners used their wealth to dominate West Virginia’s political and legal system, a pattern that corporate America continues to follow, though rarely as blatantly or as successfully. Just as important, the resistance of the miners was tempered. They were denounced as traitors and Bolsheviks. But rather than seeking to betray or overthrow the American system, the miners were striving to make the system work for them.

But it also illustrates the limitations of that conflict in this country. Standing between the miners of West Virginia and an outright working-class revolution against the Federal government was their hope for their country based on its promise of opportunity, individual freedom and fairness under the law. This optimism, which flourished from the nation’s earliest years, helped to erode the class consciousness that prevailed abroad and confronted the American workers with a fundamental dilemma: Their patriotism and allegiance to the American dream, feelings shared with the middle class, conflicted with the recognition that to assure themselves and their families of economic security and dignity, they had to challenge the corporate power structure, upon which the middle class depended for its well-being.

Nowhere was this tension more clearly demonstrated than among the West Virginia miners as they battled the coal operators in the years right after the Great War. For a long time past, the miners had endured exploitation and brutality at the hands of the mine owners and their minions, and it was against these nemeses that the miners staged their march. But it did not occur to them to hold responsible the national government nor the economic and political system on which that government was based. In the end the West Virginia miners accepted that system and the middle-class ethos undergirding it because they believed in the rule of law and the promise of the democratic process. That was why they turned away from revolting against the government, and why many of them waved American flags as they marched off after their defeat.

In the immediate aftermath of the miners’ failed rebellion, Federal investigators began looking high and low for signs of Communist influence, evidence that would have lent credence to the great bugaboo of the times. They turned up next to nothing, except for a few IWW and Communist fliers, like the one calling workers to the barricades in support “of your struggling brothers in the mines of West Virginia.” As Fred Mooney later learned, “two communists had ensconced their hides (as they always do) safely behind the walls of the Washington Hotel in Charleston, got circulars printed and got some marchers to carry them into the lines.” But an Army intelligence officer reported that he could find no trace of any organization linked to the march, except, of course, for the United Mine Workers.

Efforts to depict the rebellion as being inspired by alien influences also contravened the facts. Keeney, Mooney and most of their fellow union activists were all home-grown West Virginians, as were the vast majority of union members. Indeed the 1920 census figures showed that more than 93 percent of the population of Logan County and 97 percent of Mingo County was native born. At any rate the union did what it could to encourage its foreign-born members to become citizens. “There were no aliens or communists there,” Jonathan Spivak, the ACLU’s emissary to the West Virginia UMW, said of the union battleground in the state.

By the time they reached the leadership of District 17, Mooney and Keeney had rejected the ideologies of the left both in theory and practice. Mooney’s wide range of reading as a young man included Voltaire, Plato, Herbert Spencer and interpretations of Marx by Engels and others. But Marx himself, he conceded, “I could not absorb.” As for Keeney, though he had once joined the Socialist Party, after his experiences in dealing with socialists in the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike, he came to regard them as ineffective and unreliable allies. By 1919 he was admonishing the members of District 17 that it was their duty “to eliminate from their organization any group that is preaching their different ‘isms’.”

Asked during his Kenyon committee testimony about the meaning of the provocative phrase in the UMW constitution asserting that miners were entitled to “the full social value of their product,” Keeney denied that this was a call for a takeover of private property. That language did mean, Keeney acknowledged, that a miner should receive “all the wealth he creates.” But he believed it allowed for some exceptions, including “running expenses, transportation” and “a fair return upon the investment to the man who owns the tools of production.” Keeney’s service in the trenches of West Virginia’s labor wars had made him class conscious with a militant edge. “I haven’t left the class I was born into and I hope I never will,” he told a journalist. Still he was willing to work within the system. During the Great War, he had urged miners to produce all the coal they could, even when at times it meant ignoring rights and protections won at the bargaining table. It was Keeney, together with Mooney, who at Governor Cornwell’s behest had rushed to the scene at Marmet in September 1919 and persuaded the armed miners to give up their march and go home. And the two had carried out the same mission in August 1921 before Captain Brockus’s raid destroyed their peace mission.

In the struggle in West Virginia’s coalfields, miners, mine owners and independent observers all accepted one truth—unionism was at the heart of the battle. But as David Corbin points out in his incisive analysis of West Virginia’s long ordeal, the miners’ drive to organize was inextricably linked with their view of themselves as American citizens. As Americans, they believed they had a right to organize and join a union. And the union in turn would help them redeem the American promise of economic and social justice.

It was no accident that the bedrock of the miners’ claim to the right to organize was the Federal Constitution. “We propose to stand by and support those men that want to belong to the organization of the United Mine Workers of America and their only desire is to exercise their constitutional rights,” Fred Mooney told the Kenyon Committee at the outset of the hearings.

Senator Kenyon pressed the issue: “What constitutional rights do you feel you have been denied?” he asked. With his state under martial law, Mooney had no trouble finding an answer: “We are denied a Republican form of government; we are denied the right of public assemblage; we are denied the right to belong to a labor union.” Mooney of course knew that there is not a word in the Constitution about labor unions. But he believed that right was inherent in the rights that were enumerated by the Framers.

The Constitution created a system under which the miners enjoyed the protection of these rights as a matter of law, peacefully, at least in theory. But if the reality of their lives contradicted that principle, the miners were prepared, if necessary, to salvage those rights at the point of a gun. In 1919, when the West Virginia legislature, like others around the country, caught up in the Red Scare, was in the process of enacting a so-called Red Flag law curbing free speech, a union local in the Coal River area adopted a protest resolution serving notice on “the ruling class of this state” that “As a final arbiter of the rights of public assembly, free speech and a free and uncensored press we will not for a single moment hesitate to meet our enemies upon the battle fields. And there amid the roar of the cannon and the groans of the dying and the crash of systems purchase again our birthright of blood bought freedom.” Alarmed that this fiery manifesto would become a weapon in the hands of the UMW’s enemies, Keeney moved swiftly to get the resolution revoked. But the spirit behind it could not be extinguished, as the march on Blair Mountain demonstrated.

Within a generation, the hopes of the rebellious miners had been largely fulfilled as their government finally redeemed its part of the compact with its citizens who happened to be workers. Today’s workers have been spared the fear and desperation that haunted the miners who marched on Blair Mountain. They do not have to face eviction or jail, or the threat of violent death. And no one talks of rising up in arms.

But if much has changed, much remains the same. With all the gains made under the New Deal reforms, workers in post-industrial America have not come close to keeping pace with soaring corporate profits while the maldistribution of wealth accelerates. In the 21st century, as in the 20th, labor’s leaders are still on the defensive, battling to forestall further losses of political power and protections for their members. The bosses still hold all the high cards.

In these not-so-benign circumstances, the courage and commitment to their cause, and to each other, of the West Virginia miners, and the women who marched along with them to Blair Mountain, deserves wide recognition and respect. For the significance of the Blair Mountain march extends beyond “every mine and mill where workers strike and organize,” the domain of Joe Hill’s ghost, to Americans in all walks of life.

The saga of the West Virginia uprising seems freighted with extra salience these angst-ridden days because their rebellion capped a period of violence and turbulence with striking parallels to the American experience since September 11, 2001. The Armistice of 1918 silenced the big guns in Europe but left the United States confronting new dangers, real and apparent. Then, as now, threats at home and abroad haunted the Republic. Fearing an imminent worldwide Bolshevist revolution and plagued by labor unrest and disorder in their own country, many citizens blamed the record number of strikes on the plottings of Lenin and Trotsky. Explosions wrecked prominent landmarks. In lower Manhattan a blast at the corner of Wall and Broad gutted the House of Morgan and killed forty passersby. And conspirators used the mails to spread terror. Apocalyptic visions gripped the nation’s leaders, moving Warren Harding, only a year or so before he gained the presidency, to warn that the nation was facing “a desperate situation.” And then, as now, leaders of government and business argued for the need to restrict civil liberties and stifle dissent to protect the nation’s security. It was this sentiment that undercut the efforts of mine workers of West Virginia to gain the public attention and support they needed in their struggle against an entrenched political and economic oligarchy.

The danger of terrorism dramatized by the tragedies of 9/11 remains very real today. But if we concentrate on it to the exclusion of other concerns, we ignore other threats to our welfare. Many of our workplaces are breeding growing dissatisfaction and insecurity, our economy is producing increasing inequality and the labor laws put into place in the 1930s to prevent recurrences of what happened in Mingo County and many other places are no longer working very well to protect workers. There are no signs of bandanna armies forming, of course. But grievances of workers are real and profound, and we run a risk as a nation and society if we overlook them.

“Defender of the rights of working people” reads the inscription under the likeness of Sid Hatfield carved on his headstone overlooking the Tug River. “We will never forget.” For all his flaws, Hatfield deserves to be remembered. But it is even more important to remember the men and the cause “The Terror of the Tug” championed.

The rebellion of the West Virginia miners was defeated. But the example they set should help sustain all citizens, in and out of the labor movement, who believe that the principles the Red Bandanna Army fought for, economic fairness, political justice and human dignity, will, as Faulkner famously said of the spirit of mankind, not only endure but prevail.