Author’s Note

“Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows,” John L. Lewis observed during his reign as president of the United Mine Workers. “Its women weep for their fallen and they lament for the future of the race.” Among labor’s many costly defeats, the Battle of Blair Mountain arguably ranks as the most neglected.

When I first became interested in the Battle of Blair Mountain in the early 1960s, I thought it remarkable that so little had been written about this unprecedented episode in our development as a nation. The course of my professional life then took me in a different direction. When I returned to the subject, nearly four decades later, I found that more work had been done, all of it creditable. Yet the great uprising of the West Virginia miners remains only an afterthought in our historical consciousness, earning only a few sentences at most even in chronicles of the labor movement and no attention at all in more general accounts of the American heritage. This book is intended to help remedy this oversight. By looking into this dark corner of American history my hope is to cast light on the forces that shaped the American political and economic order in the 20th century and give the ordeal of the southern West Virginia miners its proper place in the story of our nation.

One reason for the continued obscurity of this episode up to now is our country’s dominant middle-class ethos. This frame of reference discourages attention to struggles to achieve social and economic justice, if they threaten the sanctity of property values and the maintenance of law and order. As a result the significance of class conflict in the making of America is overlooked and misunderstood.

When the union coal miners confronted their adversaries, the 20th century had barely begun. The makings were already in place but had yet to assume the established pattern of the power structure we know today. Economic advantage and political control were up for grabs, in a no-holds-barred clash between business and labor. Both had emerged from the Great War bolder and brawnier than before, each eager for more, neither willing to give ground. Those were cruder times than now, with a good deal less artifice. With so much at stake the leaders on each side did not shrink from stating they intended to crush their enemies and from backing their rhetoric with action.

In West Virginia, where the level of hostility and violence between business and labor reached its zenith, the coal operators condemned the United Mine Workers union, the largest and most powerful in the country, as “revolutionary in character and a menace to the free institutions of the country.” To meet this threat they deployed a private army of detectives and sheriff’s deputies. And during one particularly bitter and bloody strike that set the stage for the Battle of Blair Mountain, the mine owners dispatched a special train, rigged with iron plate and bristling with machine guns to assault a tent colony that sheltered the strikers and their families.

For their part, the union leaders vilified not only the mine operators but the politicians who catered to their greed. “You can expect no help from such a goddam dirty coward,” Mother Jones, one of the UMW’s most ferocious organizers, told a crowd of union men who massed in the state’s capital to seek the governor’s support in their travail. “But I warn this little governor that unless he gets rid of these goddam Baldwin-Felts mine guard thugs there is going to be one hell of a lot of bloodletting in these hills.” She was right about that. For years the union miners and the allies of the coal operators spilled each other’s blood in the West Virginia hills until the miners were beaten into submission.

Though no such despotism as flourished in West Virginia in the 1920s survives today, the struggle between working people and their adversaries for political power and economic advantage rages on, and I believe the conflict in West Virginia provides lessons that illuminate the new battlegrounds of the 21st century.

 

Robert Shogan
CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND
JANUARY 2004