[The Battle of Blair Mountain saw thousands of miners battling
cops’ machine guns—and enduring aerial bombardment. Yet today
hardly anyone remembers a thing about it.] [[link removed]]

THE BIGGEST UPRISING SINCE THE CIVIL WAR HAPPENED HERE 100 YEARS AGO
 
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Samuel Fleischman
August 30, 2021
The Nation
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_ The Battle of Blair Mountain saw thousands of miners battling
cops’ machine guns—and enduring aerial bombardment. Yet today
hardly anyone remembers a thing about it. _

Striking miners surrender their rifles to federal troops after the
Battle of Blair Mountain in August of 1921., Wikimedia Commons via
National Park Service

 

_LOGAN, W.VA.—_Heading east from here, County Road 17 snakes up and
down craggy hills for several miles before crossing an unremarkable
intersection. A deserted church sits on one corner. On the other, a
small bronze plaque recounts the Battle of Blair Mountain, a labor
dispute that saw almost 10,000 miners face off against a union-busting
sheriff, several thousand deputized locals, and the US military. It
was the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War.
This year marks the 100th anniversary, yet hardly a soul today
remembers it.

The origins of the battle can be traced to the Matewan Massacre
[[link removed]],
when gun thugs working for Baldwin-Felts—an infamous
[[link removed]] strike-breaking
“detective” agency—got into a shootout with a group of miners
and Sheriff Sid Hatfield. After Baldwin-Felts agents murdered Hatfield
in revenge the following year—on the steps of the county
courthouse—his death became a martyrdom that roused miners to
battle.

Coal life was already hard enough. Dangerous conditions (the Monongah
Disaster
[[link removed]] alone
killed upwards of 400 people, not to mention the long-term effects of
breathing in coal dust
[[link removed]]),
low wages (mine owners had been convicted of war profiteering
[[link removed]] during
World War I), and exploitative credit systems
[[link removed]] were
par for the course.

The situation only escalated
[[link removed]] in the summer of 1921
after hundreds of striking workers were arrested and held
indefinitely. Hatfield’s death was the final straw. By August,
thousands of miners were marching toward Matewan, intent on freeing
their comrades and bringing their guerilla version of class warfare
into action.

Today, downtown Matewan—population 499—stretches two blocks and
features a barbecue joint, a halfway house, and two souvenir shops. On
a recent Saturday morning, tucked inside a concrete building at the
end of the street, 30 retired miners from Local 1440 of the United
Mine Workers of America (UMWA) were holding their monthly meeting. The
engine snarls of ATVs—visitors to Hatfield-McCoy Trails, southern
West Virginia’s main tourist attraction
[[link removed]]—had
yet to fill the air. Two pots of coffee brewed in the kitchen;
still-warm egg-and-cheese sandwiches were laid out on a side table. A
single gavel called the meeting to attention, followed by a prayer for
the miners on strike
[[link removed]] in
Alabama. The hall is a place for these men to banter with old friends
and vote on union issues. It is the closest thing to a community
center Matewan has, one of the few signs of life in an area on a long
decline.

West Virginia has the sixth-highest state poverty rate in the
country—and the highest for men. The mining industry, almost 94
percent male, has fallen from a peak of 177,000 jobs nationwide in
1985 to around 42,000 today.

“There’s the hospital outside Logan and Walmart for work,” said
Terry Steele, one of the local’s more vocal members. Steele and a
few others could recall running coal in the past 20 years. A handful
said they had a child who had mined at one point, proof enough that
union jobs have disappeared, and with it the opportunity for social
mobility that the UMWA had offered for over 100 years.

State leaders in Charleston strike a different tune, praising coal
[[link removed]] while
simultaneously gutting coal communities
[[link removed]].
Coal operators, for their part, continue to operate wherever they can
squeeze the last bits of coal out of the ground, leaving communities
to deal with the ecological fallout
[[link removed]].

It is the miners who remain. With mainly small-donor contributions,
Local 1440 funded the completion of the West Virginia Mine Wars
Museum [[link removed]] next door, preserving a story of
capitalism, oppression, and solidarity that was erased from public
record.

When the bombs started falling on the slopes of Blair Mountain—on
Labor Day, 1921–many realized the gravity of their situation. For
almost a week, miners numbering in the thousands had been battling
machine-gun nests commanded by Don Chafin, sheriff of Logan County.
They had already refused the pleas of President Harding, who feared
their struggle might inspire the nearly 2 million unemployed Americans
across the country to launch a full-scale class revolution. Thousands
of leaflets bearing Harding’s message calling on the miners to
disperse, were dropped by plane—and summarily ignored.

By nightfall, after the rumble of machine-gun fire and whir of biplane
engines had dissipated, the miners must have looked around from where
they were perched in trees or stretched out in hastily dug trenches
and seen the numbers missing from their ranks. Still, they fought on.

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Their fight was the culmination of a decades-long struggle. After coal
companies rejected every effort by the UMWA to win representation,
armed struggle took hold. By the end of the week somewhere between 50
and 100 miners, among them Appalachians, Italian immigrants, and
African Americans [[link removed]],
were dead.

UMWA membership declined for years in the wake of the battle, but
after the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, union
President John L. Lewis led the UMWA back to southern West Virginia as
soldiers returning to Rome, unionizing every coal operation they
encountered. The fight to unionize the West Virginia coalfields was
over—or so it seemed.

In the final room of the Mine Wars Museum, Kimberly McCoy, the
museum’s resident guide, and a great-niece of Sid Hatfield, opened
up five different West Virginia history textbooks from the 1930s to
the 1980s to the section where “the Battle of Blair Mountain should
have been,” Kim said, “but they’re all empty.” In 1920,
Governor Ephraim Morgan set up an American Constitutional Association
to select the textbooks used in West Virginia schools, which excluded
any mention of the state’s mine wars. Generations grew up cut off
from their ancestors’ struggles because business leaders were afraid
history would repeat itself.

And it did. The members of Local 1440 in Matewan demonstrated the same
militant struggle of years past during the Massey Energy Strike
[[link removed]].
Miners picketed for 15 months outside facilities lined with
barbed-wire fencing and patrolled by uniformed guards. Massey Energy
hired helicopters to patrol the surrounding hollers. A non-union
driver was shot to death. Massey CEO Don Blankenship, perhaps the
most infamous name
[[link removed]] in
the Tug River Valley, likened the UMWA to Soviet Russia
[[link removed]],
while the UMWA later launched the successful 1989 Pittston Strike
[[link removed]].
The West Virginia mine wars have been replayed again and again.

Sitting inside the only bar in Williamson, the seat of Mingo County,
it’s easy to mistake the mostly white customers, their pants caked
in mud, helmets in tow, for local residents. There are few residents
left in an area where tourists come to spin ATVs around hills still
littered with the weapons hidden by retreating miners a century ago.
The men at Local 1440 are the last of them, bolters and buggy runners,
white and black, all of them union members. They represent the dam
holding back the change in West Virginia’s demographics.

In an act of prestidigitation, the once-minority Republican Party in
West Virginia shifted blame for the decline in coal production away
from coal companies and onto the federal government, whose embrace of
green-energy standards was blamed for the area’s decline. Democratic
Senator Joe Manchin remains a lonely outlier in a state that Bill
Clinton carried by 13 points. The flags adorning the sides of homes
going north up Route 52 are half Confederate, half American, echoing
the fiercely individualistic yet dissonant nature of politics and
identity here. The state’s independent streak, once associated with
rowdy miners disobeying federal orders, has been channeled instead
by angry insurrectionists
[[link removed]] storming
the nation’s capital.

Jobs and people keep leaving West Virginia, and those who can’t
escape are trapped between a rock and a hard place. Mingo County
was the capital
[[link removed]] of
the pill-mill industry, where more narcotic pills were sent per head
of population than anywhere else in the country. Ask the miners in
Local 1440 who suffers from breathing-related issues and every hand
shoots up. “Doctors will tell you you’re not fully disabled by
black lung and deny your claim,” said Danny Whitt, the union’s
secretary.

No one living in these hills believes the days will ever return when
these valleys bustled with the sound of departing coal trains. On the
100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain, this mining
community, left to fend for itself, is instead a tale of what happens
after businesses finds no more use in their workers.

There is a direct line between the decline in well-paying union jobs,
subsequent losses in tax revenue, the deterioration of community
services and tearing of the social fabric, and the regression of a
once highly collective class of people into a more individualist and
self-reliant population weary of notions such as solidarity. The story
of southern West Virginia is exactly this tale, written in the lives
of its people, commemorated only by a single bronze marker on the
corner of an unmarked intersection.

_COPYRIGHT C 2021 THE NATION. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION. MAY NOT BE
REPRINTED WITHOUT PERMISSION. DISTRIBUTED BY PARS INTERNATIONAL CORP._

_SAMUEL FLEISCHMAN is a labor writer, researcher and member of
the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee
[[link removed]]. His work has also appeared
in Jacobin._

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