This article is the second in a multi-part series about the West Virginia Mine Wars. The first article can be found here. Much of this research and writing was part of some academic work, though many of my favorite details had to be cut to meet those pesky word-counts. Nevertheless, I wanted the opportunity to tell as much of the story of the Mine Wars as I could, an event that has somehow been scrubbed from American history. It is a tale of tragedies and triumphs, shocking cruelty and vicious exploitation, stamped-out revolution and deep solidarity in the American working class. I hope you enjoy it.
All sources are listed at the end of the article.
I: The First Mine War
The Mine Wars of West Virginia were two armed conflicts between miners unionized under the United Mine Workers of America and a composite force of Baldwin-Felts detectives and West Virginia National Guardsmen, the first occurring between 1912 and 1913 in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek valleys, and the second between 1920 and 1921 in Mingo and Logan counties. Behind this summary are rich stories of heroism and tragedy unfortunately beyond the scope of this work, and the author regrets their omission.
On April 18th, 1912, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) District 17 ordered their members to lay down their tools. The Paint Creek Operators Association (“the operators”), a group which operated forty-one mines in Kanawha and Fayette counties West Virginia, had refused to match the eight-hour workday and 5 cents/ton increase won by UMWA districts in Ohio, and when the local countered with a meager 2.5 cent increase, they refused again.[1] After the operators quickly moved to evict the union’s leaders from company housing, UMWA miners in nearby Cabin Creek initiated a sympathy strike and submitted to their employers the following demands: 1) recognition for the union 2) rights to free speech and peaceful assembly on company property, 3) an end to blacklisting of union men, 4) an end to compulsory trading in company stores, 5) an end to “cribbing” and official recognition that a ton was equivalent to 2,000 lbs, 6) installation of scales at all mines, 7) the right for the miners to select their own “check-weight” men, and 8) a joint determination of “docking” penalties for impurities in the coal mined.[2]
On May 3rd, a contingent of Baldwin-Felts Agents arrived with rifles slung over their shoulders to evict the striking miners, their numbers to grow to 300 in the coming week.[3] The union set up a tent camp at Holly Gove for evicted miners, and there waited peacefully until an afternoon in late May when rifle fire rained down on the workers and their families from the surrounding hills.[4] This attack inaugurated a sporadic campaign of violence and terrorism between the miners and the Baldwin-Felts agents which steadily escalated as sympathetic unionists and hired agents streamed into the area. On July 26th, 300 miners deployed to the hills surrounding a Baldwin-Felts clubhouse at Mucklow and ambushed the agents as they ate breakfast: six strikers and four guards died in the ensuing gun battle.[5] The local sheriff wired Governor William Glasscock for help containing the violence, who quickly activated the state national guard.
The miners and their families rejoiced at the National Guard’s arrival, believing it meant an end to the private guard system, and a few of the guardsmen, horrified by the filthy conditions they found in the mining camps, accused the operators of holding the miners in debt peonage and allowing the guards to freely commit atrocities against their workers.[6] The violence briefly abated, but when the arrival of legendary labor agitator Mother Jones convinced non-union miners in Cabin Creek to walk out and join the UMWA strike, the strikers began purchasing surplus arms from the War Department in preparation for the violence they expected to follow.[7] The operators followed suit, refusing an offer by Governor Glasscock to arbitrate the dispute.[8]
On August 30th, miners hidden in the forested hills fired upon a group of Baldwin-Felts agents who had arrested a union check-weight men that morning, killing their captain and wounding others. The operators hurried in over a hundred new guards, armed with several machine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition, while a company of state militia searched unsuccessfully for the offending unionists.[9] On August 31st, the situation at Mucklow exploded into a hurricane of gunfire: sixteen people were killed and well over 100,000 rounds were fired.[10] The next day, UMWA wives destroyed C&O railroad tracks leading into the camp to prevent further reinforcements and miners took positions in the hills surrounding the Baldwin-Felts camp at Cabin Creek, their number now greater than 6,000. With two armed forces poised for another round of combat, Governor Glasscock again beseeched the operators to dismiss the private guards, issuing a public proclamation ordering all persons in Cabin Creek to surrender their weapons when the operators refused.[11] When the strikers fired on trains bringing strikebreakers to the area the following day, the Governor of West Virginia declared martial law in the strike zone.[12]
Governor Glasscock insisted that the mine operators come to the state capital in Charleston to meet with UMWA representatives while the National Guard disarmed the strikers and deported the Baldwin-Felts Agents. Although the operators honored the Governor’s request, they refused to meet with UMWA representatives and rejected the miners’ offer to return to work immediately if the private guard system was abolished.[13] In public statements defending their refusal to bargain, the operators insisted that strikes in Kanawha County were the product of a conspiracy between the UMWA and unionized mining companies in the Midwest, and that the UMWA was controlled by socialists who would not rest until private control of the mines was relinquished.[14]
Over the following months, martial law was repeatedly lifted and re-imposed in Kanawha County as sporadic violence rocked the community; the Governor, finding the operators unwilling to negotiate, decided to change tactics and use National Guard forces to break the strike. Guard troops began arresting miners as the Governor’s office sent inflammatory photos to state newspapers of the weapons stockpiles seized from them. Dozens of strikers were imprisoned without charges at a warehouse in Pratt to await trial by a military tribunal. On the night of February 7th, 1913, the sheriff of Kanawha County responded to the murder of a mine guard at Mucklow by commandeering an armored train built for the National Guard and fired its machine guns into the camp at Holly Grove, gruesomely killing a miner in front of his pregnant wife and infant child.[15]
The armored train attack made national headlines, inspiring sympathetic readers to purchase and ship rifles and ammunition to the strikers.[16] When dozens of miners ambushed and seized a machine gun position the next day, killing one, the state capitol newspapers inflated the death toll to sixteen and insisted that the strikers were preparing an invasion of Charleston to assassinate Governor Glasscock.[17] In the following days, soldiers arrested socialist and labor organizers across the state on unspecified charges, including Mother Jones. 166 strikers were subsequently tried in military tribunals and sentenced to prison terms ranging from five to twenty years.[18] Only a Charleston newspaperman was permitted to witness the courts martial, and while judge Colonel George S. Wallace allowed the prisoners civilian defense attorneys, they were permitted to call no witnesses or appeal their sentences.[19]
Henry D. Hatfield, the newly-elected Governor, held another round of talks between UMWA officials and the operators, who continue to refuse to meet their counterparts. When the talks failed, the Governor simply dictated the terms of the agreement: the operators would allow UMWA organizers on their properties, establish a nine-hour workday, place a union check-weight man on the scales at each mine, and allow their employees to purchase goods from independent merchants.[20] The operators agreed as long as their concessions attributed no recognition to the union, as did UMWA officials, but thousands of rank and file unionists attended public protests denouncing the agreement. In response, the Governor ordered guardsmen and sheriffs to arrest the editors of the State’s two socialist newspapers, the Labor Argus and the Huntington Socialist and Labor Star, subsequently ransacking their offices and destroying the presses. On May 1st, 1913, the Paint Creek miners officially accepted the Hatfield contract, while their counterparts in Cabin Creek held out a month longer.[21] Inspired by the extraordinary violence and stubborn solidarity of the miners in Kanawha County, the radical poet and IWW agitator Ralph Chaplin composed a song called “Solidarity Forever.”[22]
II: “The Most Extraordinary Phenomenon”
National newspapers hotly debated the events in southern West Virginia, and two governmental bodies investigated the causes of the strike. The Donahue Commission, appointed by Governor Glasscock in 1912, concluded that “the main causes of the trouble [arose] in our judgement from the efforts of the United Mine Workers to organize the union in a whole chain of plants along [Paint and Cabin] creeks. Their desire is to make the present strike region the place for the insertion of the thin edge of unionism, with the ultimate aim of organizing the whole state.” Senator William Kenyon of Iowa, author of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor’s report, disagreed:
“Among [the causes] might be related the employment of mine guards, high prices charged the miners at company stores, mine guards acting as deputy sheriffs, post offices located in company stores, private roads to the schools and stores, no opportunity to purchase homes, cemeteries upon company grounds, attempts to unionize the miners, alien ownership of large tracts of land—in one instance 12,000 acres. […] However, it is the opinion of some of the committee that the cause of all this trouble is deeper and more fundamental. The basic cause is the private ownership of great public necessities, such as coal. This coupled with human greed, incident to such ownership, has brought about the deplorable and un-American conditions in the West Virginia coal fields under investigation.”[23]
Report of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor: Investigation of Paint Creek Coal Fields of West Virginia, 28-29: 1914
The mine operators, furious with the West Virginia legislature’s decision to outlaw the use of private mine guards, formed a new regional protective association and created a $1,000,000 fund to help elect anti-union officials and protect their property from “destruction by socialists… otherwise known as the United Mine Workers of America.”[24] The continued to employ private guards anyway, realizing that the new state law carried no penalty for its violation.
In 1917, as coal company profits soared by 500 percent in supply of the American military and war-booming steel industry, Congress passed the Lever Act, empowering the president to heavily regulate essential industries. The UMWA agreed to a one-time wage increase in exchange for a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war, while socialist and IWW agitators were arrested in droves under the newly-passed Espionage Act.[25] In 1918, West Virginia coal production rose to its highest level ever, as did the number of fatalities in the State’s mines. Union leaders filed complaints against mine operators who refused to pay the Lever Act’s guaranteed wage rate, disobeyed federal orders to place check-weight men at each scale, and continued to raise rates at their company stores, fifty-two of whom were later indicted for violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.[26] Months later, thousands of West Virginians returned from France with Browning automatics, Winchester trench guns, and Springfield bolt-action rifles, believing they would make good souvenirs.[27]
In 1919, two great waves of public passion washed over the United States. The first fed on the breathlessly-reported terrors of the Bolshevik revolution, inspiring the passage of hundreds of measures outlawing socialist literature, the display of red iconography in political protest, or participation in groups “advocating the overthrow of organized society” or “opposition to government and existing institutions.”[28] The West Virginia legislature passed a measure creating a new state police force “on the grounds that without such a constabulary the Mountain State might become a haven for Bolsheviks and Anarchists.”[29] Coal operators in Logan County hired a new “sheriff” named Don Chaffin, promising him an enormous salary of $30,000 and a staff of 546 deputies to protect their properties from leftist agitation.[30]
The second wave, “the most extraordinary phenomenon of the present time” in the words of the Nation, “is the unprecedented revolt of the rank and file.”[31] 120,000 textile workers defied AFL leaders and shut down dozens of textile mills in April of 1919, followed closely by a steelworkers strike in July. In September 275,000 more steelworkers walked off the job in a nationwide strike along with seventy percent of the Boston police force, and on November 1st, 350,000 UMWA unionists obeyed calls for a national strike in West Virginia and across the country.[32] “Lenin and Trotsky are on their way,” screamed the Wall Street Journal, [33] echoing the sentiments of the Milwaukee Sentinel, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “It looks to me,” said Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding, “as if we are coming to a crisis in the conflict between the radical labor leaders and the capitalistic system under which we have developed this republic.”[34]
III. The Second Mine War
On March 29th of 1920, the United States Coal Commission, established as a result of the 1919 strike, released a report recommending a staggering 27 percent wage increase for UMWA miners. Union organizers quickly fanned out across southern West Virginia, administering the oath of obligation to hundreds of miners at a time.[35] The operators responded swiftly, delivering dismissal and eviction notices to every UMWA miner on their payroll. Ignoring pleas for negotiation by UMWA District 17 President Frank Keeney, operators in Mingo and Logan counties forced their employees to sign “yellow dog” employment contracts forswearing union membership on penalty of termination, putting a total of 2,700 miners on UMWA relief by the end of June.[36] On July 1st, UMWA officials called a strike.
Tensions in the strike zone were already running high: on May 19th a shootout between twelve Baldwin-Felts agents and residents of the town of Matewan had left the Mayor, two miners, and five agents dead.[37] The shooting in the backwoods West Virginia town made the front page of the New York Times the following morning.[38] In the years since the first Mine War, unionists in southern West Virginia had elected a slate of staunchly pro-Union Democrats to the sheriff’s departments and local public offices, leaving the operators no local authorities to guard their properties or protect the trainloads of strikebreakers they attempted to hire.[39] The operators begged West Virginia Governor John Cornwell to activate the new state constabulary, but state police commander Jack Arnold categorically refused to deploy his men as “stationary guards” for the mine owners property.[40] The Governor turned Major General George Read of the Army’s Central Department for help, who quickly dispatched a battalion of troops from the Second and Fortieth Infantry Regiments to Williamson, West Virginia on August 29th.
Between September, 1920, and February, 1921, Governor Cornwell reconstituted the state’s National Guard, declared martial law in the strike zone, and federal troops engaged in sporadic skirmishes with miners who attacked strikebreakers or guards; in November, a federal injunction was issued preventing UMWA members from “interfering in any way with working miners,” trespassing on company property, or “advertising, representing, stating by word, posting notices, or by placards displayed at any point in the State of West Virginia” that a strike was in progress.[41] While thousands of striking unionists huddled in tent camps on rented land in Lick Creek, federal troops finally achieved a lull in the violence and left Mingo County on February 16th.[42]
When newly-elected Governor Ephram F. Morgan—the favored candidate of the coal operators— took office in March of 1921, reports again reached the capitol of armed miners patrolling the hills of the Tug River Valley. The Governor dispatched sixty state policemen who were greeted by sporadic rifle fire that escalated into attacks on nonunion miners and company guards.[43] In April, an army intelligence officer described the entire West Virginia-Kentucky borderline as “a smoldering volcano with an eruption all the more imminent,” causing the Governors of both states to again request federal intervention.[44] This time, General Read declined, imploring Governor Morgan to use his state National Guard, but agreed to seek approval for a federal deployment from newly-elected President Warren G. Harding and sent intelligence chief Major Charles Thompson to the strike zone.[45] Major Thompson met with Governor Morgan and a spokesman for Mingo County coal operators before deciding that “lawless miners had caused a serious disorder warranting some form of military intervention.”[46] General Read endorsed Thompson’s assessment, but Harding refused federal intervention until he could be “well assured that the State had exhausted all of its resources in the performance of its functions.”
Governor Morgan declared martial law in Mingo County on May 19th, issued an executive order prohibiting all forms of free speech and public assembly deemed threatening to public or private property, and attempted to place the state police force at the command of the operator-controlled Mingo County sheriff.[47] But a court decision barred the enforcement of martial law by civilian officers, forcing Morgan to rely on a state militia that the legislature had so far failed to reconstitute despite repeated urging from the federal government.[48] Instead, Morgan called to duty a Mingo County militia made up of “the better citizens of the county”: “coal company officials, strikebreakers, non-union, and anti-union men” who subsequently executed mass arrests of striking miners.[49] The miners responded with a campaign of terror, executing bombing and sniping attacks on company property and Baldwin-Felts men. With tensions already at a boiling point, Baldwin-Felts agents assassinated the police chief of Matewan in McDowell County on August 1st, again earning a front page story in the New York Times.[50]
With nearly 130 miners now imprisoned without charges, Frank Keeney organized a rally of 1,000 miners in Charleston to present Governor Morgan with a resolution calling for an end to martial law in Mingo County. On August 17th, the Governor rejected the miners demands out of hand, refusing to call an end to martial law or arrest the Baldwin-Felts agents responsible for Sheriff Hatfield’s assassination.[51] Three days later, six hundred miners gathered in Lens Creek Hollow only ten miles from Charleston, and over the next four days tens of thousands more poured in from the surrounding counties in a spontaneous general strike that entirely stopped mining operations in southern and central West Virginia.[52] The group marched towards Logan County, and hundreds of armed recruits joined as it passed through their towns, swelling the force to just under 20,000.[53] Some wore olive army uniforms with steel helmets and carried weapons last used in the Argonne, but most carried pickaxes and single shot rifles, donning a miner’s uniform of blue bibbed overalls with a red bandana tied around their necks, earning the immortal Appalachian moniker of “rednecks.”[54]Don Chafin for his part mustered hundreds of local businessmen to join the composite force of mine guards and Mingo militiamen, and impressed any miner still working into the service of his deputies.[55] On August 25th, President Harding sent Brigadier General Henry H. Bandholtz to appraise the situation.
Bandholtz met with Governor Morgan and Frank Keeney, President of UMWA District 17, the following day, informing both that he was personally indifferent to the dispute but would act swiftly to ensure no further bloodshed occurred. After a private meeting with Governor Morgan, however, Bandholtz became convinced that the miners were in the wrong, and warned Keeney that he considered him personally responsible for the march and any violence that ensured. “These are your people,” he reportedly stated, “I am going to give you a chance to save them, and if you cannot turn them back, we are going to snuff them out like that (snapping his finger under Keeney’s nose). This will never do, there are several million people unemployed in this country now and this thing might assume proportions that would be difficult to handle.”[56] Keeney agreed to disperse the miners and hurried to make arrangements with the local railroads to transport them home, while another military official instructed Governor Morgan on the proper procedures for requesting federal military aid.
Later that night, however, Don Chafin inexplicably led a group of 70-100 sheriff’s deputies to a small mining community north of Blair Mountain to arrest a small group of miners believed to have skirmished with state police two weeks earlier. The attempted arrests erupted in a gunfight that killed two, and within hours more than five thousand miners, many of whom were still waiting for trains out of Logan County, reentered the area.[57] Thousands more streamed in over the coming days and deployed along a ten-mile front surrounding Don Chafin and his deputies, who had called three thousand reinforcements to a fortified position at the top of Blair Mountain.[58] Enraged by the ineptitude of the West Virginia authorities, President Harding denied Governor Morgan’s request for federal reinforcements and issued a presidential proclamation ordering the insurgents surrounding Blair Mountain to disperse by September 1st; General Bandholtz quickly returned to West Virginia carrying an order from the Secretary of War stating that “necessity is the measure of your authority.”[59]
Fighting broke out on the morning of September 1st with intermittent ferocity: estimates of the strength of each side range from 10,000-20,000. Seeking to overwhelm the miners’ weaponry, Logan County operators arranged for commercial aircraft to drop pipe bombs filled with nails and shrapnel on the attacking forces, and though their inaccuracy inflicted no casualties the explosions “virtually shook the entire steep mountain”.[60] Federal troops began arriving on September 2nd, a force that would grow to 2,000 supported by fourteen DH-4B bombers.[61] On September 3rd, UMWA forces repeatedly attempted to overrun the militiamen without success, and that afternoon complied with a cease-fire order by General Bandholtz.[62] Although heavy fighting continued in remote areas, word that the army was coming to end the conflict “was greeted with cheers from the embattled miners’ ranks.”[63] No member of UMWA leadership was willing to fight the United States Army in which so many of them had served, and over the following days nearly 5,400 miners surrendered arms to federal troops and began their journey home. Military intelligence officers searched union headquarters and meeting halls between September 4th and 8th, and found “almost no radical literature, in spite of coal operator claims, and determined that a mere 10 percent of the miners were foreigners.”[64] At least several dozen miners and militia forces were killed in the battle, though no reliable death toll is available.[65]
End of Part II.
[1] Green, James. The Devil Is Here In These Hills: West Virginia Coal Miners and Their Battle For Freedom. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2015. Pg. 83-85.
[2] Wheeler, Hoyt N. “Mountaineer Mine Wars: An Analysis of the West Virginia Mine Wars of 1912-1913 and 1920-1921.” The Business History Review 50, no. 1 (1976): 69–91. Pg. 70.
[3] Green, ibid., 85. Wheeler, id.
[4] Ibid., 88.
[5] Ibid., 95.
[6] Id.
[7] Ibid., 103.
[8] Wheeler, ibid., 71.
[9] Green, ibid., 109.
[10] Wheeler, ibid., 71.
[11] Ibid., 110.
[12] Id.
[13] Id.
[14] Ibid., 113.
[15] Ibid., 134.
[16] Ibid., 135.
[17] Ibid., 137.
[18] Wheeler, ibid., 72.
[19] Green, ibid., 139-140.
[20] Ibid., 142.
[21] Ibid., 143, 151.
[22] Ibid., 152.
[23] Wheeler, ibid., 74-75.
[24] Green, ibid., 154-55.
[25] Ibid., 169-171.
[26] Ibid., 173-74.
[27] Ibid., 177.
[28] Ibid., 181, internal quotation marks omitted.
[29] Id.-82.
[30] Ibid., 183.
[31] Nation. “The Revolt of the Rank and File.” October 25, 1919. See also Breecher, ibid., 105-130.
[32] Green, ibid., 189-195. See also Murray, Robert K. Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955. Pg. 126-127.
[33] See the Wall Street Journal of September 12, 1919, front page. Murray, ibid., 129, en. 16.
[34] Green, ibid., 193.
[35] Green, ibid., 203.
[36] Ibid., 205; Wheeler, ibid., 77.
[37] Wheeler, id.
[38] See the New York Times of May 20th, 1920, front page.
[39] Green, ibid., 216.
[40] Ibid., 217.
[41] Ibid., 219.
[42] Laurie, Claydon D. “The United States Army and the Return to Normalcy in Labor Dispute Interventions: The Case of the West Virginia Coal Wars, 1920-1921.” West Virginia History 50 (1991): 1–24.
[43] Id.
[44] Green, ibid., 227.
[45] Laurie, id.
[46] Id.
[47] Green, ibid., 229.
[48] Laurie, id.
[49] Green, ibid., 230; Laurie Id.
[50] Green, 246
[51] Ibid., 254.
[52] Ibid., 255.
[53] Laurie, id.
[54] Ibid., 261.
[55] Ibid., 256-258.
[56] Laurie, id. Green, ibid., 266.
[57] Laurie, id.
[58] Green, ibid., 270-271; Laurie, id.
[59] Laurie, id
[60] Id; Green, ibid., 278.
[61] Laurie, id.
[62] Id.
[63] Green, ibid, 280.
[64] Laurie, id.
[65] Green, id.