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Probably unknown to most people,
since 2002 the first week of April has been legally established (AB1900)
as California Labor History Week, its purpose to bring greater awareness
of worker's rights, work place safety issues, and labor history into the
public schools.
Accordingly, It would seem appropriate
to remember a forgotten incident of labor history in this issue. A
recent publication by Robert Shogan,
The Battle of Blair
Mountain, deserves our attention.
As Cecil Roberts, President of the United Mine Workers of America, says
of it: “Now, the real story of America's largest labor uprising—and the
largest armed insurrection on U.S. soil since the Civil War—comes
alive.” But few know this story: arguably, every worker should.
In 1921, some 10,000 West Virginia coal
workers, outraged over years of brutality and lawless exploitation,
picked up their rifles and marched against their tormentors, the
powerful mine owners who ruled their corrupt state. For ten days the
miners fought a pitched battle against an opposing legion of deputies,
state police, and makeshift militia.
Only the declaration of martial law and the intervention of a federal
expeditionary force, spearheaded by a bomber squadron commanded by
General Billy Mitchell, ended this undeclared civil war and forced the
miners to throw down their arms.
The upheaval burst forth in the small
town of Matewan in Mingo County, the center of West Virginia's richest
coal field. This part of the conflict, aptly portrayed in the 1987 John
Sayles dramatic film,
Matewan,
which won the Academy Award for best cinema tography, can
and should
be rented at most video stores. The cast includes Chris Cooper, Mary
McDonnell, James Earl Jones, and David Strathairn (all working for union
scale) amongst others you'll surely recognize. The labor position on
class warfare is powerfully delivered by newly arrived labor organizer
Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) to the miners:
Ain't but two sides to this world. Them
that work and them that don't. You work, they don't. That's all you got
to know about the enemy.
By early May of 1920, union operatives
had formed fourteen locals and signed up more than 3,000 of Mingo
County's 4,000 miners. At this time, West Virginia was the last bastion
of non-union mines; in most of the other states mine workers had
organized, and John L. Lewis's United Mine Workers made up the nation's
largest and strongest union. The UMW was determined to enroll all of the
mine workers.
West Virginia operators, however, did
all they could to oppose unionism. The main problem was that at this
time mine workers were forced to sign legally binding “yellow-dog”
contracts (upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court) under which miners pledged
not to join a union under penalty of forfeiting their jobs as well as
the right to live in company housing.
The trouble started when Baldwin-Felts agents (known to miners as gun
thugs), working with for the Stone Mountain Mining company, attempted to
evict union miners and their families from company owned housing within
the town jurisdiction of Matewan. They, however, lacked the necessary
court order. The Baldwin-Felts Agency (which had a nationwide
reputation for union busting) policed the mining camps, collected rents,
guarded the mines and the payroll, evicted tenants from company housing,
and kept out “undesirables” (prostitutes and union men). They also did
undercover work posing as ordinary miners or workers and reported back
to the agency on the plans and remarks of their co-workers who appeared
sympathetic to the union. Nevertheless, these private “detectives” (like
the better known Pinkertons) had no right to assume the authority of
duly appointed law enforcement agents, but they assumed it anyway, and
were despised for doing it.
The attempted Matewan evictions led to a
shooting incident between town officials, Mayor Testerman and Police
Chief SD Hafted, together with a number of armed miners who had been
deputized, and a number of Baldwin-Felts agents. The incident, which
lasted just twenty minutes, involved over 100 rounds fired, and ended
with two miners and seven detectives dead including Albert and Lee
Felts. Mayor Testerman was mortally wounded and died the next day.
Such was the beginning of America's
largest labor uprising since the Civil War, ironically, a struggle in
which America was also sharply divided into two nations: North and South
rather than workers and employers. This latter conflict involved a
collision of labor's desperation and management's intransigence that led
to an unprecedented wave of strikes beginning in 1919 which involved
more than four million workers nationally.
As it happened, Logan County, West Virginia (itself a creation of the
Civil War), was the base of the mine operators’ power. The owners
subsidized Logan County's Sheriff Don Chafin's department; in return
Chafin's deputies did all that they could to protect the owners against
the union and its organizers. Outrage over the Sheriff's strong-arm
tactics had boiled over in the summer of 1919, about nine months before
the Baldwin-Felts agents boarded the train for Matewan, so the area was
a veritable tinderbox waiting to explode. It soon did!
As conditions worsened, the United Mine
Workers union called for a strike; however, the United States Attorney
General, Alexander Mitchell Palmer—who spearheaded the great Red Scare
of 1919-1920— intervened and won an injunction against the strike on the
eve of the scheduled walkout. Labor was furious as was the Secretary of
Labor, William Wilson, who had been working hard to resolve the problem
by offering a 14 percent pay raise for miners. Wilson threatened to
resign in disgust.
Unbidden by their leaders, 400,000
miners walked off the job, shutting down the industry. Eventually, a
federal arbitration commission recommended a 27 percent wage increase,
but the mine operators would not agree. Finally, on Thursday May 12,
1921, one week short of the first anniversary of the Matewan shoot-out,
the violence escalated and the union launched a full-scale attack on the
town of Merrimack (near Matewan), laying siege to the town.
The sustained outbreak of violence came to be known as the “Three Days’
Battle,” and estimates ran as high as twenty deaths on both sides. This
prompted President Harding to sign a proclamation of martial law for
West Virginia. On May 19, Governor Morgan proclaimed martial law
declaring West Virginia to be in “a state of war, insurrection, and
riot.”
Mingo County authorities created a
vigilance committee made up of the “better citizens of Mingo County,”
men of business, men of property, to reinforce the state police and the
newly constituted national Guard as well as a newly recruited volunteer
army known as the State Militia, which lacked proper uniforms but wore
white armbands to distinguish themselves from the union men with the red
bandanas. Most miners had taken to wearing blue bib overalls and tying
around their necks a red bandana which soon became the hallmark of the
insurgent army, leading both friends and foes to refer to them as
“rednecks.”
While a shipment of Thompson submachine guns arrived in Mingo County for
the State Police, union miners were being arrested for carrying union
literature, for speaking against martial law, and for carrying arms.
Held without bail or hearing, they overflowed the Mingo County jail and
were sent to prisons in adjoining counties. A military commission ruled
on offenses ranging from larceny, adultery and disorderly conduct to
disobeying sentries and perjury. A makeshift prison was erected in a
freight terminal to house “criminals,” among whom was Mother Jones.
The Harding Administration not only sent
troops but set up a base for air operations under the command of
Brigadier General Billy Mitchell.
Small battles or skirmishes, local group encounters, intermittent
sniping, marches and counter marches, kidnappings and ransoms, marked
the progress of the union forces as they made their way through southern
West Virginia toward the town of Logan, which they hoped to envelop in a
gigantic pincer movement. A major problem with the plan was the
imposing presence of Blair Mountain, an easily defended high ground
consisting of twin peaks which looked down on a pass leading into Logan.
During the ensuing conflict, thousands
of rounds were fired by both sides using all kinds of small arms
including machine guns. The precise death toll was never established,
but estimates range from fewer than twenty to more than fifty. Both
miners and defenders were well armed and had plenty of ammunition which
they fired freely. The roar of the guns became a steady pounding in the
ears of the men on both sides: you could hear it for miles along the
river.
Eventually, the federal troops arrived. The miners were optimistic,
believing that their grievances would be vindicated. Governor Morgan
and his allies, the coal mine operators, expected that the arrival of
the troops would end their troubles with the union. The governor was
right; the officer class was more than sympathetic to the owner's
interests with which they identified and saw the miners simply as
mutineers.
Although clearly disappointed with the
turn of events, the miners were not of a mind to war against the federal
government and its military which proved to be unsympathetic to their
interests. The army of workers, some ten thousand strong, simply quit
the battle and went home. Once the war was over, the federal government
opted out.
Federal prosecution would have been
redundant since the State of West Virginia was coming down on the union
rebels with all its might and authority. Led by a vengeful governor
Morgan, determined to punish the rebel leaders by choosing to charge
them with the most serious crimes of murder and treason, which it turned
out were easier to bring than to make stick, the focus shifted to the
courts. 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.
The aftermath of the “war” included a
number of trials for treason conducted by biased judges and corrupt
prosecutors; however, the crime of treason was hard to prove, and nearly
all of the defendants were exonerated, but one lowly insurgent, Walter
Allen—a minor figure in the rebel army—was convicted of the charge even
though nothing more damaging than that he had been seen "with the armed
forces" in Logan County and "had been carrying a gun" was presented.
Out on bail while awaiting an appeal, Allen simply disappeared and was
never seen again. The state dropped the treason charges against the
other twenty men.
While most of the arrested miners were
acquitted or had the charges against them dropped, the rebellion proved
to be a disaster. The miners didn't lose the war, they lost the peace,
and the financial injuries suffered under the state's legal system
proved to be devastating to the labor movement. The numerous legal
battles essentially emptied the union coffers. As Shogan describes it:
“A political wind was blowing with gale force against the miners in West
Virginia and against organized labor throughout the country:”
In West Virginia union membership
tumbled from 50,000 to a few hundred. Nationally, the United Mine
Workers membership declined from 600,000 to fewer than 100,000. From
1920 to 1923 the American Federation of Labor lost two million workers
or nearly 25 percent of its total membership. And the courts seemed
ready to issue strike-breaking injunctions almost for the asking.
It seemed to all that the struggle between working people and employers
backed by the government and its military had been forever lost.
It took the Great Depression and
Franklin Roosevelt to rescue the unions and the rest of the American
Labor Movement from near oblivion. Success came on the heels of the
auto worker's sit-down strike against General Motors in 1936-1937, which
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 building but were
driven back by a barrage of auto parts dropped from second story
windows. The war had started again.
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