Memorials and the Mine Disaster in Monongah, West Virginia: From Trauma to an Italian Global Memoryscape

Reviewed by: The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom by James Green Thomas G. Andrews The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom. By James Green. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 440. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-8021-2331-2.) No American industry of the late 1800s and early 1900s witnessed more furious and intractable conflict between labor and capital than the coal industry. [End Page 194] Violence seemed to break out wherever men mined coal, from Pennsylvania to Colorado and Illinois to Alabama. But West Virginia undoubtedly witnessed the largest, bloodiest, and longest-lasting of these struggles. In The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom, esteemed labor historian James Green laments that “knowledge of this enduring conflict has been all but lost to American memory” (p. 8). Green has succeeded in restoring the West Virginia mine wars to their rightful place by telling the story of the industrial warfare that racked the Mountain State from the 1890s to the 1930s. Part 1 of The Devil Is Here in These Hills introduces the four sets of characters on which Green’s narrative pivots: rank-and-file West Virginia mine workers; the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the nation’s largest union during most of the period Green explores; UMWA organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones; and Charles Francis “Frank” Keeney Jr., the militant Cabin Creek miner who led the UMWA’s District 17 during many epic struggles in the 1910s and early 1920s. The author devotes Parts 2 and 3 to the mine wars that convulsed southern West Virginia from 1912 to 1921, with the nationwide strike surge of 1918–1919 serving as a watershed between two separate phases of strife. Green deftly examines the UMWA’s ongoing struggles to unite West Virginia’s diverse mine workforce in the face of ferocious opposition from the state’s bitterly anti-union mine operators. During the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike of 1912–1913, as in later disputes, mine owners hired the Baldwin-Felts detective agency to do their dirty work. As the violence escalated, Governor William E. Glasscock ordered martial law and dispatched National Guardsmen to the strike zone. A long, two-phase occupation followed, punctuated by a military tribunal that resulted in the conviction of strike leaders, including Nellie Spinelli, a mother of five, and African American activist Dan Chain. Henry D. Hatfield, Glasscock’s successor, placed Jones and other UMWA and Socialist Party stalwarts before a military tribunal for their actions, which prompted U.S. Senate investigations. When Hatfield attempted to impose peace on estranged mine owners and mine workers in late spring 1913, he inadvertently exposed a fault line between the UMWA’s national leadership and Keeney’s militants, who decried Hatfield’s settlement as a “‘sell out’” (p. 142). Keeney responded by founding an independent union, the West Virginia Miners Organization, which swiftly won a contract providing Cabin Creek miners with better terms than those the UMWA had managed to broker in other parts of the state. Soon thereafter, Keeney assumed the presidency of UMWA District 17 and launched a series of successful organizing drives that brought the district’s membership rolls up to fifty thousand. The Devil Is Here in These Hills climaxes at the battle of Blair Mountain, “the largest civil insurrection the country had experienced since the Civil War” (p. 262). This short review cannot do justice to Green’s skillful, judicious interpretation of this struggle and its aftermath, but the author’s attentiveness to the worsening relationship between Keeney and the national leadership of the UMWA plays an especially prominent role; Jones lamented that Keeney and his lieutenants had gotten “‘carried away thinking they could [End Page 195] change the world over night . . . with guns and bullets’” (p. 259), while John L. Lewis excoriated a delegation from District 17 “‘for trying to shoot the union into West Virginia’” (pp. 305–6). Green’s book offers the first full-length history of the West Virginia mine wars. Yet despite Green’s...

Journal Article The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom Get access By James Green. (New York: Grove, 2015. viii, 440 pp. $28.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 1, June 2016, Pages 207–208, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw077 Published: 01 June 2016

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

Mannington to Upper Big Branch:The Promise Betrayed John P. David (bio) and Jan Young (bio) "I told my wife, if anything happens to me, get a lawyer and sue the blankety-blank out of them. That place [Upper Big Branch] is a ticking time bomb." —Stanley Stewart, continuous miner operator and survivor of the April 5, 2010, explosion at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, speaking at a May 24, 2010, Congressional hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee in Beckley The coal mine explosion at Upper Big Branch (ubb) that killed twentynine miners and injured two was the most deadly mining disaster since Consolidation Coal's #9 mine at Farmington near Mannington, West Virginia, exploded in November 1968 killing seventy-eight miners. It was also no accident. Developments in recent years have left no question of whether there would be another disaster, but only of when and where it would be, and how many miners would be killed. Generally referred to as "Mannington," the 1968 disaster in fact serves as a point of reference for tracking the path to Upper Big Branch. Mannington caused rank-and-file outrage and was the impetus for extensive changes in the coal industry, including the passage of the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969. Broader legislation, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, was passed the following year. The United Mine Workers of America (umwa) saw the rise of the reform movement, Miners for Democracy, and the growth of the Black Lung Association. The industry itself began a realignment that resulted in a significant shift to non-union operations. The Mannington disaster along with then umwa President Tony Boyle's statement that "As long as we mine coal, there is always this inherent danger of explosion. … This happens to be one of the better companies as far as cooperation with our union and safety is concerned" clearly exposed the cozy relationship between the coal industry, its regulators, and the union hierarchy. Emboldened by growing rank-and-file discontent, umwa insider [End Page 49] Joseph "Jock" Yablonski stunned the union's establishment in May, 1969 by challenging Boyle for the union presidency. Yablonski had served as President and International Executive Board member from District 5, one of the few districts that still held elections and was not under an international union trusteeship. On December 8, 1969, Yablonski lost the election to Boyle amid accusations of extensive fraud. On New Year's Eve, Yablonski, along with his wife and daughter, was murdered at his home in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. Some years later, Tony Boyle was convicted of having arranged the murders. He died in prison in 1985. In the meantime, in the southern West Virginia counties, Robert Payne was mobilizing the Disabled Miners and Widows in strikes for Black Lung benefits. Chapters of a Black Lung Association sprang up all over the coal fields with Arnold Miller of the Montgomery, West Virginia, chapter emerging as a leader. There were massive demonstrations centering around black lung and mine health and safety in general, often featuring the three physicians, I. E. Buff, Hawey Wells, and Donald Rasmussen, who became spokespersons for the view that Black Lung was a preventable disease that had become an unchecked disaster in America. In northern West Virginia and Pennsylvania, Yablonski's sons and brother encouraged the formation of Miners for Democracy (mfd). In its first battle, mfd's Lou Antal unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Mike Budzanoski for the presidency of umwa District 5. However, by the end of 1971, the U.S. Department of Labor's investigation of the Boyle-Yablonski election had unearthed enough irregularities to overturn Boyle's election. The stage was set for another national umwa election. The forces from mfd and the Black Lung movement came together, and in May 1972 put forward a reform slate with Arnold Miller from the Black Lung movement at its head. Harry Patrick from northern West Virginia held the second slot, and Mike Trbovich from the original mfd District 5 was slotted as Secretary-Treasurer. With the rerun election supervised by 230 agents from the U.S. Department of Labor, the reform slate won, and the...

T HE strike which occurred in the bituminous coal fields of West Virginia in 1902 has been almost totally eclipsed by the contemporaneous drama that focused national attention on the anthracite strike in eastern Pennsylvania. In contrast to the outcome in Pennsylvania, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) suffered an abject defeat in its effort to obtain a voice in the setting of wages, hours, and working conditions in the northern West Virginia coal mines. A detailed examination of the peculiar conditions that prevailed in the Fairmont Field serves to highlight some of the complexities of the conflict between management and union in the coal industry at the turn of the century. Ten years after its organization in 1891, UMWA enjoyed a remarkable position of power. By 1898 the union had enlisted enough members in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania to force the association of operators in those states to conclude an annual agreement on basic bargaining points. Yet the organizing effort that had produced the central competitive field agreement had failed in West Virginia, despite the backing of Samuel Gompers, Eugene V. Debs, and a host of other labor leaders.' The unorganized West Virginia fields endangered the union's power base: the northern mines were close enough to Great Lakes transportation to compete in the northern Midwest, and the southern fields had rail and river access to the southern markets of the region. In 1901, therefore, the national officers of the union undertook a strenuous campaign to bring West Virginia miners into the union, sending experienced organizers to the state from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. For nearly a year, without fanfare, the organizers ranged through the state on the hard and often dangerous task of converting miners into union members. The supervision of this work in the southern West Virginia fields lay in

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Precarious Politics:Friends of Coal, the UMWA, and the Affective Terrain of Energy Identification Sylvia Ryerson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Rocky Adkins, then Democratic House majority leader for the Kentucky House of Representatives, speaking at a pro-coal rally in 2012 (Tom Hansell, "The Narrative of Renewal: 'If We Can't Mine Coal, What Are We Going To Do?'"https://dailyyonder.com/the-narrative-of-renewal-if-we-cantmine-coal-what-are-we-going-to-do/2018/10/10/), Adkins is now senior adviser to the governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear. Photograph by Tom Hansell / After Coal, 2012. In the iconic scene of Harlan County USA, Barbara Kopple's 1976 Academy Award–winning documentary film, shots are fired in the dark at striking miners and their wives, and Kopple's camera is knocked to the ground. The moment captures the violent escalation of the Brookside Strike of 1973–74, organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against Duke Power, the owner of the Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky. In the early morning darkness, the battle lines are clear. The predominantly white UMWA miners and their wives on the picket line confront the company-hired [End Page 719] "gun thugs" working to bring in scabs and break up the strike. With an active membership of 213,113 and 1,329 local chapters nationwide, in 1973 the UMWA remained one of the largest and most powerful labor organizations in the country, and the Appalachian coalfields had long played a central role in the union's history.1 The Brookside Strike gained symbolic significance and moral authority by contextualizing itself as a clear continuation of the Harlan County mine wars of the 1930s known as "Bloody Harlan," the nearly-decade-long battle that first established the UMWA in Eastern Kentucky. Kopple films a local UMWA rally during the Brookside Strike, where the songwriter Florence Reece comes to the podium. Her husband, Sam Reece, was a Harlan County miner and union organizer in the 1930s, and the retaliation they faced inspired Florence to pen the now-famous social justice anthem "Which Side Are You On?" As she sings her renowned verses to the 1970s crowd, Come all you poor workersGood news to you I'll tellHow the good ol' unionHas come in here to dwell Which side are you on?Which side are you on? If you go to Harlan CountyThere is no neutral thereYou'll either be a union manOr a thug for J. H. Blair Which side are you on?Which side are you on?2 Released some forty years later, the 2015 documentary film Overburden follows the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR) in the Coal River Valley of southern West Virginia, and across the Central Appalachian coalfields of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. The drama climaxes at a 2009 anti-MTR rally held outside a Massey Energy–owned coal processing plant near Coal River Mountain, the site of an impending MTR job. The "anti-MTR" activists are met by dozens of "pro-coal" miners and supporters, in an emotional confrontation. As the anti-MTR activists demand that the state intervene to halt the blasting, pro-coal supporters shout back angrily "go home tree huggers!" and wave Massey Energy flags. Thirty-one arrests are made, as the anti-MTR protestors attempt to block the road to the plant.3 Again, the [End Page 720] battle lines are clear—but the political allegiances have completely changed. While the picketers of the Brookside Strike held signs reading "Duke Power Wants Rate Increases for Customers, Poverty for Coal Miners" and "Duke Power Co. Owns the Brookside Mine, But They Don't Own Us," the miners at the 2009 protests held signs reading "EPA = Equal Poverty for All" and "If You're Against Coal Then Turn Off Your Lights."4 In a stunning reconfiguration of roles, this scene played out over and over again in protests and rallies across the coalfields beginning in the early 2000s. The question "Which side are you on?" remained ever present in the coalfields, but the sides were redrawn: one was...

Burning Bridges: Senator Rush Dew Holt and the Guffey Coal Acts of 1935 and 1937 C. Lloyd Tomlinson The legislative session was drawing to a close on the evening of June 20, 1936, the day after Rush Dew Holt’s thirty-first birthday. The United States Senate was ready to vote on a replacement bill for the Guffey-Snyder Act, a law intended to stabilize the bituminous coal industry. The Supreme Court overturned the 1935 law barely a month before with its decision in Carter v. Carter Coal Company. The court ruled that local wages and hours did not fall within the federal government’s powers to regulate interstate commerce, thereby rendering the law null and void. The Senate worked hastily to churn out a replacement and essentially stripped the labor protections from the new bill. The amended legislation had the support of the majority of the Senate as well as the president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW), John L. Lewis. The new bill was almost guaranteed to pass.1 Holt, the “Boy Senator” from West Virginia, had other plans. The junior senator took the floor and declared that he would spend his unlimited time reading from Aesop’s Fables. In addition to reading Aesop, Holt attacked Lewis for siding with the coal companies over the miners, lambasted West Virginia’s senior senator Matthew Neely for ignoring the miners in their state, and ripped into the Works Progress Administration for acting as a tool of political patronage. By the time he concluded his filibuster and the Senate adjourned, it was 11:55 p.m., and the bill was dead.2 The filibuster left an undeniable impact on Holt’s image and political career. Rush Holt Jr., in the inaugural lecture named for his father, notes that the senator “became a man without a party” that some viewed as “fearlessly honest, while others perceived him as quixotic, unreliable, and ungrateful to those who had supported him.”3 Through the remainder of his term, Holt grew increasingly isolated. The results of the 1940 primary election ensured that Holt would not return to the Senate for the next term.4 While the filibuster remains an excellent piece of political theater, as well as the defining moment of Holt’s Senate career, it merely scratches the surface of his fight against legislation that he believed did not help working [End Page 29] West Virginians. The 1936 filibuster began Holt’s shift toward becoming more critical of the New Deal. It also created a deep personal and political rivalry with Senator Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania, who cosponsored the legislation, as well as Senator Matthew Neely of West Virginia. After the filibuster, their feud played out in the public sphere: political rallies, the press, and the airwaves all served as battlegrounds. Holt also managed to make enemies of John L. Lewis and UMW District 17 president Van W. Bittner. Though Holt found himself a pariah by the end of the decade, he nevertheless remained convinced that he was fighting for the best interests of coal miners throughout West Virginia. Rush Holt has been covered by a handful of historians to date. Jerry Bruce Thomas takes a sharply critical view of Holt, pointing out his attempts to use New Deal programs as a form of political patronage to get a job for his brother, Matthew, and his persona as a reckless maverick who “took any sort of disagreement on issues as a personal attack and tended to respond in kind.”5 A doctoral dissertation by William Coffey remains the most thorough study of Holt’s life and career to date. It functions as a fairly evenhanded biographical treatment, though it does not examine his career past 1942.6 In 2011, Rush Holt Jr. delivered the inaugural Rush D. Holt lecture, which focused on the filibuster and its immediate consequences.7 The filibuster figures prominently in each of these works, revealing its importance in West Virginia and American politics, as well as its impact on the bituminous coal industry. Bituminous coal mining had been a “sick industry” for decades before the passage of the Guffey Act. It was an industry bloated by excessive competition...

As environmental legislation threatens energy-related jobs, unions may seek to assure just transitions for their workers. Just transitions are programs to guarantee decent, well-paying new jobs or early retirement for workers displaced by environmental regulations. Militant unions with a tradition of neo-corporatism will be best positioned to demand just transitions for their members. This article provides two comparative case studies of coal miners’ unions in areas where environmental reform threatens coal workers’ livelihoods. Workers in Germany’s IG Bergbau, Chemie, Energie/Industrial Guild Mining, Chemical, Energy (IG BCE) have applied sustained militancy to force the German government and employers to accept increasingly comprehensive and democratic worker input into the energy sector’s policy-making. Possessing a good deal of control over their industry, IG BCE was prepared to demand a just transition for their miners by the time the German government began phasing out underground mining. The UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) miners have a long tradition of militancy and have, at various junctures in their history, forced their employers and union bureaucrats to accept some degree of industrial democracy. However, the UMWA’s corporatism was a limited corporatism that was never as democratic as German neo-corporatism. The UMWA’s commitment to environmentalism increased as they won an expanded level of input into the coal industry’s decision-making. Nevertheless, since the late 1970s the UMWA’s militancy has waned and they have come to reject just transitions and other environmentalist policies.

My work examines how the radical immigrant miners of Franklin County, Illinois preserved radical sentiment in southern Illinois during the mid 1920s, despite the decline of both the coal industry in the region and radicalism within the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). In particular, this paper focuses on the grassroots activism and interethnic solidarity displayed by union miners from southern Illinois at the 42nd annual convention of the Illinois Federation of Labor in 1924. A number of mining representatives disrupted the proceedings and demanded that the conference openly denounce the Ku Klux Klan and their use of terrorism within mining communities. Despite the prevalence of Klan attacks on union members, the miners met heavy opposition from the UMWA hierarchy present at the convention. This was due to not only the political influence held by the KKK in the area, but also the southern Illinois organizers’ affiliation with the Communist party. The dispute at this convention spoke to the presence of a divided working class in southern Illinois that often erupted in violent conflicts based on ethnic identity, national origin, and radical affiliation. I contend that the events at this convention informed the next decade of labor disputes in the coalfields of Franklin County, in which the UMWA consistently neglected the needs of their immigrant members and left them exposed to repression at the hands of the coal operators, the KKK, and the courts.

Abstract: The April 5, 2010 Upper Big Branch explosion in West Virginia was the worst coal mine disaster in the United States in 40 years. Given the importance of the coal industry to the United States, coal mine safety regulations do not effectively prevent such disasters from occurring, and a culture of impunity protects both coal companies and government agencies from being held accountable for contributing to disasters. The United Mine Workers of America's diminished strength in West Virginia leaves most miners with little recourse against growing corporations. An examination of the history of disasters in West Virginia coal mines provides insight into how the factors leading to the Upper Big Branch explosion developed and can potentially be prevented. [West Virginia, coal mining, mine disasters, labor unions, corporate impunity, Massey Energy, legislation and enforcement]

a fierce commercial war that West Virginia’s coal operators waged against their northern rivals in the coalfields of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana from 1853 to 1933, and focuses on two coal mining regions in West Virginia, the Fairmont Field in the north and the smokeless coalfields—the New River, Pocahontas, and Winding Gulf that straddled the counties of Fayette, Raleigh, Mercer, McDowell, and Wyoming—to the south. Bituminous coal production in the United States grew rapidly around the turn of the twentieth century in response to the country’s rising industrial demand. But the coal trade of the era was characterized by excessive competition, price fluctuations, and low profitability. Mary Beth Pudup has noted that bituminous coal operators weathered the vagaries of the coal trade through mergers and consolidations, regional trade associations, and joint sales organizations. Northern operators even turned to unionization as a way to equalize costs among producers. 2 When the operators of western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana tried to neutralize competition from their low-cost southern rivals by reaching an accord with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to negotiate industry-wide wage scales, West Virginia’s operators strenuously fought off this maneuver. The repeated refusals of West Virginia coal operators to recognize the union transformed West Virginia into a pariah in the eyes of its northern rivals, “a gun pointed at the heart of industrial government in the bituminous industry.” 3

Blair Mountain: few sites possess as much importance to labor historians as the range of hills in Logan County, in the heart of West Virginia's coal country. In this engaging book, historian Charles B. Keeney tells the story of the 1921 battle, culminating decades of struggle known as the West Virginia Mine Wars. Reminiscent of James B. Green's influential Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements (2000), Kenney weaves together both the battle's history with his personal story of preserving the site from destruction by Mountain Top Removal (MTR) coal mining. Part memoir, part monograph, and part how-to manual for other activists, The Road to Blair Mountain is a refreshing work that shows the connections between West Virginia's labor and environmental movements.As the great-grandson of famed United Mine Workers of America District 17 leader Frank Keeney, the author is well positioned to present a detailed account of Blair Mountain. Rather than a mere historical recounting, the book serves a larger purpose. While there is deep writing on the Mine Wars, this history only gained widespread attention in the 1980s thanks to the pioneering history by David Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields (1981); Denise Giardina's beautiful novel Storming Heaven (1989); and John Sayles's powerful film portrayal, Matewan (1987). Along with a PBS documentary and several other histories, few of these works noted the larger role Blair Mountain played after 1921 in the imagination of labor activists. Moving from this Mine Wars history to his own engagement, Keeney details how local people stood up to an array of powerful entities.Keeney's involvement started shortly after controversy emerged in 2009, when Blair Mountain was delisted from the National Register of Historic Places. Having just taken a job at a local community college a few miles from the battlefield, Keeney was slowly drawn to halt the destruction of the mountain. We meet locals like Kenney King, who did archaeological examinations of the site for years and was key in forming the Friends of Blair Mountain (FOBM) organization in 2010. Others, too—including Jimmy Weekly, whose home sat in the way of Arch Coal's planned blasting of the mountain, and retired miners turned environmentalists like Terry Steele—fill the book's pages. Keeney joined hundreds during an energizing protest march in the summer of 2011, re-creating the path armed miners took ninety years prior.After the exhilaration of the march, FOBM developed strategies to engage with local pro-coal residents. FOBM set a tone just as the “War on Coal” rhetoric was heating up during the early 2010s. They tried to build bridges with people in coal country, treating them as potential allies, not enemies to vanquish. Kenney also notes the ways local people became citizen regulators, learning how intricate regulatory processes could be brought to bear to halt mining permits and save portions of the battlefield. Readers see Keeney and others meet with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, the State Historic Preservation Office, and the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. Building working relationships with regulators, and keeping up productive encounters with the coal industry, greatly aided the group's successes. Keeney presents a more textured history of activism, including dramatic protest marches in the summer West Virginia heat, along with sitting for hours in corporate boardrooms and before surface mining permitting hearings. In addition, FOBM tried to persuade local people with coal-mining roots of the importance of preserving their heritage.The book makes significant contributions to contemporary Appalachian history. It joins other works, such as Shirley Stewart-Burns's Bringing Down the Mountains (2007), on the role of local people opposing MTR mining. Keeney also provides a model for future studies of the effects of globalization and renewed labor organizing, as seen in John Hennen's recent book A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers (2022) and 55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike (2018). There are similar stories still to be told on citizen activism that took place against highway construction, natural gas pipelines, and neoliberal austerity measures that hit working-class Appalachians terribly hard.The book's most intriguing section examines the Mine Wars’ public memory. Striving for “identity reclamation,” Keeney shows how the history of Blair Mountain was purposefully purged from the public school curriculum (166). A key figure was Phil Conley, who in 1921 was the managing director of the American Constitutional Association, an organization formed to foster a unified pro-corporate state identity. Conley, who volunteered for Don Chafin's army, later wrote the main history textbook for public schools, which erased the story of Blair Mountain (169–71). When Conley's West Virginia Yesterday and Today (1931) was finally replaced as the standard text in the early 1970s, that new textbook devoted just a single paragraph to the Mine Wars (176). Only in the 1980s would Blair Mountain's story break out of this system of control. Aiding in this process of identity reclamation, Keeney and local residents opened the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan in 2015. Building on the earlier goals of FOBM, the museum plays a vital role in preserving the state's labor history, fostering cultural awareness for those visiting the region, while serving as an anchor to help build a more sustainable economy in the region.Keeney's narrative is empowering. This is a story of many activists, including retired coal miners, history professors, and locals trying to build a better life as the coal industry continues its rapid decline. This book is a major contribution to Appalachian labor history and a guide for future activists hoping to fight for economic and environmental justice. Addressing coal's legacy will be an ongoing project for years, but Keeney highlights the need for any successful movement to build bridges within communities and to always “be patient and resolute” (275).

In Carbon County, USA, the historian Christian Wright examines the history of labor organization in eastern Utah's coal mining industry between the 1930s and 1980s. Split into three parts, the book first documents the period from the 1930s to the early postwar years, including the problems emerging in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Part 2 chronicles the coal industry's revival during the nationally and internationally tumultuous 1960s and when the UMWA encountered the rise of a competing union in 1970: Miners for Democracy. In the book's final section, Wright dedicated one chapter each to race, gender, and generation, emphasizing the 1970s to 1980s period, which was also the decline of industry and organization. In the epilogue, Wright connects the preceding chapters to pending questions about the roles of coal and labor organization in the United States during the twenty-first century.Wright's argument is at least twofold. One argument is that labor history is still relevant and valuable. But Wright also argues that looking beyond the labor–management and union–antiunion dichotomies to the nuances of labor organization demonstrates that union power's decline in Utah's coal industry resulted from fracturing union leadership and changing understandings of identity among rank-and-file workers. Integral to Wright's study of identity are race, gender, and generation. While the first argument—the relevance and value of labor history—will speak mainly to an academic audience, the second will likely appeal to anyone interested in the histories of coal mining, Utah, labor organization, and identity studies.In exploring the depths of labor organization in Utah, Wright's book adds to several bodies of literature. For one, it is the most comprehensive examination of coal mining labor organization in Utah. It adds to a 2006 edited volume on Utah mining by examining eastern Utah over a fifty year period in particular. Additionally, Wright's arguments about labor organization extend the chronology of most mining labor histories, which often analyze the pre-1930s period. In doing so, Wright's work fills a gap but also demonstrates the value of learning from the decline of the movement, not just its heyday. Finally, labor history had its own heyday and has seen some decline, but Wright's analysis reveals how labor history might add to ongoing political conversations.Overall, this volume contains excellent prose, impressive research, and useful graphics, ranging from graphs and tables to historical images. The introductions to chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 are particularly noteworthy for their prose. Wright's spread of records from the United Mine Workers of America and Miners for Democracy archives to local repositories, including museums and records in Carbon and Emery counties, expresses a deep engagement with the national and regional stories. Readers will surely appreciate the images contained throughout the text as well, including the maps at the front, the appendices (e.g., a timeline of regional and national events), and tables throughout that illustrate Wright's extensive and impressive use of demographic data.Wright's inclusion of race and gender in particular are a welcome addition to the literature on mining history, especially in Utah, though the analysis and framing might have benefitted from stronger situating in gender and identity studies. Commendably, he consulted numerous sources regarding women's history and several histories that speak to Mexican American and Mexican workers. That said, the concept of “intersectionality” might have offered Wright a way to investigate race and gender more consistently throughout the narrative. Cordoning off race and gender in their own chapters, rather than integrating them more prominently into earlier chapters, comes with costs and benefits. Treating them separately highlights them in a way that integrating them would not. On the other hand, it suggests that the two are mainly characteristics of later labor organization. The introductions of the race and gender chapters provide only brief information about those themes in earlier chronological periods. To be fair, perhaps Wright did not include women earlier because they were not miners—state law did not allow women to mine until 1973 (227). Even so, were women part of the strikes or other labor events, perhaps similar to the involvement of auto workers’ wives at the 1937 Flint General Motors strike? If not, how did notions about masculinity affect pre-1970s unionizing? Even without answers to these questions, these chapters are still much-needed additions to the extant literature on mining and labor history in Utah and the West.In the end, Wright's thought-provoking, nuanced work is a useful base for further explorations and a smart addition to the current literature on mining labor organization efforts.

Once a month, a group of men in t-shirts, jeans, and baseball caps gather around a long table at the New River Health Clinic. The clinic, a small, one-story yellow clapboard building, is located in the tiny town of Scarbro, nestled in the bituminous hills of southern West Virginia. The members of the Fayette County Black Lung Association greet each other by name while they pour bitter black coffee into small Styrofoam cups. In the early 1970s, coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or black lung, affected around one-third of long-term underground miners. After new dust regulations took effect, rates of black lung plunged. Today, however, they are once again rising dramatically, ... Amidst the chatter and the coffee are the coughs. Some of the men hack loudly, others more quietly. All of them have advanced black lung, a disease they acquired working in the local mines. Although roughly 22% of underground miners smoke,1 compared with about 18% of U.S. adults in general,2 none of these men do. They gather not just as a support group but also to help one another complete the stacks of paperwork necessary to apply for government-mandated benefits for black lung and navigate the tortuous appeals process. Aside from the group’s leader, a bespectacled septuagenarian named Joe Massie, all the other members are in their 50s or early 60s. That’s relatively young for someone with advanced black lung, and other workers are getting sick even earlier. These miners, who have gotten so sick so fast, are on the forefront of a wave of new black lung cases that are sweeping through Appalachia. Scientists first noticed a troubling trend in 2005, when national surveillance conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) identified regional clusters of rapidly progressing severe black lung cases, especially in Appalachia.3 These concerns were confirmed in followup studies using a mobile medical unit providing outreach to coal mining areas,4,5 with later research showing that West Virginia was hit particularly hard.6 Between 2000 and 2012, the prevalence of the most severe form of black lung rose to levels not seen since the 1970s,7 when modern dust laws were enacted.8 Scarier still, the new generation of black lung patients have disease that in many cases progresses far more rapidly than in previous generations. Today, advanced black lung can be acquired within as little as 7.5–10 years of beginning work, says Edward Petsonk, a pulmonologist at West Virginia University. But not all cases progress so quickly; thus, occupational health researchers fear that what they are seeing now is only the tip of the iceberg.