The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

Abstract

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. 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 Virginias 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. …