The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom by James Green

Abstract

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...