Blair Mountain Research Articles

The Battle of Blair Mountain and the News Media: Professional Ideology and the Coverage of Bloodshed in West Virginia

In 1921, “labor trouble” was the euphemistic phrase used by newspapers to describe the often-bloody conflicts that took place between working miners and their bosses in West Virginia. The Battle of Blair Mountain was one such conflict, a well-known clash between striking miners and mine operators that was made famous because airplanes were used, however unsuccessfully, to drop bombs on the miners during the hostilities. This study examines the coverage of this event by the New York Times and Washington Post to understand the ideological assumptions of professional journalists at the time toward this brutal conflict. Using a historically informed analysis of newspaper content, this study shows how the professional norms of journalism culminated in a highly ideologically informed coverage of labor struggle, revealing upper and middle-class anxiety toward class conflict in early twentieth century America.

The Swiss Vetterli rifle in America. From soldier to coal miner

This article examines the connections between Switzerland and America that led to the development of the Vetterli infantry rifle. Using primary archival research, it shows why the Swiss Army was so keen to dispose of obsolete rifles and examines trade catalogues and other press resources to show how the Vetterli gained a ‘second life’ as a civilian weapon in North America. Finally, it uses recent archaeological evidence to show that the weapon became part of a wider ‘firearms culture’ and saw use in the largest armed revolt in America since the Civil War; the fight that became known as the ‘Battle of Blair Mountain’.

Multiculturalism in the Coal Mines: Re-interpreting the Battle of Blair Mountain in the Age of Black Lives Matter

Multiculturalism in the Coal Mines: Re-interpreting the Battle of Blair Mountain in the Age of Black Lives Matter

The Road to Blair Mountain: Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal

The Road to Blair Mountain: Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times

Silence, Invisibility, and the Violence of the Logos: Appalachian Resonances in Kashmir

Along the twisted contours of statecraft, not only do sound and fury not signify nothing, but nothing also signifies something. What are the ways in which the state activates frameworks of silence and noise, and of visibility and invisibility, to exert authority over specific cultures? This paper looks at two specific mountain cultures, separated by a hundred years and thousands of miles, to interrogate these questions of power and violence. It attempts to trace a trajectory of power-resistance by paying attention to silence, noise, visibility and invisibility – from the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia to the trauma to Kashmiri identity wrought by the recent abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. It notes how disciplinary power seeks to legitimize itself by transforming space into infrastructure, and how this tendency plays out in West Virginia in the 1920s and in Kashmir today, to articulate the uneasy relationship between violence, power and identity that suffuses our world.

Never Justice, Never Peace: Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeks by Lon Kelly Savage and Ginny Savage Ayers

Reviewed by: Never Justice, Never Peace: Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeksby Lon Kelly Savage and Ginny Savage Ayers T. R. C. Hutton Never Justice, Never Peace: Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeks. By Lon Kelly Savage and Ginny Savage Ayers. West Virginia and Appalachia. ( Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 343. Paper, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-946684-37-0.) The West Virginia mine wars remain one of the most startling moments of class conflict in American history and one of the definitive narratives of Appalachia. David Alan Corbin's Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922(Urbana, 1981) established a high standard on the subject that inspired two generations of scholarship, which has recently seen an upsurge with James Green's The Devil Is Here in These [End Page 726] Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom(New York, 2015) and this latest offering. Although most histories of the era focus on the Matewan massacre and the battle of Blair Mountain in 1920 and 1921 respectively, Never Justice, Never Peace: Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeksrefreshingly focuses only on the first phase of miner militancy, in 1912–1913, and the leadership of the enigmatic matron of labor struggle, Mother Jones. Like many other accounts of labor struggles, Lon Kelly Savage and Ginny Savage Ayers's account of Paint Creek and Cabin Creek is a story of missed opportunity for workers and of a national status quo dead set against industrial democracy. Jones was an inspirational figure for miners all over the country, but her presence was also often tactical, given the Victorian invincibility accorded by her sex and age. Miners and their families were at the mercy of their employers, primarily due to the cruelty of the mine guards employed by the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, the main strikebreaking organization in West Virginia, and the immensely powerful Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. A coalition of black, Italian, and Anglo Appalachian miners stood up to the guards' bullying at the Paint Creek Collieries mines in the spring of 1912 and began the first salvo in a conflict that defined life in central Appalachia for generations. The Socialist Party of America, coming off its biggest national vote in American history in the 1912 presidential election, temporarily pinned "high hopes for their party and its ideology" on southern West Virginia as a springboard into other southern states (p. 277). William Glasscock and Henry Hatfield, West Virginia's two Progressive Republican governors, played major roles, the former by declaring martial law multiple times, the latter by promising to serve as a mediator between miners and management—albeit while blatantly violating freedom of the press in his own capital city. In 1913, West Virginia was the crucible of American class conflict. Savage and Ayers have produced a useful, succinct retelling of the early stages of the mine wars, though without taking any unexpected interpretive turns. Mother Jones often appears heroic, if vainglorious, in their telling, and the authors know better than to take all of her statements and derring-do as gospel. The fact is that the stories of the elderly woman fearlessly facing down Baldwin-Felts mercenaries in 1912, as "fanciful" and full of exaggerated "bravado" on her part as they may have been, marked the moment when "some began to regard her less and less as a sweet old lady and more and more as an uncivil shrew" (pp. 60, 59, 61). One of the most helpful contributions provided in this volume is a new simple map of Cabin Creek and Paint Creek in southern Kanawha County and northern Raleigh County, West Virginia, and the settlements, encampments, and company towns involved in the strikes in question, a feature absent in a surprising number of similar monographs. But the useful map is only part of a remarkable product of intricate, careful research that stands as the most detailed history of Paint Creek and Cabin Creek now available. Never Justice, Never Peaceis not a major statement on American labor history, but it...

What Did the Miners See?: Archaeology, Deep Mapping, and the Battle of Blair Mountain

What Did the Miners See?: Archaeology, Deep Mapping, and the Battle of Blair Mountain

The Fight to Save Blair Mountain

The Fight to Save Blair Mountain

Deadly Picket-Lines in US Labour History

20 | International Union Rights | 24/2 FOCUS | UNITED STATES Deadly Picket-Lines in US Labour History Dead men tell no tales; that is, until the living give them voice. From 1870 to 1970, a veritable victims’ chorus of no fewer than 1160 fatalities was amassed during labour dispute confrontations within the United States of America. Each was simultaneously an expression of and catalyst within the dialectical evolution of US labour-management relations. To thee they sing. Strike-Fatality Overview Violence on America’s picket lines was protracted, widespread and intense. Fatalities, the most extreme outcome of violence, were incurred in at least 244 separate strike events, more than a dozen industries, thirty-eight states, and seventy-two years. Many more resulted in various forms of intimidation, non-fatal injuries, and property damage. Strike event names such as the Battle of Homestead (1892), Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), and Colorado Mine War (1913-14) testify to the ferocity with which agents of capital and labour advanced and / or defended their perceived rights to property and labour over the course of an era widely recognised as the most violent and bloody of any Western industrialised nation. While likely true that the vast majority of strikes involved no violence, those that did (especially those involving fatalities which are more likely to be recorded, verified and / or compiled than lesser outcomes) afford traceable patterns and insights. First, the commonly used term ‘labour violence’ is belied by the fact that strikers, organisers, and / or their sympathisers comprised nearly two-thirds of the classifiable victims. Another ten percent were bystanders: leaving less than one-fourth of the victims to be divided among strike-breakers, company guards, and / or state agents. Second, deaths were concentrated within the extraction and transportation industries. Coal mining alone accounted for roughly one-third of the deaths with another 199 (18.1 percent) on the railroads. Third, the regional distribution changed over time. Initially, strike fatalities were most heavily concentrated in the Northeast and to a slightly lesser extent the Midwest. As industrialisation spread, the violence shifted to the West and ultimately South. Fourth, 97.3 percent of the fatalities occurred between eruption of the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947: an era over the course of which evolved a discomforting and incendiary blend of economic desperation, labour militancy, employer intransigence, political uncertainty, and fatal resolve sandwiched between spans of relative labour quiescence. Dialectics of Violence The Great Railway Strike of 1877 provided a watershed moment in American labour history. It began in protest of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s decision to uphold the company’s annual dividend while reducing wages during a period of severe economic depression; and quickly spread across railways, industries, and state lines, disrupting commerce on first the Eastern seaboard and ultimately nationwide. Before its end, the nation had witnessed its first general strike, the deployment of police, numerous state and municipal militias, and federal troops against groups of non-seditious citizens, the destruction and looting of numerous railway yards, and the deaths of more than one hundred individuals. Prior to the Great Strike, ‘labour violence’ had generally been considered sporadic and non-threatening. In its wake, the reigning elitist sense of insulation from leftist politics and class based struggles was shattered, ushering instead the rise of the ‘labour question’: a multi-sided and contentious discursive formation that posed concerns centring on either problems for the newly emerging industrial society for collective labour or the problem of collective labour for the new industrial society. Alerted to the disruptive potential of large-scale labour insurgency, the overarching response by America’s political and industrial elite was to hone the means of repression. Public and private arsenals were built and stocked with updated weaponry. Militia units were re-staffed with typically middle-class personnel and sometimes upper class elites. Army officials openly lobbied for strike duty and found themselves in competition with the rise of private police forces such as the Pinkertons. Reformist impulses only began to gain traction after the Pullman Railway Strike of 1894. Like the Great Strike, Pullman was a violent national affair centred mainly on the railways, this time...

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

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...

Demystifying the Hidden Hand: Capital and the State at Blair Mountain

The Battle of Blair Mountain is an important episode in American and world history that illuminates central tenets of the current American socioeconomic system. The artifacts from the battle as well as documentary evidence and oral history show that the events of the battle are part of a larger system of exploitation that continues today. Initial analysis of the artifacts from the battle allows insight into fundamental workings of the emergence and maintenance of capitalism. Archaeological work has been central in addressing issues and injustices within this system, as shown in preservation work at Blair Mountain.

Upward defiance in organizations: management lessons from the Battle of Blair Mountain

PurposeBased upon an analysis of 30 historic narrative accounts of mutinies, Coye, Murphy, and Spencer recently extended voice theory to clarify the ontological status of the concept of upward defiance. The purpose of this article is to extend the framework of Coye et al. and illustrate the process of escalation towards hostility to offer practicing managers guidance on appropriate steps to interrupt the extreme escalation of member resistance.Design/methodology/approachThe authors examined the significant historical insurrection within the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. With the case of the Blair Mountain War, the historical record provides ample narrative data for a textual, interpretive, pseudo‐ethnographical analysis.FindingsThe examination of the Battle of Blair Mountain provides additional support for the upward organizational defiance framework proposed by Coye, Murphy, and Spencer. In addition, the authors have extended the theoretical upward defiance framework to account for the escalation of constructive to destructive forms of voice towards mutiny to reveal managerial actions and attitudes to mitigate follower defiance.Research limitations/implicationsThe common limitation to any historic case study is one of generalizability, although it often useful to accept the trade‐off between limited generalizability and the potential discernment associated with the methodology.Originality/valueThe paper investigates a mutiny outside of a maritime setting to offer support for Coye et al.’s conceptual framework, extend that framework in a manner more consistent with organizational practice, and offer guidance to practitioners.

Upward Defiance in Organizations: Management Lessons from the Battle of Blair Mountain

Based upon an analysis of 30 historic narrative accounts of mutinies, Coye, Murphy, and Spencer (2010) recently extended voice theory to clarify the ontological status of the concept of upward defiance. They proposed a conceptual framework, based on dimensions of perceived injustice to organizational members and barriers to voice, to locate the construct of mutiny in relation to voice theory, thereby enhancing comprehension of defiance in modern organizations. Mutinies, however, can also occur outside of a maritime milieu. One such example is the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, which was the largest armed uprising in the United States since the Civil War. We examine this significant insurrection with a practical lens to 1) provide support for and extend Coye et al.’s (2010) upward defiance framework, 2) illustrate the process of escalation to hostility, and 3) offer organizational managers guidance on appropriate steps to interrupt the extreme escalation of member resistance.

Flings

Flings Justin Taylor (bio) Percy took Intro to U.S. Labor History for an elective in the spring of his sophomore year. The professor's name was Leon Pitzer, an embittered pinko genius with a marked limp. In him Percy knew he had finally found the father surrogate he'd been searching for since arriving at Schmall, a semi-elite liberal arts college in a town of the same name in the heart of the heart of Ohio. Percy changed his major from English to history, and over the following three semesters took every course Pitzer offered. Too, Pitzer directed Percy's senior thesis, an inspired treatise on the American government's illegal 1921 deployment of the Air Force to bomb striking mine workers at Blair Mountain, West Virginia. The SEIU invited Percy to come to Chicago and join a hotel campaign they were working. He talked to Kat about his decision. They both cried, but later, recounting the story to Andy on the porch over nightcap beers while Kat slept, Percy tried to make it sound like only Kat had cried. Andy knew the truth because his bedroom was across the hall from Kat's and he'd been listening in. "I just don't get what the whole big deal is," he said to Rachel. "So he loves her, too. So what? Why is that some disaster? And what century does he live in where a man's not allowed to cry?" "Are you, like, preparing me for something right now?" Rachel asked. She lived around the block from Andy. They were between her sheets and he held her tightly, as though the bed were a dinghy in some rough sea and he meant to keep her from going over. Rachel and their other friend, Ellen—both film students—had managed to get their mentor to secure them internships working for an experimental West Coast filmmaker who staged an annual festival of the innovative and insufferable in Portland, Oregon. It was not clear when—or even whether—Andy and Rachel would see each other again. "Please. Just don't say anything else," Rachel said. Andy clenched his jaw. Not talking when he felt like talking was pretty much the hardest thing in the world for him, and there were [End Page 137] few people other than Rachel for whom he would do it. He thought of a popular song he'd hated in high school, the one with the chorus that went "well I guess this is growing up." He wanted to put himself through a third-floor window. He wanted to fall sleep in the half-reclined shotgun seat of his own gray Honda Civic at a highway rest stop on the mid-Atlantic coast. He squeezed Rachel tighter, closer, begging her body to be his anchor, keep him from setting adrift in his own head. Nothing was going as it had in his mind. Her lower lip was between her front teeth. They enjoyed fast, rough sex and then she threw him out so she could shower and get dressed. She was due to meet her boyfriend Marcus for pizza. Instead of a goodbye kiss, or even a hug, they high-fived—a fierce flat sound that did not echo but somehow still rung in his ears the whole block home. Andy had large, vague aspirations. He knew he liked writing, and he knew he didn't want to move back to Kettering and he knew he didn't want to stay in Schmall, especially not without his friends, but that was as much as he knew. So when a professor of his, presumably inspired by the STOP THE IMF! button on his backpack, offered to help him secure an internship at a prestigious-sounding New York political magazine that he had never heard of before, he told her he'd been a subscriber since he was fifteen and that it would be a dream come true. He printed out the application from their website and she wrote him a letter and the next thing he knew he was on a plane east. His boss in New York was a hunched man with close-cropped hair...

What if We Really Won the Battle of Blair Mountain?

What if We Really Won the Battle of Blair Mountain?

Redbud Trees (Flowering Judas)

Redbud Trees (Flowering Judas) Helen M. Lewis (bio) In Early Spring Forming a tunnel of blossoms along the road to War, West Virginia The Redbud trees burst forth with knots of red, rosy, purple flowers on naked branches, Circling the trunk like the red kerchiefs worn by coal miners who fought on Blair Mountain. Clinging perilously to mountainsides they make a shrouded gateway to the Billion Dollar Coalfield. But The Billion Dollars left the coalfields. Each spring the red buds tell that story and point to the destruction just over the hill. The mountains have provided a place of refuge for people, animals, trees and flowers, A homeplace in which to settle, work, live, for a diversity of people, wild flowers and grouse. A sanctuary, a haven for mussels, salamanders, Baptists, wood thrush and pileated woodpeckers. Now scavengers are removing the mountains to dig out the coal– Giant machines turn forested hills to moonscapes Cover streams and valleys with “overburden,” reduce the mountains to rubble. Holding fast in the arms of the mountains, Wearing their red badge of courage The Redbuds resist their removal and protest the devastation of their living place [End Page 68] They are also called Judas trees. Named for the Judas who hung himself in shame from a Redbud tree And dangled the blood money from the branches. The Flowering Judases blush with shame. They shout “Shame” to the Judases destroying God’s creation. As the blossoms fade, the heart shaped leaves wave to passers by, Crying out for the wilderness: Wake up, the earth is being destroyed. Change your ways of thinking, acting, being You are part of all living creatures. Recognize your kinship, interdependence Listen—Put your ear to the ground. Listen to the voices from the mountains. Listen to the prophets, the hemlocks, the dogwoods, fish in the streams, the bacteria in the soil, all living things. The mountains have provided a fortress: support and strength to survive, For immigrants, moonshiners, Indians, copperheads, escaped slaves and servants. A safe place—“a place to rest your eyes.” When the mountains are gone where do we get our strength? Where do we find the rock to hide behind or beneath? Where do we find solace and rest for our eyes? Put a sign in your yard—Obey the Laws of Nature. [End Page 69] Helen M. Lewis Helen M. Lewis has been a pioneer in Appalachian Studies as a sociology professor in the Virginia coalfields and as Loyal Jones’s successor at the Berea College Appalachian Center. Her activism included serving as Director of the Highlander Center. She now lives in North Georgia. Copyright © 2009 Berea College

The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising

The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising

Book Reviews : The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising. By Robert Shogan. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004. 271 pp. $26 hardcover

Book Reviews : The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising. By Robert Shogan. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004. 271 pp. $26 hardcover

The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising

Book Review| December 01 2005 The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising Robert Shogan Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004 xiv + 271 pp., $26.00(cloth) Michael Nash Michael Nash Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2005) 2 (4): 119–120. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2-4-119 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Nash; The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising. Labor 1 December 2005; 2 (4): 119–120. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2-4-119 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2004 by Labor and Working-Class History Association2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.