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

The late James Green’s last book studies two major “wars” in West Virginia’s coal fields—the first taking place from 1912 through 1918 and the second from 1919 through 1921. Green describes the stark conditions that led to industrial unrest in a detailed chronological narrative: unsafe working conditions that produced tragedies such as the 1907 Monongah mining disaster, in which between 361 and 400 miners died; poor company housing; exploitative credit practices; and the detested long ton system of paying the value of 2,000 pounds of coal for 2,240 pounds. Miners nevertheless tolerated such conditions as long as there was enough employment for the descendants of the first settlers (called mountaineers in this book) and, later, African Americans and European immigrants who came to the coalfields looking for work. Financial crises and economic disruptions throughout the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century prompted restructuring in mining, worsening conditions for miners, and consequent increasing popularity of socialism. Many miners turned to the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which had been organizing in the coal camps since 1892 but faced determined employer resistance: mining companies blacklisted union sympathizers, turned their families out of the camps, and used private police to harass them. Inspired by leaders such as John Mitchell of the UMWA and Mother Jones, miners fought back for union recognition, freedom of speech and assembly, and freedom from the private police. For Green, the mining wars of West Virginia, far from being backward and parochial, were an essential part of the “larger history of American freedom” (9).While mining plutocrats, puppet politicians, and hired private-police goons are the obvious villains against whom coal miners struggled in Green’s narrative, there are less obvious and more ambiguous antagonists. Perhaps the most surprising of these were American Progressives generally. Green makes clear that the armed strikes of the West Virginia coalfields were part of an unprecedented strike wave throughout the United States during the “height of the Progressive Era” (92). In West Virginia, as in the United States generally, the Progressive impulse fed off bourgeois fears that the nation was about to be plunged into a class war. Progressives could be found across the political spectrum at the time, but many, like Theodore Roosevelt, who could otherwise be aghast at industrial tragedies such as that at Monongah in 1907, clearly felt that such problems gave workers and their families no right to rise. Instead, workers should bow to the inevitability of inequality and exploitation.Progressives favored moderate social and economic reforms that would preserve social order. This concern for order led William E. Glasscock, governor of West Virginia from 1909 to 1913, to send the National Guard to suppress fighting between miners and the Baldwin-Felt Detective Agency hired guns at Paint Creek and Cabin Creek in 1912. The guard’s commander, Adjutant General Charles D. Elliott, did his duty, but he could not help but be appalled by the terrible conditions under which the mining companies of the Kanawha Valley kept their workers and their families. “God does not walk in these hills,” Green quotes the general; rather, “the devil is here in these hills, and the devil is greed” (96). Such sentiments did not prevent Elliott from implementing martial law, nor did they halt Glasscock and his successor as governor, Henry Hatfield, a Republican with Progressive leanings, from supporting the arrest and court-martial of miners and their leaders, most notably Mother Jones.Progressivism arose from bourgeois fears growing in towns and cities across America in places such as Charleston. The people of such places could be bothered by mining companies’ greed and private-police tactics, but the prospect of class war appalled them and was especially strong on the eve of the United States’ entry into the First World War. Many miners had reason to hope that the tensions would ease; a federal Senate investigation in 1913, led by William S. Kenyon, of the conflict in West Virginia proved an indictment of mining company practices, setting the stage for the withdrawal of troops and special police and the end of strikes. Miners placed their faith in President Wood-row Wilson’s administration, especially hoping that federal regulation of coal mining and accompanying orders that companies cease resisting union organization would bring industrial peace in West Virginia. While the UMWA was able to establish a base in the Kanawha Valley, it continued to struggle in the coalfields of the southern part of the state. While miners continued to work through the UMWA, the union’s shift toward more business unionist principles, and prominent leaders’—most notably Mother Jones’s—continued faith in waiting for more support from federal Progressives, did not sit well with more radical local union leaders, notably Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney. Keeney and Mooney understood that many coal miners in the state sympathized with the more eclectic anarchism and socialism of the Industrial Workers of the World, and they led the militant struggle for the right to unionize, fueled by postwar recession and disillusionment. The prospect of class war always seemed to be on the horizon.Green argues that miners’ persistent radicalism continued a local democratic tradition transformed by leaders such as Keeney into representations of virtuous West Virginians, mountain men who were willing to stand tall against the shady capitalists of New York and London. Such mountain democracy was a hard sell for American Progressives and may have undermined miners’ place in the narrative of American freedom. Such interpretative arcs allow little room for gun-toting violence as a means of resisting exploitation. The breaking point was the Battle of Matewan in “Bloody Mingo” County in 1920, prompted by a local coal company’s use of Baldwin-Felts agents to evict union sympathizers from the Stone Mountain Coal Camp. The ensuing gun battle between miners and the agents, the deaths of ten people, including Albert and Lee Felts, and the resulting feud between union sympathizer William “Sid” Hatfield, the police chief of Matewan, and the Felts family—which ultimately led to Hatfield’s assassination in 1921—appeared to be a victory for the miners. They celebrated Hatfield, who had intervened on their behalf, but the miners could not control how the national press or state and federal politicians would portray the renewed conflict in the southern coalfields. Sid Hatfield was one of the clan made infamous in the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Opponents of unions and those who feared class war portrayed West Virginian mountain men as ignorant primitives whose violence contrasted with the modernity and moderation of Progressivism and who were made no better by their association with radical foreigners and always-suspect African Americans. When fighting broke out between miners in Logan County and mining companies’ hired police and strike breakers in the late summer of 1921 in what became known as the Battle of Blair Mountain, miners were surprised when the federal government, at the behest of Governor Ephraim Morgan, allowed the United States Army to intervene, including by aerial bombardment of miners’ positions at Crooked Creek Gap.Freedom, in the form of union recognition, might well have accompanied the New Deal in 1933, but at what price? The second war in the coalfields ended with the local UMWA leadership on the run from persecution, many of their supporters imprisoned, and the UMWA generally in decline. Government officials, with mining company support, planned to “Americanize” the miners, cloaking the open shop in the garb of a more explicit modernism articulated by Governor Morgan; individualism was forward-looking and rational in contrast to the irrational backwardness of collective action undertaken by miners, their families, and their communities. Ten years of economic hardship followed, and while deepening economic depression brought Franklin Roosevelt, his New Deal, and early industrial legality to the fore, it was not so much political radicalism or solidarity that defined the new UMWA members of West Virginia but rather flag-waving, red-white-and-blue patriotism.Americanization and freedom may or may not be the same thing, and it is hard to know, based on Green’s study, if the collective bargaining rights gained in 1933 meant the same as the broader freedoms sought through the ideological and community solidarity of the West Virginian miners who had fought so hard in the previous two decades. Green’s narrative style favors rich description over analysis and argument. This style introduces a conceptual ambiguity in the relationship between miners’ politics, Progressivism, and Americanization. Miners became freer in 1933, but it remains unclear if that freedom was really the right to unionize or the right to conform by putting aside the leftist and popular democratic tendencies of an earlier time.

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