Battle of Blair Mountain

In 1921, coal miners fed up with unfair labor practices and exploitation took up arms against their employers. The resulting conflict lasted five days and has been called the biggest armed uprising on U.S. soil since the Civil War.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy Wilson. Coal Mining is practically synonymous with West Virginia.
There are lots of other industries in West Virginia, lots

(00:23):
of people in West Virginia. You have nothing to do
with the coal mining industry. But of the twenty five U.
S States that produce coal, West Virginia's production is the
second largest behind Wyoming coal production. And all of the
accidents and the labor disputes that have come along with
cold with coal production have all just played a really

(00:44):
central role in West Virginia's history, and today's story played
a huge part not only in West Virginia's history, but
also in the greater context of labor rights in the
rest of the United States. In one coal miners who
were completely fed up with unfair labor practices and exploitation
and attempts to prevent them from unionizing, took up arms

(01:06):
against their employers, and the resulting Battle of Blair Mountain
went on for five days and has been called the
biggest armed uprising on US soil since the Civil War.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the coal
industry in America was built on company towns and exploited

(01:26):
labor practices. And this wasn't just the practice of one
mine or one mining company. Mines with different owners operating
in different states all basically followed the same system with
similar labor practices, and if you are not familiar with
the company town phenomenon, to start off, they did not
pay an actual money. They paid company script, and company

(01:49):
script was accepted only at the company store, which was
also run by the coal company. So since miners weren't
being paid real money that was legal tender anywhere else,
they had no option to shop anywhere other than the
company store, which was owned by their bosses. And it
is probably no surprise that goods at these company stores
were expensive thanks to a hefty markup, so if the

(02:12):
MIND gave its workers a raise, it also raised prices
at the store, so the increase in wages didn't cut
into the mind's profits. In addition to the company's store
was company housing provided by the mines, which deducted the
rent from the workers pay, and often this housing was
little better than a shock and miners also frequently had

(02:33):
to lease the equipment that they needed just to do
their jobs, and they leased that equipment, of course, from
the coal company. Instead of being paid an hourly rate
or some kind of salary, miners were paid by the
pound of coal that they mind. And to further game
the system, coal company has used all kinds of tricks
to alter the apparent weight of the coal that the

(02:55):
miners were bringing up. So, for example, a cart that
was supposed to hold two thousand pounds of coal might
really hold pounds of coal, meaning that the miners were
mining five hundred extra pounds of coal that they weren't
being paid for. And miners also had their paid docked
for anything that was in their cart but was not coal,

(03:16):
So if there were pieces of rocks in the mix,
that was also a doct from their pay. And the
person who made that judgment with someone hired by the
coal company who was trained to air in the coal
company's favor. It was not uncommon for the bosses to
deliberately overestimate how much rock was in the coal, and
this is a practice that was known as cribbing. All

(03:38):
of this really meant that often coal miners were not
even breaking even, they were effectively losing money by having
a job working in a coal company or working in
a coal mine, and on top of that, coal mining
is dangerous work. It was particularly dangerous in West Virginia
at this point because the mines in West Virginia weren't
regulated as well, or they were no by was really

(04:00):
being regulated extremely well, but the mines in West Virginia
had less regulation than in other parts of the United States.
Between eighteen ninety and nineteen twelve, more miners died on
the job in West Virginia than in any other state
with similarly exploitative and dangerous conditions all over the country,
miners tried to unionize so that they could collectively negotiate

(04:24):
for actual pay with money instead of script, and safer
working conditions. Immediately, mines had employees signed what was known
as yellow dog contracts, and these were contracts that basically
said they would not join a union. In spite of
all this opposition, the United Mine Workers of America got
it started Ohio in eighteen nine. The UMW organized miners

(04:46):
in several states over the next decade, and its first
recognition in West Virginia was in nineteen o two. As
is often the case, the process of unionizing workers and
becoming recognized as a bargaining organization was a long, contentious
and sometimes violent process. This was true all over and
in many industries, not just in West Virginia or in

(05:08):
coal mining. Coal companies would evict striking workers from company
owned housing, so this caused tense cities to spring up
around mining towns, and the companies would also hire detective
agencies to investigate and harass any miners who were talking
about unionizing. One of the agencies that frequently worked on
behalf of the mining industry was called the Baldwin Felts Agency,

(05:31):
which employed all kinds of spy work and intimidation techniques
on behalf of the mine operators. Yeah, the word detective
agency in this context is kind of generous. A lot
of this work was not detective work. It was threatening, bullying, harassment,
sometimes murdering work. So over the years, as miners tried

(05:53):
to organize, mine operators and miners alike took up arms
against one another, and sometimes on the minor sides, these
weapons were actually provided to them by the union, unionizers
and mining companies. Where it odds with one another. In
West Virginia all the way through the nineteen hundreds, and
the nineteen teens. At one point in nineteen twelve, Governor

(06:15):
William E. Glassick declared martial law and dispatched the militia
in response to labor disputes and strikes that had turned violent.
It was during that particular period that Mary Harris Jones,
also known as Mother Jones, started advocating for for labor
rights in West Virginia. Through the men to late nineteen teens,
relations between the miners and the coal companies were a

(06:37):
little bit calmer thanks to a changeover in umw A
leadership and the United States entry into World War One.
Because of the war, there was a huge demand for coal,
which meant that there was more work and there was
also better pay. But even though there wasn't quite so
much outright conflict between the unions and the coal companies,
at that particular point, the unions really hadn't been able

(07:00):
to make much headway in southern and southwestern West Virginia.
The mining companies there were taking great pains to make
sure unions could not get a foothold, and in Logan
County in particular, mine operators were working directly with Sheriff
Don Chaffin to keep union organizers out of the area.

(07:20):
So by West Virginia's Logan and Mingo counties were the
largest coal producing region that had no union. Before we
talk a little bit more about specifically what was going
on in southern West Virginia, Let's take a brief moment
for a word or responsor. A few things happened to
turn this situation into a real powder keg in southern

(07:42):
West Virginia. Word reached the capital of Charleston, West Virginia
that Sheriff Chafin and his deputies were harassing and beating
up labor organizers. This led to an armed protest march,
and the governor, who at that point was John J. Cornwell,
promised that he would investigate, but the commission that is
appointed to do the investigation wound up finding in favor

(08:03):
of the Mind companies. A few months later, union mine
workers got a raise granted by the US Coal Commission.
This didn't affect southern West Virginia's non union workers, who
organized the strike in response. The UMW saw this as
an opportunity to get Southern mine workers to join the union.
This wasn't a hundred percent because they wanted to combat

(08:25):
the unfair labor practices that were going on in southern
West Virginia. Although that was a factor, a big part
of it was also that having so many minds operating
with non union labor, and having those minds be particularly productive,
had the potential to really undermine the union and the
union's work elsewhere in the state. In response to the
UMW activities, uh the coal company operators called in detectives again,

(08:51):
detectives with the air quotes from the Baldwin Felts Detective
Agency to try to break the union. They also fired
everyone who joined the union, and they had victed them
from their company housing. On May nineteenth, nineteen twenty, things
took a violent turn in the town of maite Wan.
Sid Hatfield, also known his two Gun Sid, yes one

(09:12):
of those hat Fields if you are familiar with the
story of the hat Fields of the McCoy's, although that
was long in the past. At this point, Sid Hatfield
was the police chief of mait Wan, and he encouraged
residents to arm themselves in response to all this trouble
that was going on, and they did. When detectives Albert
and Lee Felts tried to arrest Hatfield, gunfire broke out

(09:34):
and eleven people were killed, Seven of them were detectives
and four of them were residents of the town. Among
the towns dead was the mayor, and among the detectives
killed were the Felts brothers, who were brothers of Tom Felts,
the agency's chief. Because Hatfield later married the mayor's widow,
people speculated that he had pulled the trigger himself. He

(09:56):
faced charges for it and he became something of a
folk hero, but he was ultimately acquitted. This was really
kind of a tipping point, and following the Mate One massacre,
Union membership grew really quickly, with nine percent of Mingo
Counties miners being part of the UMW. By July of
that year was such an upswelling of support, the UMW

(10:17):
called for a strike to demand better pay and better
working conditions. The mine operators, on the other hand, brought
in strike breakers and armed guards, and they carried on
with business as usual mining coal and in Mingo County,
people were jailed without bail for everything from carrying union
literature to carrying a gun. When the Mingo County jail

(10:37):
was full, they started sending inmates to jails in neighboring counties.
At this point, the unions and the mines were effectively
at war with each other. Gunfire was exchanged on a
regular basis. The pro union forces would attack non union
mines and miners who weren't in the union. They also
destroyed railroad tracks that were allowing the mines to get

(10:59):
their call out to the buyers who needed to receive it. Detectives, guards,
deputies and others on the anti union side attacked the
tent colonies where fired workers had been living, and they
also investigated, threatened, and harassed the striking workers. And this
conflict went on for more than a year. On August first,

(11:20):
said Hatfield and another man named Ed Chambers, we're going
to stand trial on charges of conspiracy stemming to their
unionizing work. And this conspiracy trial was going to take
place in McDowell County, where there was really strong anti
union sentiment. While the two men were on their way
into the courthouse for their trial, detectives from the Baldwin

(11:41):
Felt Agency shot and killed them both. Naturally, there was outrage.
A week later, a crowd of hundreds marched on the
capitol in Charleston in protest, and they presented a list
of demands for better conditions to the governor. The governor
who denied all of them. Ten days later, the mine
started planning a second march. They were going to gather

(12:02):
in a town outside of Charleston, and from there they
were going to march to Mingo County to free all
of the union organizers and others who were being jailed there.
And basically they were going to try to force the
companies that were running the mines to back down. But
to do this they were going to have to go
through Logan County, and this was a stronghold of the
mining companies and of Sheriff Chaffin, who had a long

(12:25):
history of using strong arm tactics against unions. Sheriff Chase
Chafin also had the financial backing of the Logan County
Coal Operators Association, so they funded his efforts to basically
raise a small army to fend off these miners. As
all this was going on, Frank Keeney and Bill Blizzard
of the UMW tried to rally more support among all

(12:46):
the union members. They were trying to get as much
backing as as possible for their effort. On the other hand,
Mother Jones was pretty sure this was not going to
go in the miners favor, and she was trying to
dissuade them from taking further action at this point. The
march to Mingo County started on August twenty four with
the miners who had armed themselves with all manner of weapons,

(13:08):
wearing red bandanas so they could easily identify one another.
A lot of these men were veterans of World War One.
They were trained in combat, and they had among them
men with experience and strategy and tax it tactics. They
developed codes so that they could communicate with each other,
They cut telephone and telegraph lines so that the mine
operators would not be able to get information, and they

(13:31):
generally mounted a pretty organized resistance. UH women played a
part in all of this as well. They donned nurses
camps with the umw insignia and prepared for the inevitable
injuries that they knew were going to need attention, because
they knew there was a lot of danger and people
were going to get hurt. In addition to using the
money that the Mine Operators Association had given him to

(13:53):
build up his force, Sheriff Chaffin also rallied the strike
breakers to fight on the anti Union side of the battle.
That kind of fleshed out the ranks of detectives, mine guards,
and state police who were all set to defend the
mine operators. The mine workers vastly outnumbered Chaffin's force, but
Chaffin's people had far better weapons, including machine guns and

(14:14):
an artillery piece. The governor, who could see that things
were really escalating, asked Washington, d C. For help, and
at first the federal response was to send them Brigadier
General Harry Bandholt to try to keep the peace. The miners,
knowing that the federal government had been called in, actually
thought that the federal support was going to be on

(14:36):
their side. But atmosphere at this point was extremely anti
unionization in the United States. A lot of states had
anti union laws on the books, and a lot of
business leaders were certain that unions would just put a
damper on post war growth. Wanting to end things without
further bloodshed, Bandholds quite candidly told UMW leaders Frank Kenney

(14:57):
and Fred Mooney that if they could just get them
miners to go home, it would all be over. The
two of them did try to get the miners to
go home, and some of the miners did start on
their way back, but before long, one of the state
police captains, who was on the side of the mine operators,
started a fight with some armed miners, and at least

(15:18):
one person was killed in the resulting fray. Many of
the miners who had agreed to go home turned around
and went back to the march really ready for a fight.
On August twenty nine, Keeney and Mooney fled. At this point.
Both of them were facing murder charges due to earlier events,
and they knew that they'd have no sympathy now that
they'd failed to keep the peace bill. Blizzard took their

(15:40):
place as the top um w leader. The miners forces
met up with hate with Chaffin's hastily built army on
Blair Mountain, and the mountain basically lay in the miner's
path to Mingo County. They had really no choice other
than they could go over it or they could go
around it. While the miners had much better numbers in
addition to their better firepower, Chaffin's men also had the

(16:04):
high ground. As the miners tried to break through the
defenders lines, chief and dropped tear gas and bombs on
them from Chartered biplanes. When it became extremely clear that
their efforts to end things peacefully had failed, Brigadier General
ban Holtz sent in the troops from Fort Thomas, Kentucky.

(16:24):
The first of these troops arrived on September one and
mostly did reconnaissance work. Infantry started arriving in Logan and
Mingo Counties on September three, and the miners, who were
not really keen on the idea of fighting against the
actual army, started to surrender, although some of them continued
fighting into the fourth of September. And even though the

(16:46):
miners ultimately surrendered, many really look at this as a
moral victory. Uh it was the federal troops and not
the mine companies that they had surrendered. For about a
thousand miners of the estimated ten thousand who fought officially surrendered.
They were supposed to turn in their weapons, but the
miners only turned in about four hundred guns. The rest

(17:10):
of the weapons were dropped or hidden, or smuggled back
to the miners homes. The death toll of the Battle
of Blair Mountain was somewhere between thirty and fifty, which
is surprising considering how many men fought and what kinds
of weapons had been employed. This seems to have been
because a lot of the fighting happened through brush without
a clear line of sight on either party's part. The

(17:30):
miners who surrendered were allowed to go home, and some
of them were transported there by train. The idea was
that the leaders of this resistance were the ones who
were going to be held responsible. All in all, there
were one thousand, two hundred seventeen indictments that came down
from a grand jury as a result of the battle.
Three d and twenty five of these indictments were for

(17:51):
murder and twenty four were for treason. Most of these
eventually led to acquittals, or they were thrown out, or
they just never aimed to trial. But because of the
battle and the surrender, the Union itself, especially its presence
in southern West Virginia, was almost destroyed. Membership in southern

(18:12):
West Virginia dropped just precipitously, and it took almost a
decade for the UMW to regroup and start advocating for
better working conditions again. In two thousand eight, the site
of the battle was nominated to be placed on the
National Register of Historic Places. Before a property can be
listed on the register, owners of the property have the

(18:34):
chance to object to its being listed. The back and
forth that went on about whether the Blair Mountains site
should be listed was pretty long. Originally there were sixty
six owners who were identified as owning land that was
part of the site, but that number rose as high
as sixty eight and dropped as low as fifty seven
over the back and forth. The number of objections to

(18:56):
the site being listed on the register also changed a
lot based on who was doing the counting, environmental groups
or coal companies. Consequently, the battlefield was briefly placed on
the National Register of Historical Places, and then it was
removed from the register after only a few months. Several
conservation groups, including the Sierra Club, sued the U S

(19:18):
Department of the Interior over the battlefields delisting. The U
S District Court for the District of Columbia upheld the
decision in so the battlefield is not currently on the register. Yeah,
environmental groups were really hoping that having it listed on
the Register of Historic Places, while that would not give
it complete protection from an environmental standpoint, it would offer

(19:41):
some protection. One of the reasons that people are so
interested in this is because of mountaintop removal mining. There's
an ongoing struggle between people who really want to preserve
the mountain and people who want to mine it, and
in June of eleven, environmentalists and historians recreated the nine
March to Blair Mountain as part of a big protest

(20:03):
and rally for preservation efforts. On the other hand, people
who supported the coal industry basically lined the root of
the march with their own counter protest. The battle and
the miners who originally fought it have been brought up
as a symbol of the fight to preserve the mountain
or to stop mountaintop removal mining entirely. Opponents point out
that this is really inappropriation. They weren't fighting for the

(20:26):
mountain at all. They were fighting for safer jobs with
fair pay and non exploited business practices, as well as
the right to unionize. Coal continues to be a major
industry in West Virginia, but new mining techniques and new
methods mean that there are fewer jobs within the industry.
So while overall the coal industry pays pretty well now

(20:48):
um there are far fewer jobs available, so the people
mining coal are making a much better living today than
they were in nine but unemployment is a huge issue
in the regions of West Virginia where the main industry
has always been coal mining. And sort of as a
coda note on the word redneck, about six of the

(21:10):
people who requested this episode, because we've had quite a
number of requests, have mentioned in their request that the
Battle of Blair Mountain was where the word redneck originated
to mean a white rural person that you believe to
be poorer and more ignorant than you are. Uh. First
of all, redneck is actually considered a slur. It is
no more acceptable than any derogatory word for people from

(21:33):
other regions that people might use. Second of all, the
word redneck actually appeared in print for the first time
in eighteen thirty, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and
Newport Royal reported it as quote a name bestowed on
Presbyterians in Fayetteville. She was writing about Fayetteville, North Carolina.
It's not totally clear how the word redneck more from

(21:55):
that use into today's sort of hillbilliesque flavor, but it
was used as a synonym for hayseed bye and was
also used to mean an uncouth countryman by so it
was definitely established in the vernacular with the meaning pretty
much like it means today before the events in nine

(22:17):
one at Blair Mountain. So while the miners were wearing
red bandanas and they probably were called rednecks because they
had read red bandanas on that use is not where
the word redneck came from. The more you know, the
more you know. Yeah, it drives me kind of crazy

(22:37):
when people use that word, uh, because it's it's a
very derogatory term. I know that there are many people
who use the word with pride, as there are many
people who use many slurs to talk about themselves with pride.
But I cannot think of any time that I have
used one or I've heard one person say that word
about another person without casting huge, sparaging judgment on them.

(23:02):
He Yeah, it usually does come with a healthy dose
of superiority. Uh. Do you have a little bit of
listener mail as well for him? Okay, I do have
listener mail. It is from Anna and Anna writes about
our podcast on the yah As Sound Wad War of Independence.
She says, I was so excited to see that you
had done a podcast on the ya As Sound Wold War,

(23:24):
as I just visited Ghana last March. I work at
North Carolina, anti historically black university that also has a
fascinating history in terms of civil rights. I was so
excited to see that you had done a podcast on
the Yaha sound walld war as I just visited Ghana
last March. She goes on to talk about working at
North Carolina A and T, which is a historically black

(23:45):
university that played a part in the civil rights movement
in the United States because it was for A and
T University freshman who started to sit in at the
Greensboro Woolworth. She says, we took a group of students
to Ghana where we visited Kumasi in the former Assante
Palace which is now the Manhea Palace Museum. The old

(24:07):
palace itself looks more like a regular big old house,
which is very cool in that there are all these
peacocks wandering around the grounds which connect to the current
Monkeya Palace. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. I apologize
if I have slurred it in some way. One reason
in particular that I like Yah, other than the fact
that she is so badass, is that she and I

(24:27):
share the same Assanti name. Assanti names are assigned based
on the day of the week you were born. We
can guess that Kofi Annan, for instance, was born on
a Friday because Kofe is one of the names given
to boys born on Fridays. They're also names dealing with
birth order and twins. Most Ghanians are given both Christian
and Assanti names, and they will choose which to go
by when they get older. This is why you often

(24:49):
meet a lot of folks from Ghana who have the
same name. I know a lot of Kakus, which means
I know a lot of people who were born on Wednesday.
I'm a ta watching a few textile pictures that I
think Holly might appreciate. The clothing and Ghana is absolutely
beautiful and colorful, and when we were over the exchange
rate was so good that we could get beautiful handmade

(25:11):
outmit outfits for not much. The pictures I am including
are of can tape cloth being woven. This is the
cloth worn by royalty. The hand cranked sewing machine that
the women who made our clothes used. Power can be
intermittent in Ghana. As we learned the entrance to the
slave river, we visited This is where slaves who were
often sold to the various European conquerors by local tribes

(25:34):
took their last bath after walking across Ghana and being
put into the slave dungeons. She also talks about the
outfit that her tour guide was wearing, which is a
pretty cool outfit. She says that people in Ghana were
a mixture of traditional and western wear, so it's not
uncommon to see people in the street wearing many different
types of clothing. Um, and she said a picture of peacocks.

(25:57):
She talks about how Ghana is a fascinating place to
visit and it's um the official languages English, they are
incredibly friendly people and amazing clothing, and she says to
keep up the excellent work on the show. Thank you
so much, Anna. Yes, I loved the pictures. I actually
have a treadle machine very similar to the one that
she sent the photo of, so yeah, we have several. Yeah,

(26:20):
we have several machines like that in my family at
various places that most of them belonged to grandmothers and
great grandmothers. Yep I inherited mine through Brian's family who
have had it for more than a hundred years so,
and those things will go forever if you just do
a little bit of maintenance on them. Yep. So, if
you would like to write to us about this or
any other subject, we are at History Podcast at housework

(26:42):
dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com
slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History.
Our tumbler has miss in history dot tumbler dot com,
and we're on tinterest at pinterest dot com slash miss
in history. If you would like to learn more about
what we've talked about today, you can come to our
parent website, that is how Stuff Works dot com and
put the word underground mining into the search bar. You

(27:03):
will find the article how underground Mining Works. And you
can also come to our website, which is missed in
history dot com. You can find show notes all of
our episodes there. We now have working tags that will
let you navigate through all of the various episodes that
are tagged with a particular subject, like the American Revolution,
for example. We are still tagging the back catalog, but

(27:25):
our tags are navigable now, which is great. You can
do all of that and a whole lot more at
our website, which is how stuff works dot Com or
missed in History dot com For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff works dot
Com