SYMHC Classics: Battle of Blair Mountain

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Speaker 1: Bappy Saturday, we are coming up on the one anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain, which started on auguste So for today's Saturday Classic, we are returning to our episode on that battle, which came out on July. Toward the end of this episode, we talk about a lengthy back and forth involved with trying to get the site of the battle listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That back and forth continued after this episode came out, including a case in the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia. After all that, on June, Joy Beasley, keeper of the National Register of Historic Places, issued a memorandum calling the two thousand nine decision to remove the site from the register erroneous and confirming that it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm fry. Coal mining is practically synonymous with West Virginia. There are lots of other industries in West Virginia, lots of people in West Virginia who 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 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 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 exploit of 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 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 any where 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 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 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 companies used all kinds of tricks to alter the apparent weight of the coal that the 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, So if there were pieces of rocks in the mix, that was also a doctor 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 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 mine was really being regular add 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 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 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, content us and sometimes violent process. This was true all over and in many industries, not just in West Virginia or in 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, 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 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 were at odds with one another in West Virginia all the way through the nineteen hundreds. In the nineteen teens, at one point in nineteen twelve, Governor 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 mid to late nineteen teens, relations between the miners and the coal companies were a 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 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. 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 from sponsor. A few things happened to turn this situation into a real powder keg in southern West Virginia. Word reached the capital of Charleston, West Virginia that Sheriff Chaffin 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 was appointed to do the investigation wound up finding in favor 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 a strike in response. The UMW saw this as an opportunity to get Southern Mind workers to join the union. This wasn't a hundred percent because they wanted to combat 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, 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 evicted them from their company housing. On May nine, twenty, things took a violent turn in the town of mate Wan. Sid Hatfield also known as two Gun Sid. Yes, one 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, said 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 and an 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 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. With such an upswelling of support, the UMW 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 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 man lines and miners who weren't in the union. They also destroyed railroad tracks that were allowing the minds to get their coal 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, Sid 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 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 demand for better conditions to the governor. The governor who denied all of them. Ten days later, the miners started planning a second march. They were going to gather 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 history of using strong arm tactics against unions. Sheriff Chase Chaffin 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 the union members. They were trying to get as much backing as as possible for their effort. On the other hand, mo Or 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, 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 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 build hold 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 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 him Brigadier General Harry Bandholtz 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 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 blood shed, band Holds quite candidly told U m W leaders Frank Kenney and Fred Mooney that if they could just get the 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 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 place as the top um w leader. The miners forces met up with Hey 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 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. 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 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 out 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 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 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 twenty five of these indictments were for murder and twenty four were for treason. Most of these eventually led to acquittals, or they were thrown out, or they just never came 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 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 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 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 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 some protection. One of the reasons that people are so interested in the US 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 March to Blair Mountain as part of a big protest 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 an appropriation. They weren't fighting for the 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, um there are far fewer jobs available. So the people mining coal are making a much better living today than they were in ninety one, 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 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 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 Fayettville, North Carolina. It's not totally clear how the word redneck morphed from that use into today's sort of hill billiesque flavor, but it was used as a synonym for hayseed by 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 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 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. I've heard one person say that word about another person without casting huge disparaging judgment on them. Yeah, it usually does come with a healthy dose of superiority. Heay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Ye Stuff You missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H