In the annals of labor history, particularly Appalachian labor history, there are few events as important and long-echoing as the Battle of Blair Mountain, a culturally defining moment of worker organization and an enduring display of the violence the ruling class is willing to inflict upon them. Blair Mountain is treated as a conflict of the past, a glimpse into a different world where hired thugs brutalized industrial workers with clubs and bullets. The unfortunate truth is that the state-sponsored violence towards the workers has only grown in the passing decades, though it has changed its shape into a more palatable form. Times have changed, but we are still all workers, and we still all have boots on our necks.
In the late 19th century, existence as an Appalachian coal miner was one of brutality and exploitation. It was backbreaking toil in miserable, cramped, deadly conditions with hazards around every corner. One could suffer a quick and violent crushing death via cave-in, or a long agonizing decline from black lung. These workers were paid not in US Dollars, but Scrip, a currency that could only be redeemed in the company store. Termination meant eviction, and eviction meant starvation and death. Even if a terminated worker had the means to survive, be it a social network of kin or access to the basic resources needed for survival, termination meant losing your social circle. Workers lived in company towns, worshipped at company churches, and sent their kids to company schools.
On top of the physical torment, these workers were regularly exploited and denigrated by their employers. One common practice was to encourage the Weighman, the company representative who would measure the amount of coal a worker hauled, to deliberately underreport cart weights, denying workers their wages. But coal mining was the local culture. Families saw generations of miners, sons slowly succumbing to the same fates as their fathers. People were tired. People were angry. And things were about to change.
In 1921, The United Mine Workers union conducted an organization drive in the Mingo County region of West Virginia. Thousands of workers joined the union and were promptly terminated, facing eviction from their company town dwellings. To carry out these mass evictions, the local coal companies hired agents from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who saw frequent work as strikebreakers and hired muscle. Unrest quickly grew, and violence was soon to follow. In an event later named the Matewan Massacre, members of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency shot and killed the town’s Mayor, Cabell Testerman, with agents later assassinating Matewan Chief of Police Sid Hatfield (who was present at the Matewan Massacre, and killed Albert Felts for the murder of the mayor).
The Coal mines, meanwhile, were continuing to produce, operated by company imported Scab labor. The area was soon declared under martial law, with many miners arrested for altercations between scab labor and Baldwin-Felts agents. In one final push for a peaceful resolution, union organizers Frank Keeney and Mother Jones presented a list of miners demands to the governor of West Virginia. All were immediately rejected. This was the final straw for the workers, who gathered in the tens of thousands and marched on Mingo County to free their fellow workers. Their path would lead them through Blair Mountain, where anti-union Logan County police, supported by a private army funded by the coal companies, were preparing to do what police do best, hurt workers.
The Battle of Blair Mountain is, to this day, the largest armed civilian uprising in American History. It’s important to remember that this wasn’t a sudden outburst of violence; rather, it was the culmination of ten years of violence and unionbusting efforts from the coal companies. Years before the Battle of Blair Mountain itself, events like the Ludlow massacre saw women and children burned by Baldwin-Felts agents, who even utilized an armored train to pepper striking miners’ tents with machine gun fire. The pivotal battle made it clear that no escalation of force was out of the question to ensure workers did not organize. Some were bombed by planes with explosives and even poison gas bombs left over from the great war. Only with the arrival of federal troops did the striking workers surrender, with many only receiving light prison sentences as a compromise to end the hostilities.
As dramatic and exciting as the events of the Coal Wars were, and as much as the period endures in the hearts of Appalachians as an example of working folks’ tenacity in the face of oppression, the battle did not ultimately break down the power structures of the Appalachian coal industry. But this is the unfortunate truth of class struggle, it is enduring and unending. And as time passes, the means of bludgeoning workers to keep us down have changed, and we must change in our tactics to combat them. Where once the truncheon covered in workers’ blood was in the hands of a private agent, now it is in the hands of the militarized police force.
Since the 1960s, American police forces around the nation have been rapidly expanding their armaments while reducing the legal barriers in place to prevent them from using lethal force. The slow spread of SWAT teams (originally created for only the most dire of violent threats), no-knock raids, flashbang grenades, and surplus military equipment for small town police forces has been a blight on the working class. Rather than provide treatment for drug addiction, police simply imprison these non-violent users, where the prison labor complex will further exploit them. It is a new system of modern slavery, one that the state and its corporate donors greatly benefit from. The process of civil forfeiture, allowing law enforcement to ‘confiscate’ any belongings or currency that can be loosely connected to a drug arrest, has accounted for billions of dollars going to the United States Justice and Treasury Department. The narcotics these officers so brutally seek out are often only in the hands of their users through shadowy deals made with producers. One may think of Reagan era dealings like Pablo Escobar, but even recently, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez saw a pardon from President Donald Trump for smuggling over 400 million tons of cocaine into our country. The state allows these narcotics to enter our communities, refuse to provide treatment for the addictions they cause, then commit tremendous violence against the people using them while robbing these users and throwing them into privatized prisons to be exploited by our capitalist system’s corporate donors.
We must never forget Blair Mountain and the lessons it taught the working class. There is nothing the ruling class fears more than mass worker organization. They will shoot us, beat us, starve us, and break us in order to prevent us. They’ll try to take away our livelihoods and our homes. They’ll flood our communities with narcotics and opioids and then lock us away for using them. There simply is no violence the state is not willing to inflict upon its own citizens to ensure that the value we generate goes directly to the pockets of the corporate ruling class. I began writing this article in early December, and since then the federal government has murdered and tormented the people of Minneapolis, who have shown tremendous solidarity in the face of bigotry and opposed it with mutual aid and community safety. Similar to Blair Mountain, workers who have committed the mere crime of organizing and working together to resist oppression have been met with military grade resistance and violence. We must remember, always, that at the end of the day all we have is our comrades in the workers’ struggle, and no matter how hard the ruling class hopes to convince us of otherwise, we outnumber them, and the workers united can never be defeated. We must coordinate, communicate, and prepare for any level of violence our corporate backed oppressors will inflict upon us, and the only way forward is through workplace organization and community mutual aid. The pattern and wearer of the boot may have changed, but the boot still remains firmly on our necks.
Written by Zane Schacht
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