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The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom
By James Green
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this ebook
“The most comprehensive and comprehendible history of the West Virginia Coal War I’ve ever read.” —John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan
On September 1, 1912, the largest, most protracted, and deadliest working-class uprising in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were fifty thousand mine workers, the nation’s largest labor union, and the legendary “miners’ angel,” Mother Jones. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis that verged on civil war, stretching from the creeks and hollows of the Appalachians to the US Senate. Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent—then broken. The violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict, as an army of more than fifty thousand miners finally marched to an explosive showdown.
Extensively researched and vividly told, this definitive book about an often-overlooked chapter of American history, “gives this backwoods struggle between capital and labor the due it deserves. [Green] tells a dark, often despairing story from a century ago that rings true today” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).
On September 1, 1912, the largest, most protracted, and deadliest working-class uprising in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were fifty thousand mine workers, the nation’s largest labor union, and the legendary “miners’ angel,” Mother Jones. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis that verged on civil war, stretching from the creeks and hollows of the Appalachians to the US Senate. Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent—then broken. The violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict, as an army of more than fifty thousand miners finally marched to an explosive showdown.
Extensively researched and vividly told, this definitive book about an often-overlooked chapter of American history, “gives this backwoods struggle between capital and labor the due it deserves. [Green] tells a dark, often despairing story from a century ago that rings true today” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).
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Reviews for The Devil Is Here in These Hills
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
8 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The history of labor relations in the United States (and quite possibly in other countries, though I’m not as familiar with those) has involved workers having to fight hard for every gain, whether it’s shorter workdays, a living wage, or safer working conditions. But even people who support unions forget just how bad things were for workers before unions gained enough clout to be effective advocates, or just what workers went through to earn the right to join together to bargain collectively. That’s where James Green’s book comes in. And we forget also just how little support wage workers got from their elected governments to protect them from illegal retaliation by corporate owners. In fact, one of the few constants in the story of the rise of industrialization in the U.S. is that government and law enforcement would always come down on the side of the owners over the workers.West Virginia was one of the last coal-mining areas to be widely unionized, and coal operators used that to their advantage, squeezing workers’ wages in order to compete with lower prices against unionized mines whose higher labor costs resulted in higher prices. Which is generally fine; that’s the way capitalism works, or is supposed to. But capitalism is not supposed to actively suppress the civil and constitutional rights of workers, and that happened repeatedly in West Virginia coal mining towns (and of course elsewhere in the country). Miners were thrown in jail for gathering together in peaceful rallies, punished for expressing opinions that differed from those of the owners, and physically attacked and killed for trying to use work stoppages to put pressure on mine owners to recognize the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Miners who expressed support for the union were summarily fired, evicted from their company-owned housing, and forced to live in tent camps as they watched strikebreakers — almost always from out-of-state — file in to take over their jobs and their homes.Green does an excellent job of detailing exactly how the extraction industries moved into West Virginia in the 19th century, largely owned by “absentee landlords” who did not care one bit about the local environment or the local populations as long as their profits rose every year. It’s a familiar story, but no less disheartening for its being so. Another familiar aspect of the story is the way that local law enforcement and politicians up to the state and federal levels not only failed to protect workers’ civil rights, they actively colluded to deny them. Mingo and Logan counties were sites of some of the most ruthless actions against striking miners by law enforcement, including the infamous “Matewan Massacre” in 1920, which was dramatized in the John Sayles movie Matewan. As if corrupt government-based law enforcement wasn’t bad enough, company towns (so called because the coal companies owned everything, from the land to the housing to the stores to the schools to the churches) were policed by private guards hired by the mine operators and not subject to the laws of the area.People from Appalachia have a reputation for being strong, stubborn, and prone to violence. (Many of the characters in this book on both sides of the conflict are named Hatfield, all members of one of the families at the center of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud.) So there should be no surprise that when miners were badly mistreated by the coal operators, and their rights were not only not protected by law enforcement but actively violated by the same people who were supposed to protect them, they turned to violence. There were two “mine wars” in West Virginia, the first in 1912-13, leading to the death of dozens of miners and mine guards before it was ended when the governor declared martial law and defused the situation by throwing many striking miners in jail. The onset of World War I created a demand for coal that temporarily raised wages and stilled protest, but the postwar recession once again set miners in direct conflict with mine operators who slashed wages to levels far below that of unionized workers in many industries, not just mining. Tensions rose as the UMWA tried once again to organize workers, leading to the second mine war in 1920-21, which ended only when President Warren Harding sent federal troops to quell the violence and resulted in the virtual elimination of the UMWA in West Virginia. It wasn’t until Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in the midst of the Great Depression that lawmakers began to take real, positive steps to protect workers’ rights as they tried to unionize. Once the playing field was leveled, with the ability of mine owners to illegally fire workers and suppress their activities and speech, the union roared back and rapidly unionized West Virginia mines and signed contracts that provided meaningful advances in wages, safety, and civil protections.One of the most thought-provoking aspects of this book for me was contrasting the difference in effect of nonviolent protest versus armed resistance in this place and at this time. In short, there was no difference. Neither tactic resulted in any long-term gains for the workers or the union. I came away from it thinking about the incredible waste of life that resulted from both mine wars, and how the loss of those lives accomplished nothing concrete or lasting. Green makes an argument toward the end of the book that the history of violent resistance created a determination and unity among the miners that made them quick to sign up for the UMWA once FDR cleared the way for the union to operate legally. In the end, I was unpersuaded by his argument. In light of what happened in West Virginia, I gained even more admiration and respect for the campaign of civil disobedience that Martin Luther King and others used in the 1950s and 1960s to make such huge gains for civil rights.One other interesting aspect to spotlight in an already too-long review: Miners in West Virginia around the turn of the 19th to 20th century were surprisingly diverse in their backgrounds. There were plenty of white native Appalachian men, but there were also large numbers of new immigrants, especially Italians, and African Americans. One of the most heartening things I learned from Green was that the United Mine Workers of America was a leader in the notion of equal status for members of any and all ethnicities and nationalities. This is in stark contrast to some other union movements of the time, which struggled with integrating people of color into their membership without alienating white workers. Green doesn’t delve deeply into why the UMWA was so egalitarian, but it is implied that working in coal mines was such hard, dangerous work that anyone who could pull their own weight earned the respect of their fellow miners regardless of their background.I wish every otherwise well-meaning person today who thinks unions are unnecessary, or even actively detrimental to workers, would read this book. Without the United Mine Workers of America, the industrialists who owned the coal companies in this country would have happily kept their workers ignorant, deeply impoverished, and risking their lives every day without any hope of a better life for their children. The idea that corporations would willingly provide the gains in wages, health and safety, and access to democratic due process without being forced to by union workers who fought and sometimes died protecting their basic human rights is laughable. And anyone who thinks that left to their own devices modern corporations would not revert to their former abusive ways has only to look around at the state of modern union-free industries like meatpacking, fast-food and other service workers, to realize that while few are actually being shot or thrown in jail these days, there is still work to be done in the area of protecting and supporting workers.
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The Devil Is Here in These Hills - James Green
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