Speaker 1: what is up everybody this
Speaker 2: is Daryl Cooper this is the Martyr Maid podcast and you are about to listen to who's America episode
one this one
Speaker 3: is called rough extraction it's
about the
Speaker 1: West Virginia coal mine wars it happens to be the largest
and
Speaker 1: most serious uprising in the history of the United States since
Speaker 4: the Civil War. You
would have had this
Speaker 5: episode a few days sooner. I really wanted to get it out on Labor Day. But, you
know, this
Speaker 6: story, I love this story. As an American, I love this story as it just...
Speaker 6: And it's really important to me to get it right. I'm still
Speaker 7: not 100% sure that I got it right, but I put the work in, if nothing else. I've
Speaker 8: literally reworked this thing from scratch four
Speaker 9: times. I've tried recording it a couple times. I was trying to fit in all of the context and all of the great stories that I think are necessary to really get underneath the skin of this story and to give
it the
Speaker 10: dramatic...
Speaker 11: oomph i wanted to give it because i want everybody to love this story as much as i do but every time i tried you
know i'd get two
Speaker 11: hours two and a half hours into the thing and realize that i haven't even mentioned coal mining
yet i know
Speaker 12: surprise surprise martyr made podcast takes a long time to get to the point
But, you
Speaker 11: know, it was just going on too long. And so I would try again. I would try again because I didn't want to give up all this great stuff about, you know, the Hatfield and McCoy feud.
Speaker 13: Most
Speaker 14: famous Klan feud in American history happened just a few decades, a couple decades, actually, before the story I'm telling here in the very same valley there along the West Virginia, Kentucky border.
And
Speaker 14: telling that story, telling its background The social history, the history of the economic and political changes
Speaker 9: That were happening in southern Appalachia at the time Which in a lot of ways led to the Hatfield-McCoy feud Which shed a lot of light on this story And so I wanted to get that in there I
wanted to
Speaker 9: talk about the philosophy and politics Behind America's push toward industrialization And
how
Speaker 15: it came into conflict with
industrialization
Speaker 15: Those few remaining traditional communities that still existed in the country.
I wanted to tell you all
Speaker 5: about the history of the Scots-Irish and the English borderers who settled Appalachia.
And whose
Speaker 15: culture of honor
the miners
Speaker 15: of West Virginia, wherever they'd come from, were assimilated into.
Okay.
in the
Speaker 15: end i had no choice but to drop or abbreviate a lot of that and i am quite sad about
it i'm
Speaker 6: still not yeah yeah yeah i just can't redo this thing again so
the good
Speaker 6: news there is a silver lining here the good news is that i've got a sub stack page it's martyrmade.substack.com it's linked
Speaker 9: in the show notes
Speaker 9: And all of that other material that didn't make it into this episode is going to make for some great content that will be appearing there very soon. The
Hatfield-McCoy
Speaker 16: feud by itself could probably make a series out of that, but I'll at
Speaker 5: least get one hell of an episode out of it. So
if you want to
Speaker 5: learn how everything you thought you knew about the Hatfield-McCoy feud was probably wrong, head
on over to the
Speaker 17: Substack and sign up. It'll be over there soon.
Paid
Speaker 17: subscribers to the Substack have
Speaker 18: access to a whole list of articles and podcasts not available on the main feed, the history feed, including episode three of my series on Jeffrey Epstein. Those
of you who
Speaker 18: follow the main feed
Speaker 9: have probably heard the first two. It's on there. Well, the final episode can be found on Substack, and I promise you I bring my flamethrower to that one.
Last but not
Speaker 20: least...
I want
Speaker 20: to encourage everybody out there to go to originmaine.com That's
Speaker 13: origin, y'all can spell that Maine with an E, like the state, dot com
That is
Speaker 21: the website for Jocko's company, Jocko Willink My co-host on The Unraveling If you have not checked out that podcast, you really should Oh, and by the way, to answer a question I've been getting a lot lately
Speaker 21: um we will be putting out new unravelings very soon jocko has had
a busy
Speaker 22: schedule to say the least lately i know that's a
shock too so i
Speaker 9: want you to go over there to originmain.com and not just because jocko's my buddy they make a whole range of some
of my
Speaker 9: favorite things
And they
Speaker 9: make my favorite energy drinks for one I am unfortunately a caffeine addict And these energy drinks
Speaker 12: Jocko Go they're called They're available in some stores now I think Wawa's out on the east coast And hopefully some more soon They're pretty much the only energy
Speaker 24: drinks That don't make me crash and send me back to the well After an hour or two I love
them They're not
Speaker 24: all packed in with sugar or anything like that Or even artificial sweeteners
Speaker 25: I think they're sweetened with monk fruit They're
really good
The
Speaker 25: rift jujitsu gi that they make It's just without question The best gi I've ever rolled in So if you're into that kind of thing
One of you
Speaker 26: guys out there This was crazy One of you guys was kind enough to Get
me a
Speaker 27: pair of the buffalo hide boots That Origin makes And I gotta say that by itself
Probably
Speaker 28: made all the hours doing this podcast Over the years worth it It was a huge surprise And it really
Speaker 29: meant a lot
But
Speaker 29: then on top of it, I mean, they're easily the best boots I've ever had, just by far.
They're the kind of things
Speaker 31: that you want to go out and do hard work in, but then they feel so nice that you almost don't want to do that. So I'm
Speaker 28: not exactly sure how to use them yet, whether to wear them out in the fields or just wear them out when I go to a nice dinner, but I'll figure that out.
And now,
Speaker 11: just now, in fact, they've got gear from Jocko's
Speaker 9: new hunting line.
And
Speaker 9: so if you're into hunting at all,
go check
Speaker 9: it out
Speaker 21: I don't know how to describe this stuff exactly
Speaker 9: And I've
been into
Speaker 9: hunting, you know, off and on my whole life I've never quite seen anything like what Jocko's got going here I don't know how quite to describe it I mean, it looks like you're going hunting while preparing for combat, I guess, maybe But just go check it out Trust me, just go check it out And again, that is originmain.com The link is in the show.
Speaker 9: Okay. Oh, actually, one other thing. Many
of you guys
Speaker 32: have heard me mention my good friend Daniele Bolelli before. He's the host of one of
Speaker 33: the very best OG history podcasts out there called History on Fire.
Now, History on
Speaker 34: Fire was one of the biggest and most popular history podcasts out there, which is why the company Luminary, a
Speaker 35: podcast subscription service, made him an offer he couldn't refuse a few years ago. And so he's been behind a paywall for the last few years. But once he was able to, he opted for freedom and he's now back out in the wild. Not everybody knows that yet. And so this is a public service announcement for history.
Speaker 35: Anyone who wants more good history content, check
Speaker 36: out History on Fire.
For those of you
Speaker 36: who aren't long-time history podcast nerds and haven't been
Speaker 34: introduced to History on Fire, it's a long-form, deep storytelling kind of thing like you're used to with Martyrmaid. Although I will say there are some topics that he covers that, honestly, I think only he can do right.
Speaker 34: the Caravaggio series is one for sure if you want to dip your toe in to see what it's like I recommend the series on Crazy Horse that's one of my favorites for sure or the one on the Conquest
Speaker 24: of Mexico that's an excellent one so it's called History on Fire and I highly recommend it
like I
Speaker 24: said Martyrmaid taking a long time to get to the point
Speaker 9: surprise surprise but that's about it so again you're
about to
Speaker 9: listen to Martyrmaid
Speaker 6: number 22
Speaker 6: who's america episode one rough extraction i hope
you
Speaker 37: enjoy this story as much as i do
here we
Speaker 37: go i'm
content to die
Speaker 38: for my beliefs
so cut off my head and make me a
Speaker 39: martyr
The people
Speaker 39: will always remember it.
Speaker 40: No. They
won't forget. Hell does
Speaker 41: exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It
is a
Speaker 42: place. It is somewhere. Hell
does
Speaker 43: exist.
-
Speaker 43: But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking.
- I must go. - Why we must tear
Speaker 44: ourselves apart for this small question of religion?
- Who's
Speaker 45: America? Who is America?
We
Speaker 20: started asking
Speaker 20: some version of those two questions. When the Pilgrims landed in North America, probably. We're
Speaker 46: still asking those questions, and the answers have changed
over the years.
Speaker 47: Who does America belong
to?
Speaker 48: Who is America? Who are the Americans?
Speaker 49: Back during the Civil
War,
Speaker 49: People went to war against the federal government out
of
Speaker 26: loyalty to their states.
People in
Speaker 26: Virginia were Virginians first.
Their loyalty
Speaker 26: to the United States was born out of that state's participation in the federal system.
Their grandparents or
Speaker 26: great-grandparents had lived in Virginia before there ever was a United States. And
so
Speaker 50: when those two loyalties came into conflict...
And
Speaker 50: the two identities could
Speaker 11: no longer coexist. They held to the older one, the one that to them was closer
to
Speaker 51: home. Later in the 20th century, the advent
Speaker 9: of post-colonial liberation movements in the third world, a lot of American citizens, whose national origins were in the global south, the formerly colonized
world.
have
Speaker 9: often been encouraged to think of themselves as diaspora populations, as Hispanics or Africans or Asians or Middle Easterners who just happen to be residing in the United States. But
that
Speaker 12: national origin or that ethnic identity, they're told from a certain standpoint, should be their primary mode of identification.
Marxists
Speaker 12: never got much
Speaker 47: hold in the U.S., but they would have had us understand ourselves in terms of class relations, right?
Speaker 48: A
bunch of
Speaker 48: bourgeois exploiters and then the real Americans, the workers. Some groups,
Speaker 52: the Catholic immigrants, for example, Jews, Irish, Italians, Slobs, other Europeans, over
the years
Speaker 9: were castigated for slavery
Not
Speaker 9: assimilating quickly enough.
Speaker 53: Not assimilating into American society. Being hyphenated Americans, they were called.
Even as
Speaker 14: their assimilation was resisted and sometimes blocked by important segments of American society.
Speaker 9: So who's
Speaker 54: America?
The author Colin Woodward
Speaker 54: brought out an interesting formulation in his
Speaker 21: great little book...
Speaker 21: American nations it's called subtitled the history of the 11 regional cultures
Speaker 55: in North America I
know you've
Speaker 55: heard me mention the book Albion Seed before about the four major British
Speaker 56: migrations into what became America it's a fantastic book and this is actually a great supplement for that book
and it's
Speaker 49: one for people who want a little bit easier and shorter read
so
Speaker 9: Woodward
Speaker 9: ignores state and national boundaries altogether and
he
Speaker 57: gives us a gerrymandered map of the u.s canada and northern mexico that tries to mark the cultural and economic zones
Speaker 20: created by patterns of settlement and migration of successive waves of new americans over the years as
Speaker 18: they come in
And
Speaker 18: break against geographic and rival cultural barriers and slosh
Speaker 13: around and bump up against each other. As
the book's title
Speaker 20: says, Woodward identifies 11 of these regions, and he gives them names like Yankeedom,
which is
Speaker 9: probably pretty self-explanatory you would think, but yes, founded when the Pilgrims hit Plymouth Rock, but then spreading to...
Speaker 9: Eventually encompass New England and
Speaker 58: the northern strips of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa.
And then the Great
Speaker 9: Lakes region up into Michigan and Wisconsin. And even
on the other
Speaker 9: side of the Great Lakes, the Canadian shoreline in Windsor, around there, he defines as Yankeedom.
For
Speaker 59: cultural and economic and historical reasons that he goes over.
Encompassing
Speaker 60: northern
Speaker 18: Mexico, west Texas.
Speaker 18: The southern parts of the southwest and Baja and southern
Speaker 57: California is the nation he calls El Norte,
which he reminds us is
Speaker 61: the oldest of the American nations, settled by the Spanish in the 16th century, in which today,
Speaker 9: even in the northern Mexican locales like Chihuahua, Sonora, or Baja,
Speaker 9: has an economy that faces more toward America than it
Speaker 62: does toward Mexico City or anything south of it.
He points to
Speaker 63: the Deep South, founded by English
Speaker 64: slavers who came from Barbados and brought with them a particularly harsh and despotic racial
Speaker 63: caste
system.
He talks
Speaker 63: about the Cavalier Tidewater region of the Virginia Lowlands and Maryland, Southern Delaware, Northeastern North Carolina,
Speaker 65: I guess would be in there. There's
the
Speaker 66: Midlands, the Far West, the
Speaker 20: Left Coast, and the tiny and short-lived little region of New Netherland, he calls it. And there's New France up in Canada over in
Speaker 11: the east. And then there's the region that I want to talk to you all about today.
Woodward
Speaker 5: calls
Speaker 67: it Greater Appalachia. Quote, Greater Appalachia was founded in the early 18th century by wave upon wave of rough bellicose settlers from the
Speaker 68: war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, Northern England, and the Scottish lowlands. Lampooned by writers, journalists, filmmakers, and television producers as rednecks, hillbillies, crackers, and white trash,
Speaker 69: These clannish
Speaker 70: Scots-Irish and North English frontiersmen spread across the Highland South
Speaker 71: and on into the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois,
Speaker 72: the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks, the eastern two-thirds of Oklahoma, and the hill country of Texas, clashing with Indians, Mexicans, and Yankees as they migrated.
In the
Speaker 51: British Isles, this culture had formed in a state of near-constant war and upheaval, fostering a warrior ethic and a deep commitment to individual liberty and personal sovereignty. Intensely suspicious of aristocrats and social reformers alike, these American borderlanders
Speaker 73: despised Yankee teachers, Tidewater lords, and Deep South aristocrats.
In the
Speaker 11: Civil War, much of the region fought for the Union, with secession movements in western Virginia, creating West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and northern Alabama. The
Speaker 74: Borderlanders' combative culture
Speaker 53: has provided a large portion of the nation's military, from officers like Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, and
Speaker 59: Douglas MacArthur, to the enlisted fighting men in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They
Speaker 53: also gave the continent bluegrass and country music, stock car racing, and evangelical fundamentalism."
Speaker 9: You know, when the federal government sends out census takers to get a read on the demographics of the country
every ten
Speaker 9: years, one
Speaker 61: of the questions that they always ask is
Speaker 47: about our ethnicity or our national origin.
And you
Speaker 47: can say Latino or you can say Mexican, you
can say
Speaker 47: Scottish or British, African or
Speaker 75: Nigerian, whatever you think applies from a broad range of options. Well,
Speaker 62: throughout the greater Appalachia region settled by those Scots, Irish and English borderers who were then joined
Speaker 52: over the years by Southern blacks, Central and Southern Europeans and others.
The
Speaker 52: vast majority of
Speaker 73: people in that region simply give their ethnicity as American. It's
the only region in the
Speaker 76: country where that's the case. And
today, I want
Speaker 67: to tell you a story about these Americans. In
the summer of
Speaker 72: 1912, in
the mountains
Speaker 72: of southern West Virginia, in the
summer of 1912,
the
Speaker 77: Americans were near a state of revolution.
Over the
Speaker 71: course of just a couple decades, they
had had
Speaker 71: imposed on them a
Speaker 73: social, a cultural and political and economic transformation more total and more jarring,
Speaker 78: more rapid than any group
ever.
Had
Speaker 78: experienced in American history With the possible exception of the Native Americans
At the time of the
Speaker 29: Civil War Which at the time is within living memory From any of the residents here
Southern
Speaker 53: Appalachia was as isolated Politically, culturally, and economically As any place in the United States I mean, these people were up in the mountains Living their own lives by themselves
Speaker 12: And had
Speaker 26: been for a hundred years
There
Speaker 26: were parts of it that were not electrified until the 1960s.
The terrain
Speaker 26: there, and
I was there
Speaker 79: last year for a week, and it is gorgeous country out there, but I've got to
Speaker 61: tell you,
the terrain, it's
Speaker 61: rough. It consists of rugged,
Speaker 80: wooded hills interrupted by narrow valleys along numerous creeks and small rivers.
which makes
Speaker 81: it totally unsuitable for
Speaker 61: large-scale farming or cash crop export. The hillsides, they just jut straight out of the ground, and they're so steep that they can't be cultivated, and they really can't be used for much of anything other than hunting or, depending on the hillside, maybe
Speaker 9: grazing a few livestock. What
this land could
Speaker 9: support, though, was
Speaker 60: small, self-sufficient family farms.
And so,
Speaker 20: slowly but surely, the people worked their way south through the hills, following old Indian trails. The
first arrivals
Speaker 20: would come in and claim the river and
Speaker 9: creek beds where the tillable land was, and the new arrivals and the grown sons of those families would then move down to the next hollow for their plot. And that's how Appalachia
Speaker 58: was largely settled. And
you couldn't build
Speaker 58: towns there.
There's no
Speaker 26: room to build them, and no infrastructure to support them.
In this story, we're going
Speaker 26: to be
Speaker 60: spending a lot of time in the Tug Valley, which
cups a
Speaker 60: river for called the Tug that serves as the border
Speaker 26: between West Virginia and Kentucky. Well,
there were no
Speaker 26: roads into that valley until the 1900s, after Americans had been living there a good hundred years.
The
Speaker 26: whole community had been up there for a hundred years. There were no roads into that area.
And trade
Speaker 26: outside the
Speaker 73: region, virtually non-existent.
Even trade
Speaker 73: from one valley to the next valley was extremely limited because it
Speaker 79: was just not a simple matter to get around these mountains, especially with cargo, before the roads and the railroads came. And unlike...
Much of
Speaker 79: the eastern United States, with the Ohio River, the Mississippi River, all these navigable rivers that
made it
Speaker 79: easy to transport people and cargo and information over large swaths of land, there was none of that. You've got a bunch
Speaker 26: of very small and usually
Speaker 9: short rivers running through rugged mountains. If
you wanted to get a
Speaker 9: message to someone in the Tug Valley, you
had to hike
Speaker 9: in there and go tell them.
Each one
Speaker 61: of these isolated little valleys Had
its own
Speaker 61: little community And
its
Speaker 58: own little culture Sometimes there were even differences in dialect
Speaker 82: There was no division of labor It was a primitive economy in that sense
Speaker 61: Every household was a self-sufficient unit
Up until the day the
Speaker 61: coal and railroad companies showed
up
Speaker 83: These people were still tanning their own leather to make their own shoes. They were making their own thread and wax.
Speaker 5: Making their own string and rope and cloth from flax and wool.
They were
Speaker 5: still carving their own
dishes
Speaker 26: in bowls
from cucumber
Speaker 26: and poplar wood in the hills around them.
This is a
Speaker 26: traditional community.
And
Speaker 84: so outsiders...
And I
Speaker 14: don't just mean people from New York and Philadelphia, but people from the growing towns to the east and north right there in West Virginia or in the other direction in Kentucky looked at them and
Speaker 61: saw desperately poor people living a primitive lifestyle, people desperately in need of the uplifting hand of the more educated and reform-minded people in
Speaker 85: the cities.
But what
Speaker 85: they couldn't see was that there was a real tight-knit community
Speaker 11: life there, of a kind that was fading and dying out in the rest of America by that point in our history. And
the poverty, even,
Speaker 9: was, you know, sort of in the
eye of
Speaker 9: the beholder. I mean,
the people
Speaker 9: weren't rich, obviously, by any measure, but...
They
Speaker 61: also didn't spend 14 hours a day working like people in the northern
Speaker 86: factory cities did.
They didn't
Speaker 86: employ slaves. These people were
Speaker 61: isolated. They were impoverished from an income standpoint. They were living a primitive lifestyle, traditional lifestyle in many ways. But they were
Speaker 9: free.
They were free.
That's
Speaker 9: why they had come to America These people more than anyone else Came from a part of England where they had just been run over In one
Speaker 62: direction or another by external authority For hundreds, really thousands of years You can
Speaker 87: follow it all the way back to Julius Caesar These people have been resisting control
Speaker 14: by outside authorities And
when they came
Speaker 14: over to America They didn't linger in the cities
Speaker 9: on the coast They
didn't linger in the cities on the coast
Speaker 9: They didn't want to be around all that. They went straight out over into south-central Pennsylvania and then down into Appalachia and they found their home.
They were free and they
Speaker 9: had everything they needed to live and they had plenty of leisure time besides.
In Altina
Speaker 9: Waller's great book on the culture of southern Appalachia in the aftermath of the Civil War, she writes,
Speaker 67: quote,
If the
Speaker 67: importance of land was an 18th century heritage, the Tug Valley social structure was much more egalitarian in practice than that of Tidewater,
Speaker 71: Virginia. In the mountainous terrain, it was not possible to imitate the plantation system and
Speaker 88: its polarized society, and small farms dominated. In 1850, and I just...
Just
Speaker 89: check this part out.
Speaker 61: Just think about what this means as far as the type of society we're talking about and the relationship the people there have
Speaker 85: to one another. In 1850, more than two-thirds of Pike and Logan counties—those are the two Tug Valley counties
Speaker 11: straddling the West Virginia-Kentucky line—more than two-thirds of Pike and Logan County households
Speaker 51: owned their own farms.
But even
Speaker 51: the one-third of households who reported no land holdings do not represent a pauper class. Many
such
Speaker 53: households
Speaker 71: consisted of young families living on the larger farm of one or the other spouse's families. Such households were part of the parents' domestic economy until such time as the children obtained
Speaker 11: their own land.
Thus, most
Speaker 11: residents owned or could soon expect to own
land.
Speaker 90: Self-sufficient, small farms of 30 to 35 cultivated acres and 300 acres of unimproved land,
Speaker 62: often mountainsides too steep for anything but hunting or perhaps cattle grazing.
Whatever social
Speaker 73: differentiation existed, economic activity was virtually the same for everyone, and
Speaker 90: poverty was almost unknown.
All
Speaker 90: families participated in a domestic,
Speaker 72: semi-subsistence economy that included cultivating corn, wheat, oats, tobacco, and vegetables. Men and women tended domestic animals such as cattle,
Speaker 53: swine, sheep, horses, and sometimes oxen. Women engaged in home manufactures for family consumption while men supplemented the family diet with the abundant wild game
and fish.
Speaker 51: Differences between an average and a wealthy family were not in quality of life,
but simply
Speaker 51: in quantity of land, animals, and production
of
Speaker 11: home manufactures. The undiversified, subsistence economy of Tug Valley residents
Speaker 53: extended up and down the social scale. It sustained a pre-modern lifestyle of hard
Speaker 71: work alleviated by seasonal rhythms and individual flexibility.
a
Speaker 71: lack of distinction between work and recreation, and
a sense of predictability. This subsistence or
Speaker 92: semi-subsistence economy, however, did not preclude economic and social interaction, interactions that fostered a strong sense of community. If
trade beyond
Speaker 92: the mountains was almost non-existent, barter and market exchanges within the Tug Valley community itself were extensive,
Speaker 92: Families were productive economic units whose tasks were shared with relatives, neighbors, and friends more
Speaker 72: frequently than not. Hunting, fencing, planting, harvesting, horse trading, and house building were all tasks shared by the men in the neighborhood. Women got together for
Speaker 93: canning, sewing, and quilting. End quote.
There's a Japanese
Speaker 67: proverb that goes, Negara Maui Tata
Naga.
Speaker 67: Dessa Mauikara, and I know
Speaker 21: with 99% certainty that I just annihilated that. Sorry, but that's how it was spelled
Speaker 6: in English,
Speaker 21: so blame the author of
Speaker 94: the book I got it from. What it means is, the capital has its order, the
Speaker 16: village, its customs. You
might say the
Speaker 16: capital has its laws, the village, its customs.
Well, that had
Speaker 16: very much applied to...
Speaker 16: the
Speaker 62: Scots-Irish and the Borderlanders for well over a thousand years back in the British Isles and it followed them, that tenancy,
Speaker 9: to Appalachia when they migrated to North America
The
Speaker 95: Mountaineers were far, very far from the
Speaker 61: attention of state and federal government authorities and even local government, which they did have county governments, didn't supersede
the
Speaker 79: natural and organic community hierarchy. It reflected it
Speaker 9: and reinforced it. The heads of the prominent and respected families in the area, in other words, the men who were already looked to as the leaders
Speaker 96: in the community, they would hold the government posts like sheriff or judge or what have you.
The majority of
Speaker 51: the people in the late 1800s there were still illiterate,
And
Speaker 51: they had an oral culture's understanding of customary versus legal culture. They lived in a world where deals were made by
Speaker 9: handshakes with eye contact.
Where they
Speaker 9: were binding, not
because of the
Speaker 9: letter of some abstract law or contract, but because in a tight-knit community, everybody knew everybody else's business. Everybody would have known what the agreement was and outlined. And
so in all
Speaker 9: but the most
Speaker 59: complicated or difficult cases...
There
Speaker 59: tend to be a consensus over
Speaker 54: who was in the right or who was in the wrong.
The respected men
Speaker 54: serving in local government
Speaker 97: positions exercise their authority, in other words, not as representatives of
Speaker 67: some distant system or power structure. So, you know, I don't know, not like the U.S. Marshall in Old West stories where he's the lone representative
of
Speaker 57: United States law in these here parts. It wasn't like that.
And the
Speaker 57: leading men who occupied those local government posts, they exercised
Speaker 84: their authority as
Speaker 61: fellow members of the community. And their decisions weren't guided by legal technicalities, because they weren't representing some
-- they
Speaker 61: weren't representing the laws and decisions of the state legislature or the U.S. Congress. They were there to help lead and manage their community. So they didn't make their decisions by legal technicalities, they made
them by -- they
Speaker 61: common
Speaker 9: sense and local custom as they perceived it
and of
Speaker 57: course modern people hear that by
Speaker 98: that I even
Speaker 57: mean people from the more developed parts of the country back then heard it and
Speaker 26: they think well this is a government of men not a government of laws
Speaker 99: why how could objectivity and equality before the law ever exist in a place like that
and the
Speaker 99: answer is
Speaker 89: it couldn't
Speaker 89: Objectivity was not the goal And to outsiders it looked like anarchy and disorder But
it
Speaker 61: wasn't that Like any community there were rules And everybody knew what they were If
two men came
Speaker 61: in with a dispute A
he said
Speaker 61: he said dispute or something happened And one of
Speaker 57: them, everybody in the community knows everybody else They all know each other very well
And
Speaker 57: they know that this guy over here doesn't lie, is honest in his dealings, is generous and helpful in the community. And this other guy over here is kind of a ne'er-do-well who's always causing problems. And
Speaker 14: these guys end up in court, and one of them says one thing, one of them says the other. It's
not going to
Speaker 14: come down to a technicality in the law. They're going to look at these two people and...
Speaker 14: Everybody's going to kind of know what happened Just like in a very very small group of people Like your friends or family When something
Speaker 84: happens You usually don't have to hear all the details Given who's involved You can probably get a pretty good idea A defendant
Speaker 61: in a civil or criminal dispute Was not coming in and arguing his case Before some objective standard He was arguing his case To the community in which he lived
Thank you.
and
Speaker 61: on which he depended in a court
Speaker 2: presided over by a leading citizen everybody in the community agreed was a reasonable and a fair man and so it
was not
Speaker 2: anarchy
Speaker 14: because decisions that were made through these means were almost always respected for
the simple reason
Speaker 58: that anyone who tried to buck the system knew that they would be going against the whole community and it very rarely happened
These were
Speaker 61: some of the very last people In America Who were still living in A truly traditional way It was self-sufficient households Organized
Speaker 89: Into a community that governed itself By common agreement And it could have
Speaker 9: done just fine without any government at all No question about that The
Speaker 79: Civil War Gave them the opportunity to prove that And during the Civil War The
Civil War
Speaker 79: Civil society just
Speaker 12: completely broke down in southern West Virginia in many ways When Union forces under future President James Garfield came in and started burning things down Arresting people, they burned down the
Speaker 100: courthouse And
so the courts, for
Speaker 100: example, didn't function throughout the Civil War in there The local citizens were out in the forest fighting a guerrilla
Speaker 101: war against the northern occupiers
When the war
Speaker 102: was over Those leading
Speaker 17: citizens We'll be right
back.
In
Speaker 17: the county, you know, those natural leaders that everyone looked to without having to be told to. Most of those guys were now excluded from local government by the northern reconstruction regime because of their real or suspected sympathies for the Confederacy. So the civil war ends and
Speaker 12: the whole traditional way that these people were used to governing themselves
was.
Speaker 17: was completely thrown out and turned on its head those positions were all taken up now by people from the cities people from other walks of life they weren't the natural leaders in the community many many times residents
of
Speaker 103: southern appalachia after the war went
Speaker 15: to work immediately trying to put their communities back together along lines that they recognized
But even
Speaker 104: as they were getting
Speaker 62: started with the rebuilding project, there was another war coming their way.
Like many
Speaker 62: wars,
Speaker 12: this one was first announced by the arrival of refugees driven before the invading force.
See, long
Speaker 2: before any
of the
Speaker 2: residents had any idea, land speculators from the big cities knew that railroads
Speaker 17: and mining companies
Speaker 17: Steel concerns and Wall Street firms
Were
Speaker 2: gearing up to develop the coal resources in Appalachia It's one of
Speaker 105: the richest coal regions in the world
That meant that those
Speaker 9: impoverished mountaineers Living up there on their small farms Were sitting on land that was going to explode in value very soon And so, very quietly at first
Speaker 18: Out-of-towners started coming in
Speaker 18: You know, waiving $100 bills like the song goes to try to get these families to sell out
Speaker 20: cheap because they didn't know any better. A few did, but
not very
Speaker 20: many, not enough. And
so clever men
Speaker 67: went to the county registrars to see which of those mountaineer families' ancestors had failed maybe
Speaker 106: to cross every I and dot every T during the Wild West period three or four generations back when the hills were settled.
They
Speaker 107: checked to
see...
Who
Speaker 107: was fully
Speaker 9: current on their property taxes
Going back
Speaker 9: a hundred years
These people These
Speaker 26: people had never Really thought about government The government had never much thought about them
Their
Speaker 14: ancestors settled these places A hundred, a hundred, twenty, a hundred and fifty years ago And they just lived out there in the wilderness Growing and fishing and hunting Just enough food to feed
Speaker 55: themselves Taking care of themselves
Not
Speaker 55: bothering anybody, not asking anything from anybody.
There was very little
Speaker 79: cash money circulating in the area at all. And for the most
Speaker 14: part, the furthest thing from any of their minds was that they might owe tribute to some distant government.
Pretty soon, families
Speaker 11: started getting served with summons to come to court
and prove
Speaker 11: that the land they lived on for generations was really theirs.
And
Speaker 11: some rich guy or some corporation from a faraway city would have went and found someone with a discrepancy and said, well, they don't really own this land, so I'm putting a claim down on that land. I'll pay X amount to it for the county, to the county, etc. Those
clever rich men
Speaker 9: from the big city who dragged these people into court, once they got there, obviously had massive advantages. Like, for example, I don't know, they had lawyers or they were literate.
They were
Speaker 9: dragging these mountain people into a world they didn't understand at all, and they just took advantage of them
Speaker 47: hard. There
were many
Speaker 47: recorded instances
Speaker 14: of outright fraud. In
one case, an
Speaker 14: out-of-town businessman signed a contract in the presence of witnesses with
a
Speaker 15: local farmer to purchase a piece of his land for such and such amount.
Well, the
Speaker 15: farmer put his mark to the
Speaker 14: paper. He was an illiterate farmer, put his mark to the paper, and the businessman gave him his down payment, and they went on their way, the farmer expecting to settle up the rest of the payment soon. Well,
when that
Speaker 14: wasn't forthcoming, the farmer went to the courthouse to go complain, and he brought his copy of the contract.
it was
Speaker 14: only then that this illiterate farmer was made to understand that he had not
signed a
Speaker 14: contract to sell part of his land
Speaker 9: for such and such an amount, but
had in
Speaker 9: fact signed to sell all of it for the amount of the small down payment that he'd already gotten. The
farmer just
Speaker 14: did not live in a world where
a trick like
Speaker 14: that was really possible, because in his world...
Speaker 85: you many people would have been privy to the engagement as there were there were witnesses so when it went
Speaker 89: to court the judge who would have been the head of a prominent local family would listen and voice the decision of the entire community the common sense ethical decision as they would understand
Speaker 61: it when he said well this businessman obviously what he did wasn't fair you took advantage of this man's illiteracy in front of witnesses no less so i'm
I'm
Speaker 9: going to give you protection to get you out of the county safely, but I would not advise a return visit. That's how it would have been handled.
Now, all of a sudden, that's
Speaker 89: just not how things were.
All of a
Speaker 89: sudden, we had gone very quickly from a customary culture to
a
Speaker 61: legal culture.
In the case of this
Speaker 61: farmer, it was he who soon
Speaker 14: enough received a court summons.
When he
Speaker 14: went to court, expecting to confront the man who was trying to steal his family's inheritance, the land they'd settled
Speaker 86: for several generations, that man wasn't even there. He lived out of state. It
was just his
Speaker 86: lawyers there. The
farmer tried to plead his
Speaker 86: case in terms that made sense to him,
Speaker 14: in terms of fairness and common sense. He
made a
Speaker 14: moral and ethical plea. He was trying to make the point that this just wasn't right.
And the
Speaker 14: people in the courtroom may have even agreed with him, but the lawyers just kept saying, well, what does the contract say? What does the contract say? You say our client agreed to different terms verbally, but where's the proof for that? The writing on the page is pretty plain. And that is your mark, is it not? That
farmer lost his
Speaker 14: family's land.
And
Speaker 61: something like that happened to a lot.
A
Speaker 61: lot of families.
Pretty
Speaker 85: soon, even the people who could prove clean title and
that
Speaker 9: they were documented to be up to date on their taxes
were finding
Speaker 9: that the neighborhood wasn't quite what it used to be.
The neighbors to the
Speaker 9: left and the neighbors to the
Speaker 14: right had both been run off their land.
On both
Speaker 14: plots of land, to either side, you're starting to see a lot of people you don't recognize.
Speaker 14: A lot of people no one recognizes coming around all
Speaker 47: the time.
They start cutting
Speaker 47: down all the trees and using the lumber to lay railroad tracks and build buildings.
They start
Speaker 47: importing strange machinery
Speaker 14: and punching holes into the mountainside.
And then, like a flash
Speaker 14: flood,
Speaker 51: I mean, that's the only metaphor I can think of that makes sense,
is...
Speaker 51: Like a flash flood, they begin importing thousands and then
Speaker 9: tens of thousands of workers from big East Coast cities, many of them straight off the immigration boat, speaking any number of mutually indecipherable languages.
This is in a sparsely
Speaker 26: populated community, and they are just overwhelming them.
A newspaper
Speaker 26: article from a century
Speaker 75: ago, written by a visiting New Yorker, read, quote,
Miners
Speaker 109: came into the valley with a rush: Welsh coal-diggers from the pits of Kidwelly, Englishmen
Speaker 110: from Lancashire, Belgians from the coal
Speaker 53: basins of Hainaut and Liège. These mingled with much larger numbers of Italians, Slavs, Austrians, and Poles. The hills of the state resounded to the languages of foreign lands. More than thirty nationalities are represented among the workmen in the mines
today.
American
Speaker 53: miners, however, outnumber the foreigners. They have come from the coal fields of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and other states. Negroes from the southern cotton fields have found employment in the mines. And, not the least, the mountaineers of the state themselves.
These men came from all
Speaker 55: walks of life.
Speaker 55: They weren't screening them when they put them on the train
Speaker 111: and sent them down to dig coal. And so a lot of them were unattached men who had questionable backgrounds. And
so now to that
Speaker 112: person who hasn't sold out his land and wants
Speaker 47: to stay, now he's starting to
see a
Speaker 47: new element move into the neighborhood.
your
Speaker 20: one mine operator recalled that quote the thousands of men soon tens of thousands who dug that
Speaker 113: first coal were a hard-bitten lot they drank and fought and gambled and whored
with the forest
Speaker 47: stripped from the mountainsides
Speaker 20: the game
Speaker 47: that
the
Speaker 20: people and their ancestors had hunted for meat for so many years was no longer to be found in abundance
The
Speaker 114: rivers were all fished
Speaker 26: out by the countless new arrivals. The
people had depended
Speaker 26: on hunting and fishing to supplement their diets. It was a necessary, not just important, a necessary
Speaker 14: aspect of their lives. And everybody knew that in the community, and that's why it had always been considered not
Speaker 26: just unwise, but utterly immoral.
Speaker 26: And anti-social For people to cut down their forest To sell as lumber Like really it was looked
at the
Speaker 26: way People might look at a drug dealer or a pimp today If you were going around doing Large scale timber operations You'd
Speaker 115: cut down a tree here and a tree there To Build a barn or whatever you gotta do But
everybody
Speaker 110: understood that we need these forests here To support the herds of game The squirrels, the rabbits, everything else That we all need to live
Make matters worse And
Speaker 89: In what forests remained, government agents
were all
Speaker 89: of a sudden out there on the prowl for
Speaker 100: poachers, a term that in the past meant to these people that you were trespassing to hunt someone else's land without their permission, but which now had acquired the novel meaning of hunting outside the limited parameters defined by the state or federal government.
Now, I'm all for conservation and
Speaker 14: conservation laws, but again, these
Speaker 102: people...
Speaker 102: And this was, this was, they couldn't eat without it.
Speaker 116: This was how they lived.
The hills were also all of a
Speaker 116: sudden crawling with revenue agents
Speaker 63: who were coming
in and
Speaker 63: busting the local people for making and trading their own liquor without paying the liquor
taxes.
the
Speaker 6: people were just doing what they had always done what their ancestors had always done putting aside a little plot to grow some grain and cobbling
Speaker 26: together a makeshift home home distillery these people couldn't exactly go to bevmo and whip out their visa card you know if they wanted
liquor they
Speaker 6: made it themselves it's just the only way to
do it they
Speaker 6: drank it themselves or they shared it with friends and family
Or
Speaker 9: on market days or community gatherings. They might sell or trade some of it to other people.
And nobody cared. Because
Speaker 79: nobody cared what these people were doing by themselves up in their hills. But
now, all
Speaker 79: of a
Speaker 17: sudden, very important people with a lot of resources looked at those hills and saw dollar
Speaker 117: signs. And so they cared very much what the
Speaker 118: people who lived there were up to.
So
Speaker 84: the place...
Speaker 84: was just not what it had been, even five or ten years earlier. And
pretty
Speaker 14: soon, that
Speaker 11: farmer who had the clean title and was all up to date on his taxes, he just decides there's nothing left for him to do, except sell his land and try to move somewhere else.
Many of them headed to
Speaker 47: other parts of Appalachia, to
family or
Speaker 67: to find a new place to settle. But
they were
Speaker 67: already pretty far
Speaker 24: south of Appalachia.
On the
Speaker 24: path of settlement There wasn't a whole lot of extra room left to move into
Where they
Speaker 31: did move They brought with them warnings About this invasion That was heading their way
Many of
Speaker 31: them had
Speaker 47: nowhere to go
They
Speaker 63: either left the state Entirely Or they did the only thing there was to do And so As the same New York
Speaker 67: newspaper editorial read
The
Speaker 67: watching the mines creep nearer and nearer to their cabins.
Speaker 110: Residents have looked with foreboding at first and then, realizing the futility of any efforts to stand aside, they've shouldered picks
Speaker 47: and entered the mouths of the black tunnels.
One of the men who
Speaker 47: followed that
Speaker 55: path was named Frank Keeney. Frank Keeney's family had hunted and farmed the hills
Speaker 18: of Clay County, West Virginia,
for a
Speaker 18: hundred years when they got word that mining and lumber companies had claimed ownership of their land.
They
Speaker 35: lost their
Speaker 22: land and some of the family was able to find farmland some distance away and went there to set up until the corporations came for them
Speaker 28: as well.
Others went to work
Speaker 31: for the timber companies that had taken their land from them because they didn't know what else to do.
Some of
Speaker 11: them, Frank Keeney's
Speaker 11: parents moved down to
Speaker 97: Kanawha County to a place called Cabin Creek and they became coal miners there
this is
Speaker 21: the story
of I would say a
Speaker 21: lot of people you know just about everybody up in those hills that's their story
in the
Speaker 119: late 18 and early 1900s
in
Speaker 11: Kanawha County
Frank
Speaker 11: Keeney was born there all this happened
Speaker 9: two years before he was born and so two years after his family gets to Kanawa he's born and by the time he was a boy he could climb to the top of the highest mountain and look around and all he would lay his eyes on were coal mines as far as the eye could see
in
Speaker 18: the earlier quote from Altina Waller's book she mentioned that at the time of the Civil War virtually
Speaker 59: everybody
in
Speaker 59: these southern counties lived on a self-sufficient farm that either they or their family owned
just
Speaker 120: like that I mean just like that
Speaker 70: in the blink of an eye the length of one boy's short childhood that number was down from virtually everybody to single digits
the
Speaker 110: companies
Speaker 95: owned everything they owned all the land they owned the roads that came in and out
Speaker 95: and moved around within the land.
They began importing
Speaker 9: workers, but there was nowhere for them to live, and so the companies built houses, and they owned all the houses, and
they took the
Speaker 9: rent out of the miners' paychecks.
The workers and
Speaker 18: their families needed food, and they needed supplies for daily life. There wasn't any market
Speaker 12: infrastructure for that, so the company built and stocked up a store and
deducted what
Speaker 12: the miners owed to it from their
Speaker 47: paychecks.
The
Speaker 47: company didn't provide anything to the miners for work They didn't provide boots They
Speaker 12: didn't provide helmets They didn't provide picks or shovels Or any other tools or supplies That the miners needed to actually mine the coal
Speaker 26: The miners had to buy all of that themselves From the company store Just to work in the mines They
had to pay
Speaker 26: the company to sharpen
Speaker 9: their tools The
miners even
Speaker 9: had to buy the explosives For
the miners
that
Speaker 9: they used to break apart the earth from the company store of the company that
Speaker 26: they were digging coal for.
Well, since many of
Speaker 26: the miners were destitute immigrants or former black sharecroppers or just penniless
Speaker 61: locals,
they had to go
Speaker 61: into debt to the company store just to get started on their first day as a miner. And
the company
Speaker 61: made sure that many of them never, ever got back to even.
The law
Speaker 113: said that children had to go to school And
so the
Speaker 113: company built the school And hired the teachers The company
Speaker 11: controlled the curriculum To prepare the minor's children for their own graduation Into the life of a minor School
only went up
Speaker 11: to 8th grade in most places There was no high
Speaker 53: school Because after that the boys were expected to be up on the mountain
Speaker 121: working as trapper boys, opening and closing the mine's air vents or in some other capacity to prepare them for that life.
The company owned
Speaker 53: the church and
hired the minister. His sermons were
Speaker 122: monitored and were expected to reinforce company policy.
Many of the
Speaker 122: ministers provided
Speaker 101: regular reports on what the miners were saying and thinking.
In
Speaker 88: fact, company teachers, doctors, store clerks, saloon keepers, preachers, all
Speaker 92: the company employees who were not miners, they formed a separate class
above the
Speaker 62: miners. They were company people. The miners were a liquid labor force that could come and
go and
Speaker 62: every single one of them was replaceable. And
Speaker 25: so...
The
Speaker 25: company men, the teachers, doctors, et cetera, were
all
Speaker 123: expected, as part of their job description, to act as company spies and report on the words and the activities of the minors.
Well, so many workers
Speaker 63: coming in from all walks of life, speaking any number of languages, most of them young, single men,
...you
Speaker 6: know, that's an environment asking for a little bit of disorderliness......and
Speaker 124: so someone had to keep order,
Speaker 113: and so the company paid the police force. They bought the police force. Either
by hiring and
Speaker 113: arming sheriff's deputies......or by bringing in private mercenaries that they called mine guards. The
mine guards came
Speaker 113: from the
Speaker 125: Baldwin-Feltz
Speaker 47: Detective Agency. Which...
Speaker 47: It sounds like some kind of Sherlock Holmes outfit. It ain't that. Like the Pinkerton Detective Agency and other
less
Speaker 35: notorious ones from the 19th and 20th century, Baldwin Feltz was more like a domestic version of Blackwater, the private military company we put to
use in
Speaker 35: Afghanistan and Iraq.
And
Speaker 59: their primary purpose, from
the steel
Speaker 59: mills of Pennsylvania to the factories of Chicago,
In
Speaker 59: the minds of West Virginia and Colorado and Montana and all the rest of the
Speaker 63: country, their purpose was to make sure that no one mentioned the words labor union in the same sentence. In 1892, Pinkertons, and if you don't know about them, you will before this series is over. As an American, you should spit whenever you say that name.
In
Speaker 63: 1892, Pinkerton's opened fire on a crowd of people during the homestead strike at Andrew Carnegie's steel mill, killed and wounded more than a dozen people. The
journalist I was just
Speaker 50: quoting, he toured many of these company towns, and he provided a maybe
Speaker 11: surface-level outsider's account, but it's an insightful one, one that bears insight into the effects that this kind of
Speaker 50: life has.
can
Speaker 113: have on the people who live it quote
less than
Speaker 113: 20 years ago parts of those just again i
Speaker 20: just want to drive that home again i'm sorry to interrupt but this all happened less than 20 years just imagine the level of transformation
Speaker 12: we're talking about here less
than 20
Speaker 12: years ago parts of those vast stretches of low mountains that cover so much of west
Speaker 11: virginia slumbered in solitude
The
Speaker 11: traveler rode horseback up the stony beds of mountain streams and sought shelter at night in a lonely settler's hut or on the slope of an inhospitable mountain.
Bears lumbered
Speaker 11: through the
Speaker 90: wilderness, and wildcats howled at night.
No railroad
Speaker 90: had yet penetrated the region.
People lived in
Speaker 53: small groups here and there in
Speaker 51: the valleys. Life
on the
Speaker 51: whole was simple and devoted chiefly to agriculture. The earth reposed peacefully.
Today, in
Speaker 126: traversing this region, you pass coal mining village after coal mining village,
Speaker 67: as you ride up the valley of the Guyandot River, or through McDowell, Mingo, and other counties, where the hills stood in untouched quietness two decades ago. Evidences of the transformation are on every hand. The houses of those who work in the mines are never
out of
Speaker 67: sight. Large mouths gape blackly at you from the hillsides.
Speaker 67: Gaunt tipples, headhouses, and other
Speaker 127: buildings stare at you from the slopes of the mountains. Railroads send their sightings
Speaker 71: in many directions. Long lines of squat minecars run along their narrow-gauge tracks and disappear around the curves of the hills.
The
Speaker 5: earth is scraped and ugly. The blackness of coal is over everything.
And
Speaker 71: mounds of fine coal stand about. Peacefulness and quiet have departed.
and let us
Speaker 71: see what kind of civilization has resulted the typical coal mining town is not a town in the ordinary sense at
all the
Speaker 71: place where the town stands is the point at which a seam has been opened buildings have been erected and machinery has been installed
The
Speaker 128: dwellings that cluster about the tipple or straggle along the bed of the creek are not occupied by self-dependent citizens
Speaker 100: of a community which gives many opportunities for employment and presents a variety of facets to the world at large.
They are
Speaker 14: occupied solely by the men who work in the mines.
The town is the
Speaker 14: adjunct and necessary
Speaker 9: convenience of an industry. If the mines should disappear, it too would cease to exist. The town is
the adjunct and necessary convenience of an industry.
It is
Speaker 9: not even called a town in the language of the locality.
Speaker 11: It is called a camp.
No one owns his
Speaker 11: own house. He cannot acquire so much title to property. No one runs a
Speaker 68: store, operates a garage, or sells groceries or haberdashery to his fellow townsmen. No
one amuses
Speaker 53: them in a movie
Speaker 88: theater.
Speaker 88: There is no main street of small independent businesses owned by different people and making up that mosaic of commercial life
Speaker 71: that is typical of villages everywhere.
There is little, if
Speaker 71: any, participation in common group
Speaker 67: activities. No
body of
Speaker 67: elected councilman ever passes on repairs for roads.
Speaker 126: No group of people ever gets together and decides that the old schoolhouse is too ramshackle for the children or that the old church needs repainting.
No
Speaker 71: family physician builds up a successful practice by competing with other physicians. No lawyer settles disputes over property rights among his neighbors.
Speaker 88: It
is not accurate to
Speaker 88: say that no one does these things. The coal company does them all.
It owns all the
Speaker 53: houses and rents them to the miner. Even in the more enlightened company towns, the company owns the store, the pool room, the movie theater, the school, and the church.
The
Speaker 53: company employs the physicians and collects a small monthly sum from each
Speaker 71: minor to help pay him.
The company owns
Speaker 71: all the land and everything upon it. It therefore controls the life and activities of the little community. It is responsible for the sanitation. The company's ownership sometimes extends to the roads so that it can control ingress and egress. In some counties, the company is the employer of the deputy sheriffs and is therefore responsible for police supervision.
In
Speaker 71: Logan County, the mine operators paid out $61,000 last year in salaries for deputy sheriffs.
Miners in West
Speaker 71: Virginia are not paid as workers elsewhere are paid.
They do not
Speaker 71: receive in cash all that they have earned.
On their
Speaker 71: semi-monthly paydays, they are given statements showing how much they owe the company and how much the company owes them.
Among the items
Speaker 71: charged against them in this account is the indebtedness incurred at the company's store. for.
Speaker 71: Other items
Speaker 129: are rent for their
Speaker 130: houses, lighting, heating, doctor's services, use of a hospital, and even the sharpening of tools and the use of a company
Speaker 70: wash house in which to clean up after a day's work.
The law of West
Speaker 70: Virginia prohibits companies from issuing scrip in payment of wages,
Speaker 130: specifying that if such scrip is issued, it shall be held to be a promise
Speaker 110: to pay the sum specified therein in lawful money.
But
Speaker 110: the law is never enforced, and the companies generally issue the script. I'll
read one last
Speaker 106: paragraph here from this. This is from Winthrop D. Lane about 100 years ago in the New York publication called Survey. Quote, this
is an important
Speaker 131: part,
Speaker 88: that's why I broke here.
What began
Speaker 88: as a means of taking care of the emergent needs of workers became a settled condition
Speaker 51: everywhere.
Speaker 51: Today, 400,000 men, women, and children in West Virginia are living this subservient existence.
They are
Speaker 51: caught up
in a
Speaker 51: civilization
Speaker 132: within a civilization, an
alien order
Speaker 132: embedded in a democracy.
Speaker 133: So, since
the company
Speaker 133: houses were property,
the
Speaker 101: workers...
Speaker 101: had no right to privacy they had no right to personal space it wasn't their personal or private space they
didn't
Speaker 59: even have tenants rights you know the kind of thing you would think of normally if you were paying rent on a house you would get certain rights that go at
Speaker 5: that house none
of that applied the company
Speaker 5: decided which visitors you were allowed to have
homes could be
Speaker 53: searched and were searched at any time they could wake you up in the middle of the night march your family out and go tear
Speaker 11: your place up if they wanted to without warning
the
Speaker 11: way corrections officers would do a cell inspection.
Among the items that
Speaker 11: were most commonly searched for were any books and pamphlets that were considered contrary to the company's interests because the company decided what books and what newspapers and
Speaker 9: other media was allowed on its property.
Very often the only
Speaker 9: newspapers allowed were the ones that the coal mine operators themselves had set up.
Speaker 76: anybody found with unauthorized reading material was just fired on the spot.
If he had a
Speaker 53: family, he and his family were given notice to get out of their company house and get out of town.
Anybody who
Speaker 123: was fired was also blacklisted because the coal companies worked together to keep track of people that they considered troublemakers. And so a fired worker couldn't
just
Speaker 9: move over to the next mountain or the next coal field. He would find that he was not welcome anywhere.
And so
Speaker 53: this destitute worker
With no
Speaker 53: money Because he's not paid in cash He's paid in company script
For a
Speaker 53: company store That he's no longer allowed
Speaker 63: to use Would take his meager belongings He'd just have to leave the region All together with his family I mean literally leave the whole region
Speaker 26: Ownership of the company's store and any saloons or other facilities the miners
Speaker 113: used would give the company a way to reduce the miners' pay kind of through the back door. They
didn't want to cut
Speaker 124: their wages maybe
Speaker 51: and start a big fight,
Speaker 124: so they would just raise prices on the supplies that they sold the miners that they needed to actually go up
Speaker 11: and mine. They
would raise the prices on
Speaker 11: food or other supplies that they needed at home.
Speaker 134: Sometimes when the miners Would successfully negotiate a pay raise The
coal
Speaker 6: companies would argue And fight about it And act like they were trying to put it off And then
Speaker 9: they would give them a little compromise pay raise And then they would just raise prices in the company store Accordingly to make up
for it Company mine
Speaker 13: guards Would patrol voting stations During elections And
Speaker 13: intimidating workers to make
Speaker 12: sure they voted the way the company wanted, or just not vote at all. And sometimes workers were just handed out ballots from the company that had already been filled out for
them. Anybody, anybody
Speaker 26: who was heard promoting political candidates or policies that were not favored by the company was just
Speaker 9: immediately fired and evicted from the town. And
so in this way,
Speaker 9: the coal companies...
with
Speaker 9: control of this whole population of miners like they had, were able to fill up the sheriff's offices, fill up the county courts and other offices, even a lot of the state government with its own hired men.
When a miner was hurt
Speaker 57: or killed on the job,
the question
Speaker 57: of whether the mine operator was responsible went before
Speaker 61: adjudicators who were chosen and paid by the company. When accusations of abuse were made against the mine guards or other company officials,
Those
Speaker 61: reports had to be made
Speaker 135: to sheriffs who were elected and very often just simply paid by the company. They
were heard by
Speaker 115: judges who were approved and elected by the company. I
mean that quite
Speaker 115: literally. The
Speaker 113: historian David Allen Corbin writes, quote, The Logan County Coal Operators Association formed its police bulwark
Speaker 88: from a local source. It simply hired the county sheriff, Don Chafin, and his deputies.
The
Speaker 90: treasurer of the Logan County Coal Operators Association testified that the association had paid Chafin $2,725
Speaker 67: a month to work for it.
That is
Speaker 67: $40,000 a month today.
Sheriff Chafin
Speaker 62: only had an official salary from the department of several hundred dollars a month. I think it was like $365 a month is what he made. And when he was already in his mid-30s, he already reported over a million dollars in
Speaker 67: assets.
So,
Speaker 67: it gives you an idea of the scope of this. The
deputy
Speaker 71: sheriffs, like the county sheriff, were paid by personal checks from the coal operators. In
Speaker 88: one year, the association paid out $61,517 to these deputies for protection against the union. The
anti-union
Speaker 67: activities of the Logan County sheriffs and his deputies became a national disgrace and part of the region's folklore.
more.
Two
Speaker 67: deputies were stationed at each railroad depot and on each train to prevent union organizers from entering Logan County. All strangers, upon coming into the county, were searched and forced to identify themselves. When
the clerk
Speaker 67: for the West Virginia Department of Mines, Toby Heiser, arrived in Logan, he was accosted by several deputies in order to
Speaker 50: identify himself. He refused to do so, and the deputies dragged him off the train, beat him, and forced him to leave the county.
A
Speaker 50: newspaper reporter from Washington, D.C., after
Speaker 53: a visit to Logan County, wrote,
of
Speaker 5: the kingdom of Logan, he reigns supreme by virtue of a state machine blocked by the power of the operators.
The American Civil
Speaker 20: Liberties Union declared that Logan County had become a national scandal, and a U.S. Senate investigating committee
Speaker 63: denounced the Logan deputy sheriff's system as vicious and un-American. He said
it was contrary
Speaker 63: to the genius and spirit of our institutions.
Okay.
A United
Speaker 126: Mine Workers of America official told the U.S. Senate committee, I would just love to see this committee go down
Speaker 136: to Logan County without anybody knowing
who
Speaker 5: they were. And Senator Burton K. Wheeler responded, They'd probably throw the Senate committee in jail, end quote.
So that's what's
Speaker 76: going on. Okay? That's what's going on. The companies run everything.
Speaker 76: Everyone works for the company,
Speaker 123: including the government, and most of the company employees who weren't miners were expected to
Speaker 75: be involved with keeping the miners under control. Again, company teachers, preachers, doctors, store clerks, saloon keepers, all those type of employees, they were all expected to
Speaker 137: act as company spies.
The
Speaker 72: company owned and ran the post office and all the miners' incoming and outcoming mail was monitored.
Anyone heard
Speaker 128: complaining about any of this was fired and evicted
Speaker 100: and blacklisted
and
Speaker 12: sometimes beaten. Now
all of this was
Speaker 12: done, of course, according to the companies, to protect the miners from the predations of those
Speaker 20: radicals,
at
Speaker 20: the united mine workers union had already gotten its claws into the coal fields of ohio pennsylvania and other states
was even
Speaker 20: making inroads into the northern parts of west virginia
but the
Speaker 20: operators were determined that
the
Speaker 59: union would never under any circumstances be allowed to
Speaker 50: infect their coal fields in southern
west virginia
Give
Speaker 50: you some idea of the scope of this thing
Everybody can
Speaker 50: kind of understand
Speaker 138: When you go to work each day You're at the store, the office Or wherever it is that you work That the company runs the show It's their
Speaker 137: property It's their rules But
in West
Speaker 137: Virginia alone The operating coal fields Were larger than the states of Rhode Island
Speaker 13: Massachusetts And Delaware combined end.
And
Speaker 113: 94% of the miners there lived this way that I'm describing in company towns. So that's an area the size of three states in which the laws
Speaker 139: and constitution of the United States and the state of West Virginia were
not the
Speaker 139: day-to-day practical ruling authority. In
which, as Winthrop Lane
Speaker 140: wrote, represented a civilization within a civilization. An alien order embedded in a democracy.
It
Speaker 141: was an industrial dictatorship, like really a
Speaker 142: dictatorial government the size of three states in West Virginia alone just planted right here in the middle of America.
The president of the American
Speaker 143: Federation of Labor,
Samuel
Speaker 51: Gompers, wrote in 1913...
A
Speaker 51: powerful and subtle conspiracy between organized capital
Speaker 126: and the governmental agents of the state of West Virginia gives indications of the existence of an invisible government that steals from the workers the liberty they are told they have.
A U.S. congressman
Speaker 123: visiting the coal fields from Wisconsin said, One
cannot
Speaker 67: imagine the power of the mining companies. It elects senators and judges. It owns both the Republican and Democratic parties in the state.
Speaker 144: All laws are made to suit the mine owners. All the judges are elected through their influence, even up to the judges of the state Supreme Court.
Maybe the thing that
Speaker 144: gets me more
Speaker 145: than just about anything
Speaker 146: in this whole story, this whole
Speaker 11: sequence of events, for some reason, the one that just gets me the most is
that most
Speaker 11: of these coal operations...
that
Speaker 11: exerted
Speaker 52: so much social and political and economic control over the lives of the
Speaker 90: people in West Virginia were
owned by
Speaker 90: people who had never set foot in the state, would never set foot in the state.
Some were
Speaker 62: owned by men in Charleston, the capital of West Virginia, or other cities closer to home, little towns,
but most
Speaker 12: were not. Most were owned by out-of-state
Speaker 147: interests.
Speaker 147: Big out-of-state corporate interest.
Speaker 67: J.P. Morgan's U.S. Steel Company owned or operated 150,000
Speaker 13: acres in West Virginia. The Norfolk and Western Railway conglomerate
Speaker 9: ran the Pocahontas Coal & Coat Company, owned just about all of it. At
the time of
Speaker 9: purchase in 1902, I think, it was about 300,000 acres.
Those are
Speaker 12: just two. There's many more like that. Giant, distant corporations
Thank you.
A
Speaker 12: chunk of a U.S. state The size
of Rhode
Speaker 12: Island Delaware and
Speaker 126: Massachusetts And running them as Dictatorships And police states really It
comes to
Speaker 76: very much Resemble, actually Very much resemble The economic relationship Between the core and
Speaker 148: the periphery Under colonialism Under traditional colonialism Thank
you.
West
Speaker 149: Virginia had essentially been
Speaker 150: reduced To an economic colony Of
Speaker 124: Wall Street and other out-of-state financiers and corporations It really,
Speaker 151: really does resemble that system Under colonialism, the colonies had two
Speaker 11: primary economic roles They were to provide cheap labor To extract natural resources
Speaker 12: That
would then be
Speaker 12: shipped back to the mother country And then the mother country
would
Speaker 12: use those natural resources to manufacture the higher-value-added finished
Speaker 87: products for
which the
Speaker 87: colony then served as a market. That was its secondary function.
In that
Speaker 62: system, the colonies would be forbidden
Speaker 135: or prevented from using the resources that they extract to create higher-end finished products themselves. They performed the low-end work of resource extraction,
so
Speaker 135: that the imperial core could profit from the manufacturing part actual ownership of all the resources remains with the core the people in the place where the resources are extracted they might receive
Speaker 152: wages but not profits
it's a system that
Speaker 152: prevents the
Speaker 11: colonized territories from ever truly developing economically
It's
Speaker 9: actually designed to prevent that
Because a
Speaker 9: colony is not perceived
By the
Speaker 9: core as a society It's perceived as an operation
Speaker 21: As
one of the
Speaker 153: quotes said It's an appendage to an industrial
Speaker 88: operation And so things like economic development These things just don't play a role It's not a society The fact that children are born
Speaker 70: And families live their whole lives there
Speaker 25: Thank you so much for having me
Speaker 35: here.
for
Speaker 25: multiple generations, it's all incidental. The miners were viewed as a liquid commodity. Fungible labor. Easily replaceable, faceless people. You just could be swapped out with the next batch of clueless immigrants
Speaker 35: that just arrived, desperate and hungry from Central or Eastern Europe.
More than one person
Speaker 154: over the years has expressed in one
way or
Speaker 154: another I'll
see you next
Speaker 154: time.
Speaker 154: bewilderment or outrage that industrial
Speaker 155: civilization at the time ran on coal coal heated virtually all the homes and businesses around the country
Speaker 79: it powered the country's railroads and and its power grids through coal-fired power plants even the US Navy
ran on coal
And so if
Speaker 116: you were an alien from Mars Who
Speaker 156: was coming and hovering over the planet Earth And looking down and seeing a whole civilization That runs on this one precious resource
Speaker 102: You
could be
Speaker 102: forgiven for thinking That the people who lived where those resources were And dug it out of the ground Were probably some of the richest people on the planet But
in
Speaker 54: fact they were poor as dirt
And
Speaker 157: living under I mean
Speaker 157: what is honestly what would approach slave like conditions
Speaker 62: in many ways it's taken on different guises over the years from direct conquest and enslavement of the natives like
Speaker 50: in the early days of new world colonization to the more familiar style mastered by the Dutch and the British and
Speaker 52: against which the American colonies fought a violent rebellion you know all of this core periphery stuff I'm talking it's all in the declaration of independence
and
All the
Speaker 123: way up to the more modern post-World War II version, where, you know, I don't know, the CIA overthrows a populist leader
Speaker 62: in Africa and replaces
him with a
Speaker 62: dictator who gives good terms to ExxonMobil and then uses the money from that to kill his challengers and stuff his Swiss bank
Speaker 76: account, you know, modern colonialism. Well,
nowadays, we
Speaker 76: usually think colonialism and we think of the traditional terms of European imperialists colonizing less developed countries in the global south.
In
Speaker 76: very large countries, there's a reason that a country like the Netherlands or a country like England did that. It's because they didn't have a lot
Speaker 158: of land.
They wanted to
Speaker 158: open new markets or develop more resources, they had to go do it somewhere else. But
in very
Speaker 158: large countries like
Speaker 62: the United States, like Russia, like China, you
often see
Speaker 62: similar dynamics...
Speaker 62: I mean, really similar dynamics that emerge within the borders of the country itself.
You have
Speaker 62: internal colonialism,
Speaker 52: internally colonized populations.
And so
Speaker 35: again, to repeat this point one more time because I really want to drill it in there,
the hills of
Speaker 159: southern West Virginia over the course of about 20 years
were
Speaker 97: transformed into
by
Speaker 97: outside financial interests from a society of self-sufficient yeoman
Speaker 160: farmers
into an
Speaker 160: economic colony wholly owned by faraway corporations. It
all happened more
Speaker 161: quickly than the people affected by it could react. Before they were able to wrap their heads around what was
Speaker 162: happening, it had already happened.
The
Speaker 162: communities that used to exist there were completely shattered by the transformation.
It wasn't
Speaker 104: an easy task to rebuild any kind of community under conditions where people spoke a dozen
Speaker 154: or more languages, and where the coal companies were suspicious of any collective activity on the
part of their
Speaker 9: miners. The power of the operators depended on their ability to negotiate as a
Speaker 136: monolith with miners
who
Speaker 136: could only negotiate as individuals. Every individual miner is immediately
Speaker 83: replaceable.
You'd be the
Speaker 83: best
Speaker 163: coal miner in the whole wide world,
and they
Speaker 163: could replace you with a guy who's just learning the job, and the whole operation is not going to be affected
Speaker 20: 1%.
And so, no
Speaker 20: matter who you are, Mr. Miner Man, if you don't like the working conditions,
Speaker 53: or you don't like the pay...
If you
Speaker 53: don't like the attitude of the mine guards or the rules in the company town, no problem.
There are
Speaker 53: thousands of other people
Speaker 67: who can be plugged into your slot. The only way that
the
Speaker 92: miners could ever
hope to
Speaker 92: meet on something
Speaker 63: like equal terms,
really meet
Speaker 63: with the men who ran these companies as fellow human beings,
was to do it
Speaker 66: together.
Speaker 66: Because a miner is easily replaceable But the miners Are not replaceable
United Mine
Speaker 164: Workers of America Our
Speaker 33: branch of the International Union Was founded in Ohio In 1890 And
right
Speaker 91: away began making inroads Into coal fields in the Midwest During the business depression of 1894 Operators
pretty
Speaker 35: much everywhere, started cutting the pay of their miners without warning or negotiation, and so the UMW called for a nationwide strike. It was
their first
Speaker 35: major strike that they had called for.
There were a lot of
Speaker 100: British and German miners up in the Midwest, and these men understood the goals and purpose of a labor union, and so the Midwestern coal
Speaker 158: miners walked off the job. But
the coal fields of
Speaker 158: southern West Virginia
places
Speaker 158: only very recently developed and built up you know there were some of the last ones to be built up they were worked by locals or recently arrived central and southern europeans
Speaker 100: and southern blacks who had no union experience whatsoever and so they didn't walk out and they kept
working and so
Speaker 100: as all
Speaker 70: those mines up in the midwest and the northern areas shut down
the
Speaker 70: ones in southern west virginia kept going and as a result business from those striking midwestern coal fields was taken up by the non-union west virginia mining operations
did a lot of damage to those
Speaker 70: midwestern coal companies and it completely failed to get the umw anything that they had wanted and eventually
the operators
Speaker 70: up there just came to him and said look we're
Speaker 165: we're gonna all go bankrupt here if you keep this up because
Speaker 165: There's this other region down here that's just taking all the business, and so the UMW just had to call it off.
Well, after
Speaker 166: operators continued to cut wages,
three years later,
Speaker 57: the UMW called another strike.
This time, 1897. And this
Speaker 97: time, they were better prepared
and met
Speaker 97: with unprecedented
Speaker 167: success in coal fields everywhere in the country.
tens
Speaker 167: of thousands of
Speaker 168: union and non-union miners walked
Speaker 11: off the job en masse
Speaker 145: everywhere in the country that is except for southern west virginia
Speaker 9: and
so labor
Speaker 9: organizers from all over the united states pour into west virginia to get these miners there organized explain to them what a union is and what it's for and why they need
one
Speaker 57: and just to get them organized and
Speaker 57: Samuel Gompers, the head of the AFL He came in and he said The success of this strike depends This is a nationwide
Speaker 9: strike He said it depends on one factor
That the
Speaker 9: miners of West Virginia Will suspend operations Gompers
was
Speaker 52: joined by a whole bunch of Well known labor activists at the time Eugene Debs was
Speaker 59: there A whole bunch of people
But the coal
Speaker 63: companies in West Virginia Were very well prepared
Speaker 63: Company police and mine guards Rode the trains and patrolled the train stations They turned back any
Speaker 47: labor organizer That tried to enter into those southern counties Not just onto their property by the way But into the counties, period
The
Speaker 50: organizers who got through anyway And were discovered Were thrown in jail
They
Speaker 27: were fined Very often they were beaten Sometimes they were shot at By company guards or police
Thank you.
John
Speaker 67: Mitchell, who was vice president of the United Mine Workers of America at the time, he was chased and shot at by company guards and had to flee for his life by swimming across a
mountain
Speaker 169: stream. The operators went to their
Speaker 47: pet judges and got rubber-stamped injunctions against the labor organizations, ordering them to cease all efforts to organize the miners of West
Speaker 71: Virginia. The state very
Speaker 170: quickly became a focal point of the whole nationwide labor
movement.
The
Speaker 57: AFL, the Knights of Labor, the UMWA, 28 other national and international unions sent representatives to convene a council in Wheeling, West Virginia to
try to
Speaker 171: coordinate and publicize their efforts. Mass
meetings
Speaker 172: were held all over the country by workers to express indignation at the court's interference with the constitutional rights of the organizers and minors
in West
Speaker 172: Virginia.
Speaker 62: Still,
Speaker 62: Southern West Virginia was impenetrable to the Union. One
organizer
Speaker 158: reported that he'd managed to establish a local at a mine in McDowell
Speaker 100: County, but that it soon dissolved because the miners there were unwilling to participate for fear of being fired, evicted, and blacklisted.
David Alan Corbin,
Speaker 91: in his great study, it's called Life, Work, and Rebellion in the
Speaker 11: Coalfields, The West Virginia Miners, 1880-1922, by David Alan Corbin, great book,
He
Speaker 11: writes: "The miners knew their
Speaker 67: operators. When local unions were formed and miners took offices in the locals,
Speaker 126: the coal companies reacted swiftly and harshly. The truth is, an organizer wrote, that as fast as men organize, the companies are discharging them
and
Speaker 144: turning them out of their
Speaker 25: houses. The coal companies also reacted against the organizers when they became successful.
Speaker 25: Most of the organizers
Speaker 67: were threatened, some of them were beaten, and nearly all of them had their efforts halted by injunctions or were jailed, often on
Speaker 11: charges such as holding meetings on Sunday, and thereby violating the Sabbath. Well, despite
all that, the
Speaker 173: strike
Speaker 50: overall was still a huge success.
Speaker 50: membership in the umwa increased tenfold and
Speaker 59: the union dues from that refilled the union's empty treasury and gave him a sense of confidence
going
Speaker 12: forward into the future because for the first time minor solidarity had been put on display
Speaker 135: in large sections of the country and
so the
Speaker 174: operators associations up in
Speaker 174: ohio and illinois indiana and western pennsylvania
Speaker 113: great big giant coal field called the central field up there
finally broke
Speaker 113: with precedent and agreed to sit down and negotiate
Speaker 106: with united mine workers regarding wages and working conditions
Speaker 60: the result was the central competitive field agreement which made the unionization of the midwestern
Speaker 63: coal fields official
They
Speaker 63: recognized the UMWA as the miner's instrument for collective bargaining. The wage increases and other
Speaker 70: accommodations were really secondary to getting their union recognized. Without
a union, wage
Speaker 70: increases and other accommodations can always be rolled back tomorrow. You need a union. Critically, those Midwestern
coal
Speaker 115: companies that made this agreement...
They
Speaker 115: extracted a very
Speaker 100: important promise from the United Mine Workers of America.
They told them that
Speaker 100: the concessions they were making in the agreement were going to
Speaker 136: drive up their operating costs
Speaker 57: and would allow the non-union fields to the south in West Virginia to undercut and out-compete them like they had before. And
so as
Speaker 62: part of the agreement...
the
Speaker 62: United Mine Workers committed themselves to unionizing southern West
Speaker 100: Virginia come hell or high water.
And the coal
Speaker 100: companies there, though, were not going to observe any limits to prevent that from happening.
As far as the coal
Speaker 47: companies of southern West Virginia were concerned, a unionized workforce was a threat to their very existence.
You know, the
Speaker 70: coal fields in West
Speaker 175: Virginia were further away from the major coal-consuming regions on the eastern seaboard or the Great Lakes or even the Mississippi Valley. West
Virginia didn't really
Speaker 176: consume a lot of coal,
so
Speaker 70: it all had to be sold out of state for the most part, whereas the coal fields in Ohio and Pennsylvania...
They
Speaker 70: sold a lot of coal to their
Speaker 67: own states, very short distance away, which meant that the transportation costs for them were a lot lower,
so
Speaker 50: the built-in costs in West Virginia were
going to be higher, and the only
Speaker 50: lever that they had to keep themselves competitive was oil.
Speaker 50: wages like the cost of
Speaker 100: extracting the coal was the labor to do it was the only other major cost besides transportation
and since
Speaker 100: their transport costs were
Speaker 35: higher there was just a constant downward pressure on the wages of west virginia miners a lot of corner cutting a
lot of
Speaker 35: things that became more advanced in the northern
Speaker 47: mines as far as safety and things like that that didn't make it to the southern mines in west virginia
Because
Speaker 47: they cost money. And so as a result, the West Virginia mines were
Speaker 146: the most dangerous in the country.
The West Virginia
Speaker 146: mine
Speaker 160: operators, they actually, they were really paranoid. They actually saw the United Mine Workers of America as a tool that was being used against them
In a
Speaker 113: conspiracy, they really believed that this was happening, by the Midwestern coal companies to try to cripple their operations and steal their business.
Speaker 13: That's what they thought. So they were determined to keep the union out at all costs. As
far as the union was
Speaker 71: concerned, southern West Virginian mines had to be unionized, or else they would always
and
Speaker 92: forever make it mathematically untenable for other mines around the country to accept the union.
Speaker 92: to irreconcilable
Speaker 61: positions. The UMWA had not made headway into southern West Virginia so far. And part
of
Speaker 5: that was because of the efforts of the coal mine operators. But a big part of it had to
Speaker 123: do with the fact that they had so far consistently failed to understand or really address the concerns
Speaker 125: of the West Virginia miners, which were different from people in other parts of the country.
And
Speaker 177: whether it was because the immigrant black and local
Speaker 60: miners were kind of accustomed to being poor and were isolated from the temptations of civilization, maybe it was that, or maybe it was because a portion of the miners saw the
Speaker 124: job as a part-time supplement to a mixed lifestyle that included hunting and fishing and small-scale gardening, whatever the reason was, the miners in southern Appalachia were simply not
Speaker 124: that concerned about how much they were being paid
not that they
Speaker 165: didn't care at all it just was not a priority negotiating higher wages was how the union sold itself to miners everywhere else it's how it tried to sell itself
Speaker 12: to the West Virginians but for the most part they were not receptive
it took
Speaker 12: the UMWA a
Speaker 5: long time to figure out that the highest priority in West Virginia
Speaker 35: the central issue
Speaker 35: For the miners of West Virginia
Was the
Speaker 35: oppressive
Speaker 61: conditions
Of the
Speaker 61: company town And especially The abuses of the private security forces Hired by the companies
That's what
Speaker 136: they wanted help with The UMWA didn't really get this at first And so it hindered their organizing
Speaker 35: efforts But they were soon to learn the hard
way Just
Speaker 35: what the miners of southern West Virginia Had been dealing with Corbin writes Quote
The coal
Speaker 35: operators were determined
Speaker 67: to prevent the UMWA from again invading the state, believing, as did Justin Collins, that if the coal operator
Speaker 71: undertakes to fight the Union, he will have to fight force with force. More
and more
Speaker 88: operators formed police barricades against these invaders by hiring mercenaries from the Baldwin-Feltz Detective Agency. By 1910, Baldwin-Feltz guards could be
Speaker 71: found in nearly every company town in southern West Virginia.
The
Speaker 71: principal work of these guards, according to the head of the agency, Tom Feltz, was to protect the operators against organized labor. In
protecting the
Speaker 67: coal establishment from union agitators, the Baldwin-Feltz guards were effective and brutal.
Speaker 67: Whereas in earlier years, during quiet periods, national organizers moved relatively unmolested around the state,
by
Speaker 154: 1907 they were surrounded and harassed by Baldwin-Feltz guards from the time they boarded a train in Cincinnati headed for West Virginia.
The arrival of UMWA
Speaker 53: organizers often meant headlines for local labor newspapers. The February 10,
Speaker 71: 1910 issue of the Labor Argus read, All
right.
Speaker 71: Horrible Butchery of Representatives of United Mine Workers
Speaker 11: by Brutal and Bloodthirsty Guards in the New River Field. The September 8, 1910 edition of the paper headlined, Guards Brutally Assault Union Men, Two Members
Speaker 71: of the International Executive Board of United Mine Workers of America, Beaten Up by Coal Company Thugs.
The United Mine
Speaker 71: Workers Journal stigmatized West Virginia as the Black Belt, clarifying,
We do
Speaker 71: not mean that they employ nothing but colored men, but that it is a region where it is not safe for an organizer to
Speaker 136: let his business be known. By 1912, UMWA officials openly admitted that they no longer encouraged organizers to enter the state of West
Speaker 35: Virginia because of the danger posed by
Speaker 72: the Baldwin Feltz guards. The vigilance of the Baldwin Feltz guards against Union agitators carried over into the everyday internal affairs of the company town.
If a
Speaker 72: miner showed too much independence or became inquisitive or complained, he was suspected of being a union agitator and might be beaten and driven out of town. The guards forcibly prohibited
Speaker 67: the assembly of more than three miners at night, a practice they called bunching for fear that one of the miners might be an organizer preaching unionism.
Describing the
Speaker 70: guards' activities, a miner recollected, they rode horses and wouldn't let anyone they didn't like walk on the railroad tracks.
Speaker 70: Worse, though, you
Speaker 116: couldn't go into the office and tell about mistakes or complain about the store. The guards would just kick you
off the porch.
Speaker 116: These guards
Speaker 67: gained a national reputation for their beating, maiming, and murdering of union miners and organizers. In fact, Edward Levinson, in his book "I
Speaker 20: Break Strikes," a general study of industrial spy and strike-breaking agencies throughout the United States,
Speaker 20: awarded the Baldwin-Felts agency the blue ribbon for
Speaker 5: wanton, cold-blooded murders.
Miners throughout the
Speaker 5: country reported that they were appalled by the activities of
Speaker 136: the Baldwin-Felts guards in West Virginia,
and they
Speaker 136: made it known that they would not permit themselves to be subjugated in such a manner.
Indeed, in
Speaker 136: the speech that precipitated the massacre
Speaker 88: by miners of 19
Speaker 13: mine guards at Heron, Illinois,
Speaker 13: A miner had declared, we must show the world that this ain't West Virginia. The
southern West Virginia
Speaker 13: miners hated the Baldwin-Feltz guards more than did any other group of miners.
During one
Speaker 67: strike, when the miners finally unleashed their wrath against these guards, a miner told a journalist, I never had to kill a man and hope never to be compelled to kill one.
But I
Speaker 67: would kill a dozen of these guards as I would kill
Speaker 178: a dozen rats if they should attempt to lord it over us as they've been accustomed to do. End quote.
Speaker 179: Oh, story
gets me
Speaker 179: worked up, guys.
Take a
Speaker 179: breath here and settle down a little bit. All right.
So it
Speaker 180: took until 1912
to...
for the
Speaker 180: coal miners of southern West
Speaker 20: Virginia to finally rise up. In
the end, it
Speaker 20: was the very measures the coal companies took to prevent that from happening that
ended up
Speaker 57: ensuring that it did happen.
The West
Speaker 57: Virginia miners had shown little interest in striking for higher wages or better working conditions.
Very
Speaker 67: little interest in the Union, but the paranoid operators used subversion and brute force just to make sure, and that was what drove the miners to
Speaker 66: rebellion.
It began at a place
Speaker 66: called Paint Creek in Kanawha
Speaker 181: County.
Miners there at Paint Creek
Speaker 50: had been some of the few in southern West Virginia who had managed to negotiate a collective
Speaker 57: agreement with their operators.
But on
Speaker 57: March 31, 1912,
Speaker 67: that contract expired, and negotiations between the miners and the Kanoa Coal Operators Association began. The
miners were asking for a pay
Speaker 67: raise of two and a half cents per ton of coal dug. Miners, by and large, were not paid by the hour. They were paid according to how much coal they delivered. And
the miners also
Speaker 67: demanded recognition of their union.
And the miners also demanded recognition of their union.
Speaker 145: Of
Speaker 67: their right to bargain collectively.
But the
Speaker 113: operators refused. They said they couldn't remain profitable if they accommodated
Speaker 11: that two and a half cent pay raise. So the miners compromised. They said, OK, fine, we'll accept another contract on the
Speaker 50: existing pay scale.
Just accept
Speaker 50: our union.
And still the
Speaker 50: operators refused.
And so the miners cleaned up
Speaker 33: their work areas and walked off the job on April 19th, 1912.
Well, soon, the more
Speaker 113: skittish operators, worried about maintaining their downstream relationships, hurried back to the table and agreed to concessions, and their mines were opened up again by early May. That
was in much Oconomowoc
Speaker 154: County, but the operators at Paint Creek refused to compromise and
Speaker 35: instead imported 300 Baldwin Feltz mine guards to watch over their property and
Speaker 182: be their enforcers.
The
Speaker 183: guards.
Speaker 183: well they did what they knew how to do from corbin quote the
Speaker 67: baldwin felt guards built iron and concrete forts that they equipped with machine guns throughout the strike districts then evicted striking miners from their company houses
Speaker 184: destroying forty thousand dollars worth of miners furniture in the process
The guards
Speaker 71: then began to intimidate the strikers in their tent colonies at Holly Grove and Eskdale. The guards often prevented the
Speaker 67: strikers from leaving their tent colonies and prohibited the use of company-owned bridges, forcing the strikers and their families at gunpoint to wade through waist-high streams. They
also stopped
Speaker 67: the strikers and their families from using the passenger trains into
Speaker 185: Charleston,
The
Speaker 185: son of a miner who attempted to do so was kicked in the face and warned, Get off, you damn son of
Speaker 186: a bitch, or I will shoot your brains
Speaker 76: out. He
was then
Speaker 76: literally thrown off the train. The
mine guards
Speaker 185: also began to kill the striking miners, both individually, for example, a black miner chasing his stray cow, and collectively. On June 5th, the guards launched a surprise attack on one of the tent colonies, wounding several people.
Speaker 185: "...thereafter, according to a local union leader, every day or two they would sneak into the hills and sprinkle the canvas tent cities with showers
Speaker 187: of lead and pellets, caring not if their bullets hit men, women, or children." About
two years after
Speaker 188: this strike, mine guards from Baldwin Feltz and the Colorado
Speaker 67: National Guard, which was being manned and funded by a Rockefeller mining company...
Speaker 47: indiscriminately attacked a miner's tent city in Ludlow, Colorado and
sprayed it
Speaker 47: with machine gun fire and then burned it
Speaker 13: down with people hiding in little pits under the tents from the gunfire. They got burned to death. Twenty people, twelve children and two women, some men, were massacred in one night.
The full story of the
Speaker 13: Ludlow massacre
Speaker 125: is in the
Speaker 94: prologue to this podcast series.
The
Speaker 94: guards were very callous in carrying out the evictions
Speaker 113: Most of the time They would surprise
Speaker 125: families in the morning March them out of their homes at gunpoint if necessary And
one or two
Speaker 189: would guard the
Speaker 32: family While the rest of them carried the family's furniture And their other belongings outside and dumped it by the creek
They forced
Speaker 67: their way into the home of Charlie and Ed Fish And
Speaker 67: and found Ed's wife, Willie Fish, holding a sick
Speaker 138: newborn.
They marched
Speaker 138: her and her newborn outside, deposited the crib along with the rest of the furniture on a wagon out there.
They told Willie's
Speaker 113: sister-in-law that they used to hate doing this kind of work, but chuckled and said they'd gotten used to it.
On
Speaker 63: Wednesday, May 29th, 1912,
for
Speaker 63: the first time the miners struck back
that morning a
Speaker 50: group of mine guards had poured themselves some coffee and
Speaker 113: they were walking by the company
store to
Speaker 113: get some breakfast when shots rang out from the nearby hillside
started peppering
Speaker 35: around them so they rushed back to their barracks and shots start coming
Speaker 12: down from another hillside
the guards
Speaker 12: grab their rifles as shots are hitting the
Speaker 12: Guards in another larger bunkhouse nearby rushed out with weapons and began firing at
Speaker 11: puffs of smoke on the hillsides.
The attack was wild and
Speaker 11: poorly planned, and nobody
Speaker 21: on
Speaker 174: either side was hit, but
Speaker 21: the psychological impact was large. The mine guards were shaken
Speaker 113: by the fact that the miners had actually come at them.
And so a
Speaker 113: swivel-mounted Gatling gun was stationed in front of the company store.
covering
Speaker 125: the whole hillside with its field of fire. Next to the machine gun was a giant searchlight which
Speaker 190: would sweep the trees in the cabins from dusk till dawn.
Early the next
Speaker 35: morning, a guard patrol spotted a group of miners making their way through the woods and took off after them, gunfire going in both directions.
It was a
Speaker 62: group of Italians, and one of the miners was shot and killed, and the black miner, who was just out looking for his cow,
Speaker 142: was also hit. The
leader of this group of
Speaker 142: guards who was chasing them up into the
Speaker 12: hills was a man named Ernest Galgeau. He was one of the most notorious of all the guards. This
is a
Speaker 12: guy who was a known murderer before he was ever hired to Baldwin Feltz. He
was known by all the
Speaker 35: Paint Creek miners as one of the meanest bullies employed by the company.
his
Speaker 62: posse is tearing through the hills, kicking in the doors of cabins, looking for miners, any miners they can find, really. And they come up on the home of Ed and Charlie Fish, who
had not
Speaker 62: been involved in the shooting.
Speaker 113: Ed was sick in bed. Only their wives were there.
And so
Speaker 135: Ed's wife, Willie Fish, is a girl who's just about 18 years old.
Speaker 5: She remembered what happened. Quote,
Speaker 5: They, meaning the miners, came through my yard, jabbering in Italian, but I couldn't understand half of what they said.
I was
Speaker 5: telling them
to
Speaker 88: go on and scatter. As
quick as I
Speaker 88: got them out, I turned my chickens out. I had about two or three hundred chickens, and put them in the yard so they would scratch out as much of the tracks as they could. The guards came and asked, "'How long you been out here?'
"'I've been
Speaker 88: out here about an hour feeding my chickens.' They said, "'Have you seen anybody?' I said, "'I haven't seen a soul.'
I'd
Speaker 88: look them right in the eye and lie like a sailor, end quote.
Then the guards
Speaker 59: came to the cabin of Tony and Janina Sevilla, another Italian family.
Tony was away out
Speaker 59: of state looking for another job, and so Janina and the children were the only ones there.
Speaker 12: She remembered what happened, quote, I
heard this
Speaker 116: shooting, and I went to the door to see what was the matter. I
saw the
Speaker 116: guards coming down the hill.
Those
Speaker 128: guards were going into the other neighbor houses there and they began to pick up the men they could find in the houses.
They came to our
Speaker 128: house and they opened the door and then they came in and looked under the bed
and on
Speaker 128: the bed was my baby and it was asleep
and I told
Speaker 128: the guards to let the baby alone.
They struck me
Speaker 88: and I fell down and they kicked me in the stomach and they hit me with their fists here.
She's pointing
Speaker 88: to where they hit her.
And
Speaker 128: then they knocked me down again."
When the
Speaker 128: guards
Speaker 136: left, Janina Sevilla was on her knees, weeping, and praying that the five-month-old baby in her belly was okay. Six
of the Italian
Speaker 136: miners were rounded up and
marched out of the
Speaker 9: hills at gunpoint. One
of them, named
Speaker 9: Frank Russi, was released after a few days and made his way home to take care of his sick and pregnant wife. And
then ten
Speaker 9: days later, mine
Speaker 191: guards broke down his
Speaker 9: door...
He
Speaker 11: wasn't around. They found the wife there alone, pregnant and sick.
And so she
Speaker 11: runs to the home of a nearby friend whose husband was the mine foreman while the guards cleaned out her house and dumped everything they had out in the dirt.
And then a few
Speaker 12: days after that,
Speaker 192: the friend's husband, the one that took her in, the mine foreman, was fired from his job because his wife had helped Rusey's wife.
Having
Speaker 160: adopted this strategy of cruel...
Speaker 160: Really cruel brutality against the miners. You know, there was nothing business-like about it.
These
Speaker 50: Baldwin-Felz guys that they would hire,
you know,
Speaker 50: sure, some of them would be former cops and maybe those guys would be the leaders that everybody else had to follow,
but a
Speaker 50: lot of their ranks were just manned up by thugs from the
Speaker 12: cities. Guys, I mean, Ernest Gaugeau was a known murderer.
And they're hiring
Speaker 12: him and giving him a gun and saying, go up there and throw these people out of their homes, go do this, go do that.
Speaker 12: These are hard men, and they had to be hard men, because they're going up there to go against coal miners, to throw them out of their houses and chase them away from the mine. The coal miners are tough people,
and so the
Speaker 12: guys who got sent up there against them had to be tough people, but they weren't always the most savory
Speaker 160: bunch, and there was really a cruel streak to how the operators in southern
West
Speaker 193: Virginia handled these things.
And so the
Speaker 50: company then set about Replacing the miners Started bringing in train loads of scab labor From other parts of the country
And
Speaker 100: this The miners were not prepared to tolerate Because that was the one way That they could truly defeat their strike
Now
Speaker 106: these poor Replacement workers Most of these guys had no idea What
Speaker 194: they were walking into They were walking into something that was becoming a war zone Very quickly The story of Lawrence O'Brien
Speaker 195: -
Amen.
who was a
Speaker 195: replacement worker brought in from New York City and his story
Speaker 121: provides an illustrative example Lawrence O'Brien is this guy who lives in New York City he's a skilled machinist
O'Brien gets laid
Speaker 35: off from his job and he's out looking for work and he sees an ad they're looking for machinists and boilermakers and other skilled workers to get on a train and go down to West Virginia to work on motors and other gear at the mines
And
Speaker 35: so he signs up on the spot, along with several of his Irish buddies, a whole bunch of Italian and Polish immigrants who literally just got off the boat. I mean, they are still trailing their luggage behind them from their trip. They came straight from the docks.
And they don't even
Speaker 35: have time to go home for a change of clothing. He calls his
wife.
Tells
Speaker 192: her that he's found a good job It's in West Virginia But they pay $5 a day He has to leave right now And he'll write for his suitcase when he gets there And so he's on the train 200 other guys Right
away he
Speaker 196: notices the guards And he thinks, huh, that's interesting
Huh
no food
Speaker 36: was served and so when they change trains in Washington he tries to go into the station to buy a sandwich but the guards won't let him leave when
they get
Speaker 36: to the
Speaker 109: Paint Creek area guards
take
Speaker 36: out their rifles start patrolling the cars and they tell everyone,
Speaker 197: order everyone
Speaker 36: to pull down the blinds on their windows so Brian's starting to worry maybe he made a little mistake here
The train
Speaker 36: stops at
Speaker 35: different mining camps along the way and each time deposits a few workers in the hands of some guards who march them off.
When O'Brien and
Speaker 198: his friends get to their destination,
they're told
Speaker 198: by the mine superintendent
that
Speaker 196: they're going to be digging coal first thing in the
morning.
Speaker 196: Again all these guys are machinists And
Speaker 199: other skilled workers So they're like huh No sir we're machinists Not miners We were hired to come down And
Speaker 36: do machinist work And they're told We don't need machinists You're going to go into the mines And
they decide
Speaker 34: they have no choice None of them have any money And so they're at least going to go Work in the mines long enough To pay for their trip
home
O'Brien
Speaker 36: works there a
Speaker 200: full month
And then he
Speaker 192: goes in to collect his wages For digging coal from morning till night Six days a week For a month And
they give
Speaker 192: him just over three dollars He's
supposed to
Speaker 192: be making five dollars a day But they said that's all he was owed After they took out the cost of his trip down there And his supplies And his rent And every other expense O'Brien got off
Speaker 12: easy
many
Speaker 12: others who were lied to about the jobs that waited for them down in West Virginia were kept under guard and not
Speaker 9: allowed to leave.
They owed the company
Speaker 9: money for the train ride down there and the food they'd been fed. And so, at the very least, they were going to have to work that off. And they were not allowed
Speaker 192: to leave. Two men who had come in with O'Brien from
New York...
They
Speaker 192: escaped on foot
Speaker 109: and appeared after a long journey in Charleston, the capital of the state, saying that they had been told by guards that they would be shot if they tried to leave. Three
other workers signed
Speaker 109: a letter to the State Labor Commission stating that at least 150 men were being held by guards captive at Kayford and forced to work.
Speaker 10: They'd been working for three weeks without pay,
Speaker 10: and the company said they still owed money and wouldn't get back to even for several more weeks at least, so they were being held and forced to work.
Oconomowoc
Speaker 201: County, West Virginia, was a powder keg.
And all it needed was
Speaker 202: a spark.
And that spark
Speaker 202: rolled in on the
Speaker 33: morning train on
the 9th
Speaker 33: of June, 1912.
Her
Speaker 36: name was Mary Harris Jones. Better known by her affectionate nickname, Mother Jones. 75 or 80 years old at the time, thereabouts. No one was ever quite sure
Speaker 201: exactly what year she was born. Mother Jones was all five feet tall at the very most and cut the figure of your great-grandmother
Speaker 203: and
Well,
Speaker 178: she lit powder kegs for a living. She
wore a
Speaker 178: full-length black dress, this little old lady, with a black shawl
Speaker 83: and a little white bonnet, lace around her neck. Her eyes sat behind
Speaker 123: rimless glasses and ringlets of white hair surrounded her little old face, every
inch
Speaker 204: the grandmother.
But she moved
Speaker 204: well.
She
Speaker 204: had
Speaker 192: limitless energy,
even into her
Speaker 192: 80s, everybody says that. Her voice was
Speaker 35: loud and strong, and it still carried that Irish lilt she learned in the country of her birth. Her
grandfather had
Speaker 35: been hanged by the British for Irish
Speaker 205: revolutionary activity, so this was in her blood. Her
father took the family to
Speaker 33: Canada and then to the United States during the Great Potato Famine when she was a girl,
and
And
Speaker 33: in America, she'd married a union
Speaker 36: man, a union worker.
And they were
Speaker 192: living a typical family life down in Memphis, Tennessee, until during a
Speaker 113: yellow fever epidemic in 1867, she watched her husband and all four of her children,
Speaker 12: three girls and a boy, all under five years old, die within one week of each other.
And so this
Speaker 12: woman, alone, she moves herself to Chicago.
Speaker 12: and opens a dress shop, tries to start
Speaker 206: rebuilding
Speaker 109: her heart and her life. But
a short
Speaker 109: time later, the great Chicago fire of 1871 burns down most of the city, including her shop. And
then something
Speaker 207: happened. You
can leave it to
Speaker 207: legend to say exactly what it was, but something happened. Because after the great
Speaker 67: fire, this woman...
Speaker 190: who had no
Speaker 67: one and had
Speaker 190: nothing.
She began to
Speaker 190: speak out on behalf of laboring men and women
Speaker 36: in America. By
the time of the trouble in
Speaker 36: Kanawha County, Mother Jones had been at the forefront of the American labor movement for many years. She was recognized all over the country.
And she
Speaker 192: helped, as Lon Savage writes, quote, organize copper miner unions in Michigan and streetcar strikes in New York. She organized chemical workers in New Jersey, as well as women bottlers in Milwaukee breweries and shirtwaist makers in Philadelphia.
Speaker 207: She spoke to Finnish iron ore miners and Polish steel workers at Gary. She
led an army
Speaker 207: of little children from Philadelphia to New York and on to
Speaker 192: Teddy Roosevelt's home at Oyster Bay to protest child labor.
She
Speaker 184: walked the halls of Congress and conferred with presidents and millionaires. But coal miners were her
Speaker 192: boys. No
one could
Speaker 192: match her in bringing America's attention to the horrors of the coal digger's life. She gazed down into the black hole of Ludlow, where miners' wives and children were burned to death. She'd stood before gunmen and dared them to shoot.
She
Speaker 192: led miners' wives, carrying mops and beating tin pans like cymbals, through Pennsylvania's mountains to dramatize their husbands' grievances. Colorado coal operators feared her so much, they held her under military
Speaker 10: confinement for weeks without charge or hearing.
End quote. In an
Speaker 208: interview, she was quoted saying,
I am simply a
Speaker 72: social revolutionist.
I
Speaker 72: believe in the collective ownership of the means of wealth.
At this
Speaker 72: time, the natural commodities of this country are cornered in the hands of a few. The
man who owns
Speaker 72: the means of wealth gets the major profit, and the worker who produces the wealth takes what he can get. I
do not believe in
Speaker 72: socialism by a party name. It
has been the
Speaker 72: rule of the centuries to sound a name until it acquires a magic power.
Sooner or
Speaker 72: later, and perhaps sooner than we think,
Speaker 72: Evolution and revolution will have accomplished the overturning of the system under which we now live,
and the
Speaker 72: worker will have gained his own. This change will come as the result of education. My work, my life
Speaker 209: work,
has been
Speaker 209: to try to educate the worker to a sense of the wrongs he has had to suffer, and does suffer,
and to stir
Speaker 209: up the oppressed to a point of getting off their knees and demanding that which I believe to be rightly theirs. When force...
is
Speaker 209: used to hinder the worker in his efforts to obtain the things which are his, he
has the right
Speaker 209: to meet force with force. He
has the right to
Speaker 209: strike for what is his due, and
he has no
Speaker 209: right to be satisfied with less.
The people want
Speaker 209: to do right, but they've been hoodwinked for ages. But
now they're
Speaker 72: awakening. Oh yes, they're awakening. And
the day of
Speaker 72: their enfranchisement is near at hand. End quote.
Mother
Speaker 210: Jones had been there She'd been through it On her first ever visit to
Speaker 35: West Virginia During the 1897 organizing drive John Mitchell, the leader of the UNW at the time When he got there, he found her in jail She was eventually
Speaker 192: released And
Speaker 36: straight from the jail, she walked right back up into the hills And into the hollows, knocking on the doors of miners'
cabins
Speaker 201: finding them there, finding them here, even going down into the mines to speak to them
Speaker 47: if she had to. And
she just walked
Speaker 47: the hills talking to these men about their situation.
Another time she was
Speaker 47: giving a speech
Speaker 36: to West Virginia miners when shots rang out. Everybody scatters for cover, and
Speaker 192: so she hops on the back of her friend who carries her across a creek off into the wilderness.
And,
She had
Speaker 192: tended miners' wounds after gunfights with guards. Once,
when she was
Speaker 192: arrested for calling on miners to strike, she sent the courtroom into a tizzy and berated the judge as a company scab while he lectured her that her behavior was entirely unworthy of a good woman. Her
previous trips to
Speaker 192: West Virginia had
really
Speaker 109: radicalized her against the coal operators.
On a
Speaker 109: visit in 1907, she
Speaker 211: visited a miner's camp, going to each ramshackle cabin to speak with the families, as she always did, and she describes it in her autobiography. Quote, I
sent two boys
Speaker 211: across a little gully to a log cabin
Speaker 72: to get a cup of tea for me.
The miner
Speaker 72: came out and beckoned me to come over. I
went, and
Speaker 72: as I entered the door, my eyes rested on a straw mattress on which rested a beautiful young girl.
"'She
Speaker 72: looked at me with the most gentle eyes "'I had ever saw in a human being. "'The
wind came
Speaker 72: in through the cracks of the floor "'and would raise the
Speaker 192: bedclothes a little. "'I
said to the
Speaker 192: father, "'What
is wrong
Speaker 35: with your girl?' "'Consumption,' said he. "'I couldn't earn enough in the mines "'and she went to work in a boarding house. "'They worked her so hard she took sick. "'Consumption. "'Around a fireplace sat a
Speaker 212: group of dirty children, "'ragged and neglected-looking.'
Speaker 212: "'He gave us tea and bread.' "'A great crowd came up the mountainside that afternoon. "'The superintendent sent one of his lackeys, a colored fellow. "'When the miners told me who he was "'and that
Speaker 88: he was sent there as a spy, I said to him, "'See here, young man, don't you know that the immortal Lincoln, "'a white man, gave you freedom from slavery? "'Why
do you
Speaker 88: now betray your white brothers "'who are fighting for industrial freedom?' "'Mother,' said
Speaker 33: he,
I
Speaker 33: can't make myself scarce, but you know something? My hearing and my eyesight ain't so good today.
That afternoon, up
Speaker 33: there on the
Speaker 72: mountainside, we organized a strong union.
The next
Speaker 72: day, the man who gave me food, his name was Mike Harrington,
went to the
Speaker 192: mines to go to work, but he was told to go to the office and get his pay. No
man could
Speaker 20: work in the mines, the superintendent said, who entertained agitators in his home.
"'Mike
Speaker 20: said to him, "'I didn't entertain her. "'She paid me for the tea and bread. "'It makes no difference,' said he. "'You had Mother Jones
Speaker 53: in your house, and that is
enough.' "'He went
Speaker 53: home, and when he opened the door, "'his
Speaker 71: sick daughter said, "'Father, have you lost your job?'
"'She
Speaker 192: started to sob. "'That brought on a coughing fit, "'from which she fell back onto the pillow exhausted. "'That little girl died shortly thereafter.'
that
Speaker 192: afternoon he was ordered to leave his house as it was owned by the company they buried the little girl and moved to an
old barn mike was later
Speaker 184: made an organizer for the united mine workers and he made one of the most faithful workers i've
Speaker 213: ever seen
Speaker 184: end quote
she
Speaker 213: describes another visit in 1903
Speaker 109: quote
i went to stanford
Speaker 109: mountain where the men were on strike i
went
The
Speaker 36: court had issued an injunction forbidding the strikers from going near the mines. A group of miners walked along the public road nowhere near the mines. The next morning they held a meeting in front of their own hall,
Speaker 209: which they themselves had built, and a United States Deputy Marshal came into the meeting with warrants for 30 members for violating the injunction.
Speaker 90: The men said, "We did not break any law. We did not go near the mines and you know it. We were on the public road."
Speaker 90: Well, said the deputy, we're going to arrest you anyway.
They defied him to
Speaker 88: arrest them, insisting they had not violated the law. They
gave him
Speaker 88: 25 minutes to leave the town. They
sent for his
Speaker 88: brother, who
Speaker 209: was a company doctor, and told him to take him out. That
night, I went to hold a
Speaker 209: meeting with them. They told me what had happened. I said, boys, it would have been better if you had surrendered, especially as you had the truth on your side
Speaker 72: and you had not been near the mines.
After the
Speaker 72: meeting, I went to the nearby camp, Montgomery, and there was a little hotel and the railway station. Before leaving, the boys, who came to the edge of the town with me, said, "Will you be coming back soon, Mother?" I had no idea how
Speaker 209: soon it would be. The next morning, I went to the station to get an early train, and the agent says to me,
"Did you
Speaker 53: hear what trouble they had up in Stamford Mountain last
night?"
I think
Speaker 53: you're mistaken, young man, I answered, for I just came down from there myself
Speaker 70: last night.
Well, he said,
Speaker 70: they've had some trouble there all the same. Anyone hurt? Yes. I was taking railway messages and couldn't get all the details. Some shooting. I said, take back my ticket. I must go up
there. I took the short
Speaker 209: trail up the hillside to Stanford Mountain. It seemed to me as I came toward the camp as if those wretched shacks were huddling closer in terror.
Speaker 209: everything was
Speaker 72: deathly still as
i came near
Speaker 72: the nearer the miners homes i could hear sobbing
then i saw
Speaker 72: between the
Speaker 109: stilts that propped up a miner's shack the clay red with blood i
pushed the
Speaker 109: door open on a mattress wet with blood lay a miner his brains had been blown out while he slept
his shack
Speaker 209: was riddled with bullets
in five
Speaker 209: other shacks men lay dead
and
Speaker 209: one of them a baby boy and his mother sobbed over the father's corpse.
The coroner
Speaker 209: came. He found that these six men had been murdered in their beds while they peacefully slept, shot by gunmen in the employ of the coal company.
The coroner went. The men were
Speaker 109: buried on the mountainside, and nothing was ever done to punish the men who had taken their lives."
well it
Speaker 113: doesn't take but a few experiences like that to set anybody on the war path and
Speaker 214: mother jones had more than a few of those experiences she
was the patron
Speaker 36: saint of miners across the country but mother jones was no mascot
she had
Speaker 36: been organizing machinists in butte montana when she saw a note in the local newspaper about the trouble
Speaker 35: in west virginia and so she decided on the spot to cut her work short and caught the east to appalachia
when she pulled
Speaker 63: in that june morning
even in the
Speaker 63: capital there in charleston the tension was thick in the
air taxi drivers
Speaker 113: approached to give her a lift to town and
Speaker 113: but she turned him down. She said she's perfectly capable of walking a mile or two to the business district. And
so she does. She
Speaker 113: gets there, goes to a hotel,
Speaker 35: washes herself up, eats some breakfast. Again, this is the morning that she arrived. And just after
Speaker 33: washing up and eating breakfast,
no rest for
Speaker 33: the weary, she's back on the move again to the train station to take a smaller train up to Kanawha County.
Well, on the
Speaker 88: train, she meets the Union's district president, who hadn't expected to see her. And
so he invites her
Speaker 47: with him to a mass meeting. And so that's where they went. They
get off the train
Speaker 47: at Paint Creek
Speaker 146: Junction. And she looks around, and the first thing she notices are gunmen everywhere.
Speaker 196: Everything
Speaker 20: was still, she remembered.
And no
Speaker 20: one would know the bloody war that was raging in those silent
Speaker 52: hills except for the sight of those guns and the strange, terrified look on everyone's faces.
So she
Speaker 35: got on another train from the junction, a smaller, even smaller one, and took Yed up into the hollow, running parallel with a creek and a busted-up
Speaker 55: road. She's
passing by
Speaker 55: the dilapidated homes of miners with their little gardens off to the side. She was passing through
Speaker 109: areas...
Speaker 109: entirely devoted to mining so that the landscape looked like you know Mordor
finally they arrived
Speaker 12: to their destination and word gets around that Mother Jones has come to help the miners and so the people start to stream in start to assemble
one of
Speaker 206: them was the friend who had carried her across the creek on his back those years ago he told her he wasn't able to carry her anymore since the
Speaker 35: Baldwin Feltz guards had thrown him off a train and injured
Speaker 57: his back
about half of
Speaker 57: the miners were europeans italians poles hungarians mostly
Speaker 36: another 25 were black men who had come up from the south to get out of the fruitless toil of the sharecropper and
then the
Speaker 146: other 25 were men from right there in west virginia and
so she went
Speaker 109: around and worked the crowd shook their hands
and
Speaker 109: speaking to them as individuals or small groups and
Speaker 212: listening to
Speaker 79: their tales of abuse at the hands of the Baldwin-Felz guards. When
all the
Speaker 79: people were assembled who were going to come, she starts talking. She starts exhorting the
Speaker 175: miners. She
Speaker 36: knows exactly how to rile these men up. She would challenge them. She would condemn them and make fun of them for failing to have not already fought back.
The
Speaker 109: whole thing would be laced with her trademark profanities. The miners loved that.
She went for a full
Speaker 36: 90 minutes, and the crowd was wrapped the entire time, laughing when she wanted him to laugh, cheering or jeering as she conducted him, crying or shouting with rage like on cue.
Speaker 47: A news account of the event later reported that she put all the other speakers, most of whom were half her age, in the shade.
So she settles into her hotel
Speaker 3: back in Charleston.
Speaker 3: settles in for the long haul and shuttles back and forth to minors camps
Speaker 13: in Kahnawauk County all summer long.
She made
Speaker 72: speeches on a daily basis and mass meetings sprung up anywhere that she was rumored to be headed.
Ginny Savage
Speaker 5: Ayers writes, quote, Her voice rocked people with its power, its clarity, its command, its hint of Irish brogue and feminine charm. Poet Carl Sandburg called it a singing voice.
It was
Speaker 130: low and pleasant, UMWA leader John Brophy once said, with
Speaker 11: great carrying power. And when she got excited, the intensity of it became something you could almost feel physically.
Well, come July
Speaker 11: 4th, she speaks
to a
Speaker 35: crowd at a Beckley courthouse and tells the people there to stop thinking in terms of political
Speaker 83: parties.
Stop
Speaker 83: thinking in terms of elections, and start thinking in terms
Speaker 36: of labor and capital. Later
in the month, she
Speaker 36: spoke to striking miners on the Coal River, and we're not exactly sure what she said there, but it was enough that the Charleston
Speaker 215: newspaper reported that it had provoked a great deal of enthusiasm, as well as unrest in the neighborhood. The
very next day, a group of
Speaker 13: those miners armed themselves.
and
Speaker 13: assembled on coal company land to protest the use of scab labor.
Most, if
Speaker 13: not all of them, had seen Mother Jones the day before,
and
Speaker 62: they were fired up,
she says, for I
Speaker 53: had told them their jobs were their bread and butter, and that they should fight for that at any and all times, for the comfort of their wives and their babies depended on it.
The deputy sheriff went
Speaker 53: up there to disperse the minors,
Speaker 109: but when he got there, he found that the minors numbered at least 150, and he was by himself.
and so
Speaker 113: they approached him and said that sheriff we're gonna disarm you now and so he starts to raise his gun at them and from somewhere in the crowd he was shot five times not killed though
Speaker 146: well
the county sheriff
Speaker 146: puts in an emergency call to the governor's office he
says
Speaker 201: that things are now growing beyond the ability of local law enforcement to control law enforcement's being attacked
the
Speaker 12: governor must send the national guard immediately
and
And so
Speaker 12: soon, a company of soldiers and a machine gun squad, who
were
Speaker 36: supposed to be leaving for training in Pennsylvania, turned around, canceled those plans, they're going to Boone County, West Virginia. Mother
Jones was blamed for that
Speaker 72: violence, she didn't deny responsibility. I not only advised the miners to buy rifles, but personally raised the money which paid for them.
If the
Speaker 72: state of West Virginia allows the coal companies to hire and arm such thugs as the Baldwin-Felds detectives for the purpose of
Speaker 209: shooting down the miners...
then
Speaker 209: I would not be fit to live under the flag of this country if I let my boys go empty-handed.
Winchester and
Speaker 109: Springfield's rifles and stacks of ammunition were flowing into
Speaker 202: Paint Creek
and the rest of
Speaker 202: Kahnawa County, headed for both the miners and the Baldwin-Feltz guards. People were gearing up for war.
Miners who had more
Speaker 202: than one gun gave one to miners who didn't have one.
The miners
Speaker 202: weren't being permitted to bring or transport guns, so they had to be smuggled.
Even miners'
Speaker 36: wives got in on the act.
Willie Fish,
Speaker 36: the miner's wife who covered the tracks of the fleeing
Speaker 47: Italians by releasing her chickens into the yard, she
smuggled guns and
Speaker 47: ammunition for the miners under her tea gowns and her big linen coat. I
said I'd get them
Speaker 72: off the hill. They said, how? And I said, you just have somebody meet me at Banner and I'll get the guns off.
and I
Speaker 72: slipped one down my dress on this side. I had
Speaker 90: one gun on either side of me, and I had a pocket full of shells. I could hardly walk, and I'd go right down past the store. They didn't think about me carrying anything like that.
I'd go up
Speaker 90: to banner a little piece, and then a man would pop out of the bushes, and I'd give him a countersign.
The
Speaker 192: miners were all using call
Speaker 3: and response passwords to identify each other.
I'd give
Speaker 66: him a gun and a handful of shells, and
And
Speaker 66: he would take back to the bushes. Then I'd go a little further, and another man would pop out of
Speaker 90: the bushes. Usually I carried two at a time. Sometimes I'd take bags of shells instead of guns. And I carried all the
Speaker 196: guns off the hill.
Rumors were
Speaker 216: circulating that miners from other areas were making their way to Paint Creek to
Speaker 36: join the strike.
And
One
Speaker 35: evening in late July, two Baldwin-Feltz guards from Fayette County were coming through the area called Holly Grove on their way up to Paint Creek Junction. They were riding one of these old
Speaker 123: two-seater pedal-powered bicycles that rode on railroad tracks. You don't really see those anymore.
Speaker 75: Well, the guards' names were Bill Phalp and Robert Stringer.
And as they made
Speaker 75: their way through Holly Grove, all of a sudden shots broke out and Robert Stringer went down, shot in
Speaker 10: the head.
The
Speaker 10: other one, Bill Fout, pulls his revolver and starts shooting back, but he was hit in the back in the arm and he goes flying off the railroad bike down an embankment. He
tore his shirt and tied
Speaker 109: up his injured arm and then shed his blood-soaked
Speaker 35: coat and ran away, managed to get away through the woods to a hospital a few miles out. When
Fout and Stringer don't
Speaker 182: arrive as expected, the other mine guards
who are
Speaker 182: waiting for him become concerned.
And so the
Speaker 182: murderous guard that I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 206: Ernest Gaozhou and two others, arm themselves and head in the direction of Holly Grove. And
Speaker 35: when they get there, they find Stringer's body. They figured Fowlp was likely dead as well, and there were probably hostiles all around, so they didn't linger. They went back to get reinforcements. And then the next morning,
Speaker 20: Gaozhou leads a posse back there. When
they get
Speaker 20: there, they find two young teenage girls and they find two young teenage girls
Speaker 20: who were kind of edging up some distance away from stringer's corpse they'd just never seen a dead body before and their curiosity got the
best of them when the girls
Speaker 178: see the guards they try to retreat across a bridge but the guards catch up with them and put guns in their faces in
Speaker 109: order to get off the bridge and go wade through the creek and
so they do
Speaker 109: that and the guards are pointing guns
Speaker 55: at them and directing curses at them the
whole time
And the
Speaker 55: guards then burst into the tents in the homes of the sleeping miners, sticking guns in people's faces. They round up 22 men, abuse
Speaker 136: them, make them get close and stare at the corpse. The
miners in the hills
Speaker 88: around saw these captive men being led away, and so they start to take pot shots at the guards from the trees. So
the
Speaker 67: guards...
put
Speaker 67: their captives, the miners, between them and the direction of the gunfire to use them as hostages and human shields as they made their escape.
They got Stringer's
Speaker 9: body and then headed back to Mucklow from where they'd come.
But when they got
Speaker 12: to Mucklow, the four guards that they had left there were already engaged in their own gun battle with miners in the hills.
One of
Speaker 12: those four had managed to get the Gatling gun,
and
Speaker 13: he was using it to strafe the hillsides, but the miners managed to mitigate its effects, somewhat at least, by aiming at the ammunition belt, feeding bullets into the gun, and severing it.
Guards from a
Speaker 12: nearby station heard the
Speaker 36: gunfire. They rushed to the scene. On
their way, they ran
Speaker 36: up on a group of miners who had been firing down into the camp, and they all spun on each other, and one of the men with the guards was killed. Okay.
Speaker 36: it's
Speaker 12: becoming a full-scale battle. Well, finally, Gaujo returns with his posse and those 22 captured men, and
Speaker 47: the prisoners are forced to sit down in front of the Gatling gun to act as human shields as the automatic sprays over their heads into the hills. The
battle went on
Speaker 62: for about an hour. Thousands and thousands of rounds fired. Several people killed. After
it was
Speaker 26: over, the guards continued to abuse the prisoners.
One
Speaker 26: of the things about the
Speaker 62: miners in all these stories, and actually on the guard side as well it was true, but certainly more so with the miners, it seemed to have been
Speaker 113: a point of principle not to ever admit the number of their own who were hit or killed.
They didn't want
Speaker 113: to give the guards the
Speaker 35: satisfaction, and so very often the number of casualties is a bit fuzzy.
And
Speaker 35: the estimates can vary widely, but reports here
Speaker 213: were that between 8 and 12 men were killed and about 20 were wounded that morning.
The night before,
Speaker 217: telephone wires had been cut by miners throughout
Speaker 196: the area.
They'd also
Speaker 196: intercepted and wrecked a freight train hauling for the coal company. At
Mucklow, they
Speaker 12: sabotaged a tipple, which, if you're not familiar with it,
with
Speaker 12: mining equipment a tipple is a ubiquitous site at mining operations in quarries if you've ever seen a miner a quarry driven by one or something and there's a big structure with a long ramp descending from it that's the tipple coal cars would deliver coal from the mountainside down to the tipple
it would be dumped
Speaker 12: into the tipple and then directed down the ramp into the full-size freight cars waiting on the main railroad that's how they got it
out
So
Speaker 12: every mine had one, and without the
Speaker 11: tipple, no mine could operate, and so they became frequent targets of the striking miners. The miners were verging on full-scale
Speaker 12: rebellion.
That night, the first
Speaker 12: National Guardsmen arrived and began patrolling the hills.
Before long, three
Speaker 206: more companies of soldiers were ordered to Paint Creek with another battalion on the way. So
with the
Speaker 206: soldiers in town, both the miners and the guards
stepped back
Speaker 206: and took a breath.
Things
Speaker 11: quiet down a bit, and people even expressed optimism that maybe the worst was over. There was still tension
thick in
Speaker 11: the air. You could cut it with a knife. The
next day, Mother Jones went
Speaker 11: up to Hollygrove, the site of Stringer and Fowlp shootings, and spoke to a mass meeting
there.
Speaker 47: Someone had found Phalp's bloody coat that he had
Speaker 67: left behind when he fled and brought it back to Hollygrove. And Mother Jones, in top form, is waving it over her head and
Speaker 218: shouting, This is the first time I ever saw a goddamn mine guard's coat decorated to suit me! The crowd goes insane. They
cut that bloody
Speaker 67: coat up into small scraps and pin pieces of it onto their lapels as souvenirs.
rumors
Speaker 12: of more armed miners were making their way into Paint Creek continued
to
Speaker 11: circulate many of these miners who were coming in headed to the capital Charleston
Speaker 36: to rendezvous before heading down
there so Mother
Speaker 36: Jones went to that city
Speaker 12: and word went out across the coal fields that Mother Jones would be addressing a mass meeting on the levee in Charleston Ginny Ayers describes the scene quote
The
Speaker 12: Elk Ridge
Speaker 109: Band came marching smartly down Capitol Street, played a march in front
Speaker 90: of the state capitol, then moved out toward the river. People smiled and followed. A few blocks away, miners from Kelly's Creek and Boomer Branch, Longacre, Ward, Smithers, and a
Speaker 184: dozen other camps along the northern side of the Kanawha poured off a train at the Kanawha and Michigan Depot and marched down Capitol Street toward the river.
On the
Speaker 90: river's south bank, miners swarmed off the morning local from paint and cabin creeks and streamed across the bridge into the music and the excitement. Down
at the
Speaker 10: river itself, at the foot of the levee,
Speaker 72: the stern-wheeled valley bell steamed into dock. Its gangway came down and miners filed out onto the cobblestones. In
overalls and
Speaker 72: muslin,
Speaker 184: battered hats and suspenders, the miners roamed through town, talking and calling. All right.
Speaker 184: peering into
Speaker 53: store windows admiring the buildings biding their time at noon they gathered on the levee
they had
Speaker 67: come to hear mother jones
at one
Speaker 67: o'clock walter deal union organizer mounted a dray wagon near the top of the sloping levee and tried
to speak few
Speaker 67: paid
Speaker 52: attention
then mother
Speaker 52: jones appeared at the top of the levee and began moving toward the
wagon
Speaker 52: dressed as always in black
Speaker 85: silk that reached to the ground, white lace at the neck, the silver curls of her hair tucked neatly into place. She
made her
Speaker 85: way through the crowd, exchanging quips.
Speaker 88: If you would just use your brains instead of your mouths, she said to someone, but you do not. A miner responded kindly, take your time,
Speaker 218: mother. Don't you give me any advice, she snapped back. I will attend to you. I will stay with you. I believe you are right, someone called.
With her
Speaker 126: customary agility, she climbed into the back of the dray wagon and looked out over more than a thousand faces, stretching down the levee to the river.
Behind her,
Speaker 72: beneath the city's towering new office building, hundreds of townspeople, moving
Speaker 77: through the business district, surged forward to look and listen. The crowd hushed.
Her voice,
Speaker 126: strong but sympathetic, boomed
Speaker 219: out over the levee and the river. Every movement made in civilization has had an underlying purpose.
You
Speaker 219: have reached the century in human civilization
Speaker 130: when the charge of human slavery must forever disappear. And
that was all
Speaker 130: it took. The miners erupted
Speaker 126: into a loud, prolonged applause, cheering, yelling, telling the
Speaker 71: world they loved her. The feeling was mutual, and she responded to them.
You, my
Speaker 71: friends, in my
Speaker 218: estimation, have stood this insult too long.
You have borne
Speaker 218: the master's venom, his oppression. You have allowed him to oppress you.
she
Speaker 218: was warming up
when we
Speaker 220: said a little more bread he
set out
Speaker 220: to get the human bloodhounds to murder you
your governor
Speaker 220: has stood for it he went off to chicago and left two gatling guns with the bloodhounds to blow your
brains out the
Speaker 220: crowd was electrified a voice shouted that is what he has done mother yes that is what he has done but
what did
Speaker 220: you elect him for another voice that is the question
Then
Speaker 220: you elected a sheriff that began to shake like a poodle dog the night of the trouble on Pink Creek, and she was off again. The crowd was in her
Speaker 85: hands as she swayed her hearers, apparently as the wind sways the grass, as one witness said. Charleston
Speaker 90: citizens, many of whom had heard of Mother Jones but not actually heard her speak, stood around the edge of the crowd. Sometimes a buggy or automobile stopped while the passengers listened.
From
Speaker 90: his position in the crowd,
Speaker 67: stenographer S.P. Richmond, hired by the coal operator, scribbled down her words verbatim with Greg's shorthand. This industrial warfare is on, she
Speaker 71: resumed after another round of applause. It can't be stopped. It can't be put back.
It is
Speaker 218: breaking out all over the nation.
The whole
Speaker 218: machine of capitalism realizes for the
Speaker 221: first time in history that there is an intellectual awakening of the dog below, and he is barking.
have
Speaker 221: you been barking on paint creek and
from there she
Speaker 221: turned her wrath against the baldwin felt guards when a corporation which is bleeding you to death would go and hire human bloodhounds to abuse your wife your child it is time every man in the state should
rise
Speaker 70: mother jones was where she wanted to be doing what she did best her boys were there adoring
Speaker 12: cheering laughing responding
Speaker 12: She drew them out, started them cheering, quieted them,
Speaker 90: softened them, enraged them, and then drew them out again. I am 80 years old. I have passed the 80th milestone in human history.
Speaker 218: I
will be 80
Speaker 218: more, for I've got a contract with God Almighty to stay with you until your chains are broken.
And they
Speaker 218: cheered again.
With the crowd now
Speaker 71: fully in her control, she spoke of what many, including the coal operators, listened to hear.
the
Speaker 71: possibility of continuing
Speaker 90: violence. Her words were deliberately ambiguous. Don't
get into
Speaker 90: conflict with
Speaker 218: the boys in the state militia, she urged them, and they answered, amen, amen. Don't you let me hear that you have ever injured a single mine. These mines belong to you.
But then she
Speaker 218: added, I am not going to say that you don't molest the operators. It is they who hire the dogs to shoot you.
And when that
Speaker 218: applause died down, I'm not asking you to do it.
But
Speaker 218: if he is going to oppress you, deal with him. I'm
not going to
Speaker 218: take back any water because I'm here in the capital. No backwater for me.
No man
Speaker 218: lives on the face of God's earth that is oppressing my class that I am afraid of.
And the
Speaker 218: applause erupted again.
But hints of
Speaker 218: violence sprinkled throughout. I will say, Mr. Operators, the day is going to come when you will say you wished you had never seen the face of a mine guard.
Speaker 218: We are law-abiding citizens. We will destroy
Speaker 222: no property. We will take no life. But if a fellow comes to my home and outrages my wife, by the eternal he will pay the penalty.
Speaker 221: I will send him to God in the
Speaker 130: repair shop.
And again,
Speaker 130: the miners surged forward, cheering and applauding as she went on, The man who doesn't do it has a drop of revolutionary blood in his veins.
End
Speaker 223: quote.
Speaker 75: When the major in charge of the
Speaker 62: state militia there in Charleston Decided things had gone far enough He sent word up to Mother Jones While she was speaking that she was under arrest And
so she
Speaker 62: wraps
Speaker 71: it up And finishes with
Speaker 222: Goodbye boys I'm under arrest I may have to go to jail I may not see you for a long time Keep up this fight Don't surrender And
she was
Speaker 224: led off to jail For what was probably the 100th time in her life
after
Speaker 123: the event one gun store in Charleston reported selling 300 guns that afternoon another sold 350
Speaker 225: another one just said it sold all the guns it had and it put out a sign saying that they had more on order the
next
Speaker 123: day the state governor picks up the newspaper and sees the headline Mother Jones stirs up minors and they purchased
Speaker 64: 750 rifles levels.
well of
Speaker 75: course she was out of jail soon she always managed to get out
Speaker 146: of jail soon and she heads right back up into the hills to keep on agitating this time she
Speaker 47: was headed up to nearby Cabin Creek
a creek that
Speaker 47: ran parallel to Paint Creek and a lot of the action that we're going to be talking about here takes place
Speaker 136: between the two this place was known to be even more hostile to unionization than Paint Creek
and she went
Speaker 136: up there at the invitation of a minor and
Speaker 63: who worked up there, named Frank Keeney. I mentioned Keeney a while ago. His family had been run off their land by speculators to make way for the railroads and coal mines.
When his father died,
Speaker 63: Keeney began working in the mine when he was just 12 years old to support his mother and two
Speaker 26: sisters. Now he's 30
years old,
Speaker 26: and Frank Keeney, he's an impressive looking guy, but
Speaker 113: he's small and he's supposed to be soft-spoken, but...
Speaker 113: Quick-tempered and certainly not a man to be trifled with
His
Speaker 47: great-grandson is actually a history professor out in West Virginia today
Last year
Speaker 47: I was out there at an event when he was present And an older
Speaker 59: man whose father had known Frank Keeney Gave the introduction to our little event And to the great-grandson
He looked to
Speaker 9: him and he said One of the things he said was When he asked his dad what Frank Keeney was like
I'll see you
Speaker 9: next week.
That
Speaker 9: his dad paused for
Speaker 226: a moment and then just said,
when he
Speaker 226: spoke, people listened.
And so that kind
Speaker 226: of stuck with me a little bit, because I think that does say a lot without saying very much
at all. Frank Keeney had
Speaker 72: emerged as a leader among the miners because the union was
perceived
Speaker 136: to be moving slowly, even reluctantly, as this conflict continued to spiral.
one
Speaker 57: day Frank Keeney walked into the union headquarters and demanded help from
Speaker 13: the UMW to arrange mass meetings in the strike district but the union officials refused to send anybody and so Frank Keeney reads him the riot act and basically
Speaker 12: from that point on took the reins of the paint creek and soon the cabin creek strike himself well
Keeney had been in
Speaker 11: Charleston trying to get some more union leaders to come up to cabin creek to help organize his miners couldn't get anybody to come
The
Speaker 26: National Union had put down word that it was too dangerous. Their organizers were to avoid the area.
And so when Keeney
Speaker 79: heard that Mother Jones was in town, he sought her out to see if she would come.
I'll come
Speaker 9: up, she says. I've been thinking of invading
Speaker 227: that place for some time.
And so she
Speaker 47: told Frank Keeney that she would be there Tuesday night and to spread the word that there was going to be a mass meeting.
Mother Jones
Speaker 47: tells the rest
Speaker 88: herself, quote,
The
Speaker 88: night before I was to speak at Cabin Creek, a fellow by the name of Ben Morris, a national board member with the union,
Speaker 90: came to me and said, "'Mother, I understand you're going to Cabin Creek tomorrow. Do you think that is wise?' "'It's not wise,' said I, "'but necessary.' "'Well, if you go, I'll go,' he said. "'No,
I think
Speaker 90: it's better for me to go alone. You represent the national office. I don't. I'm not responsible to anyone.'
If
Speaker 90: anything happens and you were there, the operators might sue the union for damages. I
go
Speaker 209: as a private citizen. All they can do is put me in jail, and I'm used to that.
He left me and went
Speaker 209: directly to the governor and told him to send a company of the militia up to Cabin Creek as Mother Jones was going up there.
Then he got the
Speaker 71: sheriff to give him a bodyguard, and he sneaked up behind me.
At any
Speaker 71: rate, I did not see him or the militia on the train, nor did I see them when I got off.
That night,
Speaker 71: we held a meeting.
When I
Speaker 53: got up to speak, I saw the militia that the national organizer had had the governor send. That board member was there, too. He
had made
Speaker 53: arrangements with the local chairman to introduce
Speaker 51: him. He began speaking to the men about being good and patient and to trust the justice of their cause.
Speaker 9: I rose. Stop that silly trash, I said. I motioned him to a chair. The men hollered, sit down, sit down.
He sat. Then I
Speaker 218: spoke.
You men
Speaker 218: have come over the
Speaker 220: mountains 12, 16 miles Your clothes are thin Your shoes are out at the toes Your wives and little ones are cold and hungry You
have been
Speaker 220: robbed and enslaved for years And now Billy Sunday comes here to tell
you
Speaker 218: to be good and patient and trusted justice What silly trash to tell men whose goodness and patience is cried out to a deaf world Someone screamed Organize us mother And
we'll see you
Speaker 218: next time.
"'And
Speaker 218: they all began shouting, "'Organize us! Organize us!'
Speaker 53: "'March over to that dark church on the corner,
and I
Speaker 53: will give you the union obligation,' said I. "'The men started marching. In the dark, the spies could not
Speaker 228: identify them. "'You can't organize those men,' said the board member, "'because
Speaker 116: you don't know the ritual.' "'The ritual hell,' I said. "'I'll make one up.' "'Well, they have to pay $15 for their charter,' he said."
Speaker 116: I'll get them their charter. Why, these poor wretches haven't
Speaker 229: fifteen cents for a sandwich. All you care about is your salary, regardless of the destiny of these men.
On the steps of the
Speaker 67: darkened church, I organized those men. They raised their hands and took the obligation of the union.
Go home from
Speaker 67: this meeting, said
Speaker 229: I. Say nothing about being a union man.
Put on your
Speaker 229: overalls in the morning, take your dinner buckets and go to work in the mines.
And get
Speaker 229: the rest of the men out."
End quote. And from that
Speaker 76: day, the miners of Cabin Creek and Paint Creek
Speaker 36: were in common rebellion.
A week
Speaker 36: later, she's up at Cabin Creek again. She gives another speech.
After she
Speaker 36: finishes, a miner approaches her.
Speaker 13: He had come with 40 others from the Red Warrior Coal Camp up the creek, and they were there to ask if she would
Speaker 113: help them organize a union local.
And so she goes with him
Speaker 113: right then and there.
she
Speaker 113: climbs into
Speaker 109: a buggy that they had brought, and they started the three miles toward Red Warrior, with the other
Speaker 9: 40 trailing behind on foot. As they went, other people came out and joined the march, so that soon there were over a hundred people walking behind Mother Jones in this buggy. And as they come up on
Speaker 228: Leawood, suddenly they find themselves confronted on their path by at least 50 Baldwin Feltz guards, armed with rifles, pistols,
Speaker 230: and shotguns.
Speaker 230: blocking their way
and a.c
Speaker 230: felt of the felt's family of the baldwin felt detective
Speaker 13: agency one of the bosses the big boss men stood in the
Speaker 20: middle of his men behind a mounted machine
gun with
Speaker 20: a belt of ammunition fed into
it they ordered
Speaker 138: mother jones to stop where she was
the guards moved
Speaker 138: and surrounded the people moved
into the
Speaker 12: crowd and began searching people for their guns so mother jones jumps out of the buggy without
assistance
Ran up
Speaker 160: the tracks to where the machine gun was She grabs the muzzle of the machine
Speaker 90: gun And looks back at her people Says nothing to the guards And just nods her head to tell her followers to get going past them
And so they
Speaker 90: start moving And A.C. Feltz, the
Speaker 218: Baldwin Feltz commander, yells at her Take your hands off that gun, you hellcat And
Mother
Speaker 170: Jones uses the opportunity to launch into one of her most famous rants
In front
Speaker 218: of 150 witnesses. Sir, my class goes into the mines. They bring out the metal that makes this gun. This is my gun. My
class melt
Speaker 220: the minerals in furnaces and roll the steel. They dig the coal that feeds the furnaces. My class is not fighting you. Not you. They
are
Speaker 218: fighting with bare fists and empty stomachs the men who rob them and deprive their children of childhood.
It is
Speaker 218: the hard-earned pay of the working class that your pay comes from.
Commander said he
Speaker 88: didn't give a damn. And he threatened to kill her and every one of those people before he would let them pass. And she looks him in the eye and says, Young man, I want
to tell you
Speaker 218: that if you shoot one bullet out of this gun at those men, if you touch one of my white hairs,
that creek
Speaker 218: will run with blood and yours will be the first to crimson
Speaker 110: it. And he...
Speaker 110: looks at her skeptically and says well how you gonna manage that and then she bluffs she points up to the hills and
Speaker 72: says up there in the mountains i have 500 miners they were all marching armed to the meeting i'm going to address right now if you start shooting they will finish the game
and so ac felt step back
Speaker 217: and the men let her and her people pass
And
Speaker 217: people who were there spread that story far and
Speaker 214: wide And Mother Jones legend just grew another few inches
This is an
Speaker 214: 80, 85
Speaker 231: year old woman Tiny little thing looks like your great grandmother
Well after she
Speaker 232: gets up there She swears in the men of Red Warrior And she
Speaker 75: returns to Charleston the capital Where
Speaker 233: she had just one day to prepare For what would become arguably her most famous speech
Jenny Savage
Speaker 233: airs again
Quote
the
Speaker 184: excitement seemed beyond control the violence the presence of soldiers on the creek mother jones speeches and the breaking of cabin creek bringing a whole new dimension to the
Speaker 90: controversy had stirred things to such an extent that the event generated stories all over the front pages of charleston's two main newspapers for two
days
Men from
Speaker 90: the closed mines at Paint and Cabin
Speaker 88: Creeks had begun arriving in Charleston the
Speaker 53: night before, and next morning bought many rifles from the hardware stores and carried them around town waiting for things to start.
Miners from
Speaker 53: Boomer and other Union mines across the river from Paint and Cabin
Speaker 67: Creeks arrived too, in such numbers that the mines there were closed for the day as well. Everything seemed to have been planned.
Under a
Speaker 88: bright sun that sent temperatures into the 80s, Cabin Creek miners assembled at the levee. Pink Creek miners on Capitol
Speaker 71: Street and the others on Kanawa Street. At one o'clock, two marching bands blasted out patriotic music to set the
Speaker 90: pace. Hundreds of miners paraded through town.
in
Speaker 90: bib overalls and corduroys, some carrying rifles, old and young, native mountaineers,
Speaker 136: former slaves and the children of slaves, eastern Europeans and Italians. They marched to the beat, waving to friends. They carried huge banners stretching across
the
Speaker 218: street, held on each side by marching miners, with red letters proclaiming, no Russia for us, to hell with the guard system. Mountaineers are always free, out of the
Speaker 220: state with the Baldwin murderers.
We are
Speaker 220: the Cabin Creek peons. Kick out the guards. The nation's workmen
Speaker 218: cannot be submerged without submerging the nation. Down with the human bloodhounds. And more. A thousand strong,
Speaker 67: they poured into the Capitol grounds, where they were herded off to one side, well away from the entrance. The
Speaker 90: audience listened politely to the lead-up speakers until the moment all awaited. Walter Deal called on Mother Jones.
Speaker 90: everyone looked around but she was not there then they spotted her she stood triumphantly atop a dry
Speaker 130: goods box directly in front of the steps to the capital entrance where no one could fail to see her
as she
Speaker 71: knew they would miners stampeded across the grounds surrounding her and filling the walkways and lawn effectively blocking the entrance to the state capital she smiled triumphantly from the improved vantage point told the children to be quiet
and
Speaker 71: began what was to
Speaker 35: become her most famous speech, as stenographer Richmond leaned against a pillar and took down every word. This, my
Speaker 90: friends, marks, in my estimation, the most remarkable move
Speaker 72: ever made in the state of West
Virginia. It
Speaker 72: is a day that will mark history in the long ages to come. What is
it? It
Speaker 72: is an uprising of the oppressed against
Speaker 90: the master class.
Her
Speaker 90: voice thundered out across the Capitol Square, as around her the crowds cheered her words and the citizens on the streets stopped, entranced. Behind her, well-dressed state leaders and
Speaker 67: bureaucrats listened
in the entrance
Speaker 67: to the Capitol, while others crowded forward in the hallways to hear.
Speaker 67: Still farther inside the Capitol, the governor listened unhappily as he carried
Speaker 184: on appointments and a heavily scheduled and trying day. At one point, he emerged from his office, listened for a few minutes through the window to Mother
Speaker 71: Jones' speech, then hurried back to his schedule. Acknowledging the governor's plea that he did not have the power to remove the mine guards, she told her audience, You
Speaker 218: are asking the governor of the state to do something he cannot do without betraying the class he
Speaker 71: belongs
to.
From
Speaker 71: time to time, she turned around and spoke directly to the well-dressed state officials who peered from the capital entrance or stood on the steps around her, and they shifted their weight uneasily. Using powerful biblical imagery, she compared the miners to the Israelites that were called out of Egypt, saying God formed them into a union so they could escape from bondage. She reminded them of their social position, referring to the recent sinking of the Titanic, where the wealthy saved themselves and while many of the lower class perished.
in
Speaker 71: this way she built up to her pivotal statement laying
Speaker 185: down the gauntlet to the governor
and you fellows
Speaker 185: have stood it entirely too long
it is now
Speaker 185: time to put a stop to it
the crowd was
Speaker 185: fully in her hands as she breathed defiance we
will
Speaker 218: give the governor until tomorrow night
to take
Speaker 218: them guards out of cabin
Speaker 221: creek
here
Speaker 221: on the steps of the capital of west virginia i say that if the governor won't make them go then we will make them go end
Speaker 234: quote a
charleston
Speaker 109: reporter wrote one could not listen without being thrilled by the eloquence of the aged orator and the intense earnestness of her hearers
He
Speaker 109: wrote that the men were filled with the feeling of bitter injustice. Most of them were prepared to fight and give their lives fighting to end the guard system, which they hate. Mother Jones was the spark that lighted the
Speaker 235: smoldering fires of resentment into action.
Another person
Speaker 12: who was there.
Speaker 12: This is a fantastic character Who you'll hear more of in this series Named Ralph Chaplin
Speaker 113: Who was a socialist activist From the industrial workers of the world The Wobblies And he was there at The Paint
Speaker 12: Creek, Cabin Creek strike Throughout much of it And he also spoke on the levee that day Now
he's a
Speaker 12: very experienced socialist agitator.
Speaker 20: He speaks in front of meetings and to crowds all the time. He knows how to get people riled up, but he describes the scene in his autobiography. Quote, I
spoke at
Speaker 20: scores of socialist
Speaker 192: meetings in Huntington and nearby towns. The largest of these was Charleston. There must have been a couple of thousand people on the riverfront when I spoke after
Speaker 11: Mother Jones at a mass meeting one Sunday.
Winter was
Speaker 71: coming on, and Miner's children had been going barefooted.
I was
Speaker 71: happy to help Mother Jones in launching a drive to buy shoes for them.
I made a strong
Speaker 71: appeal from the platform for industrial
Speaker 130: solidarity. I urged everyone to vote for Eugene V. Debs. I
denounced the
Speaker 71: smugness of churches and conventional people generally for their indifference to human injustice and suffering.
No words of
Speaker 11: mine, however, could compare with the vitriolic wrath of Mother Jones on the same subject.
She
Speaker 11: might have been any coal miner's wife ablaze
Speaker 88: with righteous fury when her brood was in danger. Her voice shrilled as she shook her fist at the coal operators, the mine guards, the union officials, and all the others responsible for
Speaker 219: the situation. She prayed and cursed and pleaded, raising her clenched and trembling hands, asking heaven to bear witness. She wore very long, very
Speaker 88: full skirts and a black
Speaker 130: shawl, and her tiny bonnet bobbed up and down as she harangued the crowd.
The
Speaker 130: miners loved it and laughed, cheered, hooted, and even cried as she spoke to them, end quote. A
newspaper man managed to
Speaker 12: get an interview with Mother Jones after the speech. And at the end of the interview, he asked her, what did she think
Speaker 50: would happen in the end of all this?
And she looks at him
Speaker 50: and says, we will have
Speaker 236: revenge.
That's what she
Speaker 236: told him.
And so he
Speaker 236: says, then
Speaker 93: what?
And she
Speaker 93: looks over at him and raises an eyebrow and says, Isn't that a lot to get in one lifetime? So
things have been
Speaker 93: turned up
Speaker 237: to 11. And a lot of that is thanks to Mother Jones. And
now the miners
Speaker 62: on the north side of Kanawha County. These
are the
Speaker 62: ones who are unionized.
They're looking
Speaker 62: down south and watching all this happen.
Speaker 62: And
Speaker 125: they are getting more and more agitated.
Some of them
Speaker 125: are saying that they're leaving their
Speaker 130: brothers down in Peyton Cabin Creeks out to dry.
So at the end of
Speaker 130: August, a
few more
Speaker 52: miners were killed and another was shot through the lung and survived by mine guards. And the union miners in Kanawha County had seen enough. The organized men were going to go help their brothers.
Speaker 88: They held meetings and,
to
Speaker 88: decide what to do, and Frank Keeney, failing to get any
Speaker 72: direct assistance from the National Union, made a direct plea to the men of Kanawha County to stand with his beleaguered minors.
And so,
Speaker 53: without coordination from some central authority, these men came together on their own,
men who already
Speaker 53: had their
Speaker 73: union contract, okay, who had nothing to gain individually,
nothing to gain
Speaker 73: individually from sticking their noses in somebody
Speaker 85: else's
Speaker 136: fight.
except
Speaker 136: it wasn't somebody else's fight. They
knew that
Speaker 136: the coal miners would stand together or they would all
Speaker 76: die alone, and every one of them knew that.
So on their
Speaker 76: own, on September 1st, 1912, the Union miners of Kanawha County, 5,000 or 6,000 of them, grabbed their rifles
Speaker 203: and assembled and then crossed the river to march on Paint Creek to drive out the mine
Speaker 231: guards.
Now, the
Speaker 231: governor, you know, the poor governor, he's in a very difficult spot. The
coal operators all
Speaker 13: but ran his state, including the state government, and they represented the economic
Speaker 59: core of West Virginia. I mean, coal mining was far and away the leading economic activity in the state. These
men drew a lot
Speaker 27: of water.
Speaker 27: And they had a lot of power, just period. They had real power that he had to
Speaker 5: contend with.
And these
Speaker 5: men were absolutely refusing to even be in the same room as the miners. Refusing.
Company spies
Speaker 5: provided a
Speaker 184: report to the governor telling him about the 5,000 or 6,000 miners who were arming themselves in Kanawha County and preparing a full-on attack against the Baldwin Feltz guards at Paint Creek.
And so he's
Speaker 126: trying to placate both sides.
But
Speaker 126: he's just finding that there is no compromise available here. These men had been killing each other for months.
And more than
Speaker 90: that, you know, this had been building for years.
These men had
Speaker 90: seen their families abused by the mine guards for
Speaker 116: years. A
lot of people were
Speaker 116: demanding that the governor declare martial law, but he
Speaker 154: was reluctant to take that final step. And so in lieu of that, he issued what became known as the Peace Proclamation. All persons...
who
Speaker 154: were not members
Speaker 67: of the National Guard,
that included
Speaker 67: both Miner and Mine Guard, were ordered to lay down their arms and to refrain
Speaker 88: from assembling or marching as armed bodies and from obstructing the public highways and from uttering inflammatory speeches calculated to incite riot, violence, or injury to persons and
Speaker 130: property.
The Peace
Speaker 130: Proclamation gave...
The
Speaker 130: militia, the authority, to use force to put down violence and disorder and to disperse
Speaker 125: any unauthorized assemblies, violent or not.
But it made little difference. The
Speaker 125: operators were not
Speaker 231: prepared to back down one inch.
They began
Speaker 231: bringing in more strike breakers,
Speaker 231: And
Speaker 53: more mine guards Evicting more miners from their homes Now under the protection of the National Guard Who would drive off the miners If they tried to interfere with the process
One
Speaker 51: family was kicked out of their home In the evening And so a neighbor offered to let that family Sleep that night on
Speaker 89: his porch Until they figured out what to do the next day Well before nightfall Before everybody falls asleep A guard comes around to the house And tells them to get off the porch Because that porch is company property
too
And so
Speaker 56: the family goes and sleeps in an open
Speaker 71: field And these stories are being shared around by people all the time Everybody has had something like this happen to them Or knows somebody who has That
same guard
Speaker 50: was killed by miners two days later As he was trying to march a captured striker off to the Baldwin Feltz clubhouse
And then, just after
Speaker 13: the peace proclamation was issued Just a couple days after it was issued Janina Sevilla, that Italian miner's pregnant wife
Speaker 113: Thank you.
that I
Speaker 113: mentioned earlier, who had been punched in the face and kicked in the stomach by Baldwin Feltz guards, went in for an
Speaker 20: emergency procedure to have her baby, which had been dead for some time, taken out of her.
And word of that
Speaker 76: spread, and the miners went ballistic.
The
Speaker 76: next morning,
Speaker 238: mine guards came under fire from miners in multiple locations, with
Speaker 57: National Guard troops hurrying over to one location, only to find that the shooting had died down and men scattered into the forest and shooting erupted somewhere else. Now
it was the
Speaker 26: Union itself that was urging the governor, you gotta declare martial law. They figured at least the military had to abide by some kind of code of conduct. Anything would be better...
then
Speaker 26: the terror of the mine guards
Speaker 47: and whatever the miners did in retaliation and so finally the governor gave in over the
objections of
Speaker 47: the coal
Speaker 12: operators who didn't want to see their mine guards disarmed by the regular military the governor declared
Speaker 85: the area around paint and cabin creeks to be in a state of war and he appointed a military commission and declared it to be the sole law in the strike
Speaker 130: zones judge jury and if necessary executioner
Arrests
Speaker 130: could be made without warrants, without judicial review. Trials could be held without the traditional rights accorded to defendants, no habeas
Speaker 109: corpus. Men
could be
Speaker 109: jailed without ever standing before an actual judge or jury. The
constitutional
Speaker 67: historian Robert Rankin, in his study of the use of martial law in U.S. history, he wrote...
Speaker 67: In the history of the United States, martial law has never been used on such a broad scale,
Speaker 53: in so drastic a manner, nor upon such sweeping principles, as in West Virginia in 1912 and 1913 during the Paint Creek Trouble.
Here is the
Speaker 53: climax of the use
Speaker 10: by the state of its power to declare and carry into effect martial law
Speaker 233: with all its force.
David Alan Corbin
Speaker 233: writes, quote,
Instructed by
Speaker 123: the governor and their commanding officers, the soldiers arrested hundreds of striking minors and their leaders without warrants and detained them in makeshift jails called bullpens without the right of habeas corpus. In flagrant disregard of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in ex parte milligan, the
Speaker 52: soldiers then established military tribunals and court-martialed over 100 civilian minors.
There
Speaker 52: was no pretense of balanced justice in this unconstitutional proceeding. The coal operators and Baldwin-Feltz guards, who were known by all to have engaged in violence, were never even questioned, while a striking miner was sentenced to five years in prison for telling an army officer to go to hell.
With true
Speaker 52: military efficiency, the miner was arrested on Tuesday, court-martialed on Wednesday, and was in prison on Thursday. End quote.
The
Speaker 50: military did make a genuine effort To disarm everybody And stabilize
Speaker 123: things They took all the weapons they could find From both the miners and the mine guards They even disarmed the local justices of the peace They
went to
Speaker 123: the sheriffs and the justices of the peace Took their guns and said they weren't needed right now They had no authority until martial law was over Go home
but
Speaker 50: still the companies were bringing in scab labor and still they continued evicting the miners' families from their homes as the military
Speaker 9: stood by to make sure it all went smoothly and
the feeling
Speaker 9: among the miners who had initially
had some
Speaker 9: positive feelings toward the soldiers were starting to change they were thinking the
Speaker 116: soldiers hadn't come after all to restore peace but just to help the operators
Speaker 67: break their strike
And
Speaker 67: so a few began exchanging gunfire with the soldiers now.
Coal tipples
Speaker 67: were set on
Speaker 184: fire, along with barns and other structures. Mobs
of women
Speaker 184: attacked
Speaker 240: strikebreakers with broom handles.
Mother Jones urged
Speaker 20: the miners
Speaker 52: not to engage directly with the government forces, but even she was pushing up on the limits of her restraining power.
Thank you.
In one
Speaker 154: incident, she was barely able to restrain a mob of miners from murdering someone they thought was a scab. It
was a
Speaker 154: black man named Felix Salmon, and he had gotten off the train at Cabin Creek Junction, and as he walked into the ticket office,
a local
Speaker 154: miner approached him and said he didn't recognize him. Where'd you come from? So
Salmon
Speaker 67: says, I came
Speaker 113: from up the creek.
And so the miner
Speaker 113: accused him of strike breaking.
salmon
Speaker 113: denies it but the miner wasn't going to be put off so he hit salmon and knocks him down salmon
jumps up
Speaker 53: and runs away and now a whole group's chasing him hitting him and kicking him yelling scab scab and so he
runs to the
Speaker 53: other side of the train depot where he finds
Speaker 11: himself cornered and the crowd closes in on him but he manages to break away and tries to run out of the depot and at the door he sees mother jones little old mother
Speaker 156: jones standing there by herself mother he says
Speaker 156: my god i'm not guilty of this i'm not guilty of this save me god knows i'm not guilty
and so mother
Speaker 156: jones says to him god has nothing to
do
Speaker 12: with this the miners are running this part of it
and so as the crowd
Speaker 12: runs up on him she puts her hand up they all stop and she tells him they gone far enough and
some of the crowd
Speaker 12: wanted
Speaker 67: to defy her but most of them were not prepared to do that and so she led the man by the arm up onto a train and got him out of there
but
Speaker 5: barely with
Speaker 241: martial law in effect and
the
Speaker 34: guards and the miners mostly disarmed or if not
Speaker 35: disarmed at least unable to bear their arms out in public they had to keep them hidden
the situation
Speaker 35: seemed to stabilize
hundreds of men
Speaker 35: had been rounded up and held some for
Speaker 75: quite some time without trial
and
Many
Speaker 75: of them faced military tribunals, which heard their case and pronounced a verdict and a sentence right there on the spot, and they were just let off. No
lawyer, no
Speaker 20: nothing. Dozens of people were thrown to prison that way. But
the guards and
Speaker 20: the miners wanted to show that they were the good guys here. And
anyway, they all
Speaker 113: knew that for all their toughness and bluster, the U.S. Army was still the U.S. Army. And so, for the most part, they
Speaker 206: tried to keep their heads
Speaker 123: down.
And as soon as
Speaker 123: it was practical, the governor, who did not like this business, he was getting a lot of pressure
Speaker 12: from civil liberties groups in the state and around the country. He said, mission accomplished. And he ends the period of military rule. And
the fighting resumed
Speaker 12: almost
Speaker 52: immediately. And within months, martial law was declared once again.
and
Speaker 52: again the fighting died down and again civil liberties groups took the governor to the woodshed and so again he soon ended martial law and again the guards and the miners were back at each other
that winter was cold
Speaker 235: and it was violent striking miners waited it
Speaker 53: out in tent cities and
living
Speaker 53: on donated food and whatever they could hunt or fish or grow or scrounge
Speaker 113: up. Snowfell. One
of these tent
Speaker 113: cities was set up on Holly Grove, which was the site of the attack on those two Baldwin Feltz guards, Fowlp and Stringer earlier. It
was one of
Speaker 50: the few places where the miners could actually set up their tents to live because it was on private land, not owned by the
Speaker 20: companies.
Well,
Speaker 242: that February...
and
Speaker 20: company guards rolled out a new weapon. Ralph Chaplin, that socialist wobbly who spoke on the levy with Mother Jones, he was still around, and
he had
Speaker 20: gotten word that an armored train was being built up at the Chesapeake and Ohio rail yard in Huntington for use down in the Kanawha County strike. They
were calling it the
Speaker 243: Bull Moose Special. And in addition to the armor,
Speaker 20: Slits were being cut to allow riflemen to fire out from the inside of the train without putting themselves in danger.
Room was made
Speaker 244: for machine gun mounts on the train.
So Chaplin and his
Speaker 90: wobbly friends go to the workers who are rigging this thing up. And Chaplin says, quote, We appealed to the railroadmen and shopmen who were unionized to lay down their tools rather than proceed with work on this deadly contraption.
This
Speaker 90: seemed fair enough to the machinists, but the boilermakers and Carmen, members of a local holy roller cult, informed us that they had taken the matter to Jesus in prayer and had been told to go ahead and put it on the armored plates. The armored train was spirited away under
Speaker 20: cover of darkness. Our hearts sank when we discovered that it was no longer at the nearby C&O shop.
We spread a
Speaker 20: warning to the hills and waited anxiously for newspaper
Speaker 22: headlines announcing new atrocities. We didn't have to wait long.
Speaker 22: And so
with their shiny
Speaker 64: new toy ready to go, the guards decided to try out the bull moose special.
After some
Speaker 67: trouble around Hollygrove, a few operators along with
Speaker 20: some hired men and several deputy sheriffs loaded onto the train and started making their way in that direction.
Several
Speaker 20: of the deputies had been deputized just that night for the purpose, and one of them was an Irishman named Lee Calvin.
Calvin had worked the
Speaker 20: previous fall for the mine guards,
when some of his
Speaker 20: men, who were afraid of being laid off for lack of action at the time,
Speaker 20: staged a false flag attack of gunfire to try to blame the striking miners, he found out about it and he tried to fire the leader of the men who had done it, but the company overruled him and so he quit.
After that, he went
Speaker 245: to work for a railroad guarding trains that were carrying scab labor into the area.
But when one
Speaker 10: day he was given orders to shoot anybody who threw rocks or yelled at the scabs, he quit that job.
And so it's early
Speaker 10: February.
Speaker 123: February.
He's
Speaker 123: back in Charleston, he's out of work, he's been out of work for a while,
Speaker 48: and a coal operator recruits him to go up with a group
Speaker 20: of men to Mucklow on Paint Creek. And
first he says no, he doesn't
Speaker 20: want anything more to do with these people, but he had been out of work for a month, and so when the county sheriff, who was going to go on a trip,
came up and asked
Speaker 20: him to join, he said he would.
And so
Speaker 20: Lee Calvin finds himself on the Bull Moose Special as he's pulling out to head up toward Paint Creek.
At nine
Speaker 20: o'clock at night.
And looking around
Speaker 20: the train, he noticed his rifles and machine guns and boxes of ammunition stacked everywhere. The
train climbed up
Speaker 20: the tracks to Paint Creek at 15 miles an hour with
Speaker 246: the train lights all turned out.
It's pitch dark. Looking out the window,
Speaker 247: the men saw a small cabin
Speaker 20: that was brightly lit up with women and children visible in the doors and windows looking out.
The night
Speaker 20: before, several miners had gathered to play games and sing songs and have a little party at the fish residence. Everybody had such a great time that one of the partiers, Francis Francesco Estep, who was
called
Speaker 184: Cesco by his friends, invited
everybody up
Speaker 184: to his cabin for some more fun the following night, and so they all came.
There
Speaker 184: were nine people there, not including the children,
Speaker 248: and those were the people seen through the windows of the Bull Moose Special as it rolled by that night.
Lee Calvin saw the cabin full
Speaker 18: of women and children. The operator saw it, and the operator on board announced that they
Speaker 113: must have been put there for safekeeping by the men to get them out of the attack zone, and they were all about to have a fight. And so the men start loading their weapons,
and
Speaker 9: the last of the lights are put out on the train,
Calvin
Speaker 20: doesn't like any of this They try to give him a weapon He refuses to take it Goes over to the right side of the train To just lean out the window and smoke a
Speaker 47: cigarette
As the
Speaker 47: train rides by the main tent city There at Hollygrove The train all of a sudden gives two short blasts Of the whistle in the pitch darkness And at
Speaker 35: that signal gatling guns and rifles
Speaker 20: Just open up on the tents in the cabins Ginny Ayers writes Quote Moving
Speaker 113: quickly to the left side of the train
Speaker 113: Sheriff Hill saw instantly that they were all shooting,
Speaker 90: everybody shot.
He could hear
Speaker 90: the rapid fire of a machine gun. Looking out into the blackness of the night, he could see nothing except flashes of the shots, which had come from the miners' positions after the train had begun firing, according to Calvin. It
looked like a
Speaker 90: bunch of fireflies,
he remembered. The coal operator on
Speaker 113: board later described the battle that ensued after the initial shots. Something crashed through the window from the left-hand side of the train about two feet in front of
me.
He was
Speaker 116: sitting near Tom Stacey, who felt a bullet whiz by us. It tore a hole through
Speaker 72: the crown of my hat.
The operator
Speaker 72: fired from the window into the tents and into the houses, and he could see the flashes of the fire directed at the train.
With each flash
Speaker 72: of the men
Speaker 180: shooting from the village, he could see the man, his entire person, outlined, end
Speaker 20: quote.
And so the engineer
Speaker 20: keeps the train moving at 15 miles an hour as the shooting continues, just unabated. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
When the
Speaker 99: train gets clear of Hollygrove, the coal operator on board shouts to back up the train. We'll give him another round. Thankfully, the sheriff
Speaker 11: on board, who had just sort of watched dumbly as this whole thing went down so far, finally intervened and ordered the engineer to keep going. The
people who were gathered
Speaker 11: at Chesko Estep's party
Speaker 113: and many other families who had just put their kids down for bed, they were startled by the two blasts of the train whistle and the gunshots that immediately followed.
And the
Speaker 113: men put their women and children behind cover as best they could,
Speaker 18: and then those who had them grabbed rifles and tried to run outside to return fire. A
woman ran to her
Speaker 18: children's room and tried to get them to safety as bullets were crashing through the walls and the windows. Her husband was following along trying to shield her and the kids from the rounds,
Speaker 53: but one got by and hit his wife in the foot. Chesko
Estep had run
Speaker 53: outside to see what was the
Speaker 142: matter.
as one
Speaker 142: of the women at the party ran outside with her children toward the cellar. And so Chesco yells for
Speaker 152: all the women to hurry up and get in the cellar with the children right quick.
When the shooting
Speaker 53: seemed to have moved on past them, Maud Estep, Chesco's wife, calls for her
Speaker 67: husband, and there's no answer. And
so she
Speaker 67: ventures out
Speaker 11: and finds him with a small hole in his face and a great big hole in the back of his
Speaker 65: head, dead on the
floor,
And so
Speaker 192: she grabs her husband's rifle and goes out and starts shooting at the train.
This all might have
Speaker 52: been the result of paranoid and keyed up guards on the
Speaker 47: train misinterpreting the situation and overreacting. But to the striking miners, the attack of the bull moose special on Holly Grove was nothing short of an attempted massacre. Most
of the residents of Holly
Speaker 249: Grove had been driven out of the village into the forest
and,
Speaker 249: and spent the night out there and so
Speaker 72: the next morning when they tried to make their way back to assess the damage mine guards were waiting and opened fire on them again when
a group
Speaker 72: of miners
Speaker 109: tried to dig a grave for chesco estep they were fired upon by guards from a nearby hillside they tried again they were driven back
Speaker 9: again by gunfire
most of these
Speaker 9: miners had their weapons and so a battle broke out and it continued off and on for a full
Speaker 20: day and
When they
Speaker 20: finally fought their way back in and drove the guards off, they saw that bullet holes had turned their tents and the walls of their cabins into Swiss cheese. Up
in Mucklow, where the
Speaker 250: Bull Moose Special had arrived, the guards and the scab miners and their families
Speaker 184: heard what had happened, and they were terrified that the miners were now going to descend on the city and massacre them.
Speaker 184: Telegraph wires were cut by the miners, isolating the town, and the railroad refused to run any more trains up into the war zone.
Some women went
Speaker 184: out and sabotaged train tracks to prevent the train from coming back their way. A
few days later, miners
Speaker 184: launched a nighttime raid on Mucklow and at least two people were killed.
After the
Speaker 251: attack on Holly Grove,
ralph
Speaker 211: chaplin the wobbly he rushes to the scene with a camera and notebook to get details for a story so he can spread the word of what
happened and he
Speaker 211: heads back to charleston to the office to
Speaker 252: write it
up he says
Speaker 67: the state capitol when he got there was an armed camp martial law was in evidence everywhere the streets were full of soldiers and sentries were stationed in front of the state house and the governor's residence from the upper windows of both of these buildings jutted the muzzles of machine guns
At
Speaker 67: the city jail, we saw a squad of militiamen bringing a group of
Speaker 88: prisoners from the strike zone to the city lockup.
As the
Speaker 184: great iron doors swung open to receive them, the spectators started to hiss at the militiamen.
Calls of
Speaker 184: scab herders were heard.
Some of
Speaker 184: the guardsmen brazenly glared back at the crowd. Others hung their heads.
Well, Chaplin managed to get some
Speaker 184: firsthand accounts of
Speaker 12: the conditions in which the jailed miners were being kept.
The
Speaker 12: interior of the bullpen at Paint
Speaker 90: Creek was described as vile, with sleeping quarters inadequate, sanitation unspeakable, and floors filthy beyond description. We learn that 50 miners were being held there, only three of whom were not native West Virginians. Even with two or three men sleeping in the coal bin, many were forced to spend the night standing upright in the corners.
Speaker 88: And
so chaplains rushing
Speaker 88: around from scene to scene reporting on this labor conflict in West Virginia.
In every
Speaker 88: town we passed, miners were gathered in anxious little groups. Feeling was running high. I heard miners saying on every
Speaker 126: side, just wait until the leaves come out.
The remark
Speaker 126: puzzled me until the desperate implications became apparent. The leafless hillsides
Speaker 90: made the miners targets for enemy fire and exposed their movements when they were seeking points of vantage from which to take potshots at guards and militiamen.
On the
Speaker 126: way to Dickinson, we had the opportunity to survey the whole panorama of the
Speaker 72: danger zone. At two roadway junctions, we could plainly see the yellow wigwams of the militiamen, with
Speaker 71: stacked rifles glistening beside them. Several times, we caught glimpses of machine guns overlooking the frail tent colonies of the miners.
While we were
Speaker 71: on our way back home, hell broke loose in the entire Kanoa Valley. We were caught in the midst of it.
Speaker 71: Armed miners
Speaker 70: from all parts of the state were on the march with the avowed purpose of destroying the hated death train. Terrible passions were aroused. There were hundreds of incidents. Vengeance stalked the green valleys of West Virginia. We passed through a district where, in a
Speaker 253: single engagement, 16 men had been killed, or, as the strikers put it, four men and 12 gun thugs. End
Speaker 150: quote.
One resident
Speaker 150: of a company town at the time remembered: "Not a week
Speaker 53: passed, but that tragedy touched some
home. When a
Speaker 53: housewife chanced to glance through the window and see a group of minors bearing an improvised stretcher between them, she spread the
alarm, and in
Speaker 71: a twinkling women were on the porches, wiping hands on aprons, calling to one another. And before the grim-faced bearers were halfway to the doctor's
Speaker 126: office, a multitude of folk trailed in their
wake.
Speaker 126: Anxious, distraught women and children, uncertain of
Speaker 90: the fate of their loved ones, demanded to know the identity of the victim.
When the
Speaker 90: dreaded news was revealed, the women gathered around their hysterical sister and offered comfort.
Striking minors
Speaker 184: were not only evicted from their homes, as I said earlier, they were also banned from all company facilities and services, which were the only
Speaker 12: facilities and services in the whole region.
and
Speaker 12: so when someone was sick or wounded, they went without a doctor.
Women gave
Speaker 20: birth to babies in dirty tents without medical supervision. Six
more companies of the
Speaker 11: National Guard were ordered into the area, and for the third time in eight months, the
Speaker 75: governor declared martial law. On February 13th, Mother Jones was placed under arrest and charged in military court with inciting a
riot against
Speaker 109: literally for reading from the declaration of independence to an assembly later on conspiracy to commit murder was added to her docket
and for
Speaker 67: her part she refused to even recognize the legitimacy of a military tribunal held on u.s soil against u.s citizen so she wouldn't even make a plea or a statement
and so without
Speaker 215: any due process whatsoever the old lady was sentenced to 20 years in the state
penitentiary
with
Speaker 67: all this turmoil many people really everybody on both sides knew that the governor had lost control of the situation and that the only way it
could be hoped to
Speaker 62: be gotten back was if they got new leadership and fortunately it was an election year so Governor Glasscock was his name Mother Jones liked to call him Governor Crystalcock
Speaker 12: he was
he
Speaker 12: was a seemingly well-intentioned and serious man uh but he was in a situation that maybe nobody could have managed and so he was defeated and he was replaced by a new governor who
Speaker 157: promised to end the mine war as his first priority
the new
Speaker 254: governor was sworn
Speaker 113: in on march 4th 1913 and that very day he traveled up to paint creek to see the situation for himself now this new guy
Speaker 163: governor hatfield governor henry hatfield was his name very interesting guy very colorful figure
he was the youngest
Speaker 67: governor in west virginia history at least at the time and he was a nephew of devil ants hatfield who was the leader of
Speaker 35: one of the two clans involved in
the
Speaker 67: famous
Speaker 12: hatfield and mccoy
feud governor
Speaker 12: hatfield was born down on mate creek near the border in the heart of coal country in mingo
county
he
Speaker 12: was a tough man
Speaker 66: especially for a governor he was known to fight he beat the hell out of at least two men in his governor's office for disrespecting him
his branch
Speaker 66: of the
Speaker 63: Hatfield family had moved out of that area after the feud wound down and he and some others in his family had gone into education and become professionals
Speaker 35: obviously he's the governor of the state but he wasn't so
Speaker 163: distant from the lives of those minors
in fact
Speaker 163: he
Speaker 67: still had cousins he
still had cousins
Speaker 67: i mean distant cousins uh not ones he was in any regular contact with
i
Speaker 12: mean you understand these are big families like
that families
Speaker 12: like the hatfields are huge they call them clans and that fits just fine every other person it seems like in southern west virginia back then
Speaker 255: carried the name of hatfield or was married to or had an in-law who did
and so he
Speaker 255: wasn't close to these cousins but
he knew
Speaker 255: they were down there
Speaker 13: mining coal
and
a younger
Speaker 13: cousin named Sid Hatfield will be along in this story very shortly well
this governor
Speaker 67: Henry Hatfield was
a doctor
Speaker 67: before he was governor and so after he takes office he decides he's going down to Kanawha County to see things for himself all
of his
Speaker 9: advisors say no the hell you're not those miners are likely to murder you if you go down there you're not going anywhere
Speaker 9: Well, he's skeptical of that, and he's not taking no for an answer, and this was not a man who
Speaker 67: lacked physical courage.
And
Speaker 184: so rather than going down there with the governor's armed security detail, he went down there by himself, not as the governor, but as a doctor.
Didn't tell anybody who
Speaker 184: he was.
Speaker 9: Brought his doctor's bag and everything and went down to the coal camps anonymously to see the people and provide some medical care to anyone who needed it.
And he found a
Speaker 9: lot of people who needed
it.
In fact,
Speaker 52: that's how Mother Jones actually met Governor Henry Hatfield He was walking through a camp on the Kanawha River And saw a hut with a soldier
Speaker 126: Marching smartly back and forth in front of it with his weapon So he goes up to the soldier He tells him who he is And
he says,
Speaker 126: what's in that
Speaker 184: hut?
And the
Speaker 184: soldier says Well, sir, Mother Jones is in the hut And I'm set here to guard her
So the
Speaker 54: governor goes in
Speaker 54: and these are his words i found her lying on a straw tick on the floor carrying a temperature of 104 a very rapid respiration
Speaker 185: and a constant cough she had pneumonia so
the
Speaker 256: governor orders her put on the next train
Speaker 230: to charleston
to go to a
Speaker 230: hospital he says that he thought for sure she was going
to die but
Speaker 146: mother jones ain't so easy to kill so she survived and
He also
Speaker 146: saw the pitiful state of the thousands of
Speaker 5: miners living in those snow-covered tent colonies. He saw and treated sick children and pregnant women. Now,
he knew these kind of
Speaker 92: men well enough to have no illusions about the
sort of
Speaker 92: trouble miners could get up to, and
Speaker 257: he knew that they'd played their part in this whole mess, but he'd seen enough.
He ordered
Speaker 258: the release of dozens of strikers being held by the military authorities. Word spread throughout the camps
Speaker 53: who the
Speaker 20: doctor was who had been treating sick miners and their families, and that, and the fact that he was born down on May Creek, gave the governor some credibility with the miners.
Governor Hatfield
Speaker 20: then sat the miners and the operators down and told them that this fight was over.
and he
Speaker 20: instructed them
Speaker 35: both regarding the settlement his office had drawn up, and they were both going to accept it or they would face his wrath. The
agreement contained
Speaker 72: some concessions to the miners, and so on May 1st, the National Union agreed to the conditions. But
they hadn't
Speaker 72: taken the temperature of the miners in Kanawha
Speaker 11: County, and they rejected the agreement, prepared to
renew the
Speaker 11: strike. So the governor gets word of
that and says,
And
Speaker 53: really, the miners had called his bluff because despite his threats, he knew that the eyes of the national
Speaker 109: media, not to mention now a U.S. Senate investigative committee, were watching his every move. And
he really did
Speaker 109: not want to start his
Speaker 236: administration off by calling in troops to renew the fighting in Kahnawa County. So he tells the coal operators,
Speaker 201: not this time.
I'm not
Speaker 201: coming. You
guys are on your own
Speaker 201: out there, and there will not be another round of martial law.
Well I
Speaker 3: figured that was probably a bluff too I'm sure it was If it got bad enough I'm sure he'd have sent them in But it was a good enough bluff that the mine operators
Speaker 35: Finally blinked
And so
Speaker 35: finally The miners of Paint and Cabin Creek Were able to extract from the operators An agreement to all of their demands Including the most
Speaker 160: important one To officially recognize The union and the coal fields At Paint and Cabin Creek And
now the
Speaker 62: boys at Cabin Creek caused a little trouble for some time longer but then they accepted the deal as well and they agreed to go back to work the miners had
Speaker 13: won one
year
Speaker 136: after the Paint and Cabin Creek strike had finally ended by the way the union had to transport many
Speaker 192: of those tents that had been used by the striking miners many of them covered with patched up bullet holes out to southern Colorado for years
Speaker 192: used by striking
Speaker 35: miners and their families out there.
Those tents
Speaker 35: wouldn't make the return trip.
This was the
Speaker 35: incident where the Colorado National Guard, armed and paid for by Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron Company,
and
Speaker 75: augmented by criminals and other dregs from Denver, as well as mine guards who were
Speaker 15: wearing military uniforms,
just massacred
Speaker 253: people at the Ludlow Tent Colony.
Just
Speaker 253: attacked and massacred these
Speaker 47: people Sprayed them with machine guns for hours And then burning down the tent city As the people cowered in holes That they had dug in the ground Under their tents for cover
Back in West Virginia The Paint
Speaker 144: Creek Cabin Creek strike Had really changed
The whole
Speaker 144: situation It changed everything
There was
Speaker 144: no way for the miners Or the operators in the state
Speaker 55: To go back to the way things
had been
A new sense
Speaker 55: of solidarity and confident militancy emerged among the miners of Kanawha County. They had fought and
Speaker 136: won, and had even won a better deal after the National Union had capitulated on their behalf.
Miners in the region had a
Speaker 53: new sense of independence, because they
not only
Speaker 53: stood up to the companies, but had
defied
Speaker 13: the state government and even their own union leadership.
And so
Speaker 13: local miners like Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney and Bill Blizzard, these guys now carried more water in southern West Virginia coal
fields
Speaker 11: than anyone at the National Union office. They
came out of the experience
Speaker 136: convinced more than ever that violence
was sometimes
Speaker 113: necessary and justified, and more importantly, that it could work.
And that
Speaker 113: was a lesson that would bring them to the brink of disaster just a few years later. Now
down in the coal fields on the
Speaker 113: southern border with Kentucky, which at this point is the last remaining stronghold of non-union coal mining
Speaker 63: in the state, some
of the mine
Speaker 63: operators there took the lead in
Speaker 78: improving working conditions and adding amenities to the company towns where the miners
lived.
They
Speaker 109: improved the company homes, some of them built playgrounds for the miners' children. Many
of the
Speaker 109: schools were improved, and the companies raised the pay of the teachers to try to bring in a better class of educator. Mine
operators brought
Speaker 219: in welfare
Speaker 35: workers to instruct the miners' wives in home management, and cooking, and gardening, and other things. They built recreational facilities to give to the miners' children.
Speaker 35: to give them someplace other than the saloon to spend their off hours.
David Corbin
Speaker 88: writes,
Speaker 90: quote, These were good-faith attempts to regain the respect and loyalty of the miners. Is it not true, a coal operator asked, that too many coal operators treat their employees as belonging to what they term the mining class? The operator exhorted, Because their occupation is different, does not make them worthy of less consideration.
It places a
Speaker 90: larger responsibility
Speaker 126: on those possessed of greater advantages.
The new
Speaker 126: order was not designed to eliminate class differences, but to make them acceptable to the minors. Kinder and more
Speaker 259: benevolent, indeed
Speaker 90: paternalistic, concern on the part of the operator was essential. "Old creeds and old faiths are being discarded. They do not conform with new experiences," a company pamphlet to its store clerks read as it advised a "better consideration of the needs and requirements of its minors."
The
Speaker 90: trouble in the past, the handout explained, was a failure of cooperation where it should have had it. Instructing the store clerks to give better service to the miners, the pamphlet announced that the company was seeking new ends by new methods, based upon broader, more altruistic foundations. End quote.
These companies
Speaker 136: claimed that the improvements they were making
made it so
Speaker 136: that the miners actually had access to
Speaker 136: better
Speaker 217: homes and better facilities, better infrastructure than they ever could have otherwise afforded themselves. And
that
Speaker 227: actually might have been true in some of the company towns.
But it was still
Speaker 227: a company town.
Speaker 53: One
mine operator
Speaker 53: suggested to his fellow owners that it might be advantageous to allow the miners to own their homes.
When a
Speaker 53: miner has something he can
Speaker 260: call his own, something he can improve, then he's going to appreciate his job more and will take better
care of it.
Speaker 261: Indeed, mining companies lost
Speaker 9: a tremendous amount of money on company housing.
Speaker 53: They charged rent, but they lost a ton of
money on
Speaker 53: it. The operators in just one southern West Virginia county lost $422,000.
on
Speaker 184: company housing in just a three year period and that's in their money it's a lot of money
allowing the miners
Speaker 184: to own their homes it would make them more loyal to the company since
it would
Speaker 184: be more difficult to just pack up and move to the next coal field for slightly better pay
but it would also
Speaker 89: take the maintenance costs of the homes off the company's books and so it made all the economic
Speaker 236: sense in the world and
But it
Speaker 236: was a step too far for the operators. And
so the
Speaker 236: proposal was quickly dismissed. There were limits to
how much
Speaker 26: control they were going to give up. Because if the operators' strategy for stopping the spread of unionism involved carrots,
Speaker 228: it involved sticks as well. They were extremely paranoid.
They
Speaker 228: really believed that there was this great conspiracy between the United Mine Workers of America, the labor union,
and all the
Speaker 228: big out-of-state mining companies. There was a grand conspiracy between the two
Speaker 215: to destroy and seize control of the coal industry in West Virginia. That's what they thought.
They said in
Speaker 215: public and private
Speaker 226: statements that they thought most of the miners were clueless and basically okay, but they were prey to these socialistic and anarchist radicals
Speaker 262: who only wanted to destroy and overturn everything.
So every time there
Speaker 184: was an accident, any time equipment was damaged,
Speaker 136: the operators assumed it was sabotage. They
made the case that
Speaker 136: if the UMWA was able to organize their coal fields,
they would
Speaker 11: bringing virtually all coal production in the United States under union influence, that
the union could then
Speaker 11: hold the entire country hostage,
could grab
Speaker 161: 110 million people in the United States by the throat. At
the same time they were making
Speaker 227: improvements to company towns, they were also turning them into police states.
They
Speaker 88: hired thousands of mine guards who patrolled the towns on foot and horseback, armed with shotguns, rifles, pistols, blackjacks, clubs. Some
towns were
Speaker 88: surrounded
Speaker 263: with razor wire, and sentries were placed to control who came in and out. Mounted Gatling guns
Speaker 231: became a common sight,
installed on
Speaker 231: rooftops
Speaker 228: at the first rumor of unrest.
many of these
Speaker 228: mine guards specialized as going undercover company spies these
men
Speaker 20: had worked and lived alongside the miners gaining their trust and reporting on their words and activities to the company
any miner
Speaker 20: who was heard advocating for the union or even complaining about pay or conditions in the camp
Speaker 185: was immediately fired and evicted and often roughed up on his
way out
Miners who
Speaker 36: gathered in groups of three or more were broken up unless they were at some company-approved facility, like a church or a movie theater. Their
homes continued to
Speaker 264: be subject to unscheduled searches.
Speaker 110: Their mail was monitored at the company post office. In
addition to deciding
Speaker 110: who could go in
Speaker 126: and out of southern West Virginia, the companies decided still which books and other reading materials the miners could have.
Speaker 26: They banned any literature that they didn't approve.
like I
Speaker 26: said, carrots
Speaker 88: and sticks well everything had changed for the miners as well the families of Kanawha County had been
Speaker 185: through hell and back and they had stuck together and they had won it was this profoundly unifying experience
in the
Speaker 90: company town there were two, always two identifiable classes of people there were the miners
And
Speaker 113: the company men, which included all the
Speaker 52: store clerks and the bookkeepers and the doctors, the preachers and the teachers and all the rest.
What that meant
Speaker 265: was that all of the people who,
in a
Speaker 265: regular town, usually
would have
Speaker 152: been able to serve as leaders and figures of respect in communities. You
know, the doctor,
Speaker 92: the preacher, they were all understood to be company
Speaker 136: men. And
so they
Speaker 136: couldn't be leaders in the community.
They
Speaker 136: did their jobs,
Speaker 67: but no miner looked to them as a figure worthy of special consideration. It
also meant that the usual
Speaker 90: avenues for coming together as a community, especially the church, were
not
Speaker 53: available for that purpose because they were all in the company payroll. Miners
knew that
Speaker 53: ministers and teachers and doctors
Speaker 126: and even the
Speaker 53: saloon keepers had as part of their job description to report on them to the company.
There
Speaker 53: was only one meaningful activity to bring them together on their own terms, and that was their solidarity in organizing
Speaker 63: and working as coal miners.
One UMWA district
Speaker 136: leader said in a speech that the church has had its place,
Speaker 126: its natural place in our lives. Our various fraternal societies have had their place.
Speaker 126: But, after all, the one organization that has done more for us than all the others combined, I say
Speaker 90: to you, is the union movement. The trade union movement is our very life, because what trade union movement does for us through its strength, power, and influence, determines the kind of life that we and our wives and children are living in this country. The
union not
Speaker 90: only determines
Speaker 259: what our material life shall be, but it determines to a large degree our spiritual life as well.
The
Speaker 259: trade union movement gives us that existence that allows us to love our neighbor and worship God as we should, end quote.
Now with Irishmen and
Speaker 53: Slavs and Hungarians and Italians and Southern blacks and more all mashed up with the
Speaker 126: local West Virginian miners,
there were
Speaker 126: obviously as many religious denominations as there were people out in the fields.
The company
Speaker 12: usually only built one church, and it was always the denomination of the operator himself. Corbyn writes, quote,
Gone were the
Speaker 184: circuit-riding
Speaker 53: ministers and campfire revival meetings that native mountaineers had known. Gone
were the
Speaker 53: prestige and independence of the black church and the black minister that the southern
migrant black
Speaker 53: miners had enjoyed.
And
Speaker 184: gone were the power and prestige of the mainline Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church that the European immigrants had known.
In their stead
Speaker 126: stood the company-sponsored and controlled preacher, the company-built and controlled clergy,
all
Speaker 184: operating within the confines of the company-controlled town.
One of the features of the
Speaker 35: West Virginia coal mines over the years was that the miners moved around
a lot.
And they
Speaker 35: would work one
Speaker 109: field for a while, and then they would hear that a nearby field was short on men and paying a little more, so they'd pack up and go over there for a while.
From county to county, hill to
Speaker 11: hill, valley to valley, they would move around a lot like this. And
since different
Speaker 11: company towns had
Speaker 50: different churches, many
miners would
Speaker 50: have had occasion to attend church in six, maybe ten or more denominations
Speaker 9: over the course of his life.
And
Speaker 9: sometimes even miners who stayed put had their denomination Unexpectedly switched
up on
Speaker 9: them when the coal mine
Speaker 99: changed ownership So while there was some sectarian tension in the early days When operators were importing thousands of new people From all over the place to populate the hills Before
long
Speaker 54: that was all washed away By the ecumenical nature of the miners' life The Irish Catholic
Speaker 57: and the English Anglican in.
Speaker 57: both had to attend the Baptist church
and are
Speaker 57: both preached at by a
Speaker 163: company minister so they didn't see much use in fighting over who was right
this same
Speaker 66: spirit extended to racial and ethnic tensions
of course no
Speaker 217: place is perfect in that respect but the coal fields of southern West Virginia
were not only
Speaker 52: some of the most diverse but also some of the most tolerant places you were likely to find anywhere in the country in those
days
as
Speaker 26: corbin said the blacks in another community well they would have attended a black church in the black part of town where a black minister would preach the gospel in a manner that is intended for a black audience
their
Speaker 113: children would go to black schools and the black adults would socialize with other black
people well
Speaker 113: this was not possible
Speaker 71: in the company town
and to the
Speaker 53: operators a minor was a minor they came and went
Speaker 53: occupying and vacating the company houses and facilities and then moving on maybe coming back sometime in the future but a minor was a minor
so there was
Speaker 12: no sense in building separate areas for
Speaker 88: different groups of people black and white usually lived right next to each other in identical houses they ate identical food
They
Speaker 88: went to the same church, their kids went to the same schools, they socialized at the same saloons or recreational centers, and they bitched about the same
Speaker 113: mine operators.
In the few towns
Speaker 113: where a separate area was built for black miners, everything was the same quality as the rest of the town. And very often, the black section would be half-occupied with white miners with nowhere else to put them, or
else
Speaker 154: the black section would overflow
Speaker 153: and there'd
be...
black
Speaker 153: families living over in the white section so nobody really thought much of it especially after a while
because the black miners
Speaker 54: saw that you know they and their ancestors had been through everything in the
Speaker 63: south but here in west virginia the white miner was worked and abused and cheated and harassed and threatened just like he
was and the
Speaker 72: white miners saw that when the chips were down
the
Speaker 72: black miner held the line with him against the white operators and their white mine guards. The
same went for
Speaker 51: the various European ethnicities.
This was
Speaker 51: totally contrary to
Speaker 72: the intentions of the mine operators themselves. One mine operator told a journalist that
Speaker 90: they'd purposely hired all different kinds of miners, Americans, Dagos, Slavs, Niggers, Hungarians, and Poles,
Speaker 90: They're pretty well mixed, and you bet your life we try to keep them mixed. As
long as
Speaker 90: you've got them mixed, they
Speaker 266: cannot talk to one another so well, and it keeps them out of mischief.
You can
Speaker 266: control them better when you've got them mixed.
Now the
Speaker 267: thing is, it
might be true
Speaker 267: for a while, but only for a while.
See, the operators were
Speaker 88: worried that if they didn't mix the minors by race and ethnicity, that people of the same type would be able to come together and
Speaker 226: organize. Okay.
But if
Speaker 226: they'd kept them separate,
that might
Speaker 116: have happened But the problem would have been smaller scale, maybe more containable Oh,
the Polish
Speaker 90: miners are starting to organize over there No problem, tell the Hungarian miners that the Poles are causing problems And get them fighting with each other, then get rid of the Poles The
black
Speaker 268: miners are organizing over here Tell
the white
Speaker 268: miners that the Negroes think they're just as good as any white man And let nature take its course
But that
Speaker 116: didn't work when all the races were mixed together. Over time, people stopped identifying themselves by race or
Speaker 136: religion, which
would have
Speaker 136: kept the workers chopped up into manageable groups and instead began to identify themselves as coal miners. It was
the only
Speaker 66: identity that mattered. It was their class, not their religion, not
Speaker 51: their race or ethnicity, that determined their lot in life, determined how they were treated, where they were, everything.
They knew
Speaker 85: they could expect no solidarity from people of their own race if those people were part of the ownership class. They
knew
Speaker 72: they could only rely on other minors. Minors
of all races and
Speaker 219: creeds, they drank together, they socialized together, they fought together, they argued together, they sang the same
Speaker 217: union songs together. And over time, they developed a real spirit of brotherhood.
Thank you.
The
Speaker 88: miners being alienated from the people and the institutions that might have provided leadership or solidarity on other people's terms,
they generated
Speaker 90: their own leaders from among their own number. And because the culture of the mountains
Speaker 52: was what it was,
they followed
Speaker 52: those men who had put the most on the line and showed the most courage and competence in the fight, local men like Frank
Speaker 71: Keeney and Bill Blizzard.
and men
Speaker 269: like Sid Hatfield.
Sid
Speaker 270: Hatfield was born in 1893 in the wilderness on the West Virginia-Kentucky border. Just
two years
Speaker 217: before he was born, his family, the Hatfields, had been involved in that most famous example of feud violence in American history with the McCoys. Those
are the
Speaker 136: final days of old Appalachia.
And the
Speaker 136: leader of the Hatfield clan, Devil Ants
Speaker 11: Hatfield, finally had enough of the bounty hunters and the Kentucky posses that were always coming after him. And he sold his 5,000
Speaker 113: acres of timberland to a corporation and moved his family up out of the area.
But not all the
Speaker 52: Hatfields left. And there along the Tug River, in a county called Mingo, which didn't actually
Speaker 20: exist earlier in the story. It's part of Logan County, but it's been split off. Now we've got Mingo County there on the border.
was where
Speaker 20: Sid Hatfield grew up.
The first coal mine
Speaker 11: opened around the time Sid was born, and he watched the industry grow up and his home transform as he grew into a teenager. He
learned to read in a
Speaker 11: one-room
Speaker 20: schoolhouse, but by the time he came of age, there was only one path available to anyone who didn't want to leave the region, and
so
Speaker 191: along with everybody he knew Sid Hatfield went to work in the mines.
with
Speaker 271: the other men he rode coal cars on his belly deep into the mountain worked all day
Speaker 20: on his hands and knees in three foot shafts tapping support posts into place laying new rail for the mine cars as they went deeper and deeper into the earth drilling
Speaker 5: holes with hand operated augers into the walls and then placing dynamite that blasted their
way
Speaker 75: to the next stop and
They
Speaker 75: shoved the coal into cars that
Speaker 177: rode out on the rails to dump their cargo into the tipple. They went into the hole when it was still dark in the morning. They
ate
Speaker 13: their lunch in the dark
and they
Speaker 13: crawled
Speaker 136: back out with black faces and sooty lungs when it was dark in the evening. And
they did
Speaker 136: that six days a week.
Sid was a
Speaker 5: young man in 1912 when...
Speaker 5: Paint Creek and Cabin Creek exploded in violence, just three counties to the northeast of where he lived.
And he
Speaker 26: heard, like everyone heard, that the miners in Kanawha had won their fight for the union.
The police state
Speaker 11: conditions I was describing just a few minutes ago,
and these
Speaker 11: southern West Virginia counties that were still not
Speaker 72: unionized after Paint Creek and didn't intend to be, right here in the Tug Valley, Sid Hatfield's home, it was right in the heart of that.
Sid was a
Speaker 67: little guy Wiry though,
Speaker 9: maybe 150 pounds He had short hair and big old jug handle ears And he was one of those guys who smiled and laughed very easily With
Speaker 5: his whole face and body He would just burst out laughing, double over He's got gold teeth and they're flashing out for everybody to see Sid
gained a good
Speaker 5: reputation
Speaker 64: as a hardworking miner And also as a reliable friend
he
Speaker 246: made friends and he kept
Speaker 114: them they said eventually
he
Speaker 12: was promoted to work as a blacksmith and so he was able to come out of the mines into the
fresh air
Speaker 53: but as lawn savage writes he never forgot the underground miners or that he
was one of them instead
Speaker 53: was a young man he saw one of
Speaker 20: his friends killed in the mines and then the man's wife and children put out of their home by the company without aid or compensation
and that's the kind
Speaker 47: of thing that radicalizes a young man
Speaker 47: Savage continues, quote,
From high on the
Speaker 47: Kentucky
Speaker 53: mountaintop, Sid could look across the tug to Matewan on the West Virginia side. Matewan was a town of 800 people, a block of businesses, a
Speaker 136: main street lined by maples with whitewashed trunks, big wooden houses behind the maples, miners' cabins along Mate Creek and the railroad, and a high rock cliff behind
Speaker 184: it all.
There
Speaker 184: were a depot, a bank, a company store, a hotel, a hardware, two drug stores, and the Dew Drop Inn.
There was
Speaker 90: also Testerman's Jewelry, run by the town's Natalie-dressed mayor and his attractive young wife, offering musical instruments, tobacco, patent medicine, eyeglasses, and
Speaker 184: ice cream from a marble-topped soda fountain, as well as jewelry. Pool rooms, saloons, and prostitutes prospered from the miners' trade.
Speaker 184: Moonshine, shooting, and fighting abounded.
Speaker 90: Corruption was expected, and votes were bought and sold. Coal operators in the area paid deputy sheriffs and private detectives to enforce the laws they liked. Company spies circulated secretly among the miners to learn of any union activity, and most people believed public officials took graft from gamblers and prostitutes. It was a frontier
Speaker 126: town as wild as the west. Maitwan,
Speaker 126: some of the town's leading citizens once said, was the worst governed town in the state.
Sid
Speaker 88: liked it. He played pool, poker, and slot machines, chewed, smoked, drank at the Blue Goose Saloon, and chased the women. He fought often,
Speaker 71: and he beat one opponent so badly that they had to hospitalize the
man. He shot
Speaker 71: guns along the
Speaker 90: riverbank, and they still say in Mingo that Sid could throw a potato in the air, draw his pistol, and split it open.
After
Speaker 88: he became famous, he told a group of congressmen he once had a little shooting match with a fellow by the name of Wilson in the Auburn mines.
Wilson was the
Speaker 219: mine foreman. Sid didn't finish the story except to say he, Sid, was arrested, tried, and found clear.
These
Speaker 136: were the qualities that won respect in Matewan, and they caught the eye not only of Mingo's miners. C.C. Testerman, the mayor, appointed Sid Hatfield as the town's
Speaker 61: first chief of police, end quote.
Speaker 9: See, Matewan was a bona fide incorporated town. It was not a company town.
Speaker 68: It was a real town.
It had a
Speaker 68: mayor, not a manager or a supervisor. And
it had a
Speaker 68: police
Speaker 77: department, not mine guards patrolling the place.
There
Speaker 77: was nothing the operators
Speaker 192: could do about that Except to try to bribe or otherwise compromise the people in charge
There was a
Speaker 272: town up the way
Speaker 12: near Cabin Creek that was like that A place called Eskdale This was an incorporated town right in the middle of land Owned on all sides by the coal
Speaker 20: companies And the miners could hold rallies and mass meetings there Organize their union there There was nothing the coal companies
could do about that
The
Speaker 20: miners voted
Speaker 67: in a union-friendly mayor up there in Eskdale, and he was so hated by the operators that he couldn't even leave town, since every way out was company property.
Speaker 211: He was literally imprisoned in that town. Well,
in Sid Hatfield, the miners had
Speaker 51: a police chief in Matewan that they could call their own,
and he
Speaker 51: understood them. He
Speaker 5: was one of them. He still thought of himself as one of them, and
he did things in a
Speaker 5: way that they could appreciate.
when guys
Speaker 5: were fighting he'd
Speaker 115: pull them apart and send them on their way
when they were too
Speaker 115: drunk he'd bring them home
Speaker 54: and
he would openly
Speaker 54: take their side
and he even got
Speaker 54: him in trouble himself in
Speaker 59: the winter of 1919 for possessing illegal whiskey and for fighting but that just endeared him to the
Speaker 62: miners more and so testerman kept his popular police chief on
the job
Speaker 62: before long
Sid
Speaker 62: Hatfield's popularity was such that he decided
Speaker 243: to declare as a candidate for Constable of the whole Mate 1 District.
It was just at
Speaker 127: that
Speaker 11: time that the United Mine Workers began a concerted effort to finally bring the Union to Mingo County. World War I had provided a brief respite from the tension
Speaker 35: between the miners and the mine operators.
Coal
Speaker 35: was needed
Speaker 67: more than ever during the war Not only to fuel the U.S. effort once we got involved But to supply the Entente powers before that
The U.S.
Speaker 273: Navy still ran on coal And
needed
Speaker 11: the cleanest, purest coal possible for its ships And that coal was to be found in West Virginia And
the quality of
Speaker 12: West Virginia's coal Was the major reason that the government built our largest Navy base
Speaker 11: Nearby there, in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1917
And
The
Speaker 11: miners could have used this opportunity to
press
Speaker 50: their demands. There's never a better opportunity to do it. The federal government would
Speaker 5: almost certainly get involved, and
the coal
Speaker 5: operators would have no choice but to negotiate with them.
They could have crippled the
Speaker 5: military effort. They
could have
Speaker 63: forced the nationalization of the mines if they had decided to strike in 1918. But they didn't. Word went out from the National Union that
the miners could have used this opportunity
Speaker 63: And from Frank Keeney, personally, in southern West Virginia, that there would be no strikes and no labor unrest for the duration of the war. Coal
miners were exempted from
Speaker 47: military service because they were doing a job that was so central to the war effort, but
many of
Speaker 47: them volunteered anyway, so many of the miners had friends or brothers or cousins over there in France.
And before you
Speaker 5: think the coal miners got off easy avoiding the war, I should tell you that during those years, coal miners in West Virginia experienced a higher casualty
Speaker 67: rate on a man-for-man basis than the American expeditionary force in
Speaker 11: Europe. I know that sounds crazy, but I've seen it in multiple sources.
When union
Speaker 57: leaders gave speeches, it was to encourage the miners to do their duty to the country, to
Speaker 26: dig as much coal as possible, make sure it was cleaner and freer of impurities and dirt than it ever was before. Although the coal companies were reaping
Speaker 53: record profits shipping coal out to Europe and supplying the US military, many of them used the excuse that the government had put a ceiling on the price to justify cutting
Speaker 88: miners' wages.
But
Speaker 88: even still, the miners did not go on strike.
These men had their
Speaker 88: problems with the coal barons. They had their problems with the county sheriffs and the state legislatures and their governors.
But they
Speaker 50: were American patriots,
to the core. But now the war was over. And for
Speaker 274: years, the miners had been inundated with government propaganda, telling them...
That
Speaker 114: they were serving their country every day when they went to work. In the most important way, in the most critical industry.
They've been told, as all
Speaker 275: the American people had been told,
that their
Speaker 275: service and their sacrifices, not to
Speaker 55: mention the killing and dying, were necessary to end tyranny and make the world safe for democracy. That violence was sometimes necessary to end tyranny and free people.
The irony
Speaker 55: was not lost on them when they came back to the dreary and oppressive life of a coal miner in a company town. And
so they sent men from
Speaker 55: unionized districts down to Mingo County to get them organized. Frank Keeney, who by this
point
Speaker 228: was the UMWA District 17 president, he
comes down,
Speaker 228: pistol on his hip, to supervise the operation.
Speaker 215: Billy Blizzard's another one, the union local president...
gave
Speaker 215: speeches to the miners in pouring rain nobody went anywhere it
was a
Speaker 48: real moment you had you had men of all races and ethnicities coming together as miners in mingo
Speaker 247: county in 1920
there was one
Speaker 247: gathering where 500
Speaker 228: miners prayed and sang songs together and then a black miner stands up this is mostly
Speaker 90: a white crowd
he says
Speaker 90: if i wouldn't be a union man i'd go home and ask my wife to chain me in the yard with the
dog
And
Speaker 90: everybody, white, black, immigrant, didn't matter. Laughed together, slapped them on the back.
Speaker 276: They were minors.
Mother Jones came in
Speaker 277: and gave a speech in May 1, about 100 yards from the Kentucky border there.
Frank Keeney had
Speaker 72: warned the operators that
Speaker 209: in their present temper, the Mingo miners are not to be fooled with. They will oppose to the last any use of private armies enlisted by the coal companies.
The
Speaker 153: operators, of course, paid no attention to that And they just imported more and more Baldwin-Feltz guards And
so the
Speaker 247: miners begin going on strike
Many of them left
Speaker 247: their company homes voluntarily Taking up with their families on land rented by the Union And tents provided by the
Speaker 55: Union Within
the early
Speaker 55: months of 1920 The
miners
Some
Speaker 55: 3,000 miners in the Tug Valley had signed up for the United Mine Workers of America. They're making massive headway, but the operators were going to fight back with everything they had.
Figuring Sid for an
Speaker 215: impulsive hillbilly, the Baldwin-Felts agency tried to bribe Sid Hatfield,
Speaker 20: offered him $300 a month to work for them, which
was a hell of
Speaker 20: a lot of
Speaker 178: money.
For
Speaker 178: a poor kid from the Tug Valley back then. There's a hell of a lot of people today who would call that a pretty helpful dose of money in their lives.
Well, Sid told
Speaker 178: them to get bent.
Then they tried to pay
Speaker 114: him just to let them install a machine gun on the roof of a building in May 1.
He told
Speaker 114: them again to back off and they better get out of town. So
the operators
Speaker 55: started cracking down on the union organizing and the miners' strike began to pick up.
And
Speaker 55: like clockwork,
Speaker 203: Baldwin-Feltz guards were everywhere.
Speaker 278: Intimidating working miners and
Speaker 10: driving the striking ones out of their homes. One wet and cloudy day in May, 1920, 13 Baldwin-Feltz men,
Speaker 55: including two brothers of Tom Feltz, the president of the company,
came in
Speaker 55: to mate one on a train.
Most
Speaker 215: of them were big men with a very serious
look.
In
Speaker 215: dark suits and carrying cases that everyone
Speaker 20: who saw them knew contained guns. They
get off the train
Speaker 20: and they go to Mate One's hotel for a quick lunch and then as soon as they arrived,
they climbed
Speaker 20: into three cars and headed up along Mate Creek to a company town where there were several striking miners who were still living in their company homes. And the
Speaker 55: people in town knew exactly what that meant.
Speaker 55: before long they got confirmation word starts coming
Speaker 53: back that the detectives have already kicked one family out into the rain they've got plans a whole list for many more and
Speaker 114: so the men in the town decided they were not going to let this happen and so they headed back to their homes and got their
guns Sid Hatfield
Speaker 114: was in town and
Speaker 20: he was more angry than any of them
He
Speaker 20: goes to the mayor and tells them what's going on, and together they go up to the side of the houses to go talk to Al Feltz, one of the brothers directing these
Speaker 109: evictions. When
they get
Speaker 109: there, they see a husband and a wife standing in the road in the rain.
The wife had
Speaker 109: been
Speaker 20: washing clothes out back when they came in holding guns and told her to get out. So
she asked, can
Speaker 20: I finish my laundry and wait until my husband gets back? But
they
Speaker 64: said, no, get out. They start dumping her furniture outside in the dirt.
her
Speaker 113: husband arrived just as Sid and Mayor Testerman were getting there and so Sid marches up to the leader, Al Feltz he demands to know what's your legal authority
Speaker 109: for making these evictions Feltz tells him first of all, this is not within Mate One city limits, so it's not your jurisdiction and second anyway,
Speaker 113: sure, I've checked with the courts I've got all the authority in the world and so Sid says, well let me see it and Al just blows
Speaker 35: him off he says, go back to Mate One and make some calls and figure it out yourself
Well,
Speaker 35: Sid's getting
Speaker 47: pretty heated by this point, so the mayor comes in and intervenes, pulls him back from the escalating situation, and they go back to town
Speaker 9: with a big crowd of miners following behind him.
When they get
Speaker 9: there, they make some calls, and they find
Speaker 59: out that, in fact, the Baldwin-Felz guys were not acting under any legal authority whatsoever, and so Sid announces, with great
Speaker 9: satisfaction, that this gives him the power to arrest them for unlawfully throwing people out of their homes.
And so he
Speaker 9: asked the deputy sheriff
Speaker 35: over the phone to write up and send arrest warrants for the guards. The deputy said they'd be on the next train to make one that afternoon.
Somewhere in the
Speaker 35: conversation, Sid is supposed to have said that he'd like to kill the Baldwin-Feltz men, which may have been a figure of speech at
Speaker 113: the time he made it, but which would acquire importance as the day proceeded. Okay.
Just to be
Speaker 59: short, Sid asked the mayor to write up his own arrest warrants on the authority of the town so that for the time being, until
Speaker 9: the county warrants arrived, he could hold the men for illegally brandishing firearms within town limits. And so the mayor did that.
And by now,
Speaker 199: everybody had heard what's going on.
Miners were
Speaker 206: out in the streets, most of them carrying.
The
Speaker 206: rain started to pick up, and more stories started trickling in. Families with all their belongings set out in the weather. There was one story of a pregnant woman, a sick child, and a baby in its crib,
Speaker 279: set out in the rain with nowhere to go.
And so by the time
Speaker 279: the detectives roll back into town, just after four o'clock,
Speaker 280: the miners were in an excitable mood.
The
Speaker 256: guards went back to the hotel for dinner And afterward they came out into the street to catch the 5
Speaker 281: o'clock train The one with the county warrants coming
in Well Sid
Speaker 282: Hatfield
Speaker 64: goes
Speaker 283: and steps directly to Al Feltz The leader of the men
Both of them had
Speaker 283: holstered pistols
Speaker 20: This is a scene straight out of an old west movie
The
Speaker 20: champion of the miners standing nose to nose with the chief of the Baldwin Feltz detectives.
They're outside a
Speaker 284: hardware store and
Speaker 175: the tension was thick as armed miners are peeking through the doors and windows to see what's going to happen here. Nobody knows exactly what's
Speaker 184: going to happen. And so Sid, right now Feltz's face tells him, I've got warrants to arrest you all.
Speaker 184: and Al Feltz just shrugs and says, oh, I'll return the compliment so happens I've got a warrant
Speaker 227: to arrest you and so one of the miners runs to fetch the mayor saying, hey, they've got Sid under arrest and
Speaker 113: so the mayor comes to the scene and he says, let me see the warrant you supposedly got and so he's handed a piece of paper and he takes a look at it and he says, this is bogus he goes to throw it back and
Speaker 215: just then and the people still argue over who started it shots rang out
And
Speaker 64: the mayor went down, shot in the belly.
Sid
Speaker 18: drew pistols and fired back, and he shot Al Feltz, the brother of the Baldwin Feltz president, in the head, killing him.
Then, just
Speaker 59: gunfire was general up and down the street, as the other detectives
Speaker 62: and the armed miners stationed about the square just opened up. And immediately, the detectives realized, oh no, they were outnumbered and outgunned, and so they started scattering for cover.
One of them made it to the
Speaker 62: river, jumped in, and escaped across into Kentucky, and,
Two
Speaker 62: detectives who were brothers hopped a fence and
Speaker 59: ran inside a house, but inside there were miners, and then there was gunfire, and then they
ran out
Speaker 59: bleeding. Both of them managed to make their way to the train station where they hid until the next one pulled in and they got
on board and they
Speaker 211: escaped. One of the guards who used to be a police chief in Virginia before signing
Speaker 18: on with Baldwin Feltz tried to run when the shooting started, but a miner with a rifle drew a bead on him and put him
down.
Lee Feltz, the
Speaker 18: other Feltz brother who was
Speaker 84: there He draws two guns, starts shooting when he sees his brother Al go down While Miner draws on him and empties his.32 toward Lee Feltz Misses with every shot So Lee Feltz turns toward him and empties his pistol at the Miner And he misses with all his shots And
then
Speaker 113: just then a man with a rifle took aim at Lee Feltz The youngest brother of the family And the second Feltz brother to die that day
And the
Speaker 12: miner who had missed Feltz with all those shots was not going to let his day end on a
Speaker 109: note like that, so he grabs one of Lee Feltz's pistols, reloads it, and runs to the bank,
Speaker 228: where he sees a wounded detective, another former
Speaker 18: Virginia police chief, limping for cover. And this miner, his name was Art Williams, he walks right up and executes that Baldwin Feltz man on the spot.
The
Speaker 55: detective who was third in command behind the Feltz brothers, a man named C.B. Cunningham, was standing right next
Speaker 47: to Al Feltz when the bullet went through his head. And so Cunningham had... this is a serious operator with a checkered past. He had been at the Ludlow Massacre seven
Speaker 18: years back in Colorado, manning the machine gun that was raining the bullets down on helpless miners and their families.
when
Speaker 47: Feltz got shot Cunningham Drew starts shooting into the hardware store where he could see several miners with guns Sid and several others turned on him
Speaker 114: and they took his life
by the
Speaker 114: time the gunfight drew to a close seven of those 13 Baldwin Feltz men
Speaker 285: had been killed along with two miners and Mare Testament
five
Speaker 22: others had gunshot
wounds
Mayor
Speaker 20: Testerman took some time to die, and with his dying breaths, he just kept repeating, Why did they shoot me? I can't see why they shot me.
Depending on who you
Speaker 209: talk to, even to this day, you'll hear it called either the Battle of Matewan or the Matewan Massacre. Tom
Feltz, the
Speaker 286: president of the agency, whose
brothers
Speaker 18: were now dead, he had no hesitation in calling it a massacre.
When he
Speaker 18: heard what happened, he formed up a posse of heavily armed men and took the night train
Speaker 55: straight to Mingo County.
Someone called
Speaker 14: ahead to Maitwan to warn the men there, so Sid and the Mingo County Sheriff deputize 100 miners, make sure they all have guns,
and prepare them to
Speaker 59: fight off this attack when it comes.
When
Speaker 59: the train is bearing down on Mate Juan The engineer, who apparently was a very wise
Speaker 114: man Wanted no part of what was about to happen He just gunned the engine and tore right through town onto Williamson
Speaker 100: As Tom Feltz and all his men were screaming and threatening him Probably the right move
To the
Speaker 278: miners The battle of Mate Juan Made Sid Hatfield a folk hero
You
Speaker 278: know, Baldwin Feltz men had harassed and bullied and beaten and killed miners and their families for
Speaker 275: years. Stories of their atrocities were well known to miners all over the country, not just in West Virginia. And
now Sid
Speaker 67: Hatfield, their popular leader, a police chief who had spent his youth down in the hole with the rest
of them, had
Speaker 55: thrown down with the Feltz brothers themselves and sent their detectives scurrying for their
lives.
You
Speaker 55: know, the miners
Speaker 13: before would take pot shots at them. They would hit and run. But when it came to a face-to-face confrontation, they would scatter. They would try to avoid
Speaker 27: that. Sid got right in their face and
Speaker 287: threw down and he won.
There's always been conflicting
Speaker 113: accounts about who shot Mayor Testerman or why. Sid
and the
Speaker 113: miners say that Al
Speaker 47: Feltz shot the mayor and that that's how the whole thing started, followed by Sid drawing his pistol
Speaker 275: and killing Al
Feltz.
Tom
Speaker 275: Feltz spread the story that it was actually Sid himself who shot the mayor. A story that Sid helped to get around a little bit when, just a few
Speaker 63: weeks after the killing, he married the mayor's young widow. Tom
Feltz said that Sid
Speaker 63: had shot the mayor
Speaker 20: to get him out of the way, and then shot his brothers in cold blood in a calculated ambush. Sid
and his
Speaker 18: supporters shot back that if he'd really wanted to kill the mayor, there were better ways to do
it.
than
Speaker 18: starting a massive
Speaker 211: gunfight in broad daylight with 13 heavily armed Baldwin felt detectives in
fact Sid said
Speaker 84: and other people backed him up on this he and the mayor were very close and the mayor had asked him to take care of his wife should anything ever
Speaker 47: happen to
him six days after the
Speaker 13: fight at mate one in statewide elections the effect of the incident on Sid's reputation was pretty clear
Speaker 33: because he carried all six precincts in his district and became the Democratic nominee for constable.
The action in
Speaker 55: May 1 gave the union movement a burst of renewed energy. It didn't have anything to do directly with the union, but everybody was buzzing about it.
The UMWA
Speaker 114: announced that all the coal operations along the southern West Virginia border, east of McDowell County, had all been organized, all of them except for two, and those were
Speaker 62: next.
Speaker 62: mother jones she's 85 years old now she comes storming back into town in full form cursing and swearing about
Speaker 225: the mine owners and their pet politicians with
all their
Speaker 225: usual wit and sarcasm on display condemning and mocking the miners to go to maw and that was one of her favorite
Speaker 209: tactics with the men quote you have stood and seen
Speaker 222: yourself robbed of every ton of coal you mine so much was taken out and professional murderers were hired to keep you in subjection
Speaker 222: and you paid for it. Damn you. You were not fit to live under the flag. You paid professional murderers with that money you were robbed of, and you never said a word. You stood there like a lot of cowards robbed by the mine owners, and you let them do it.
And then
Speaker 222: you go about
Speaker 288: shaking your rotten head. Not a thing inside. You call yourself Americans. Let me tell you, America need not feel proud of you.
well the
Speaker 55: miners might have rioted and killed any man who said that to him but from mother jones they ate it up
inmate one she met and
Speaker 55: spent time with sid hatfield and the two became friends miners
swarmed to
Speaker 55: mass meetings in mingo and williamson about 90 percent of mingo county miners had taken the union oath by the end of june 1920
Speaker 55: Frank Keeney said that was more than enough to justify a demand for
Speaker 35: official recognition by the operators. And so a resolution was made that all the miners would go on strike on July 1st, unless the operators of the holdout districts agreed to negotiate. The operators were not about
Speaker 20: to do that, but instead doubled down on breaking the union movement. And so on July 1st, 1920, the
Speaker 13: strike was really on.
Thank you.
More
Speaker 13: Baldwin-Feltz mine guards and operator-funded deputy sheriffs were brought in to put an end to it.
Within days,
Speaker 114: there were reports of skirmishes and gun battles between the miners and them.
Workers in the
Speaker 114: non-union
Speaker 55: mines were warned by the strikers not to go to work, told to come join the
Speaker 36: strike or they would not be safe from the consequences. Because
there were
Speaker 36: miners who just didn't want to join the union.
Why?
They
Speaker 36: perceived
Speaker 75: their wages as fair enough and had a positive relationship with management because there were some operators that were pretty
Speaker 13: solid and they saw no reason to invite the trouble or even to pay the union dues. Fair enough from the standpoint of the individual worker, but the union's
Speaker 59: position was that it had to be all or
nothing.
If any coal
Speaker 55: fields were left without a union, it would always undercut unionized fields and make the union's position in those fields untenable. Some non-union miners received pay hikes or other benefits every time union organizers came around, on the condition that
Speaker 110: they refused
to hear the union
Speaker 110: out. The union told them that those gains would be temporary, because every individual miner is expendable. Sure, they raise your pay now, but what are you going to do when they claw that raise back in six months?
You
Speaker 110: won't be able to do a thing,
because no
Speaker 110: miner can stand on equal terms with the owners. But the miners, the miners collectively, as one, decide whether or not coal gets dug in this country.
No individual miner has any effect
Speaker 110: whatsoever on that question.
The goal
Speaker 110: was that any time any coal mine operator in the country needed workers, he would have to negotiate not with individual men, but with the mine
Speaker 70: workers of America. Miners
who resisted
Speaker 20: unionization were seen as a wedge that the companies
Speaker 13: could use to splinter and break up the whole movement, and so they were not
Speaker 24: looked on kindly very often by the miners who were trying to organize.
and of
Speaker 24: course scabs as
Speaker 75: sympathetic as many of their stories were and the miners were aware
Speaker 36: that most of the scabs were just poor schmucks looking for
a job but the
Speaker 36: miners viewed them like soldiers in the enemy trench
Speaker 136: you're not bad men necessarily and in more peaceful
Speaker 35: days they could have all been friends like the french and german boys freezing a hundred yards from each other in
belgium but
Speaker 209: there was a higher principle at stake and if fate
is
and
Speaker 114: history had arrayed those men among the forces brought to bear by the operators, then so be it.
But as determined as they
Speaker 114: were to gain
Speaker 285: recognition of their
Speaker 20: union, the operators were equally determined to stop it. Corbyn writes, quote, The
Mingo County
Speaker 20: operators were not about to surrender to the institution that they hated, and that they claimed would cause the downfall of the United States.
They
Speaker 20: brought in trainloads of strikebreakers from the south
Speaker 75: in New York and Chicago to run the mines and imported more and more guards to protect their plants and the strikebreakers.
Like their
Speaker 136: union brethren in Raleigh and Fayette counties, the Mingo County miners would not settle for a war of attrition. They were prepared to fight for their
Speaker 285: union, and they too took the offensive to stop production. The Mingo County strike had now become the
Speaker 20: Mingo County War.
The
Speaker 20: miners brought in and distributed guns. They attacked,
Speaker 136: beat, and sometimes killed mine guards and strikebreakers at mines all over the non-union zone. With so many Baldwin-Feltz guards and state police in the area, these
Speaker 70: attacks could not be haphazard. On several occasions, the striking miners placed material across the tracks of the mine cars.
When the
Speaker 70: driver of the
Speaker 67: car stopped to remove the obstacle, the miners ambushed the strikebreakers.
The
Speaker 67: striking miners also blocked and
Speaker 90: shot up trains that were importing potential strike breakers into the county, sending the passengers fleeing back to
New York. The
Speaker 90: miners also stopped production by
Speaker 109: destroying Coal Company property. The tipple at Rose Siding was blown up, the railroad tipple at Thacker was dynamited,
Speaker 90: the drum house at Ajax was dynamited and the head house gutted, and the head house at War Eagle was dynamited.
Speaker 90: Fires of incendiary origin destroyed the head house of Stone Mountain Coal Company and the company store at Lynn. The striking miners also attacked the superintendents, foremen, plant managers, and other company officials who attempted to keep these mines running. The striking miners of Mingo County
Speaker 53: aggressively, and at times ruthlessly, attacked anything or anyone standing between them and their union. Casually, a Mingo County miner wrote of the new means of responding to the
Speaker 70: activities of the mine guards.
Speaker 70: A thug was killed last week on the Mingo County line. He had just driven
Speaker 71: two union men out of the county. Our people want no trouble, but the thugs can sure get it if nothing else will do them.
Neither did the striking
Speaker 71: miners tolerate the
Speaker 90: strike-breaking activity of the state police, who were sent into Mingo County to keep the mines from closing. They shot and killed at least three state policemen at Vulcan and Nolan. We
are going to
Speaker 90: fight until the last ditch, declared Frank Keeney.
Speaker 90: There will be no abatement of effort, and neither time nor money will be spared to protect the lawful and statutory rights of the mine workers in Mingo County.
Those who are
Speaker 90: wondering whether they will be organized may rest assured that this means the organization
Speaker 53: of the coal miners of Mingo.
Gun battles between
Speaker 53: striking miners and the mine guards and state police became frequent occurrences. At Nolan in June 1920, at Freeborn in July and
Speaker 71: September, at Merrimack in Chatteroy in November, to name only four.
Speaker 71: Several of the battles lasted hours and resulted in numerous
Speaker 53: deaths," end quote.
And now
Speaker 53: from Lon Savage, quote, Bullets peppered down on working non-union miners at the Borderland Mine near Williamson. One hundred miners opened fire on
Speaker 71: non-union miners at Freeburn, Kentucky, shooting from the West Virginia mountains across the Tug Valley. An operator of the mine's cable cars fell wounded, and women and children ran
Speaker 90: screaming from the camp.
Speaker 90: Kentucky's governor dispatched 200 National Guardsmen to the Kentucky side of the river, and West Virginia's ordered state police back to Mingo. Violence only increased. On August 4th, riflemen shot down from the West Virginia mountains at Kentucky Guardsmen opposite Mate 1. A horse was shot out from under one Guardsman, and a bullet ripped through another's campaign hat. When strikers attacked at Freeburn again, Kentucky Guardsmen drove them back with
Speaker 71: machine gun fire. Freeburn was attacked a third time.
Speaker 71: a gun battle broke out at mohawk a rail car was torpedoed deputies beat a black striker with clubs
and
Speaker 90: dumped him semi-conscious
Speaker 136: from an automobile a baseball game turned into a free-for-all between union and non-union sympathizers everybody bought guns coal operators ordered rifles and
Speaker 90: machine guns as part of their standard mine equipment state police rushed from one outbreak to another end
Speaker 225: quote now back to corbin
The
Speaker 225: destruction of company property and the guerrilla warfare involved more than the miners' hatred of the mine guards and their vindictiveness toward the coal companies. There was a purpose to their violence,
to
Speaker 71: close the non-union mines. The coal company at Mohawk, for example, attempted to continue operations with imported
Speaker 53: strikebreakers. The UMWA sent an organizer into the town to talk to those miners. He was run out of town by the company's mine guard.
A
Speaker 53: second organizer was sent in, and he was accompanied out of town by the mine's superintendent, a mine guard, a deputy sheriff, and three state policemen.
The strikers
Speaker 53: tried a third time to organize the
Speaker 90: miners and to persuade the company to cease operations.
Several hundred
Speaker 62: of them then gathered in the hills surrounding Mohawk and shot down into the town until the company officials agreed to close the mines.
a
Speaker 64: group of armed miners intercepted a patrol of deputy sheriffs and state police under the command
Speaker 13: of a man named Captain Brockus real hothead didn't
get
Speaker 70: violent but the miners disarmed them and humiliated them and then chased them off and Captain Brockus took the whole matter very
Speaker 184: personally and his
Speaker 24: vendetta will come back to haunt us very soon
the
Speaker 225: miners overwhelmed the mine guards they overwhelmed the state
Speaker 63: police
Speaker 63: And they gained control of most of Mingo County. Now, rather
than
Speaker 24: mine guards patrolling the streets of company towns, it
was the
Speaker 206: miners who were posting sentries to watch out for scabs or for Baldwin-Feltzmen. They controlled the streets.
When the telephone company
Speaker 52: wanted to repair downed telephone lines, they had to request permission from the miners to do it.
Tom
Speaker 154: Feltz, president of Baldwin Feltz He knew he had to strike back And he had to strike
Speaker 87: back hard Or else risk his agency losing any hold they had whatsoever In the West Virginia coal fields He
decided to
Speaker 87: strike directly at the head of the snake Or at least that was the way he saw it He had
Speaker 275: personal reasons, obviously For hating Sid Hatfield Who had killed his two brothers in the Mate 1
gunfight
He and the
Speaker 55: operators used their influence to secure murder indictments on Sid and 22 of the minors purported to have been with him that
Speaker 90: day in May 1. They
instantly all became local
Speaker 90: celebrities, to the point that 500 people came to try to get into the overflowing Williamson courthouse to see their arraignment.
the people
Speaker 90: of mate one came together and paid the bail for every single one of them and soon
Speaker 87: enough sid was back walking the streets of mate one pistols on his hip police chief badge on his chest
but when the hotel
Speaker 11: owner who had fed the baldwin felt's guards on the day of the gun fight this
is a man
Speaker 11: who was known to
Speaker 20: oppose the union and be sympathetic to the guard's cause when he was shot and killed
Speaker 9: sid was blamed for that too
He had
Speaker 9: witnesses backing an alibi that put him somewhere else, but he was indicted for that murder. Behind
the scenes,
Speaker 59: Tom Feltz and the operators were doing everything they could to make sure that Sid's fate was sealed before his trial even started. Finally,
admitting that
Speaker 59: the state's forces were completely overmatched by the enraged miners of Mingo County, the
Speaker 47: governor, now
a man by the name
Speaker 47: of John Cornwell, called Washington, D.C. and asked for federal troops.
In late August, as the
Speaker 18: leaves were beginning to turn, federal troops came in and occupied Mingo County. Now,
the miners
Speaker 24: were tough and they were resourceful and they were able to stand up to bullies, but they were no match for U.S. soldiers. The
ones that
Speaker 24: didn't get
Speaker 109: the word that Daddy was in town and tried to continue their attacks were dealt with quickly by trained men using well-honed infantry
Speaker 90: tactics.
Throughout the
Speaker 90: fall, the operators in Baldwin-Feltz
hung
Speaker 90: back and watched the soldiers do their work. Several mines reopened
Speaker 109: under the protection of federal troops.
The operators
Speaker 109: were content to wait,
knowing
Speaker 9: that one of their best weapons would be deployed in a few months.
That weapon
Speaker 9: was the Mountain Winter.
Miners' wives and
Speaker 9: children were living with them in the freezing tent
Speaker 20: cities.
Those who got
Speaker 20: sick or those who had wives scheduled to give birth would have to do so without medical care.
The Union
Speaker 59: had to provide for all the people well enough to keep them going, and that cost a lot of money. In
the past, the
Speaker 59: winter had broken probably more strikes than a thousand Baldwin-Feldt's guards. As it
began to get
Speaker 59: cold, and things seemed to have calmed down, the Federal
Speaker 55: troops were pulled out, but fighting resumed almost immediately
Speaker 246: as miners went on the offensive against the working mines, and the strikebreakers brought in to work them.
On
Speaker 136: November 27th, the governor declares Mingo County to be in a state of insurrection and places the entire county under the dictatorship of the commanding general of the 5th Corps.
When the
Speaker 136: soldiers arrived
Speaker 62: again, many
of them
Speaker 62: were
Speaker 13: shocked to see the desperate state of the striking miners. Savage writes, quote,
Rain,
Speaker 52: snow, and wind swept across the Appalachian range, tearing the last leaves from the hardwoods and exposing the rocks and brown compost of the mountains. In the tent colonies, miners built fireplaces of rock and mortar,
Speaker 90: and many floored their tents. Families of five lived on $10 a week. Barefoot children played in the snow. Women gave birth in tents. Children died in the tents.
In a
Speaker 90: widely published story, one reporter told of following a barefoot child through the snow to a tent near Maitwan. You know, he's quoting the article. Inside, on a cot improvised of bricks and sand, a woman
Speaker 71: was writhing in pain. By her side sat a skeleton-like man, coughing desperately. On
the bare,
Speaker 215: frozen ground, these barefoot children sat huddled together holding hands over a miserable little wood fire.
Speaker 215: The tent sagged and strained under the whipping of the wind, end quote. A
New York Times
Speaker 175: reporter who was there on scene saw the degradation on the faces of the children living in a tent colony near Williamson.
He had brought several
Speaker 175: pounds of candy to distribute to
Speaker 248: the children, and they accepted it and they thanked him, but he noted that there was no laughing or squeals of delight.
Only the downcast
Speaker 164: faces of children who were grateful for the calories.
some of
Speaker 164: them
Speaker 35: asked about santa claus one boy said his brother was too sick to come get his candy and so the reporter and the crowd of children went to the tent where he was resting and
when he
Speaker 35: raised his hand up to get a piece lawn savage writes that the others nearly buried the little boy in candy
one thing that i suppose
Speaker 12: is worth mentioning because i probably have not emphasized it enough is that the coal operators were not monolithic
They
Speaker 12: were not uniform in their ruthlessness. They were all opposed to the union, but they weren't all the same. When the weather got so bad that people began
Speaker 59: to die,
Speaker 62: one mine owner opened up his empty houses to let the strikers' families live in them until the weather moderated. But
others went
Speaker 225: far in the other direction. One of them forced a family out of their home on Christmas
Speaker 13: Eve.
Media reports
Speaker 13: made the story widely known around the country.
Speaker 52: And other unions as well as charity groups and many regular people on their own volition started
Speaker 11: shipping food and supplies to Mingo County.
Seeing American
Speaker 11: families in this kind of
Speaker 12: desperation, other Americans stepped up on their own to help them.
As Christmas
Speaker 12: approached, a train came
Speaker 18: in with 2,000 hams, followed by loads of candy and nuts and fruit and toys for the children sent by the people of America.
with the
Speaker 175: soldiers back in town violence ceased almost immediately many
of the
Speaker 53: miners and their families at this time were actually welcoming the federal troops when they came in this
Speaker 289: time they actually staged a little parade for them or treated the soldiers like they were on a parade they all lined
Speaker 73: up on the road the soldiers were coming in on
and they
Speaker 290: passed out little American flags, and they had all the kids waving those, and everybody was dressed in their Sunday clothes, waving and singing songs for the soldiers to welcome them in.
They knew that the
Speaker 18: county sheriff and the state police and the West Virginia state government was beholden to the coal operators. They knew they couldn't hope for fair treatment from them, but
Speaker 5: they still believed that the nation at large...
And the
Speaker 5: federal government to which they were all loyal, for which many of them had fought in the trenches of France in 1918, that
when the federal
Speaker 5: government saw
Speaker 13: their situation, and
saw that they were
Speaker 50: only asking for the basic right of freedom of association, to gather
Speaker 25: and organize themselves, and
to negotiate
Speaker 25: with their employer with a collective voice, that they would be treated fairly by the U.S. government.
Well, the soldiers
Speaker 291: themselves did their part to justify the miners'
Speaker 13: hope. An army truck went up into the hills and came back with a big Christmas
Speaker 100: tree, which was set up in Williamson and covered with colored lights, and the Union even circulated a document around Christmas time instructing the miners to
keep within the law.
Speaker 100: The soldiers put out Christmas trees at their
Speaker 59: encampments, and on Christmas night,
they
The
Speaker 59: martial law injunction against large assemblies was temporarily suspended. And in
a scene
Speaker 59: that kind of calls up memories of the Christmas truce in 1914, you had strikers, non-union
Speaker 70: miners, soldiers, and local Williamson citizens all gathered around the big tree to sing Christmas carols together.
But the amity was
Speaker 59: short-lived. In January, the trial of Sid Hatfield
Speaker 67: and his friends began.
Tom
Speaker 67: Feltz had hired seven high-powered lawyers to assist the prosecution to make sure that Sid Hatfield was convicted and executed. Feltz
wanted
Speaker 84: nothing to do with the prison sentence. He wanted Sid Hatfield dead. One
of the lawyers that
Speaker 100: he hired to assist the prosecution, a practice which even by itself seems
Speaker 12: pretty inappropriate, I think. Imagine you're accused of a crime and the wealthy brother of the alleged victim
Speaker 292: hires a bunch of lawyers to go to work for the prosecution.
Well,
Speaker 292: one of those lawyers he hired was named James Dameron,
who had been
Speaker 292: a
Speaker 57: judge until the previous August, when he handed down the indictments on Sid and the others and then immediately resigned his position and went to work prosecuting them for Tom Feltz.
Speaker 13: It
seemed like everybody in
Speaker 13: West Virginia showed up to watch that trial. The
miners came in
Speaker 13: wearing their working
Speaker 177: overalls or corduroys, all of them except for Sid, who was marked off as the group's
Speaker 11: leader by a brown suit.
Fit
Speaker 11: for a Maitwan police chief now seeking higher office. Not
long into
Speaker 293: the trial, there was an uproar when it was discovered that Sid had two guns on him,
and he said that
Speaker 35: he'd been threatened with assassination, but he willingly surrendered his weapons. In
the courtroom,
Speaker 35: Sid was loose, smiling, hamming
Speaker 20: it up for reporters. When he was surrounded by a dozen of them looking for a quote, he said, "'I reckon you thought I had horns.'
They
Speaker 20: got a kick out of that, and headlines
Speaker 13: went out calling him Smiling Sid and the boy leader of the mountains, since he looked younger than his 28 years. He's an only 28-year-old man. Asked
about the Matewine gunfight
Speaker 177: by a reporter from Philly, Sid told him it was a life or death matter. He did only what everybody would have done in the circumstances. The
judge surprised
Speaker 294: everyone and revoked bail for the whole group, and so after the day was done, they were moved to the jail.
But
Speaker 294: while the judge might have been more sympathetic with the owners, the men closer to the ground favored the minors, and that included the jailer. The jailer's wife
Speaker 70: invited Sid's wife to stay in their house during the trial. The
jailer gave the
Speaker 70: minors their own wing
Speaker 229: and left their cell doors unlocked so that they could circulate
Speaker 295: and socialize with each other. When
their wives and
Speaker 292: girlfriends and other relatives were allowed to come visit them, they
turned it
Speaker 292: into a full-fledged party right there in the jail.
While
Speaker 5: everyone was singing and dancing inside,
Speaker 260: Sid went to the window and shouted out to a gaggle of reporters that this wasn't jail, it's the Maitwan Hotel.
That was a tough task
Speaker 113: finding a jury that could even pretend to be impartial, not
Speaker 26: least because it was hard to find people who weren't related in one way or another to any of the 22 defendants.
The
Speaker 26: charges on two of them were dropped Almost as soon
as
Speaker 292: the trial began And both of them were super upset about it They demanded to stand trial with their friends And they stormed out when the judge told them That it wasn't up for discussion Well the lawyers for the minors Knew
Speaker 184: their audience In both the jury
Speaker 35: and the gallery And they played the songs that they knew Those people wanted to hear They were asking Baldwin-Feltz witnesses How many women, children, and sick people They'd evicted from their homes that day
As it
Speaker 12: became clear that the trial was going pretty well for the defendants, the prosecution's hired lawyers tried a different strategy. Isaac Brewer,
one of the
Speaker 266: miners who had been standing behind Sid Hatfield when the shooting started, had taken one in the
Speaker 13: chest and had his gun shot out of his hand, and he was able to make his way to safety, and he survived to be indicted and tried with the rest of them. The operator's men got word to the defendants
that...
they
Speaker 13: thought might be vulnerable to compromise, that they would pay $1,000 to anyone who switched sides and witnessed for the prosecution.
Speaker 292: Brewer was initially rock solid, but a Baldwin-Felds spy set
Speaker 36: up in Mate One as the owner of a restaurant where the miners regularly gathered. He worked Brewer over for months.
Speaker 36: This is a very
Speaker 52: skilled undercover operative. Been working for a long time. He was telling them that Sid and the others were planning on framing him and putting the whole thing on him
and that they were
Speaker 70: going to leave him hanging to get themselves out of trouble.
Again, these labor
Speaker 70: spies were snakes, but they were good at their job.
This
Speaker 290: man, his name was Charles Lively. At
least we
Speaker 290: think that was his name. He gave so many different ones over the years it can be hard to track.
He made Brewer
Speaker 290: think he was his friend.
Come
Speaker 296: into the restaurant, he'd feed him steaks and free liquor as he whispered this poison into Brewer's ears. Lively
later
Speaker 35: said that it was the toughest assignment in terms of difficulty that he ever
Speaker 36: had as an undercover agent. It took months.
There were times
Speaker 36: when his prodding pushed Brewer to the point of rage and he was close to giving Lively a beating.
One night,
Speaker 90: Lively told an interviewer later...
Speaker 90: one night brewer ate in my place and i decided to turn him for good i told him it means your life for theirs they're gonna swear you fired the first shot are you gonna swear you fired the first shot and be the goat
he got up and
Speaker 90: started to go out i said come into the kitchen i got something nice i
gave him a
Speaker 90: drink of white
Speaker 53: lightning moonshine whiskey and talked i gave him another and kept talking finally he said well what do you want me to do
we had another
Speaker 91: drink
Then
Speaker 91: I said, get in touch with one of the state's lawyers and tell them you're ready to tell the straight of it.
Those boys
Speaker 91: are going to sacrifice you. Go and save
Speaker 126: yourself.
The next thing I
Speaker 126: knew, Isaac Brewer had turned state's witness.
The jury and the townspeople seemed
Speaker 13: skeptical of Brewer's story, though.
Many of
Speaker 13: them were just outright hostile to him.
And in any case,
Speaker 192: he couldn't say for certain...
that
Speaker 192: he'd seen who fired the initial bullet that had killed the mayor that question was very quickly becoming the crux of the
Speaker 177: whole dispute and
so worried that things
Speaker 177: were really turning against him Baldwin Feltz reluctantly, very reluctantly put their top labor spy, Charles Lively on
the stand
Speaker 59: to testify, they blew his cover
among all the other
Speaker 59: ways you could describe him one thing that Charles Lively was,
Speaker 18: was a murderer
He
Speaker 18: had killed a man in Colorado just before the Ludlow Massacre there, in cold blood.
Speaker 203: He
was
Speaker 18: arrested and did time
Speaker 203: for it. Then
he had worked as a
Speaker 203: spy and a strikebreaker for Baldwin-Felts
Speaker 13: all over the country. Lively
was transferred out to
Speaker 13: West Virginia when trouble looked like it was on the
Speaker 59: horizon, and he went to work in one of the mines to embed himself among the miners and start to
Speaker 70: gain their trust. He
joined the Union
Speaker 70: local at Stone Mountain.
Speaker 70: Became one of its most active members.
He was
Speaker 70: organizing meetings and recruiting members, giving speeches. Very often the speeches were laced with violent rhetoric. He was encouraging people
Speaker 9: to go out and do violent things.
He could work
Speaker 9: for the FBI today.
Anyway, like
Speaker 9: I said, this guy was good at his job.
And the miners
Speaker 202: really trusted him.
They had no
Speaker 202: idea.
Well,
Speaker 63: eventually he hatched another plan, and Baldwin Feltz set him up in the east end of Maitwan with a restaurant. Better
yet, it was on
Speaker 72: the lower floor of a building that contained the offices of the United Mine Workers there. Well,
Lively was already
Speaker 72: a popular figure with the miners, so the restaurant
Speaker 109: became a popular
Speaker 55: place for them to gather. The men would go there and speak freely. Sometimes he would catch bits of conversation from Union men coming down the stairs.
And
Speaker 297: every night, Charles Lively sent out
Speaker 13: coded reports to his superiors at Baldwin Feltz.
Nobody, I
Speaker 13: mean nobody, had any idea Lively
Speaker 84: was a spy. So
when the
Speaker 84: prosecution announced the addition of a surprise
Speaker 100: witness and Charles Lively walked into the room,
the whole
Speaker 13: courtroom went into an uproar. Miners glared at him. They watched and listened to Lively give his testimony with murder in their eyes.
but the
Speaker 217: move turned out to be another misstep for the prosecution and the defense knew exactly how to parry it
nobody
Speaker 5: likes a sneak nobody likes a liar and nobody likes a snitch and
all of
Speaker 5: those things were part of Charles Lively's job description Lively
told the
Speaker 5: courtroom
Speaker 109: about conversations he said he'd heard which had the miners bragging about their role in the massacre but in the end it was just
hearsay
Under
Speaker 53: cross-examination, Lively, the sociopath, was so tone-deaf to how he was coming across to regular people That he just made
Speaker 209: the defense's job easy They asked him,
so when you
Speaker 209: became a member of the union,
did you
Speaker 209: not raise your hand and swear a solemn oath? And he said he had So the defense says, well, that oath didn't mean much to you,
did it?
So why
Speaker 209: would we believe
Speaker 298: that you value the oath you took today in this courtroom any more highly? Have
you not
Speaker 298: already proven yourself willing to betray your oath as part of your obligation to the men who pay you? The
same men
Speaker 298: who today are paying the state's lawyers? The
defense
Speaker 226: smelled blood. Press the advantage. He asked what he knew about the attempt by Baldwin Felt to bribe Sid Hatfield.
and the
Speaker 286: usually calm and collected lively
Speaker 209: shifts in his seat he says he said something about an offer
he turned
Speaker 209: down the offer didn't
he now that was
Speaker 209: the substance of it was anything else
Speaker 67: said on the subject
well he said
Speaker 67: something about being offered a thousand dollars in a monthly
salary and that
Speaker 67: got him
Charles
Speaker 67: Lively was an admitted liar and an oath breaker while Sid Hatfield had turned down a $1,000 bribe rather than betray his friends or his job as police chief Nothing
Speaker 52: Lively was going to say after that was going to register with the jury By
the time of
Speaker 52: the closing statements the
Speaker 83: defense was just strutting in front of the jury They knew they'd won They wanted to
Speaker 298: buy Sid Hatfield like they did Isaac Brewer
Speaker 222: and Charles Lively If Hatfield could have been bought
Speaker 222: He would have been in the place of Brewer and Lively today, but he could not be bought. And he stands trial for his life. I
am proud
Speaker 222: to know that Matewan elected such unimpeachable men to office. Poor, perhaps, but men who will not sell their manhood.
They tried not
Speaker 222: only to buy Sid Hatfield, but offered to pay $1,000 to bring a machine gun into Matewan. And what for? To shoot down that little band of union men.
the
Speaker 299: trial lasted
Speaker 35: 43 days and by the time it came to a close it was nearly springtime the jury convened to discuss the fate of the men but no sooner
Speaker 75: had they closed the
Speaker 11: door to the deliberation room than one of them, a farmer who had ridden into town from his wilderness home on horseback looks
out the
Speaker 177: window into the distance he
Speaker 13: says, when this trial started
The
Speaker 13: mountains out there were green and bare.
Now the
Speaker 13: trial was ending, and the
Speaker 249: mountains were turning green, and the dogwood and
Speaker 136: laurel were about to bloom, he says. He
says he was
Speaker 136: prepared to sit there in that room until the mountains turned brown again and the dogwoods bloomed again before he would vote to convict a single Matewan boy.
There
Speaker 294: was no point in arguing it, if anybody had wanted to. So the jury quickly returned a verdict
Speaker 13: of not guilty on all the men. People
in the
Speaker 13: courtroom signaled to the people in the lobby, and the people in the lobby informed the assembled crowd outside, and a great cheer went up.
When the men
Speaker 59: returned on the 5 o'clock train into Mate One, the entire town turned out to welcome them back like war heroes. Charles Lively,
Speaker 9: the coward, did not go back to Mate One.
even
Speaker 9: though his wife and children were still there
Speaker 64: later his son who did not retain a positive memory of his father wrote that he had abandoned his family to whatever the outrage minors might have in store for them
he said his
Speaker 64: mother
Speaker 75: kept the children inside and pulled the curtains closed fearing that there was going to be a knock on the door from the men that her husband had
Speaker 63: betrayed and tried
to hang when the knock
Speaker 175: finally came she creeps to the door
and
Speaker 175: And she answers, and it's a bunch of Union men standing out on the porch. This is all from her son.
And they told her they
Speaker 300: had nothing
Speaker 136: to fear from them or anyone else.
And they
Speaker 136: helped her get her things together and loaded onto a wagon
and
Speaker 292: took her to a train and saw her off back to Bluefield, where Baldwin Feltz was headquartered and where their father had fled.
So Sid was free and
Speaker 24: back in Mate 1, among friends, but everybody knew that Tom Feltz was not through with them.
Speaker 24: and that he was a marked man. Sid even said so.
Speaker 299: He admitted they'd probably get him one day, sooner or later.
He still had
Speaker 299: another murder charge ahead of him,
the one
Speaker 10: for the hotel owner,
and this
Speaker 10: time Tom Feltz was not going to leave anything to chance.
One of the
Speaker 52: lawyers that he had hired to assist the prosecution also happened to be a state senator in
Speaker 35: West Virginia,
and during
Speaker 35: the trial he rushed through a bill that would allow the prosecution in criminal cases - Thank you.
to
Speaker 35: draw a jury from outside the area.
Now, it's long
Speaker 35: been the practice to allow the
defense to request a
Speaker 175: change of venue if they feel like the local community is too involved in a case to be impartial,
but
Speaker 59: this was spinning that on its head. Now, it would be the prosecution complaining that the local community wouldn't be impartial and
Speaker 12: demanding...
In
Speaker 12: flagrant violation of the right to be tried by one's peers, I'm no lawyer, that's how it looks to me, to get a jury that will be more likely to convict. In
the meantime, the
Speaker 9: federal troops pulled out of Mingo again as springtime opened, and
again,
Speaker 136: almost immediately the fighting resumed, on May 12th, when half a dozen towns came under fire.
Speaker 136: Guards and the non-union miners grabbed their guns and started firing back And
Speaker 9: there were battles up and down the Tug Valley The state police came in on a passenger train with sniper rifles Firing them from the train into the hills Lon
Speaker 71: Savage writes, quote That night, families slept on floors, under beds, in cellars And the
shooting
Speaker 90: continued Lighted windows drew gunfire until, one by one, they blinked
out
At
Speaker 90: Maitwon, streetlights were extinguished. The battle resumed full fury at dawn Friday and raged all day.
A woman
Speaker 90: walking across a clearing with her baby drew fire in Maitwon. She ran for safety, clutching her child as bullets kicked up dust
Speaker 10: around her. A teamster jumped from his wagon and fled amid a hail of bullets as his mule stampeded aimlessly, the wagon bouncing behind him.
two more
Speaker 10: persons were killed ambrose gooseland
Speaker 90: 16 was hit in the stomach on a railroad bridge near mate one and lay there all day alive as bullets hit around
him he
Speaker 90: died two days later dan witt of mate one was killed the same morning when he left his family to go for water 40 miners
Speaker 185: were hemmed in at a mine by heavy fire stray bullets killed half a dozen cattle
and a mule
At one
Speaker 185: mine, a bookkeeper was driven
Speaker 138: back by gunfire each time he left his building to retrieve a pile of groceries that were spoiling by the railroad. Like
running a
Speaker 138: gauntlet, passenger trains
Speaker 88: roared through the valley at full speed,
Speaker 70: their passengers lying on the floors. In Maitwan, businesses closed, school was canceled, and non-union miners abandoned their cabins and fled.
Sid
Speaker 225: walked through the largely deserted town with his friends, heavily armed, and found the superintendent of the Stone
Speaker 301: Mountain Coal Company supervising a group of men unloading a rail car. They quarreled, and Sid hit the superintendent. Some said Sid struck him down with his rifle. Sid admitted only that he slapped him down. The superintendent was hospitalized nine days, and another criminal charge, the 10th, was
Speaker 71: filed against the young constable of Magnolia District.
On Friday, a
Speaker 71: deputy sheriff waving a piece of white muslin made contact with Union riflemen in the mountains
Speaker 53: behind Mate 1, and they promised to stop shooting if their opponents would do so too. Acting on that promise, the commander of
Speaker 71: the state police sent a prominent physician into the Kentucky mountains to negotiate with the non-Union miners there. The physician crawled a half-mile under
Speaker 72: fire and, standing among bullet-riddled buildings, obtained a promise that the non-Union miners would cease their firing.
The
Speaker 10: doctor returned triumphantly Saturday night to Matewan, where an elated state police commander welcomed him. As the word spread,
Speaker 215: the three days' battle slowed and stopped, end quote.
Well, by this point, the governor
Speaker 292: of West Virginia is in full panic mode. He
calls on
Speaker 292: President Harding to send in federal troops, saying nothing
Speaker 238: short of 100% federal martial law,
Speaker 238: with regular
Speaker 275: army troops could restore order to mingo county and the unrest was spreading now
miners in
Speaker 13: other counties up to central
west
Speaker 293: virginia near the capital were holding their own mass meetings the boys up at conawa county were
Speaker 302: getting riled
up many of
Speaker 293: them wanted to form up their ranks and march down to mingo to unionize the tug valley miners once and
for all
these
Speaker 293: meetings these were wildcat
Speaker 301: meetings they weren't coordinated by the union and in fact bill blizzard the
Speaker 229: sub-district president who was not some pussycat afraid of a little action was doing his best to calm everybody
down now the state of west
Speaker 229: virginia had a big
Speaker 116: problem i should have mentioned this before
actually the
Speaker 116: state's national guard had been federalized during world
Speaker 192: war one and sent off to fight
The
Speaker 192: problem was when the war was over
Speaker 52: Nobody had taken the time to reestablish it The legislature hurried through a measure to get it going But that was going to take some time The governor had only
Speaker 59: 100 men on the state police force That was it And
so he's
Speaker 59: pleading with President
Speaker 13: Harding Please send federal troops, I need the army But the president said that West Virginia needed to take care of its own problems for once
Speaker 113: instead of calling for help from the White House every time it popped up Well
Speaker 113: commander of the state police there in mingo captain
Speaker 59: brockus he'd
Speaker 78: taken that humiliation of his men that happened very personally like i said and he was determined to pay the miners back
but he
Speaker 78: lacked the forces to really
do it and so in
Speaker 78: desperation he took a step that kind of
really shows how
Speaker 78: the class
Speaker 59: antagonism at play here went far deeper than just the miners and the mine
Speaker 100: owners.
he
Speaker 100: called on the better people of mingo county those are his words they were the better people
Speaker 301: doctors and lawyers preachers insurance brokers merchants and shopkeepers you know people who worked indoors and wore smooth-soled shoes to work every day
he called them to
Speaker 301: a
Speaker 87: meeting in the courthouse at williamson
Speaker 70: the same one that recently hosted the miners
trial
and he
Speaker 70: said he needed
Speaker 136: men who were prepared to stand up for law and order in Mingo County.
Everybody knew
Speaker 136: what he meant. He needed men prepared to fight the minors. The
office dwellers
Speaker 136: were enthusiastic
Speaker 215: in their support, and
they
Speaker 20: declared their readiness to clean up the scum in Mingo County. The
next
Speaker 35: day, the governor issued a harsh declaration of martial law.
He banned
Speaker 35: all public gatherings and
Speaker 217: suspended the Second Amendment,
And he
Speaker 217: ordered that
no
Speaker 71: publication, either newspaper, pamphlet, handbill, or otherwise, reflecting in any way upon the United States or
Speaker 303: the state of West Virginia, may be published, distributed, or circulated on
pain of imprisonment. There were no troops
Speaker 177: to enforce martial law, so the militia, newly formed from the better people of the county, did it.
Well, they
Speaker 177: sort
Speaker 13: of did it. From day one, martial law was only enforced against the minors.
Other people
Speaker 13: continued to assemble freely,
Speaker 13: conduct parades, hold political rallies, but inmate Juan, if more than two minors stopped to talk on the streets for more than a moment, they were confronted by armed state police or militia volunteers and told to scatter.
The jails
Speaker 304: overflowed with
Speaker 70: minors.
So arrested men
Speaker 70: were sent to other counties to be held,
and then
Speaker 110: eventually those jails filled up. Captain Brockus openly admitted that many of them had been put in jail for carrying unauthorized literature.
Many
Speaker 229: minors were arrested, jailed, and then eventually released without ever having any kind of a hearing
Speaker 303: whatsoever. The union filed a lawsuit complaining
Speaker 292: that the military dictatorship was unconstitutional, and the judge agreed, since the citizens' militia was
Speaker 13: not an armed instrument of the state. The
governor got
Speaker 13: around that quickly enough by signing an edict inducting the state
Speaker 125: militia, or rather inducting this non-state militia, into the service of the state.
The miners fought back, sabotaged
Speaker 175: more mine equipment, fighting with the state police and militia. The
police and
Speaker 175: militia retaliated on June 3rd. After
Speaker 62: a report of a shot from near one of the tent colonies, Captain Brockus and 40 of his men stormed the camp, arresting every miner they could lay their hands on. 42 random miners were thrown in jail.
When the
Speaker 62: militia commander was
Speaker 59: shot at from near the same colony ten days later, he ordered his troops to spray the tents with machine gun fire to force the families in the colony undercover so that he could come back until he came back with more
Speaker 175: men. And
so he comes back
Speaker 175: with 70 militiamen and more state police back to the scene and all the people are ducking
down because they've
Speaker 175: been ducking machine
Speaker 24: gun fire and then on a signal they all storm the tents and go in and just take everyone they can catch.
The
Speaker 137: order given was to shoot any armed miner on sight. A
group of them was
Speaker 137: spotted in the woods
Speaker 301: nearby and a squad of militia opened up on them. The miners fired back and a state trooper was shot in the stomach. The
militia and
Speaker 70: the police cleared that camp and then rampaged through the place, slashing all the tents with their knives, destroying the furniture, destroying the food, destroying all the supplies that the miners needed to live out there.
Speaker 18: Forty-eight men were brought in, many of them wounded, and they were stuffed into a single jail cell.
Next, Captain Brockus
Speaker 109: raided the offices of the United Mine Workers. He
held them
Speaker 109: hostage until they agreed to leave the state.
Soon, it was
Speaker 125: time for the miners' next trial. The
first time
Speaker 113: around, that prosecution, they'd
been very
Speaker 113: careful in how they structured it. That was
only for the
Speaker 64: murder of the two Feltz brothers.
They
Speaker 64: wanted to keep their powder dry in case they needed another
Speaker 297: shot. So
even though it was
Speaker 297: from the same incident, I guess technically it wasn't double jeopardy.
This trial was for
Speaker 297: the murder of the other six
Speaker 70: Baldwin-Felts men. And so as this day approaches, Sid gets word that he's been indicted again.
And this
Speaker 59: one was a little more ominous.
He was
Speaker 59: accused of leading an attack on a mine at Mohawk, which was well outside his stomping grounds, and he was ordered
Speaker 100: to appear in court in Welch, West Virginia, which was a stronghold of the operators and their allies.
Everybody told
Speaker 100: him not to go. They
told
Speaker 301: him it was a setup. Frank
Keeney wrote
Speaker 301: to ask the governor to provide protection for Sid and Welch. The governor refused, but he assured Frank that...
Speaker 301: Steps had
Speaker 215: been taken to ensure his safety. Sid's lawyer wrote the judge who was assigned to the case,
and he
Speaker 215: said that
Speaker 5: he was concerned for his client's safety in Welch.
But the McDowell
Speaker 26: County
Speaker 5: Sheriff assured the judge that everything was taken care of,
and there
Speaker 5: was no trouble coming.
Well, when the day
Speaker 5: came for Sid to appear in court, that sheriff took an out-of-town vacation paid for by the Baldwin-Felts detective agency.
Speaker 13: Sid...
His
Speaker 13: wife and his good friend Ed Chambers, who was charged with him, along with Ed's wife, rode the train into Welch, along with the Mingo
Speaker 79: County Sheriff. Of
all people,
Speaker 79: Charles Lively boarded and came and sat near them, even tried to make small talk
Speaker 13: with them. It
may have been only
Speaker 13: the sheriff on board in the presence of his wife that kept Sid from tearing his throat out with his teeth.
Yes.
In Welch,
Speaker 175: they rented a hotel room across the street from the courthouse, and there they sat to discuss the case with the union lawyer
who was sent to defend
Speaker 175: them. Sid had
Speaker 59: brought two pistols with him, as he always did, and his lawyer warned him that you need to leave the guns here in the hotel room, this time to avoid creating another scene like you did
last
Speaker 192: time. The sheriff was there, and so Sid handed the guns off
to him.
And then it
Speaker 192: was the Mingo Sheriff who looked out the window and spotted
Speaker 91: Charles Lively standing on the courthouse lawn.
And he
Speaker 91: says, he's keeping pretty close track of us this morning, isn't he? Sid
looked out the
Speaker 11: window, and the street was buzzing with activity, much of it having to do with the upcoming trial.
Charles Lively was
Speaker 12: standing at the top of the courthouse steps, and he wasn't alone. At
least six
Speaker 290: other Baldwin-Felz men were there with him.
sid and
Speaker 305: ed chambers and their wives and lawyers
Speaker 63: left the room and headed to the courthouse
Speaker 294: unarmed each of them with his wife on his arm
it's from rg
Speaker 294: yoho's biography of charles lively quote as
sid
Speaker 306: started up the steps he smiled waved at the crowd and said hello boys those
were the
Speaker 306: last words that ever came from his lips
Speaker 229: Charles E. Lively, Buster Pence, Bill Salter, and perhaps other Baldwin-Feltz men assembled there, sprang upon the pair of Matewan boys, firing their
Speaker 301: guns as they charged forward upon their two helpless victims. Their furious shooting, and the barrage of slugs coming from the guns, somehow missed the two innocent wives accompanying them.
But it did,
Speaker 5: however, wound a bystander.
Speaker 5: Lively, firing a pair of guns, shot Sid Hatfield first, spinning Hatfield's body around and knocking him
Speaker 88: from the grasp of his wife, who fled in fear. While she ran to the purported safety of the office of the vacationing sheriff, her husband's lifeless body tumbled down the stairs,
Speaker 67: blood streaming onto the concrete sidewalk below. Although the former Matewan police chief died almost instantly, the detectives continued firing shots into his body.
As the
Speaker 67: fellow agents concentrated their efforts on
Speaker 90: killing Hatfield and Chambers, one of the Baldwin Feltz men emptied his revolver into the blocks of the granite courthouse.
This was
Speaker 90: obviously part of a well-coordinated attempt to persuade others and also to lend credibility to the agent's
Speaker 71: future claims of self-defense by making it appear that these shots came from the guns which were then deliberately placed in or near the lifeless hands of Hatfield and Chambers, a fact admitted to by the man
Speaker 297: later.
Almost as
Speaker 306: soon as Hatfield was hit, the Baldwin-Felts gunmen turned their weapons on Ed Chambers, shooting him multiple times. Chambers
Speaker 70: fell in a crumbled heap on his side, with his back
Speaker 90: still facing the steps.
They advanced on
Speaker 90: his body, continuing to trigger gunshots into both Chambers and Hatfield. Ed Chambers' wife stayed at her husband's side when the shooting started. She followed his wounded body down the steps, begging the detectives to leave him alone.
Speaker 90: Charles Lively rushed down toward the fallen Chambers as Mrs.
Speaker 218: Chambers pleaded with him. Oh, please, Mr. Lively, don't shoot him anymore. You've killed him now.
But seeing
Speaker 162: Chambers was still breathing, Lively placed a gun behind Ed's ear and administered a
Speaker 90: final killing shot into his skull. Brokenhearted and infuriated by the detective's merciless act, Mrs. Chambers clubbed Lively with her umbrella.
Speaker 90: Lively pointed the
Speaker 71: hot barrel of his gun At her and said Don't you hit me with the umbrella again You dirty devil
Or I
Speaker 71: will shoot you End quote
So Mrs. Chambers is screaming For
Speaker 62: men standing around watching To come and search her husband's body To see that he was unarmed But the Baldwin Feltz men Held guns on everybody And told him to get away
And then they
Speaker 62: took Mrs. Chambers by force And led her away from
Speaker 293: the scene Into the courthouse
All of
Speaker 293: them Thank you.
Speaker 293: would go before a friendly jury and they would all be acquitted on grounds of self-defense for what was a pure, cold-blooded assassination in broad
Speaker 297: daylight,
sponsored by some of
Speaker 297: the wealthiest men in the state and carried out with the connivance of the local authorities.
Word went out
Speaker 297: across the mountains.
Sid
Speaker 307: Hatfield had been murdered by Baldwin Felt's thugs.
2,000
Speaker 160: people showed out for the funeral procession.
But when
Speaker 160: that was complete,
the time for
Speaker 67: mourning was over. Now it was time for war. Coal
miners from around
Speaker 33: South and Central West Virginia began to assemble at Lenz Creek up by Paint and Cabin Creeks, about 10, 15 miles from the state capitol, just up the Kahnawa from Paint and Cabin Creeks. It's
where the
Speaker 207: state's most militant miners worked.
There were thousands
Speaker 207: of them coming in.
They came on
Speaker 209: every train.
Not
Speaker 209: only filling the seats, but the aisles, the vestibules, sometimes the roofs.
Others came in on
Speaker 71: cars, some on horses or in wagons, and a lot of people just hiked in.
Some of them wore the
Speaker 71: steel helmets they'd kept from their service in the war.
But they wore a
Speaker 13: different uniform.
They wore blue
Speaker 308: overalls with a red neckerchief tied around the neck.
And virtually
Speaker 308: every single one of them was carrying a gun.
They gunned him
Speaker 309: down in cold blood.
Shot
Speaker 309: him down like a dog, one
of the
Speaker 309: miners said.
They killed him in front
Speaker 309: of their wives, another
Speaker 129: said.
Frank Keeney said
Speaker 52: that it had become apparent
that the
Speaker 52: only way to get justice in West Virginia was with a high-powered rifle.
If the governor was
Speaker 52: going to empower a middle-class militia and hired mercenaries to murder miners under cover of martial law,
then
Speaker 52: the miners had no choice but to put an end to it themselves all
up and
Speaker 293: down the rivers and the creeks and coal camps all over the region men gave speeches and they took votes and they all resolved to march on mingo county free the miners who were being imprisoned under martial law and hang the corrupt sheriff who ran the place if
the better
Speaker 293: people of mingo county wanted a fight now they're gonna get one
Speaker 293: this time from miners who had been through
Speaker 301: it before during the paint and cabin creek strikes
the khanawah
Speaker 301: sheriff saw what was happening he went and warned the governor but the governor said he didn't have any more power to stop it than the sheriff did
so the word
Speaker 301: went out
Speaker 36: on to mingo
miners went
Speaker 36: through the mining camps warning any stragglers that if they didn't get up and join the marks they better not be there when the rest of them got back but pretty much everybody went with enthusiasm
Many of
Speaker 36: them walked or piled into cars or wagons, while others commandeered trains and ordered the engineers at gunpoint to take them
Speaker 52: south to Mingo. The
marchers were not
Speaker 52: black, they were not white, they were not immigrant, they were coal miners.
They formed up in
Speaker 52: military-style
Speaker 193: units. War veterans from the First World War were identified and put in positions of leadership. Some
of them were
Speaker 20: actually Spanish-American war veterans. They formed
up in military-style units.
Along
Speaker 20: the way, these guys gave crash courses in weapons handling and basic tactics to the miners who had never been in combat.
They raided the
Speaker 67: company stores at the towns they passed along the way, taking food and supplies, weapons and ammunition, but merchants at the independent towns were not bothered. One
group of miners fell in
Speaker 150: with a Gatling gun in 5,000 rounds, and more machine
Speaker 62: guns were reported stolen from several company camps. The miners
were destroyed.
Speaker 62: Wives of Union miners, who were trained as nurses, accompanied their men wearing nurses'
Speaker 13: white uniforms and caps, but with their local Union number on the cap instead of the usual Red Cross. They
expected there to be
Speaker 310: wounded, and they were prepared for that. At
one point, people
Speaker 123: in the capital thought that the miners were marching on the city of Charleston, and the place flew into a panic
Speaker 13: until the reports were disproven.
Okay.
The
Speaker 13: authorities went to Frank Keeney and the Union
Speaker 100: headquarters there in Charleston and told him, you've got to call this off. And
he told
Speaker 100: them, this is not a Union operation. This
is the
Speaker 100: miners, on their own. And neither he nor anyone was going to stop them. I've
interfered
Speaker 149: again and again, he said. This time
Speaker 209: they can march Domingo as far as I'm concerned. The Union local at Blair...
Having been
Speaker 209: given prior instructions,
Speaker 13: ran out ahead of the rest of the army to the base of Blair Mountain, where they expected a fight, and dug trenches in preparation. An advanced
patrol of
Speaker 62: 500 to 800 miners went ahead, cut down telephone and telegraph wires, and cleared a 65-square-mile area of Baldwin Feltzguards.
mother
Speaker 62: jones drops what she's doing comes back to west virginia and as soon as she arrives it becomes clear that this was something much different than she had ever seen something much more dangerous so
Speaker 294: she met with the governor and both of them expressed concern about where this was headed and so with the governor's
Speaker 169: blessing she went down to mingo to talk to the miners there she could feel their
rage and
and
Speaker 169: fearing what was to come she hurried back to lens
Speaker 60: creek to try to talk the
Speaker 62: miners down this old fire-breathing radical mother jones is urging the miners to go home
she even pretended to
Speaker 11: have a telegram from president harding himself ordering the miners to disperse
the miners weren't
Speaker 90: buying it she even pretended to read from
it
"'I
Speaker 90: request that you abandon your purpose and return to
Speaker 220: your homes, "'and I assure you that my good offices will be used "'to forever eliminate the gunman system from the state of West Virginia.'"
It was the best
Speaker 146: she could come up with on short notice. Frank
Keeney and
Speaker 175: the other union leaders were there, and they asked to see the telegram themselves. Mother Jones wouldn't give it to them. And
so they
Speaker 175: went back to Charleston and got confirmation that no telegram had been sent.
"'I'm sorry.
even
Speaker 175: mother jones had
Speaker 164: lost control of the miners already they had begun to march in columns of hundreds across the ridge toward mingo county more
Speaker 13: miners joined them as they made their way through boone and toward logan
county when
Speaker 13: the miners made camp their army went on for 20 miles along
a creek
Speaker 225: there were
Speaker 71: thousands
of them more
Speaker 71: showing up every hour guns in
hand
Speaker 71: Miners hijacked a train with three empty flat cars and loaded it up
Speaker 73: with minors and supplies and ran on ahead.
Each night
Speaker 73: when they made camp, the mood was serious. They weren't clowning, they weren't drinking.
Men gave speeches
Speaker 73: and everybody spoke of Sid Hatfield and Ed
Speaker 136: Chambers and how they'd been shot down like dogs in front of their wives.
In the
Speaker 136: evenings and on the way, war veterans continued to try to impart some basic military training on this ragtag redneck army. To
get to Mingo, the
Speaker 136: miners first had to get through Logan County.
Logan was an
Speaker 136: anti-union fortress, ruled over by that sheriff I mentioned before,
Speaker 164: Sheriff Don Chafin.
The one
Speaker 164: who made $300 a month but somehow had a million dollars in his bank account because he was paid a fortune by the coal
Speaker 13: companies to keep the union from spreading any further south
Speaker 67: in West Virginia. In
Logan, all
Speaker 67: anybody spoke of was the miners' march. Chafin
had sent
Speaker 67: out word to those better
Speaker 235: people of his county, the bankers and the clerks and the lawyers and merchants and insurance salesmen, and of course the mine officials and the non-miner
Speaker 125: employees.
Speaker 125: to be ready to muster at the courthouse at the sound of the town fire alarm.
And so as the
Speaker 50: miners approached Logan, the fire alarm blares. And it's very, very early in the morning.
Speaker 13: It was like 2 in the morning. And so all the better people of Logan County prepared to fight off the invasion of these dirty, ignorant coal miners from the hills. This motley army made up of the deplorables of their day.
Speaker 263: Immigrants, Negroes, hillbilly white
Speaker 293: trash.
The
Speaker 293: rifles were handed out, and the bankers and the lawyers and the insurance salesmen of Logantown
Speaker 235: went up to fight the miners. He
took cars up to the
Speaker 235: ridge of Blair Mountain, where breastworks and trenches were being set up to
make a
Speaker 235: stand
Speaker 70: against the oncoming rednecks. Chafin
had been
Speaker 70: preparing since the miners had begun to gather at Lens Creek. He anticipated this.
He set
Speaker 70: up a commissary to supply his middle class militia and had workers start building the defense on Blair Mountain before the miners even started heading south. His
men cut down trees,
Speaker 301: they blocked roads, they built up restworks of boulders and dirt and logs that stretched for 10 miles across the path that he knew the miners would have no choice but to cross. He
had a fleet of cars set
Speaker 9: aside for dedicated use, running men and supplies up to the front line.
He'd even
Speaker 9: gotten his hands on three airplanes, along with pilots, to observe and possibly attack the miners. Remember,
this is only
Speaker 12: 1921,
Speaker 175: so there's no airfield available, and the biplanes were parked on a baseball field with enough room for them to gather speed and take off. As
the alarms continued
Speaker 136: throughout the morning, the better people of Logan fill the streets and make their way up Blair Mountain.
Deputy
Speaker 53: sheriffs went to the mining camps that were being worked by scabs and non-union miners waking people up and shouting that anybody who didn't pick up a gun and go fight was fired and
Speaker 123: would be arrested as a potential traitor. By
the time the
Speaker 123: sun came up over
Speaker 60: Blair, Chafin had 700 armed men dug in atop the ridge. Later
in the day, one
Speaker 289: of the planes made a reconnaissance flight over the mountain.
Speaker 289: and saw the column of miners stretching back for miles.
There were
Speaker 87: thousands of them.
Some miners
Speaker 87: fired on the plane, so he hightailed it back and told Chafin what he'd seen. Corbin writes, quote, A
sizable
Speaker 90: proportion of the marchers were from out of state. Approximately 2,000 of them were
Speaker 52: World War I veterans, and all of them were from industrialized backgrounds.
This army was
Speaker 52: organized and
Speaker 67: prepared to fight.
The
Speaker 67: marchers had their own doctors, nurses, and hospital facilities. They had sanitary facilities.
The
Speaker 71: marchers were fed three meals a day in mess halls and commissaries. In addition to robbing the local
Speaker 90: company stores for food, the marchers bought every loaf of bread, 1,200 dozen, in Charleston and transported the loaves to their campsites.
The
Speaker 71: miners were prepared to fight, and they had to be, for they would sustain a week-long battle against Chafin's army of over 2,000 men who were equipped with machine guns and bombing planes. Approximately 2,000 army veterans were the field commanders, and they instructed the other miners in military tactics. A former member of the National Rifle Team of the U.S. Marine Corps and a former captain in the Italian army gave shooting lessons.
Speaker 71: Several former officers, including an ex-major, drilled the miners. After watching several hundred ex-servicemen drill
Speaker 137: the miners until they marched in something like military order, a reporter walked down to another area and heard an ex-serviceman tell a squad of miners how to fight machine guns.
Speaker 129: Lie down, watch the bullets cut the trees, outflank them, and get the snipers. End quote. The
governor got reports that
Speaker 311: there were no fewer than 7,000 miners on the
Speaker 67: march.
Thank you.
He heard
Speaker 67: that Mother Jones had tried and failed to stop them and that they were determined to go to Mingo County to free their friends from jail and avenge the murder of Sid Hatfield. He
had no
Speaker 67: National Guard. He
knew that
Speaker 67: Sheriff Chafin's army of deputies and office dwellers and mercenaries could at best only hope to slow the miners down.
He called on
Speaker 13: the White House and the Secretary of War and he told them that the southern part of his state was in open rebellion
Speaker 67: and that he needed the U.S. Army. And so Washington sent down a brigadier general to determine whether that was
Speaker 312: a necessary step. The
general took the
Speaker 199: next train down to Charleston. He arrived at 4 a.m. Without stopping
Speaker 13: for breakfast, he goes directly to the governor's residence and wakes him up in bed to get the story.
as soon as
Speaker 13: he's done with that he sends men to get frank
Speaker 229: keeney and another local union leader named fred mooney out of their beds and bring them before
him and he
Speaker 229: tells them in no uncertain terms that things cannot get more serious than they are right now
because the
Speaker 259: next step was to call the u.s army and air service down on their minors
he told them that
Speaker 70: they would be held personally responsible for whatever happened
Speaker 70: This had to be stopped now, and he ordered them to go to the Miners' Army and make them stop.
They were on their way
Speaker 52: in a car before 6 a.m. Savage writes, quote,
Minutes before
Speaker 71: the arrival of Mooney and Keeney, the advance guard of the Miners' Army, marching with near military precision and discipline, had set out for the Logan County line, 12 miles away. They had lined
up...
an
Speaker 71: observer reported when their leaders commanded fall in and at the command forward march they swung away on the road to logan with fire and determination in their eyes their guns firmly grasped in their hands keeney made a quick decision at 2 p.m he said that he would have a meeting in a nearby baseball
park all
Speaker 71: union miners were required to attend he ordered those around him to spread the word and make the arrangements
Speaker 71: Then he and Mooney sped out of town toward Logan to overtake the advance guard.
They had gone
Speaker 71: only a short distance. The taxi passed the column on the road and swung in front of its head. Keeney jumped out and spoke. The column halted. There was a heated exchange. The miners could not stop. Keeney insisted,
Speaker 67: and he prevailed. The miners agreed to a temporary halt, turned around, and marched back to the rest of the army.
The
Speaker 71: miners assembled at the ballpark. When Keeney and Mooney approached, they found the bleachers filled with miners, their guns glistening in a bright sunlight.
Other men lay
Speaker 90: full length on the grass in the shade of the highboard fence. Guards manned the gates, and miners gave a new password.
Speaker 71: I come creeping. They turned away newspapermen, a policy Keeney endorsed. The men were in an angry mood. Keeney spoke from the hood of the taxi.
a lot
Speaker 71: of you men are going to disagree with me he began but don't interrupt i'm telling you facts and
you will
Speaker 71: find there is no time to argue
then kenny
Speaker 71: said i've told you men god knows how many times that anytime you want to do battle against don chafin and his thugs i'll be right there in the front lines
with you
Speaker 71: i've been there before and you
know it but this
Speaker 71: time you've got more than Don Chafin against
you.
You
Speaker 71: got more than the governor of West Virginia against you. You
got the
Speaker 71: government of the United States against you.
Now, I'm
Speaker 301: telling you for your own good and for the good of the cause, and you've got to do it.
Break up
Speaker 301: this march. Go home. Get back to your jobs. You can't fight the government of the United States.
Savage
Speaker 313: continues, quote, Mooney followed Keeney. Union men, he said,
Speaker 71: didn't balk federal authority.
Speaker 71: Union men were loyal to their country. It was time to give up the march. Trains would be dispatched to Madison and Danville to take them home, back to their jobs. Others spoke, generally agreeing that the march should be abandoned, at least for now. An aged black miner rose. Boys, he's right, he said of Keeney's warning about federal power.
You ain't
Speaker 71: fooling no more. This is your daddy talking. It's your real Uncle Sam. The decision emerged. They would go home.
Speaker 52: slowly the men began edging out of the ballpark many started immediately on the long march home others waited
Speaker 225: for the promised trains word spread into the hills and hollows and back along the line of the march as darkness fell miners built
Speaker 177: campfires in the hills and talked of their adventure waiting for the trains the march they
Speaker 292: thought was over end quote
well
Speaker 292: Sheriff Chafin
Speaker 124: had informants near the miners army who had listened in on events at the ballpark and so they called and said good news boss the miners are disbanding and heading home
and so
Speaker 124: Chafin
Speaker 70: sends word up to the ridge to recall his troops back to town those
men come
Speaker 70: back to cheering
Speaker 62: crowds like they're war heroes and
the Logan
Speaker 62: Banner newspaper sends out a special edition with the front page headline reading attempted invasion fails questions.
The
Speaker 124: governor was elated, and Washington, D.C. was relieved.
But not all the miners
Speaker 124: were ready to call it quits, and
others
Speaker 71: simply hadn't gotten the word. Somehow, rumors started circulating that Chafin's deputies in Logan were killing miners,
Speaker 70: including women and children, and so some of them, at first only a few hundred, grabbed their rifles and set out again toward Logan. Okay.
that
Speaker 70: night those men went through the nearby mining camps full of men who had not accompanied the march to begin with and told the miners there that the mines would be closed in the morning and called on them to come fight with their brothers and
most of them did other
Speaker 70: union leaders heard of frankini's speech and at first they didn't believe he'd made it you know frankini of all men was not the one to back down when they found out it was true they decided to
Speaker 314: go past him straight to the miners.
and
Speaker 314: they sent a delegation to get them fired up and turn them back around.
The next
Speaker 314: morning, one of
Speaker 184: Chafin's airplanes flies
up over
Speaker 184: the mountains
and
Speaker 50: sees that the miners are reforming their lines.
In his hurry
Speaker 50: to get back, he flew too low and clipped a tree and crashed upside down on the roof of a house.
The pilot was not
Speaker 52: hurt, but still.
How many
Speaker 52: insurrections have you been in that resulted in a downed military aircraft?
Yes.
In
Speaker 52: Charleston, there
Speaker 70: was an airstrip, and three large Army Air Service combat aircraft, armed with machine guns and bombs, had arrived and were parked as the people of the town showed up to gawk at them. One
of them was the
Speaker 70: Seagull, which was the aircraft flown by the country's most famous pilot, Billy Mitchell.
Speaker 124: Mitchell was there in Charleston himself, General Billy Mitchell And he stood around the aircraft talking with
Speaker 315: the local officials and the townspeople Billy Mitchell was one of the prophets of air war in the 1920s He was
Speaker 316: dedicated to trying to make the nation's leaders see that aircraft were going to rule the next
major war
He had
Speaker 301: just flown in from a training exercise off the coast of Virginia where he was showing how an aircraft had the power to sink an armored ship. When
he heard what
Speaker 70: was happening in West Virginia, he saw it as another opportunity to show what the planes could do. So
he developed
Speaker 70: plans to stop the march from the
Speaker 192: air, first by blanketing the miners with tear gas, and if that didn't stop him, then attack with bombs and
Speaker 76: bullets while his aircraft spotted for nearby artillery.
it took a
Speaker 76: long time to recall all of
Speaker 62: don chafin's men from the ridge most
of them
Speaker 62: didn't arrive till evening and others didn't come back until it was close to midnight and
they were dusty
Speaker 62: and exhausted and unaware
Speaker 71: that the miners had actually come back in their direction and so just after midnight they're
Speaker 12: just getting home and the fire alarm blares again and the better men of logan town were out of bed and back
Speaker 34: to the courthouse to muster faster this time than before, having been through it already
Speaker 317: once.
They got
Speaker 109: their supplies, they hopped in the waiting cars, and they headed back up to the barricades atop Blair Mountain. Some
of them were
Speaker 164: armed with hand grenades. Sandbags reinforced machine gun nests looking down the mountain toward the path of the miners.
800 men
Speaker 164: of Logan were there. Keeney
and the
Speaker 9: others hadn't realized yet that the miners had gone back on the offensive. The trains that they had sent
Speaker 62: down
had
Speaker 62: come back with some miners on them, and so they took that as confirmation that the orders were being
Speaker 12: followed. But
all of a
Speaker 12: sudden, the general summons them and shares the reports that he's been receiving that the march was not over after
all. And so
Speaker 87: Keeney's colleague, Bill Blizzard, rides up with the general so that he can go get a look at the situation for himself.
When he came to a group
Speaker 87: of miners who were
Speaker 50: coming up on a bridge crossing, the general blocks the
and
Speaker 50: gets out of his car and stands there waiting
Speaker 62: for the miners to bunch up as a crowd. Now,
the veterans
Speaker 62: in the miners' army knew a general when they saw one.
One of them
Speaker 62: shouted, Are you General
Speaker 318: Pershing?
And he
Speaker 318: says, No, I'm General Bandholz, and I'm here for the United States government.
And so the
Speaker 169: general pauses to let that sink in, and then with perfect timing, he
Speaker 289: says,
There are
Speaker 319: servicemen among you.
You
Speaker 289: know what the army means, what it can do. You
know that it
Speaker 289: never
Speaker 301: bluffs, but always calls them. I
don't want
Speaker 301: martial law here. Neither do you. I've seen enough men killed. I don't want to see any
Speaker 176: more die.
But if it
Speaker 176: must be, then we will go under martial law. I
don't want
Speaker 176: it, but I must obey orders.
The
Speaker 320: General...
Speaker 320: like all flag officers understood how to stand before men and awe them and he awed the
Speaker 156: minors especially the veterans
suddenly a
Speaker 156: minor in the crowd blurted out my god we wouldn't revolt against the national government
and with that
Speaker 156: the tension broke and some
Speaker 146: of the vets started rushing forward to try to shake his hand and tell the general about their military service and the general stayed there and talked with the men until a train arrived
Speaker 125: and then saw them off on I'll
see you next time.
Well, that
Speaker 206: experience had won general bandholes over, too. And
what he saw
Speaker 206: were not blood-crazed anarchists, but
Speaker 87: good American boys who'd just gotten a little riled up, that's all.
And so he wired
Speaker 87: Washington,
Speaker 70: D.C. and said, keep the troops on standby. They
won't be
Speaker 70: needed for now. And
that night, he
Speaker 70: got on a train and went back to Washington. But
there were still miners
Speaker 217: headed to Logan.
And
Speaker 217: still, Chafin's forces were arrayed on the ridge to oppose them.
There was also
Speaker 50: Captain Brockus, that vengeful commander of the state police whose men had been humiliated by some of the miners. He had
spent the interval
Speaker 50: getting the names of
Speaker 228: all the men who were supposed to have been involved with that, and was determined to get them back.
And so he
Speaker 12: took a force of 70 state troopers on an expedition to go arrest them early one morning.
Thank you.
and so he
Speaker 12: rendezvoused with
Speaker 321: chafin who
Speaker 206: reinforced him with another 230 men bringing his number up to
Speaker 13: 300 and they set out toward a camp where several of their targets are supposed to be holed up
as they
Speaker 13: made their way up the mountain toward the miners camp they were spotted and the men who spotted them ran
Speaker 62: back to the camp shouting that the thugs were coming so
the men got
Speaker 62: guns and hid their families
Speaker 62: Bracus' forces were coming
Speaker 305: across small groups
Speaker 290: of miners, and they'd corner them and disarm them and arrest them, and they would set the POWs in front of them as human shields and march them at gunpoint. At
this point, they
Speaker 290: came across
Speaker 10: two miners, and they had guns, so Captain Bracus approached and demanded to know why
Speaker 266: they were armed. They
told him it
Speaker 266: was their business, and one of the state police shouted from the crowd that,
Speaker 266: "'They'd come to get you, goddamn miners,' "'and it was then that the shooting started. "'Miners emerged from the trees "'and began firing
Speaker 13: on Brockus's men. "'Three miners went down immediately. "'Another was hit. "'Bullets whizzed through the forest "'and through the walls of cabins and tents. "'Brockus's men are being hit. "'He
Speaker 62: looked around at the chaos. "'He thought maybe this was a mistake, "'and so he orders his men to retreat, "'and
they go
Speaker 62: tearing down the mountain.
"'Well,
Speaker 150: word spread that the thugs had attacked.'
The
Speaker 150: miners were going home, and the thugs attacked anyway. People were dead. Miners came from all
Speaker 123: around and saw the bloody bodies.
Women and
Speaker 123: children were screaming and crying. The miners saw that, many of them over
Speaker 71: the corpses of their husbands and fathers.
They told the men that
Speaker 71: the state police had come down in the middle of the night, and hundreds of them had opened fire on their homes.
They said,
Speaker 71: Terrified women and children fled down the road and as they went spread word among the miners what had happened. This
time, when the
Speaker 225: miners
Speaker 13: assembled, they would not be turned back.
Thirteen and
Speaker 13: fourteen-year-old boys stood armed alongside their fathers and older brothers. On Wednesday morning, August
Speaker 312: 31, 1921, all the building frustration increased.
Speaker 312: and anger and resentment that
Speaker 206: had bubbled up over the years in the West Virginia coal fields exploded into
Speaker 35: full-scale war.
The President of
Speaker 35: the United States ordered the U.S. Army to go put down the miners' rebellion.
Don Chafin calls
Speaker 35: on neighboring McDowell County for reinforcements.
He asks the
Speaker 35: middle class and professional citizens there to send all the men that they could to fight off the barbarians headed to Blair Mountain.
And so
Speaker 35: McDowell sent their bankers, their lawyers, their
Speaker 24: businessmen and doctors, 600 more men reinforcing Chaffin's defenses on the ridge. But
no fewer than
Speaker 24: 10,000 miners were headed their way.
Some estimates
Speaker 266: have the number at 12 to 15 or even 20,000. Two
or three
Speaker 235: times as many.
Speaker 235: Wives working as nurses and cooks, young boys as supply runners and messengers supported the Army in non-combat roles. The
word in the capital
Speaker 293: and among the mine owners had been that all the trouble was being caused by the hotheads
Speaker 70: from Kanawha County, the same miners who'd given the state so much trouble a decade before at Paint and Cabin Creeks.
And
Speaker 70: certainly those miners were a strong element, played a major role in getting the march going. But by the time the army reached Blair Mountain, everybody realized that this
Speaker 301: was way bigger than one county. Miners from Mingo, Logan, Boone, McDowell, and other counties were there. Miners from even further away. It seemed as if all of southern West Virginia had risen up
Speaker 235: in rebellion. As
Savage says,
Speaker 235: George Washington had fewer soldiers at the Battle of Trenton.
the
Speaker 235: engagement which
Speaker 20: changed the course of the American Revolution.
And that
Speaker 20: morning, the miners began their ascent up Blair Mountain.
Almost
Speaker 175: immediately, rifle and machine gun fire began spraying down the mountainside. Aircraft
Speaker 75: appear overhead and begin dropping bombs.
These were
Speaker 75: Chaffin's planes dropping improvised bombs that were about
two and a
Speaker 73: half, three feet long, and maybe...
six
Speaker 73: to ten inches in diameter i've seen one of them before i
Speaker 62: don't have the measurements exactly in my head but
they had
Speaker 62: put them together basically giant pipe bombs rigged up and they would fly over and drop these down on the miners and some of these things turned out to be duds and they were captured by the
Speaker 305: miners that's why i've seen one of them it's on display at the blair mountain museum in mate one today
A few days of
Speaker 13: military training was not enough to turn the minors into a Navy SEAL team So their tactics were sloppy and their coordination was often non-existent But
Speaker 301: they were brave I mean just think Without being given orders from an officer Without just you and your boys Storming up a mountain with dug in machine guns Firing down on you while planes are dropping bombs on you
And
Speaker 301: you and your friends are storming up this mountain. It's crazy.
It takes a lot of
Speaker 85: training, a lot of military training to get trained infantrymen to go up a hill like that.
And these
Speaker 52: miners were doing it.
Small units made their own way
Speaker 52: up the mountain, fired their weapons, and then attracted fire. And they'd
Speaker 67: retreat and then try to make their way up another way. You know, the whole thing was...
Speaker 67: somewhat disorganized it wouldn't have impressed
Speaker 62: napoleon but the miners
Speaker 11: were brave i just imagine a group of you and your friends tearing up a mountainside with machine guns
Speaker 20: dug in to trenches pouring down on you while planes are dropping explosives on you it takes a lot of
Speaker 25: training to get infantrymen to do
something
Speaker 11: like that and these miners were doing it
they did
Speaker 11: have one thing that napoleon would have understood well and that was numbers they swarmed blair mountain like angry bees corbin's account reads quote
Speaker 270: when the
Speaker 53: miners arrived in the battle zone and began to fight they demonstrated preparedness and organization arriving on foot
Speaker 70: and in cars trucks and trains that they had commandeered the miners with cartridge belts
Speaker 301: and packs rolled as neatly and smoothly as a stovepipe
Speaker 301: responded to a bugler's sounding of assembly and their sergeant's shouts of packs and guns fall in
a coal
Speaker 301: company official later testified that
i noticed one
Speaker 88: company march up opposite the station face to the front and commanded by a man acting as a captain he
faced the men
Speaker 88: to the front like the captain of an army would do he called the roll later he
Speaker 219: ordered the men to throw down their tin cups he said they were going into
Speaker 71: action that night and he didn't want anything to rattle
Speaker 71: Sentries were then placed along the mountain ridge. Sharpshooters with telescopic rifles were stationed at strategic locations to clean out Chafin's machine gun nests.
The other
Speaker 71: miners moved out in flank movements, each under the command of an Army veteran. Harvey Dillon, a veteran of the Spanish-American War and World War I, commanded the Droughty Creek Division. Hewitt Creek Division was led by a former Army colonel, and another high-ranking officer led the charge up Blair Mountain.
It was
Speaker 137: carefully done, a coal operator later testified, just as well as General Pershing had his army in France.
The battle
Speaker 137: raged for over a week. A veteran of the Spanish-American War reported that he
Speaker 90: heard about as much shooting at Blair as I did at Manila.
Planes that the
Speaker 90: Logan County Coal Operators Association
Speaker 71: had rented shelled the miners with gas and crudely made explosive bombs for three days.
As a
Speaker 62: side note, I think that's probably the first recorded use of poison gas dropped from an aircraft in combat, and
it was being
Speaker 62: dropped on coal miners in West Virginia.
Both armies
Speaker 184: took prisoners, and each side was accused of torturing them, and both sides killed. A
message sent
Speaker 184: out from the headquarters of Chafin's army read,
As I've
Speaker 71: returned from the front-line trenches, thought I would try to tell you a little something about what has been going on over there.
Speaker 71: We certainly have been doing some honest-to-God fighting the past few days. I lost three men yesterday. Happened about 8 a.m. yesterday.
Perhaps I
Speaker 71: will stop off and tell you all on my way home, if I don't get bumped off before I get away. Give my regards to the boys and kill all the rednecks you can. A horrified nation sat back in disbelief as newspapers reported on the largest armed conflict in American labor history.
The
Speaker 71: headlines of an issue at the New York Times read, Fighting continues in the mountains. Planes reported bombing minors. Heavy firing unabated. An
issue of
Speaker 71: the Washington Evening Star declared in bold letters, Martial law, fighting now ranging on a 20-mile
Speaker 137: front.
The Charleston
Speaker 137: Gazette headlined, Logan now in a state of siege.
By the morning of
Speaker 137: September
Speaker 150: 1st,
The
Speaker 150: miners had already captured half of the mountain ridge that was blocking their way, and they were preparing to roll up the rest of Chafin's lines and storm down into Logan and Mingo counties. A
state police
Speaker 67: captain appeared in Logantown. A machine gun had jammed at one of the mountain passes, and the miners had broken through. Chafin
hastily tried
Speaker 71: to construct a second line of defense for his men to fall back to, and the people in the town went into a total panic.
a coal
Speaker 71: operator there in logantown called a congressman that he knew personally and told him that unless troops were sent by
Speaker 136: midnight that night the town of logan was going to be attacked by an army of thousands of miners
a squadron of
Speaker 136: 17 military aircraft were flown in people gathered and cheered when it was time for
Speaker 50: them to take off for the battle but when the third one tried to take off it glanced off a telephone pole and nose down and flipped over in a
Speaker 301: field.
two
Speaker 301: other of the aircraft had engine problems and couldn't take off at all
another one
Speaker 301: had engine trouble and made an emergency landing and hit a mound of dirt and blew a tile and tire and broken axle two
others lost
Speaker 301: their way in
Speaker 50: fog and ended up in tennessee when they tried to return to charleston the next day they hit a storm and when they tried to land one of them hit a ditch and
Speaker 70: took out the landing gear and demolished the plane
and
And the
Speaker 70: other one looked for another landing spot until he was almost out of gas, then tried to land on the side of a hill, ran into a fence, and he crashed. So, not the finest hour for America's Air Force.
Just then, with
Speaker 70: Chafin's forces scrambling back to secondary lines and the people of Logan evacuating the
Speaker 113: town, that's when Daddy showed up.
Speaker 62: U.S. Army regular soldiers, most of them combat veterans from World War I, began rolling into the area in train cars. Thousands of them. When
the miners
Speaker 70: first saw the soldiers, again, many of them were pleased. They smiled and waved.
And these men were
Speaker 70: in rebellion against the coal operators in their local government. But
by and
Speaker 70: large, they were naively loyal American patriots.
they
Speaker 70: knew the state and local governments were captive to the coal interest but again they just thought if they could just get the attention of the federal government that's all they had to do then their case would be
heard many of them
Speaker 70: took the arrival of the army as confirmation that they had been
Speaker 301: heard that the federal government was finally sending help they really thought that they
thought the
Speaker 301: army would settle things down and then as a neutral party force a settlement
They didn't
Speaker 301: imagine that the army had been sent to take the side of the coal operators and their hired guns. The
soldiers arrived
Speaker 301: coming up behind Chafin's forces on the Blair Mountain Ridge, told them all to go home. Army
men manned
Speaker 13: their positions and sent word down
Speaker 164: to the miners that Chafin's forces were gone, and
from now on it
Speaker 164: would be the U.S. Army that you would be shooting
Speaker 175: at.
And so
Speaker 175: as word spread that the U.S. Army had arrived, the shooting died down and finally stopped. The
miners,
Speaker 72: again, many of them were war veterans. And they took that very seriously. And they were
Speaker 87: just, it wasn't just fear. These guys were obviously prepared to die.
Speaker 35: They're charging machine gun nests. But they were not prepared to fight with American soldiers. They just were not prepared
Speaker 13: to do that.
the
Speaker 13: miners climbed down their side of Blair Mountain and made camp or prepared to make their trip back home the
Speaker 50: miners had sworn an oath of secrecy that held until the oldest of them passed so we don't know exactly how many were killed but there were reports of dozens and some said hundreds dead I
wish this
Speaker 164: story had a happier ending
After the
Speaker 164: Battle of Blair Mountain, the miners and the miners' union was pilloried as a bunch of savage Bolsheviks in the nation's business-friendly press. The
owners
Speaker 299: re-established control of their coal fields, and miners went back
Speaker 13: to work. Hundreds
of them were
Speaker 13: thrown in prison, and several union leaders were tried for treason. Others,
including a
Speaker 13: pastor who had taken a gun up to march with the miners, were
Speaker 292: sent up
Speaker 62: for murder.
There were no
Speaker 63: arrests of the mine guards,
or the
Speaker 63: citizens' militia from Logan, or any of the state police or sheriffs who had beaten and tortured and killed miners in 1920 and 21. Frank
Keeney was one of
Speaker 175: the men who were tried for treason in 1922,
Speaker 35: but a sympathetic judge, or one who just wanted the whole thing to be over, moved his trial to a friendlier venue where the charges were dismissed.
Many other
Speaker 35: cases were also transferred
Speaker 322: to minor-friendly jurisdictions, and most of them were dismissed as well. Old
Sheriff Don
Speaker 294: Chafin was lauded as a hero by the better people of West Virginia, although a little while
Speaker 35: later, during Prohibition, he was caught up in a bootlegging scheme and ended up doing two years in prison. The
strike in Mingo dragged on a
Speaker 5: little while longer, but eventually had to be called off.
The
Speaker 5: cost of
Speaker 175: it had bankrupted Keeney's District 17 of the UMW, and at least 20 people had been killed, not counting the March on Blair Mountain.
The coal
Speaker 175: operators, the county authorities, the better people of West Virginia, and the U.S. Army had finally crushed the Union in the state of West
Speaker 136: Virginia. In 1920, when
all this
Speaker 136: began...
Speaker 136: The UMW in West Virginia had nearly 50,000 members, and
by
Speaker 164: 1929, at the end of the decade, it would be down to about 600. The
miners crawled back to
Speaker 164: their company towns, they kept their heads down, avoided the mine guards, and they did what they were told to do.
Across the Kentucky
Speaker 175: border, not too far from our story here in Harlan County, the
miners had
Speaker 175: only begun to
Speaker 36: fight, and they wouldn't stop for another decade.
It
Speaker 91: wasn't until the 1930s,
under FDR's
Speaker 91: New Deal legislation giving workers the right to organize themselves as a union, that the coal miners of West Virginia finally had a permanent voice.
Today, there are less than
Speaker 91: 10,000 miners working underground in West Virginia
Speaker 13: coal mines. The industry finds itself under attack immediately.
Speaker 13: Mostly by the same kind of people who signed up to fight the miners in 1921.
Office
Speaker 323: workers, businessmen, students, middle class professionals, the better
Speaker 324: people of America who wear flannel and other work clothes as a fashion statement,
but try to avoid
Speaker 324: shaking the dirty hand of an actual miner when they
Speaker 175: come across one.
Almost 80,000
Speaker 175: American coal miners have
Speaker 70: died of black lungs since 1968.
and God
Speaker 70: only knows how many of them died before that had a name. The miners'
Speaker 13: march on Blair Mountain may have been ill-considered,
at times
Speaker 5: chaotic. Certainly it set their cause back a long ways. But these Americans,
these people
Speaker 25: who identify themselves on census reports
Speaker 50: simply as Americans, and whose sons and daughters
Speaker 325: still
to a
Speaker 325: disproportionate percentage of the fighting in America's wars.
Speaker 124: There's a joke that goes around the U.S. military that we wouldn't have an infantry if it weren't for Appalachia. I've
heard the same
Speaker 124: one about Texas and
Speaker 91: Florida, and probably both versions are true.
Well, these
Speaker 91: people, these Americans,
who
Speaker 88: went off into battle here at Blair Mountain, who did something that seemed so crazy and so over the top to so many of us, these people were not living under a
Speaker 73: democracy. They
were living
Speaker 73: under a form of peonage that has
no
Speaker 91: parallel in American history in its scale and its oppressive nature aside from the institution of slavery itself. And
so what do you do in a
Speaker 144: situation like that? What do you do when...
Speaker 144: a mine guard beats or kills you or one of your friends or abuses your wife or your children and you go to the sheriff and that doesn't do any good because the sheriff works for the mine company
okay, well
Speaker 224: you go to the county authority nope, the judges work for the mine company
go to the
Speaker 224: governor nope what do you do?
what did the founding
Speaker 224: fathers of the country do?
okay
Men don't
Speaker 226: do what these men did just because they got riled up. They do what they did because they saw no other choice. And
if men like
Speaker 88: these had not fought, even though they lost, if they had not fought and put the fear of God into the better people of this country, if
you think the
Speaker 88: barons of industry and finance would have, out of the goodness
of
Speaker 59: their hearts,
Speaker 59: lifted working people off the barrel they had them over in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
we can agree to
Speaker 326: disagree. And
so, of
Speaker 150: course, I can't condone violence of any kind.
No, no,
Speaker 150: no. Can't go that far.
Speaker 227: Cannot condone violence.
But on the
Speaker 227: other hand...
Speaker 327: I was born on this mountain Long
time
Speaker 327: time
ago for
Speaker 328: they knocked down the timber and they stripped
mine the
Speaker 328: coal when
Speaker 329: you rose
in the morning
Speaker 329: for it was
light
When I'm
Speaker 328: in that dark hole I come back up at night I
was
Speaker 327: born on a smile A smile in my home
Speaker 330: And she hugs me and keeps me
Speaker 330: For worry
or woe
Speaker 331: Well it took everything that she gave Now they're
gone To
Speaker 332: put out down this mountain This mountain's
not home
I
Speaker 333: was young on this mountain and I'm old
and I
Speaker 334: knew every holler
Speaker 335: every cool swimming hole
till one
Speaker 327: night I lay down
Speaker 327: Woke up to find And
my
Speaker 334: childhood was over Wind
Speaker 336: down in the mine I was
Speaker 327: born on a smile Smiling up
Speaker 327: my home.
Speaker 330: And she holds me and keeps me from worrying,
Speaker 331: oh. Well, they took everything she gave, now they're gone,
Speaker 332: but I died
on this man.
Speaker 332: In this mountain's
my home There's a hole in this
Speaker 337: mountain
It's
Speaker 330: dark
Speaker 338: and it's
deep The guy
Speaker 330: only knows all the secrets it keeps There's
a
Speaker 327: chill in the air Only miners can't feel
And there's
Speaker 330: ghosts in the tunnels
Speaker 330: and left the company's
seen wrong I was
Speaker 327: born on a smile, a smile
Speaker 330: in
my home
Speaker 330: and she holds me and keeps me from worry
and woe
Speaker 331: Well, they took everything that she gave. Now they're
Speaker 339: gone.
Well, I'll
Speaker 339: lie on this mountain, this mountain in my home.
Thank you.