Chapter 17: Blood on the Coal — Labor Wars in the Mountains

"There are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair. Which side are you on? Which side are you on?" — Florence Reece, "Which Side Are You On?" (1931), written on a calendar sheet while her husband hid from company gun thugs in Harlan County, Kentucky

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Describe the Mine Wars of West Virginia — Paint Creek-Cabin Creek, Matewan, and Blair Mountain — as the deadliest labor conflicts in American history
2. Analyze the role of Mother Jones, the UMWA, and rank-and-file miners in organizing against total corporate control
3. Explain why the mine wars were so violent, connecting the stakes of the conflict to the conditions of company town life described in Chapter 16
4. Connect the Appalachian mine wars to broader American labor history and to the suppression of this history in national memory

Introduction: The War You Were Never Taught

The deadliest labor conflicts in American history did not happen in the factories of New England or the stockyards of Chicago. They happened in the hollows of West Virginia and Kentucky, in coal camps tucked between ridges so steep that sunlight reached the valley floor for only a few hours each day. They involved machine guns and armored trains and aerial bombardment. They involved the United States Army being deployed against American citizens on American soil. They involved a march of ten thousand armed miners — the largest armed uprising in the United States since the Civil War.

And most Americans have never heard of them.

This is not an accident. The suppression of the mine wars from American historical memory is itself a historical event, one that served the interests of the same corporate powers that the miners fought against. The battles were real — men died, women were jailed, children went hungry, entire communities were burned to the ground. But when the shooting stopped, the story was buried. It was buried in corporate archives and sealed court records and history textbooks that devoted a paragraph to "labor unrest" before moving on to the next president or the next war.

This chapter is about pulling that story out of the ground.

What happened in the coalfields of Appalachia between roughly 1900 and 1935 was not simply a labor dispute. It was class warfare — a term that historians sometimes shy away from but that the participants themselves used openly and accurately. On one side were coal operators backed by private armies, compliant courts, cooperative governors, and ultimately the military power of the United States government. On the other side were miners — Black and white, native-born and immigrant — who wanted nothing more radical than the right to organize, the right to be paid in real money instead of company scrip, and the right to live in a house they could not be evicted from for attending a union meeting.

The violence of these conflicts was not incidental. It was structural. It grew directly out of the conditions described in Chapter 16 — the total control that coal companies exercised over every aspect of life in company towns. When a company owned your house, your store, the school your children attended, and the road you walked on, the decision to join a union was not just a workplace action. It was an act of existential defiance. And the company's response — eviction, blacklisting, hired gunmen, and ultimately open warfare — was proportional to the threat the companies perceived. If miners won the right to organize, the entire system of captive labor would collapse. The operators were not fighting to protect profits. They were fighting to preserve a form of total social control that was, in everything but name, a feudal kingdom.

The miners were fighting for their lives.

Let us begin with the woman who lit the match.

"The Most Dangerous Woman in America": Mother Jones in the Coalfields

She was small — barely five feet tall — and old. By the time she became the most feared labor organizer in the American coalfields, Mary Harris Jones was already in her sixties. She would continue organizing into her nineties. She had white hair, wore plain black dresses, and spoke with an Irish brogue that could make a crowd of five thousand miners laugh, weep, and then march on a company stronghold, all within the space of a single speech.

The coal operators called her the most dangerous woman in America. She took it as a compliment.

Mother Jones, as she was universally known, was born Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland, around 1837 — she was famously vague about her exact birth year, and researchers have debated it ever since. Her family emigrated during the Great Famine. She became a teacher and then a dressmaker. In 1867, a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis killed her husband, George Jones, an ironworker and union member, and all four of their children. She was thirty years old, give or take, and everything she had in the world was gone.

Four years later, she lost her dressmaking shop in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Homeless for the second time, she wandered into a meeting of the Knights of Labor — one of the earliest American labor organizations — and found the cause that would consume the remaining five decades of her life.

By the 1890s, she had become a full-time organizer for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the union that would play a central role in every major coalfield conflict for the next half century. The UMWA had been founded in 1890 through the merger of two earlier miners' organizations, and from the beginning, it faced a challenge unique in American labor history: organizing workers who lived in company-owned towns, were paid in company scrip, were surveilled by company-hired guards, and could be evicted from their homes — thrown into the road with their families and furniture — for the act of signing a union card.

Mother Jones understood something that many labor leaders of her era did not. The coalfield struggle was not just about wages. It was about whether human beings would be treated as human beings. She spoke to miners not as an economist or a political theorist but as a mother — she insisted on the title — telling them they had a right to live with dignity, that their children deserved shoes and schoolbooks, that no man should have to beg permission from a company guard to walk on a public road. Her speeches were profane, funny, sentimental, and incendiary, often all at once. She told miners their bosses were "a gang of thieves" and told their wives that if their husbands were too cowardly to fight, the women should "take their mops and brooms and clean up the industrial system."

She was arrested more times than anyone bothered to count. She was convicted of conspiracy. She was held under military arrest without charges. At the age of eighty-three, she addressed a crowd of miners in West Virginia and told them: "I'm not afraid of the militia, and I'm not afraid of you operators. I'm a free-born American citizen, and I've got a right to talk as long as God Almighty lets me live."

She lived to be either ninety-three or one hundred, depending on whose birth date you believe. She is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, alongside the miners who died in the Virden massacre of 1898. She asked to be laid there, among her boys.

But before she died, she helped set in motion the chain of events that would turn the West Virginia coalfields into a battleground.

Paint Creek and Cabin Creek: The First Mine War (1912-1913)

The first major eruption came in 1912, on two narrow creeks in Kanawha County, West Virginia — Paint Creek and Cabin Creek, tributaries of the Kanawha River, each lined with coal camps stretching back into the hollows like beads on a string.

The miners on Paint Creek had been working under a contract with the coal operators that expired on April 1, 1912. When they attempted to negotiate a new contract that included recognition of the UMWA, the operators refused. The miners struck. Within weeks, the operators brought in replacement workers — scabs, in union terminology — and hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to enforce order.

The Baldwin-Felts agency, based in Bluefield, Virginia, was the most feared name in the Appalachian coalfields. Founded by William Gibboney Baldwin and Thomas Lafayette Felts, the agency provided what it euphemistically called "industrial security" — armed men who served as private police forces for coal operators across West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia. Baldwin-Felts agents functioned as a private army. They evicted striking miners from company housing, beat organizers, intimidated witnesses, and, when violence escalated, shot to kill. They were deputized by sympathetic county sheriffs, giving them the legal authority of law enforcement officers while they remained on the payroll of the coal companies.

The evictions on Paint Creek were immediate and total. Striking miners and their families — men, women, children, the elderly, the sick — were thrown out of company houses, their belongings piled on the dirt roads. It was early spring in the mountains, cold and wet. The UMWA set up a tent colony at Holly Grove, on the banks of Paint Creek, where the evicted families crowded into canvas tents that provided minimal protection from the rain and wind. Conditions were miserable. Children fell ill. Food was scarce.

And then the shooting started.

The Baldwin-Felts agents, operating from fortified positions along the creek, began firing into the tent colony. On the night of February 7, 1913, an armored train — a locomotive fitted with steel plating and mounted machine guns — rolled slowly up the tracks along Paint Creek, and the men inside opened fire on the sleeping tent colony. This was not a metaphor. This was not a exaggeration passed down through oral tradition. An armored train with machine guns fired into a camp full of families.

The miners called it the Bull Moose Special. It made multiple passes. Miraculously, only one person was killed in the attack — a miner named Cesco Estep — though many were wounded and the terror inflicted on the camp, particularly on the children, was devastating.

The violence on both sides escalated through the spring and summer of 1912 and into 1913. Miners armed themselves and fought back. Ambushes and skirmishes became common. The governor of West Virginia, William Glasscock, declared martial law on the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek district, suspending civil liberties and placing the region under military control. A military commission was established to try civilians — including Mother Jones, who was arrested in February 1913, convicted of conspiracy to commit murder by the military tribunal, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. She was eighty years old.

The sentence provoked national outrage. The United States Senate launched an investigation. New Governor Henry Hatfield brokered a settlement that granted miners a nine-hour workday, the right to shop at stores other than the company store, and a modest wage increase — but not union recognition. Mother Jones was released. The tent colonies were dismantled.

Paint Creek-Cabin Creek was over, but it had established a pattern that would repeat with increasing fury: miners organizing, operators responding with hired violence, the state intervening on the side of capital, civil liberties suspended, the federal government stepping in only when the political embarrassment became intolerable. It was a dress rehearsal for what was coming.

Matewan: The Day the Chief of Police Chose a Side

Matewan is a small town on the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, in Mingo County, West Virginia — right on the Kentucky border, deep in the heart of coal country. In 1920, it had a population of a few hundred people, a main street of wooden buildings, a railroad depot, and a police chief named Sid Hatfield who was about to become the most famous lawman in Appalachian history.

Sid Hatfield — no close relation to the feuding Hatfields of a generation earlier, though the coincidence of the name in Tug Fork country was noted by every journalist who covered what happened next — was twenty-seven years old, a former miner himself, and openly sympathetic to the union cause. This was unusual. In most coalfield towns, the law enforcement apparatus — sheriffs, deputies, constables — was controlled by the coal operators, either through direct payment or through the political machines the operators funded. Hatfield was different. He had been elected by the miners and their families, and he answered to them.

In the spring of 1920, UMWA organizers arrived in the Mingo County coalfields to begin a new organizing drive. The response from the Stone Mountain Coal Company and other operators in the district was immediate and familiar: miners who signed union cards were fired and evicted. By May, hundreds of families had been thrown out of company housing and were living in tent colonies along the Tug Fork.

On May 19, 1920, a group of Baldwin-Felts agents arrived in Matewan on the afternoon train. They were there to carry out more evictions — to physically remove miners and their families from company houses in the Stone Mountain company town of Red Jacket, just outside Matewan. They carried out the evictions, dumping furniture and belongings into the muddy street while women and children watched.

When the Baldwin-Felts agents returned to the Matewan depot to catch the evening train out, Sid Hatfield was waiting for them. So was Mayor Cabell Testerman. And so, quietly, were armed miners who had positioned themselves on the buildings and hillsides overlooking the town's main street.

What happened next has been reconstructed from conflicting eyewitness accounts, court testimony, and forensic evidence, and the exact sequence remains disputed. What is not disputed is the outcome. Hatfield confronted the Baldwin-Felts agents, led by brothers Albert and Lee Felts, and attempted to serve them with arrest warrants. Albert Felts produced what he claimed was a warrant for Hatfield's own arrest. Words were exchanged. Mayor Testerman examined the Felts warrant and declared it fraudulent. Someone — no one has ever definitively established who — fired the first shot.

The gunfight lasted less than a minute. When it was over, ten men lay dead or dying in the street and on the railroad tracks. Seven of the dead were Baldwin-Felts agents, including both Albert and Lee Felts. Mayor Testerman was mortally wounded. Two miners were killed. Sid Hatfield, against all odds, was unscathed.

The Matewan Massacre — or the Battle of Matewan, depending on whose side you were on — was front-page news across the country. Sid Hatfield became an instant folk hero in the coalfields, the lawman who had stood up to the Baldwin-Felts and won. Miners sang songs about him. His image circulated in UMWA publications. The coal operators, who had lost some of their best enforcers, were humiliated and furious.

Hatfield was tried for murder and acquitted by a Mingo County jury of his peers — miners and miners' wives who were not inclined to convict a man for shooting Baldwin-Felts agents. But the operators had a longer memory than the courts. On August 1, 1921, Sid Hatfield and his friend Ed Chambers walked up the courthouse steps in Welch, McDowell County, where they were to stand trial on a separate charge. They were unarmed — their lawyers had advised them to leave their weapons behind as a gesture of good faith.

Baldwin-Felts agents were waiting on the courthouse steps. They shot Hatfield and Chambers dead in broad daylight, in front of Hatfield's wife, who was walking beside him. The agents claimed self-defense. No one was ever convicted.

The murder of Sid Hatfield was the spark that ignited the largest armed uprising in the United States since the Civil War.

The Battle of Blair Mountain: Ten Thousand Armed Miners March to War

The news of Sid Hatfield's assassination spread through the coalfields like wildfire. In the mining camps of Kanawha County, in the tent colonies of Mingo County, in the union halls and the boarding houses and the front porches where miners gathered after shift, the reaction was volcanic. Men who had been debating whether to fight or wait decided all at once that waiting was over.

Within days, thousands of miners began assembling in the hollows south of Charleston, West Virginia, near the town of Marmet on the Kanawha River. They came from dozens of mines across several counties. They came armed — with hunting rifles, with shotguns, with pistols, with whatever they had. Some wore overalls. Many wore red bandanas around their necks, the identifying symbol that marked them as union men.

Here is a fact that most Americans do not know: the term "redneck" — which in modern usage has been appropriated as a class-based slur or a self-deprecating badge of identity, depending on who is speaking — has its origins in the West Virginia mine wars. The red bandana worn around the neck was a union identifier, a visible declaration of solidarity. Miners who wore the red bandana were called "rednecks." It was, originally, a term of political allegiance, not a derogation. The coal operators and their allies in the press used it as an insult. The miners wore it with pride.

The assembled miners — their numbers grew daily, eventually reaching somewhere between ten thousand and fifteen thousand, depending on the estimate — had a clear objective. They intended to march south from Kanawha County into Mingo County, where the Baldwin-Felts agents and the state police were terrorizing union families in the tent colonies. They intended to free their brothers. They intended to organize the entire southern West Virginia coalfield, by force if necessary.

UMWA District 17 leaders Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney had initially supported the march but grew alarmed at its scale. They attempted to persuade the miners to turn back. Even Mother Jones, who was at that point ninety or so years old and still active, addressed the assembled miners and urged them to disperse peacefully. The miners listened politely and kept marching.

The march covered approximately fifty miles through rugged mountain terrain, following ridgeline trails and creek beds. The miners organized themselves with military discipline — they had scouts, supply lines, field kitchens, and a rough chain of command, many of them having served in the U.S. military during World War I. They advanced in columns. They posted sentries. They were, in every meaningful sense, an army.

Standing in their way was Don Chafin, the sheriff of Logan County, through which the miners' route passed. Chafin was the most powerful political figure in the county and was openly on the coal operators' payroll — he later admitted to receiving payments of more than $30,000 per year from coal companies, an enormous sum in 1921. Chafin assembled a force of approximately two thousand men — sheriff's deputies, state police, volunteers from the coal operators' associations, and Baldwin-Felts agents — and established a defensive line along the crest of Blair Mountain, a long ridge that blocked the miners' route into Mingo County.

The Battle of Blair Mountain began on August 31, 1921, and lasted approximately five days. The miners attacked the ridgeline in waves, advancing through dense forest up steep slopes against entrenched positions. The defenders had the advantage of terrain — they held the high ground and had clear fields of fire down the mountain slopes. Chafin's forces also had access to machine guns and, in at least one instance, hired private aircraft to drop homemade bombs and gas canisters on the miners' positions.

This bears repeating. In 1921, in the United States of America, private aircraft hired by coal company interests dropped explosive and chemical devices on American citizens.

The miners fought with extraordinary courage but could not break the defensive line. The battle raged across a front of approximately ten miles, with fighting concentrated in the hollows and on the ridges around Blair Mountain. Estimates of casualties vary — the mountainous terrain made accurate counts impossible, and both sides had incentives to minimize their losses — but most historians believe between fifty and one hundred people were killed, with hundreds more wounded. Some accounts put the number higher. Bodies were buried quickly in the woods, and an unknown number of dead were never officially recorded.

The battle ended on September 2, 1921, when federal troops arrived. President Warren G. Harding had authorized the deployment of the U.S. Army, including infantry units and a squadron of Army Air Service bombers from Langley Field in Virginia. The Army's Billy Mitchell — the same general who would later become famous as an advocate for air power — oversaw the deployment. When the miners saw the U.S. Army uniforms, most of them put down their weapons and went home. They had been willing to fight the Baldwin-Felts agents and Don Chafin's mercenaries, but they would not fight the United States Army. Many of them had worn that uniform themselves, in France, just three years earlier.

The aftermath was brutal. Nearly a thousand miners were indicted for murder, conspiracy, and treason against the state of West Virginia — one of the very few times in American history that citizens have been charged with treason for actions within a state. The trials dragged on for years. Most of the defendants were eventually acquitted, but the legal costs bankrupted the UMWA's District 17 treasury, and the organizing drive in southern West Virginia was effectively crushed. Union membership in the state plummeted from approximately fifty thousand to around ten thousand within a few years.

Blair Mountain was the largest armed insurrection in the United States since the Civil War. More ammunition was expended than in some Civil War battles. The federal government deployed military aircraft against its own citizens. And yet, for decades, the battle was barely mentioned in American history textbooks. The miners lost the battle, and then they lost the story.

"Bloody Harlan": A County Under Siege

If the West Virginia mine wars were concentrated eruptions — sudden, spectacular, and eventually suppressed — the conflict in Harlan County, Kentucky was a slow-burning siege that lasted nearly a decade and earned the county a name that clung to it like coal dust: Bloody Harlan.

Harlan County sits in the southeastern corner of Kentucky, pressed against the Virginia border, in some of the most rugged terrain in the Appalachian coalfield. The county had been one of the last areas opened to large-scale coal mining — the railroad did not reach the county seat until 1911 — but once the coal boom arrived, it came with ferocious intensity. By the late 1920s, Harlan County was producing millions of tons of coal per year, and the population had swelled from fewer than ten thousand in 1910 to more than sixty thousand by 1930.

The county was dominated by the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association, a coordinated body that set wages, controlled local politics, and maintained a private enforcement apparatus that rivaled anything in West Virginia. The operators controlled the county judge, the sheriff, the tax assessor, and most of the local police. The sheriff's department was, for all practical purposes, an extension of the coal companies' security force. Deputies were paid with coal company money. They carried out evictions, broke up union meetings, and beat or killed organizers with impunity.

The conflict in Harlan County escalated sharply during the Great Depression. Coal prices collapsed. Operators slashed wages. Miners who had been earning barely enough to survive found their pay cut by thirty, forty, fifty percent. Families were going hungry — literally hungry, in a way that middle-class Americans in 2026 find difficult to imagine. Children's bellies swelled with malnutrition. Women boiled weeds for soup. Men walked miles to mine portals, worked ten-hour shifts on their hands and knees in eighteen-inch coal seams, and came home to families that did not have enough food to eat.

In 1931, the UMWA attempted to organize the Harlan County mines. The operators' response was immediate and overwhelming. The Battle of Evarts on May 5, 1931 — a shootout between miners and company guards at the town of Evarts — left four men dead and launched what became known as the Harlan County War, a years-long campaign of terror, counter-terror, and occasional open combat that drew national attention and became a symbol of everything that was wrong with the American coal industry.

The operators hired gun thugs — the euphemistic term was "deputies" — who patrolled the county roads, stopped cars, searched homes, and beat anyone suspected of union sympathies. Organizers were shot from ambush. Union sympathizers were dynamited out of their homes. The county became, in the words of one contemporary observer, "a police state in everything but name."

The violence attracted the attention of writers, intellectuals, and activists from outside the region. In 1931, the novelist Theodore Dreiser led a delegation of prominent writers to Harlan County to investigate conditions. The committee's findings — published as "Harlan Miners Speak" — documented a systematic campaign of terror: beatings, shootings, bombings, and the starvation of miners' families. The committee members themselves were indicted by a Harlan County grand jury for criminal syndicalism.

It was during this period that Florence Reece, the wife of UMWA organizer Sam Reece, wrote "Which Side Are You On?" while company gun thugs searched her house looking for her husband. She tore a sheet from a wall calendar and wrote the lyrics on the back. The song, set to the tune of the Baptist hymn "Lay the Lily Low," became the most famous labor anthem in American history:

Come all of you good workers, Good news to you I'll tell Of how the good old union Has come in here to dwell.

Which side are you on? Which side are you on?

The Harlan County conflict continued, with varying intensity, throughout the 1930s. A second wave of organizing in 1937-1939, backed by New Deal labor protections — particularly the Wagner Act of 1935, which guaranteed workers' right to organize and bargain collectively — eventually succeeded in establishing UMWA representation in many Harlan County mines. But the cost had been enormous. Dozens of people had been killed. Hundreds had been beaten, jailed, or driven from the county. The trauma embedded itself in the community's identity: decades later, people in Harlan County still talked about the mine wars the way people in Mississippi talked about the Civil War, as a defining event that shaped everything that followed.

Why So Violent? The Structure of Coalfield Conflict

A question that recurs whenever the Appalachian mine wars are discussed is: Why? Why were these conflicts so extraordinarily violent? Other American industries — textiles, steel, meatpacking, automobile manufacturing — had bitter labor disputes, and some of them turned violent. But nothing in American labor history approaches the sustained, organized, military-scale violence of the coalfield wars. Why was coal different?

The answer lies in the structure of the company town system described in Chapter 16, and in the geography of the coalfields themselves.

First, the totality of corporate control. In a textile mill town, a fired worker could find another job in another mill, or leave the industry entirely. In an Appalachian coal camp, a fired miner was also an evicted tenant. He was not just losing his paycheck — he was losing his home, his children's school, his family's access to the only store for miles, and his right to be physically present in the community where he lived. The company owned everything. To defy the company was to risk not just unemployment but homelessness, hunger, and exile. The stakes were existential, and existential stakes produce existential resistance.

Second, the geographic isolation of the coalfields. The narrow hollows described in Chapters 1 and 15 — the same topography that had created isolated communities for generations — also created natural fortifications and killing grounds. A hollow has one road in and one road out. The company town at the mouth of the hollow controlled that road. When miners struck, the company could seal the hollow. When miners marched, they had to advance up narrow valleys against entrenched positions on the ridges above. The terrain dictated the military character of the conflict.

Third, the private army system. Coal operators did not rely solely on public law enforcement. They hired private detective agencies — Baldwin-Felts, but also others — that functioned as corporate militaries. These men were not bound by the restraints (however imperfect) that governed public police forces. They were paid by the operators, answered to the operators, and used violence with the operators' explicit or implicit approval. When the public law enforcement apparatus was also controlled by the operators — as in Harlan County, where the sheriff was on the company payroll — there was literally no one to whom a miner could appeal for protection.

Fourth, the racial and ethnic composition of the workforce created both solidarity and vulnerability. As described in Chapter 16, the coal companies deliberately recruited workers from diverse backgrounds — white Appalachians, Black southerners, Italian and Hungarian and Polish immigrants — in part to prevent solidarity. But the shared conditions of exploitation in the coal camps often had the opposite effect: they created bonds across racial and ethnic lines that were rare in early twentieth-century America. The UMWA was one of the most racially integrated unions in the country. This interracial solidarity terrified the operators, who understood that if Black and white miners stood together, the workforce could not be divided and conquered.

Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, the absolute refusal of the coal operators to compromise. In other industries, employers might resist unions but eventually negotiate. The Appalachian coal operators, particularly in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, refused to negotiate at all. They saw unionization not as a normal part of industrial relations but as an existential threat to their entire system of control. And they were right. The company town system depended on captive labor. A union that could negotiate wages, working conditions, and housing would fundamentally alter the power relationship. The operators fought total war because they perceived the threat as total.

The result was a level of violence that had no parallel in American labor history. Not because Appalachian people were inherently more violent — the "feuding hillbilly" stereotype, as discussed in Chapter 13, was a construction designed to serve exactly this kind of narrative — but because the structural conditions of coalfield life made compromise impossible and escalation inevitable.

Interracial Solidarity in the Mines — And Its Limits

One of the most remarkable and underappreciated aspects of the Appalachian mine wars was the degree of interracial solidarity they produced. In an era when much of America was rigidly segregated — when the Ku Klux Klan was experiencing its massive 1920s revival, when lynching was a routine form of racial terror across the South, when Black Americans were systematically excluded from most labor unions — the UMWA organized Black and white miners together, in the same locals, fighting for the same demands.

This was not accidental. It was strategic, and it was ideological. The UMWA's founders understood that the coal operators' primary tool for preventing union organization was racial division. Companies recruited Black workers from the Deep South and immigrant workers from southern and eastern Europe in part because these workers had no existing ties to local communities and could be used as strikebreakers. If the union organized only white native-born miners, the operators would simply replace them with Black or immigrant labor. The only way to win was to organize everyone.

And to a remarkable degree, they did. The UMWA's coalfield locals in West Virginia and Kentucky included Black miners in leadership positions. Black miners marched at Blair Mountain alongside white miners. Black union organizers worked the coalfield camps at the same risk — and sometimes greater risk — as their white counterparts. The red bandana was worn around Black necks and white necks alike.

Primary Source Excerpt — Testimony of a Black miner, Senate hearings on the West Virginia coal fields (1921): "I joined the union because the union was the only thing that treated a colored man the same as a white man. In the mines, we all breathe the same dust. We all get the same cough. The company don't care if you're black or white when the roof falls in. Why should we care when we're fighting the company?"

But the limits of this solidarity were real and should not be romanticized. The UMWA's integration was pragmatic as much as principled. Outside the union hall and the picket line, segregation persisted. Coal camps were often divided into separate sections by race — "colored camp" and "white camp" — with separate churches, separate schools, and separate social lives. The union fought for economic justice across racial lines, but it did not always challenge the social structures of racial hierarchy that existed in the camps and communities.

And when the union was defeated — when the mine wars were lost and the UMWA's power in the southern coalfields was broken — the interracial solidarity that had been its greatest strength largely dissolved. Black miners, who had been among the most committed union supporters, were often the first to be targeted for retaliation. The operators' strategy of racial division, temporarily overcome by the urgency of the struggle, reasserted itself once the struggle was over.

The interracial solidarity of the mine wars was real, and it was meaningful, and it deserves to be remembered. But it existed within a larger context of American racism that the union movement could challenge but not overcome. The miners who marched together at Blair Mountain went home to segregated camps. The solidarity was in the fight. The inequality was in everything else.

The Redneck Bandana: Reclaiming a Name

The red bandana merits its own consideration, because the history of a symbol can illuminate the history of a struggle.

When the miners of southern West Virginia organized for the march on Blair Mountain, they needed a way to identify each other. In the confusion of a military-scale operation involving thousands of men moving through forested mountain terrain, a visible identifier could mean the difference between being shot at and being waved through. The red bandana — cheap, widely available, easily tied around the neck — became that identifier. You wore the red bandana, you were union. You were a redneck.

The term had existed before the mine wars — its etymology is debated, with some scholars tracing it to sunburned necks from outdoor labor and others to Scottish Covenanters who wore red cloth as a political symbol. But in the West Virginia coalfields, the term acquired its most politically charged meaning: a redneck was a working person who sided with labor against capital. It was a class identity, not a racial one, and it was worn with fierce pride.

The transformation of "redneck" from a term of class solidarity into a derogatory label — and then, in recent decades, into a complicated identity marker associated with rural white working-class culture — is a story of political erasure. The labor origins of the term were forgotten as the mine wars themselves were forgotten. What remained was the sound of the word, stripped of its history, available to be filled with new meanings that had nothing to do with union solidarity or class consciousness.

When you hear the word "redneck" today, you are hearing an echo of Blair Mountain. But most people do not know that, and that forgetting is not innocent.

The Suppression of Memory: How America Forgot Its Mine Wars

The mine wars were not obscure events. In their time, they were front-page national news. Blair Mountain was covered by every major newspaper in the country. The Harlan County conflicts drew prominent intellectuals, congressional investigations, and extensive media coverage. President Harding authorized the deployment of the U.S. Army. These were not minor labor disputes tucked away in some forgotten corner of the country — they were, by any objective measure, among the most significant domestic conflicts in twentieth-century American history.

And yet, by the middle of the twentieth century, they had largely vanished from the national narrative. History textbooks mentioned them in passing or not at all. The general American public had no idea that thousands of miners had fought pitched battles against private armies and the U.S. military, that aerial bombs had been dropped on American citizens, that a state had charged its own citizens with treason for demanding the right to organize.

How does a country forget something like that?

Several factors contributed to the erasure. First, the miners lost. The immediate aftermath of Blair Mountain was not union triumph but union destruction — mass indictments, the collapse of UMWA membership in southern West Virginia, and decades of continued operator dominance. History is written by the victors, and in the coalfields, the victors were the coal companies. Corporate archives sealed the records. Company-friendly historians minimized the events. The narrative of Appalachian history was shaped by the same interests that had fought the miners.

Second, the Cold War. After World War II, any labor movement that had used militant tactics or expressed class-conscious politics was vulnerable to being labeled as communist — and therefore un-American. The mine wars, with their armed insurrection, their red bandanas, and their language of class warfare, were easy targets for Cold War-era suppression. Celebrating the mine wars meant celebrating armed resistance to capitalism, and in Cold War America, that was politically dangerous.

Third, the stereotyping of Appalachian people (discussed in detail in Chapter 14 and to be examined again in Chapter 35) played a role. The "hillbilly" stereotype reduced Appalachian people to caricatures — ignorant, violent, backward. Within this framework, the mine wars could be dismissed as just more "mountain feuding," more evidence of Appalachian backwardness, rather than being understood as a sophisticated, organized labor struggle with national implications.

Fourth, the mine wars challenged a core American myth — the myth that America is a classless society where economic disputes are resolved through rational negotiation and democratic process, not through armed conflict. Acknowledging that ten thousand American workers took up arms against their employers, and that the United States government responded by deploying the Army against its own citizens, was deeply uncomfortable for a nation that preferred to locate its class conflicts safely in the past (the American Revolution, the Civil War) or safely abroad (European socialism, Soviet communism). The mine wars were too recent, too American, and too revealing to fit comfortably into the national story.

The recovery of mine wars history has been a project of the last several decades — driven by Appalachian historians, community organizations, documentary filmmakers, and the descendants of the miners themselves. The work of historians like David Alan Corbin, Lon Savage, and James Green has brought the mine wars back into the scholarly record. The 1976 documentary "Harlan County, USA," directed by Barbara Kopple, brought the coalfield labor struggle to a national audience and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. In 2009, Blair Mountain was listed on the National Register of Historic Places — a recognition that was contested by coal companies that wanted to mine the site for surface coal, a conflict that itself became a microcosm of the ongoing struggle between extraction and memory in Appalachia.

The battle to preserve Blair Mountain — both the physical site and the historical memory it represents — continues. It is a reminder that history is not something that simply "happened." It is something that is remembered or forgotten, preserved or erased, told or silenced. The mine wars happened. Whether they are part of the American story depends on who is telling it.

Primary Sources: Voices from the Mine Wars

The following excerpts are drawn from testimony, speeches, songs, and letters produced during the Appalachian mine wars. Read them not as historical artifacts but as the voices of people who were fighting for their lives.

Mother Jones, speech at Paint Creek tent colony, West Virginia (1912): "You goddamn cowards are going to sit here and let them shoot you? I've seen men with more fight in them — and they were dead! Get up. Get up and fight for your children, for your wives, for your own souls. No man was ever free who didn't fight for it. And I tell you, boys, the time for fighting is now."

Context: Delivered after the Bull Moose Special armored train fired into the tent colony. Mother Jones was in her late seventies.

Sid Hatfield, statement to reporters after the Matewan shootout (1920): "I done what any honest man would do. They came here to throw women and children out into the road. I stopped them. If that's against the law, then the law is wrong."

Context: Hatfield was acquitted of murder charges but assassinated on the McDowell County courthouse steps the following year.

Florence Reece, spoken introduction to "Which Side Are You On?" (recorded 1971): "That night the gun thugs came to our house looking for Sam. He'd gotten away, but they ransacked the house. I was there with our seven children. After they left, I took a calendar off the wall and wrote the words on the back. I didn't have to think long about the tune. It came from an old hymn. The words came from what I saw every day in Harlan County."

Context: Reece was nineteen years old when she wrote the song. She lived to be ninety, and sang "Which Side Are You On?" at labor rallies until the end of her life.

Letter from a striking miner's wife, Harlan County (1931), published in "Harlan Miners Speak": "Our children have not had milk in three weeks. The baby is sick and I cannot get medicine. My husband is a good man and a hard worker. He went into that mine every day for eleven years and never complained. All he asked was to be paid a fair wage and to have someone speak for him when the company cheated. For that they threw us out. We are living in a tent. It is November. I am asking — is this America?"

Context: The Dreiser Committee collected dozens of similar testimonies during their 1931 investigation.

Testimony of a Black miner before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, hearings on conditions in the coalfields (1921): "The colored miner and the white miner — we work side by side in that mine. The coal don't know the difference. The dust don't know the difference. The company knows the difference. They use it to keep us apart. But in the union, we are all miners, and that is the truth that scares them most."

Whose Story Is Missing?

The mine wars have been primarily documented through the accounts of white male miners, union leaders, and the operators they fought. But other voices were central to the struggle and remain underrepresented in the historical record:

• Women: Miners' wives organized food distribution, maintained tent colonies, smuggled weapons and information, and faced the same risks of violence and eviction as their husbands. Florence Reece is remembered because she wrote a famous song, but thousands of women performed equally heroic acts that went unrecorded.

• Black miners: Despite their crucial role in union organizing and at Blair Mountain, the specific experiences of Black miners in the mine wars are underrepresented in the historical literature. Their double burden — fighting both the operators and the racial hierarchy within the camps and communities — deserves more attention than it has received.

• Immigrant miners: Italian, Hungarian, Polish, and other immigrant miners participated in every major coalfield conflict, often facing additional vulnerabilities (language barriers, immigration status, nativist hostility) that native-born miners did not share.

• Children: The mine wars were fought by adults, but children lived through them — through the evictions, the tent colonies, the gunfire, the hunger. Their experiences are almost entirely absent from the historical record.

If you are completing the Community History Portfolio, this is a critical moment to investigate: Did your chosen county experience labor conflicts? What form did they take? What records survive — and what has been lost?

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

For the Community History Portfolio project, research the following questions for your selected county:

1. Mining history: Was there coal mining in your county? If so, when did it begin, when did it peak, and what companies operated there?
2. Labor organizing: Was the UMWA active in your county? Were there strikes, organizing drives, or conflicts? What form did they take?
3. Company control: Did your county have company towns? Was the county's political structure influenced by coal operators?
4. Violence: Did labor-related violence occur in or near your county? What do local newspaper archives, court records, or oral histories reveal?
5. Memory: How is the labor history of your county remembered today? Are there monuments, museums, plaques, or annual observances? Or has the history been forgotten? If forgotten — why?

Source suggestions: County historical societies, UMWA archives, state archives in Charleston (WV), Frankfort (KY), and Richmond (VA), the Appalachian Collection at Appalachian State University, the West Virginia and Regional History Center at WVU, and the Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College's Appalachian archives. Local funeral home records can be surprisingly valuable — they document deaths that official records sometimes omit.

Conclusion: The Unfinished War

The mine wars did not end in 1921, or 1935, or at any other convenient date. The conflict between labor and capital in the Appalachian coalfields continued — sometimes violently, sometimes through legal and political channels, sometimes through the slow attrition of poverty and despair — throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The Harlan County conflict of the 1970s, documented in Barbara Kopple's "Harlan County, USA," showed that the fundamental dynamics of the mine wars had not changed: miners wanted dignity and safety, operators wanted control and profit, and the state's sympathies were negotiable.

The mine wars matter not because they are relics of a vanished past but because the conditions that produced them — concentrated corporate power, captive workforces, geographic isolation, the legal authority of capital over the daily lives of workers, the willingness of the state to deploy violence on behalf of economic interests — are not relics. They have taken new forms, in new industries, in new places. The specific grievances of the coalfield miners may seem distant from the economic struggles of the twenty-first century. The structural dynamics are not distant at all.

Ten thousand miners marched on Blair Mountain because they believed that working people had a right to organize, a right to bargain, a right to be treated as citizens rather than as company property. They fought one of the largest armed battles in American history. They lost. And then their story was taken from them.

This chapter is one small act of giving it back.

Chapter Summary

The Appalachian mine wars — including the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike (1912-1913), the Matewan Massacre (1920), the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), and the Harlan County conflicts of the 1930s — constituted the deadliest labor conflicts in American history. These were not isolated incidents of "labor unrest" but a sustained class war between coal operators backed by private armies and state power, and miners — Black and white, native-born and immigrant — fighting for basic human rights. The violence was structural, produced by the total control of company towns, the geographic isolation of the coalfields, the private army system, and the absolute refusal of operators to negotiate. The interracial solidarity of the mine wars was remarkable for its era, though limited by the persistence of racial segregation in camps and communities. The suppression of mine wars history from national memory served the interests of the same corporate powers the miners fought, and the recovery of that history has been an ongoing project of the last several decades. The term "redneck" originated as a union identifier in the mine wars — a fact that has been largely erased from popular understanding.