Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges

Author:Chris Hedges [Hedges, Chris; Sacco, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568584737
Publisher: Nation Books


Joe and I made our way through the underbrush up the slope of Blair Mountain with Kenny King. King is part of a group that is trying to save the mountain, slated to be destroyed for its coal seams. Blair was the site of the largest civil uprising and armed insurgency in the United States since the Civil War. In late August and early September 1921, as many as fifteen thousand armed miners, angered by a series of assassinations of union leaders and their chief supporters, as well as mass evictions, blacklists, and wholesale firings by coal companies, for five days faced militias and police, who were equipped with heavy machine guns and held back advancing miners from behind a trench system still visible on the ridge above us.

At the time of the uprising, thousands of miners and their families, thrown out of company housing because of union activity, were living in tent encampments along the Tug River. The incident that would set off the rebellion happened on May 19, 1920. Agents from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency—hired company goons referred to derisively by the miners as “gun thugs”—arrived in the town of Matewan to evict miners and their families from company houses. The local sheriff, Sid Hatfield, had turned down the usual coal company enticements to turn against the union. When Hatfield now tried to arrest the company-hired agents, a gun battle broke out, leaving ten dead, including Matewan’s mayor.60 Hatfield was indicted on murder charges but was acquitted in January 1921, which infuriated the mine owners. They had Hatfield charged after his acquittal with dynamiting a coal tipple. When Hatfield and his young wife, as well as deputy and friend Ed Chambers and his wife, walked up the courthouse steps in Welch for the new trial, they were assassinated by a group of Baldwin-Felts agents standing at the top of the stairs.61 The killings triggered the armed rebellion, with many of the Winchester rifles and handguns allegedly supplied by the United Mine Workers Union. The coal operators hastily organized militias and hired private planes to drop homemade explosives on the miners. General Billy Mitchell sent Army bombers to carry out aerial surveillance of the miners. It was only when the U.S. Army was ordered into the coalfields that the miners gave up. By the time the five days of shooting ended, perhaps one hundred miners were dead. The state of West Virginia indicted 1,217 miners for complicity in the rebellion, including charges of murder and treason. Many miners spent several years in prison. The union was effectively broken. It was not reconstituted until 1935, when the Roosevelt administration legalized union organizing.62

The physical eradication of Blair Mountain, part of the methodical destruction of southern West Virginia, will obliterate not only a peak, but also one of the most important physical memorials to the long struggle for justice. The battle marked a moment when miners came close to breaking the stranglehold of the coal companies. And its neglected slopes, soon perhaps to be blasted into rubble, are a reminder of the relentless assault of corporations.



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