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bloodygranuaileAfter many years of being like “I’ve got to read this book next,” I did in fact read James R. Green’s The Devil Is Here In These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and their Battle for Freedom. More specifically, the book club graciously agreed to read it with me after I’d suggested it several times, thus prompting me to actually do so.
Overall I found this a really good read. It’s got it all: strikes, murder, leftist infighting, heroic underdogs, spy stuff, explosions, flooding of Biblical proportions, the lot. We’ve got cameos from big-name labor history leaders like Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, and we meet lesser-known-outside-of-West-Virginia folks like Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney. We meet lots of Hatfields (not as many McCoys, though).
One thing that sticks out to me as a modern socialist is that the West Virginians who took on the mine owners and their private guards were a politically mixed bunch who fought on every front at their disposal. They held rallies, they ran elections for political office, they unionized, they picketed, they talked to the press, they published their own press, they sued, they stole guns and sabotaged industrial equipment and had shootouts. Truly the whole gamut of tactics. And it wasn’t neatly divided up into, like, the business unionists did electoral work and the anarchists toted guns, or anything that neat and simple. The same people who supported more “moderate” tactics in one controversy would sometimes back the more “extreme” ones in another. The first time the National Guard was called in, most of the miners were pleased to have federal forces show up instead of just the coal companies’ private rent-a-cops; Mother Jones was one of a relatively small number of more radical voices in the picture who presciently warned that state power could never really be the miners’ friend and would eventually be turned to putting the strikers in line (she was right about this, of course). Later, when the strikers decided to march to the state capital to spring their brethren from jail, Jones went so far as to fake having received a telegram from the President to try to get them to stand down. Frank Keeney was usually one of the more militant “red” minority voices and butted heads with the more business-unionist head of the NMWA; he was also one of the people pushing the mine workers to go all-out on patriotism and shit during WWI. Turns out labor history is full of people after all, and people are contradictory and contain multitudes.
I feel like I learned a lot from this book but I will have to cudgel my brains a bit to come up with some good discussion questions. Maybe my brain is just tired but I’m basically like “I learned a lot of things! I don’t have questions about them ‘cause I learned them now!” so it’s clearly time to wake up my dormant brain cells.
Overall I found this a really good read. It’s got it all: strikes, murder, leftist infighting, heroic underdogs, spy stuff, explosions, flooding of Biblical proportions, the lot. We’ve got cameos from big-name labor history leaders like Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, and we meet lesser-known-outside-of-West-Virginia folks like Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney. We meet lots of Hatfields (not as many McCoys, though).
One thing that sticks out to me as a modern socialist is that the West Virginians who took on the mine owners and their private guards were a politically mixed bunch who fought on every front at their disposal. They held rallies, they ran elections for political office, they unionized, they picketed, they talked to the press, they published their own press, they sued, they stole guns and sabotaged industrial equipment and had shootouts. Truly the whole gamut of tactics. And it wasn’t neatly divided up into, like, the business unionists did electoral work and the anarchists toted guns, or anything that neat and simple. The same people who supported more “moderate” tactics in one controversy would sometimes back the more “extreme” ones in another. The first time the National Guard was called in, most of the miners were pleased to have federal forces show up instead of just the coal companies’ private rent-a-cops; Mother Jones was one of a relatively small number of more radical voices in the picture who presciently warned that state power could never really be the miners’ friend and would eventually be turned to putting the strikers in line (she was right about this, of course). Later, when the strikers decided to march to the state capital to spring their brethren from jail, Jones went so far as to fake having received a telegram from the President to try to get them to stand down. Frank Keeney was usually one of the more militant “red” minority voices and butted heads with the more business-unionist head of the NMWA; he was also one of the people pushing the mine workers to go all-out on patriotism and shit during WWI. Turns out labor history is full of people after all, and people are contradictory and contain multitudes.
I feel like I learned a lot from this book but I will have to cudgel my brains a bit to come up with some good discussion questions. Maybe my brain is just tired but I’m basically like “I learned a lot of things! I don’t have questions about them ‘cause I learned them now!” so it’s clearly time to wake up my dormant brain cells.