American Experience

The Mine Wars

In the spring of {1921}, efforts by West Virginia coal miners to join a union leads to the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War.

AIRED SEPTEMBER 3, 2019
The Mine Wars
THE DESIRE FOR DIGNITY RUNS DEEP.

Film Description
At the dawn of the 20th century, coal was the fuel that powered the nation. Yet few Americans thought much about the men who blasted the black rock from underground and hauled it to the surface. The Mine Wars tells the overlooked story of the miners in the mountains of southern West Virginia — native mountaineers, African American migrants, and European immigrants — who came together in a protracted struggle for their rights. Decades of violence, strikes, assassinations and marches accompanied their attempts to form a union, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. The West Virginia mine wars raised profound questions about what freedom and democracy meant to working people in an industrial society.

Battle of Blair Mountain

Part of the West Virginia Coal Wars


Cover of The Washington Times with the headline that the US airfleet has been sent into West Virginia.

{The Washington Times that is currently being published is a different newspaper entirely.}

Date: August 25 to September 2, 1921
Location: Logan County, West Virginia

The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest labor uprising in United States history and one of the largest organized armed uprisings since the American Civil War. The conflict occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, as part of the Coal Wars, a series of early-20th-century labor disputes in Appalachia. Up to 100 people were killed, and many more arrested. The United Mine Workers saw major declines in membership, but the long-term publicity led to some improvements in working conditions.

For five days from late August to early September 1921, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers (called the Logan Defenders) who were backed by coal mine operators during the miners' attempt to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields when tensions rose between workers and mine management. The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired and the United States Army intervened by presidential order, which was represented by the West Virginia National Guard.

{snip}

Legacy

In the short term the battle was an overwhelming victory for coal industry owners and management. UMW membership plummeted from more than 50,000 miners to approximately 10,000 over the next several years, and it was not until 1935—following the Great Depression and the beginning of the New Deal under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—that the UMW fully organized in southern West Virginia.

{snip}

Future of site

Starting in the summer of 2006 a local hobby archeologist, Kenneth King, led a team of professional archeologists to further investigate the battlefield. King and the team's initial survey "mapped 15 combat sites and discovered more than a thousand artifacts, from rifle and shotgun shell casings to coins and batteries [and] little sign of disturbance" to the site, challenging earlier surveys conducted by Arch. In April 2008, Blair Mountain was chosen for the list of protected places on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP).

The site was accepted, and added to the NRHP list on March 30, 2009, although clerical errors by the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) failed to notarize all objections. In mid-2010, "Subsidiaries of two of the United States' largest coal producers — Arch Coal, Inc., and Massey Energy Company, ... — hold permits to blast and strip-mine huge chunks of the upper slopes and ridge of Blair Mountain, removing much of the mountaintop.", National Geographic reported.

In October 2012 a federal district judge ruled that a coalition of preservation groups did not have standing to sue to protect the historic site. On August 26, 2014, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit voted 2-1 to overturn the ruling and returned the case.

In April 2016 the order to remove the Blair Mountain battlefield from the National Register was overturned by a federal court, and the further decision to add the site back to the register was turned over to the Keeper of the National Register. On June 27, 2018, the Keeper's Office decided that the 2009 decision to remove the site from its listings was "erroneous" and issued a statement confirming that as of that date the site was again on the National Register.

{snip}