"The mine war was a product of clashing economic interests and conflicting ideas of freedom, but it was also the product of men with aggressive personalities." James Green, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts and author of an earlier book about the labor movement (DEATH IN THE HAYMARKET: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America), has assembled a gritty cast of characters in this fact-rich recounting of the West Virginia mine war.

The cast of "aggressive" men included Frank Keeney, a local boy who first went down in the mines to work at age 10. Keeney quickly learned the ropes: miners were beyond tough, working without complaint and mocking those who were scared or balky (including the new boys). In crowded clumps they played with explosives in the dark underground, were regularly cheated out of their pay by various ruses dreamed up by unscrupulous rich mine operators, and were well aware of the daily possibility of death or maiming. (One West Virginia governor baldly stated, “It is but the natural course of mining events that men should be injured and killed by accidents.”) Keeney grew up to be an operative for the United Mine Workers Union, once declaring, “I haven’t left the class I was born into yet…and I hope I never will.” He came into his own as an organizer during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike of 1912, the first skirmish in the mine wars, in which both sides were armed and the miners were fighting for their livelihood as well as their lives.

"James Green, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts and author of an earlier book about the labor movement...has assembled a gritty cast of characters in this fact-rich recounting of the West Virginia mine war."

On the other side was Sheriff Don Chafin of Logan County, son of a sheriff, who despised what he saw as the insidious incursion of socialism inherent in unionism. He was paid by the mine owners to keep the UMWA out and led the operator's forces against the miners at the legendary battle of Blair Mountain.

And there were women in the fray --- not just the miners’ wives who stood fast behind the scenes, organizing meetings and rallies at schools and churches, but larger-than-life white-haired “Mother” Mary Harris Jones, an Irish widow who espoused the cause of working people, gave impassioned speeches exhorting miners to join UMWA (and shoot when shot at), and was arrested for her active role in the West Virginia wars. She was called “the miner’s angel.”

Starting with the Paint Creek Strike and ending in 1921 with the organized fracas on Blair Mountain, the conflict underscored, as perhaps no other series of events in our history, the classic divide between the workers and the bosses. Forced to lease their equipment, rent their houses from the coal operators, and buy goods at a company store, miners were at the mercy of capitalists, so not surprisingly, many of them did seek an overarching political change. But many were just fed up and saw that elsewhere, in the Midwest and Pennsylvania, through union prodding, miners had gained shorter hours, better pay and far more just working conditions. Americans outside the region easily branded the miners as bloodthirsty hillbillies until credible news gradually seeped out about the inhumane conditions they labored under. 

By the 1920s, UMWA had gotten some concessions from mine owners, and the owners had given some ground just to avoid further union footholds. By the mid-1930s, improvement of mineworkers' conditions became a piece of the New Deal jigsaw puzzle. But in recent years, there has been an undeniable resurgence of harsh feelings with the now non-violent struggles against mountain-top removal; some folks still march on Blair Mountain, using memories of the bygone days as a rallying cry to modern activism. 

Spanning a time when the Civil War was still a painful memory for the older men, and young men were returning from Europe after fighting the gory "the war to end all wars," these events, until now with Green’s account, have been largely forgotten, in some instances suppressed (not taught in local schools or discussed by the participants). Green gives the troubling era rebirth.