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The Battle of Blair Mountain

Robert Shogan

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Jul 24, 2008 Werner rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history

After reading Storming Heaven [see my review of that novel] and watching the movie Matewan, I wanted to read a dependable nonfiction account of those events, so that I'd know exactly what actually happened in real life, and verify for myself how closely the fictional versions reflect the truth (the answer to the latter question turns out to be, pretty closely!). Longtime serious journalist (a veteran Washington correspondent) and now Johns Hopkins Univ. academic Shogan provides that account. His After reading Storming Heaven [see my review of that novel] and watching the movie Matewan, I wanted to read a dependable nonfiction account of those events, so that I'd know exactly what actually happened in real life, and verify for myself how closely the fictional versions reflect the truth (the answer to the latter question turns out to be, pretty closely!). Longtime serious journalist (a veteran Washington correspondent) and now Johns Hopkins Univ. academic Shogan provides that account. His relatively new history updates and supersedes Lon Savage's older book, Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War 1920-21 (which is one of the many sources Shogan used in his research) as the definitive record of these events.

The central events recorded here are the shoot-out in Matewan, WV in 1920, precipitated when town authorities and deputized miners tried to arrest a group of Baldwin-Felts "detective agency" gun thugs in the employ of the coal companies for the illegal evictions from company housing of coal miners and their families who had been fired for joining the UMW union (the houses were owned by the coal companies, but by law evictions were supposed to be handled only by the sheriff's office --partly because of the practice, of which Shogan notes instances, of coal company minions deliberately destroying miners' furniture); the subsequent trial and acquittal of Matewan police chief Sid Hatfield and others on a murder charge stemming from this gun battle; the murder by coal company gun thugs of Hatfield and his friend Ed Chambers at Welch WV in 1921, committed on the steps of the county courthouse with the collusion of local law enforcement officials, and the subsequent "acquittal" of the killers even though the county prosecutor characterized the evidence against them as "absolute;" the pitched battle at Blair Mountain later that year, when 10,000 coal miners, marching to the relief of fired coal miners and their families --who, under state martial law, were being subjected to false arrest and whose tent colonies were being violently assaulted by coal company thugs and state police acting as coal company mercenaries-- were met by a "militia" of Baldwin-Felts gang members, Logan County sheriff's deputies openly in the pay of the coal companies, and anti-union townsfolk; and the Federal military intervention which ended the fighting, but then simply restored the status quo. Shogan sets this in the context of the rise of the union movement, in WV and the U.S. as a whole, in the preceding decades, and of the subsequent developments; and explains the continuing relevance of this story for our economy and society today.

Those who demonize unions will, of course, seize upon Shogan's liberal credentials to dismiss this book as slanted propaganda tailored to slander the saintly coal magnates. That judgment, though, would be grossly false; Shogan has a basic sympathy with exploited and brutalized human beings, but his historiography is carefully balanced and tied to the record of attested facts. His research was clearly intense and scrupulous, with a bibliography (pp. 249-254) of both primary and secondary sources, in every medium, bearing on the events. Where accounts conflict, he lets the readers be the judge of their veracity; his treatment of labor heroes like Sid Hatfield and Mother Jones is not an exercise in hagiography; and he doesn't deny or excuse the fact that some union miners engaged in intimidation and sometimes violence against replacement workers (though he sets it in the context, as anti-union propaganda does not, of a regime that itself made no pretense of refraining from violence or of respecting the rule of law or the property rights of the poor). What he does deliver is a clear, jargon-free account of attested facts, in a lively style that could serve as a beneficial model for much of the academic history written today. (While he doesn't employ documentary footnotes, he has about 19 pages of endnotes, arranged by chapter and page number, giving the source material for specific statements.) And the facts speak for themselves --the miners were the victims of unspeakable, criminal abuse that makes a mockery of American democratic ideals and Christian social ethics.

A lot more could be written here, but this will suffice. In short, this is a must-read account of a too-little known chapter of American history, which continues to resonate in the present. I would recommend it to every reader in America! ...more

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