Rednecks

by Taylor Brown

Here, four of five towns were coal camps, company towns that smoked from the hillsides, and miners worked ten hours per day, six and one-half days per week, paid forty cents for each long ton of coal they blew, picked, and shoveled out of the sunless dark of the mines, where collapse and explosion and sickness lurked. A land where any attempt to organize, to join a union for better pay or safer conditions, was met with these men in the street. The Baldwin-Felts, hired guns of King Coal.

For West Virginia, they’d built the Bull Moose Special, an armored locomotive that steamed past a strikers’ tent colony up on Paint Creek in ’13 with machine guns ablaze, blasting the brains of a well-loved miner across the walls of his frame house. Now they’d come to Matewan.

Mingo County, West Virginia. Sid’s town. That morning, they’d gone up to the coal camp above town and thrown out the families of every miner who’d joined the Union. While the men were at work underground, they’d forced out the wives and children at gunpoint, piled their belongings in the road, and barred the doors behind them. Quilts and kettles and hobbyhorses were hurled out into the rain, cane chairs and hanging mirrors and old war uniforms—anything the company didn’t own. Now they’d come for Sid.

“I might not have growed up in these hills, but I learnt enough in my day to know you best respect them. They got everything you need to survive and double what you don’t,

“Now you men who fought in the Great War, you were told it was a war for democracy, were you not? A war to end all wars. You went Over There, you took down the Kaiser and the German Reich. You saved the world from oppression and came home and found what? More oppression. More autocracy. A new bunch of American kaisers, men who made their fortunes on the war, on coal and steel, arms and machinery, on the blood and muscle of American fighting men, only to abuse those same men back here at home, exploiting them in their mines and mills, factories and stockyards and killing floors. Robber barons and coal czars who use gun thugs and murderers to keep you in subjection, bent-kneed before them, your voices unheard. Same as the kings of the Old World.

Sid’s face went hard, like Moo had rarely witnessed. No smile in sight. “They sent us a message. Reckon we’ll send one back.” Moo swallowed. “What kind of message?” Sid looked downriver. “One loud enough they ain’t apt to mishear it.”

The saddest day I had was in speaking at a number of points from Bluefield to Huntington, West Virginia. There had been a strike by mine workers and in the cold fall days, with a sprinkle of early snow, the miners and their wives and children had been evicted from company houses and were suffering. Worst of all, men in the Army uniform were being used by the mine owners under the pretense of “preserving order.”

–Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, 1920.

The governor, at behest of the coal operators, had asked the War Department to intervene. Five hundred soldiers from an infantry regiment out of Camp Sherman, Ohio—the first federal troops to step foot in the Tug Valley since the Civil War. Their canvas tents bloomed overnight, their guns oiled bright beneath the sun. No public assemblies would be permitted, no parades. No rallies or picket lines. The soldiers patrolled the roads with fixed bayonets. They greeted every train at the station, ensuring the influx of strikebreakers—scabs—wouldn’t be harassed. They guarded every mine.

When they arrived, the camp seemed worse than Moo had left it. A vast wreck of trampled tents and knifed foodstuffs and gunshot livestock. Pigs, chickens, even the camp’s milk cow lay dead. Mud-caked figures stooped low over the ground, hunting for household belongings, poking sticks into the muck. Someone wailed over a dead dog. Flies were everywhere, dizzy with opportunity. Musa’s face knotted up. Doc Moo thought for a moment the boy would cry. “Who done this, Papa?” Doc Moo thought a moment.

was a complicated question, in fact. The coal operators, the politicians, the state police, the county vigilantes. Money became influence, influence became policy, policy became force. And the miners were no saints, meeting violence with violence. He sighed. “Men did this, son.”

They are a hundred men at first, then two hundred. Five hundred. One thousand. An army of men rising from the earth, clad in blue-bib overalls. They hail from Italy and Poland, the Deep South and Appalachia. One in five is Black. They wear red bandannas knotted around their necks, as if their throats have already been cut. People will call them primitives and hillbillies, anarchists and insurrectionists. They will call them Rednecks.

“No armed mob will cross the Logan County line.” The Czar carried a pistol with twelve notches filed into the receiver, one for every man he’d killed—enough to make a saw file, men whispered—and maintained a small army of deputies and undercover agents who rode every train in and out of the county, hassling anyone suspected of Union business or sympathies. His men had pistol-whipped reverends for speaking well of labor unions, planted moonshine stills under the homes of Union miners, and fed prisoners plates of beans mixed with crushed glass, too fine to detect, so they writhed in torment for hours before they died.

Constitution don’t near touch these hills, seems like. It’s back to a monarchy, like Revolutionary times. Time to march on King Coal, chop the legs out under his throne. They spat hissing into the flames. This time, it would take an act of God to stop them.

“Reckon there comes a point a person just don’t care no longer. Rather get killed standing up for himself than cowering in fear.”

miners were still swarming in from every point of the compass. Word had company stores raided of arms, men in overalls training in the clearings, and Black miners eating in Jim Crow restaurants right alongside their white comrades, rifles propped against their tables. Moo feared what the country might do to put such a movement back in the ground. Moo loved America, he did. This country had attempted a “Great Experiment” for the promotion of human happiness—a written recognition that all men were created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, and the state existed to guarantee those liberties, not to impede them. In practice, those high ideals made it a nation of deep hypocrisy—a country ever on a knife’s edge, ever failing to live up to its own principles. A nation ever in conflict with itself.

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn That the Union makes us strong. Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, for the Union makes us strong.

“You ask me, Crock, there’s different Americas. America if you got means or don’t, if you work in a tie or neckerchief, up in the office or down on the killing floor. White or colored, man or woman. Native or not. I reckon there’s Americas they’d drop a bomb on, and ones they wouldn’t even think it.”

I wonder what you might call a system in which a skilled labor force the size of a small nation are made to work in conditions more dangerous than armed service in the Great War, are paid not in legal tender but company scrip, housed not in personal homes but company camps, where they and their families are given zero compensation for job-related injury or death, and any drive for better wages or safer conditions is back-broken by a private army of company spies and hired gun thugs who regularly throw families out into the cold and beat fathers with brass knuckles, who have fired machine guns into tent colonies and done cold-blooded murder in broad daylight on the front steps of an American courthouse—just last month. If not tyranny, what would you call such a system, Mr. Secretary? Certainly you wouldn’t call it American.”