The Devil Is Here in These Hills Quotes

“Something extraordinary happened on Spruce Fork Ridge that day: For the first and only time, American citizens were subjected to aerial bombardment on their own soil.”
― James R. Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

“Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the Supreme Court’s newest member, wrote a dissenting opinion in which he argued that the union had pursued peaceful, legal means to a legitimate end; that miners who joined the union had no intention to injure their employer’s business; and finally that the UMWA could not be judged an illegal organization under an antitrust law Congress had aimed at monopoly corporations. In Brandeis’s view, the court’s majority naively assumed that Hitchman’s miners freely chose to sign yellow dog contracts. Like his fellow justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Brandeis believed there could be “no liberty of contract where there was no equality of bargaining position.” Under modern industrial conditions, Holmes had written, it was natural for a worker to believe that he could not secure a fair contract unless he belonged to a union. On this basis, Justice Holmes and one other member of the high court joined in Brandeis’s dissent.”
― James R. Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

“Feeling the heat, Governor Hatfield released Mother Jones on May 7. The next day she appeared in the Senate gallery and applauded when Senator Kern’s call for an investigation passed by a voice vote. Acting largely on her own, one woman had done more than the nation’s top union leaders to alert reformers to the suppression of civil liberties in industrial America.”
― James R. Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

“Meanwhile, Mother Jones and strike leaders decided to raise a hue and cry in the state capital by marching through Charleston with three thousand strikers and their supporters. At a rally, a stenographer hired by the operators transcribed a speech by Mother Jones, who told the assembly to expect no help from that “goddamned dirty coward” Governor Glasscock, whom, she added wickedly, “we shall call ‘Crystal Peter.”
― James R. Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

“But Elliott found no signs of “Christian civilization” on Paint Creek, for there, he observed, the mine owners’ quest for “dividends” had led to the degradation and impoverishment of their employees. “God does not walk in these hills,” the general concluded. “The devil is here in these hills, and the devil is greed.”
― James R. Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

“The conflict in West Virginia seemed warlike because of the huge arsenals assembled by both sides, the number of mercenaries the mine operators employed, the guerrilla tactics the strikers adopted, the four deployments of National Guard troops the governor ordered, and the abiding hatreds the clash created. As a result, the first West Virginia mine war embodied all the evils of class warfare that frightened so many Americans during the Progressive Era.”
― James R. Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

“Red Ash mine was also the location of a disaster in 1900, which killed forty-six miners. This earlier catastrophe outraged Mother Jones, who spoke of it often on her organizing campaign that year, and it had triggered public pressure to improve the state’s mine safety laws. The legislature rejected all proposals for reform, however. The lawmakers apparently agreed with West Virginia’s Republican governor, G. W. Atkinson, who said in 1901: “It is but the natural course of mining events that men should be injured and killed by accidents.”
― James R. Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom