The Coal Wars 1890 – 1930
The coal wars which ravaged the Appalachian states for more than four decades – as well as spreading to other coal mining regions across the nation – were the result of atrocious working conditions, poor wages, the company town system, and the failure of state and local governments to protect the miners and their families. The drive to unionize divided miners and ancillary workers, leading to riots, mob rule, mercenary private security forces, and considerable graft and corruption.
Professional strikebreakers and anti-union activists were used to prevent miners from forming local unions affiliated with the United Mine Workers. Since miners and their families usually lived in company towns and purchased food and supplies from company stores, the mine operators were able to use the tactics of eviction and starvation to control the behavior of their employees. Strikes were prevented or stopped by the use of armed confrontation, and mine owners often bribed local politicians to obtain the support of state militia and local sheriffs. The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency became nationally known as an army of thugs for hire to end strikes through violence.
Strikers responded by attacking the hired guns and by destroying mine company property. In West Virginia alone, from roughly 1910 through 1921, pitched gun battles between miners and security forces led to hundreds of dead, thousands of injured, including many innocent bystanders who had the misfortune of getting in the way of flying bullets. One West Virginia confrontation, known as the Battle of Blair Mountain, led to more than 10,000 armed miners engaging an estimated 2,500 sheriff’s deputies, state militia, and agents of Baldwin-Felts in a gun battle in the West Virginia woods which lasted more than a week. The President of the United States, Warren Harding, declared the entire state of West Virginia to be under martial law and deployed more than 2,000 federal troops – veterans of the First World War – to restore order.
During the Coal Wars, public sentiment ran mostly against the miners, who were depicted in the press as impeding the economic growth of the nation. Much of the press was in the pay of the large mining companies and their supporting lobbies. Many of the miners, particularly in West Virginia, were recently arrived immigrants, which contributed to the public disdain with which they were treated. Efforts to organize were viewed as socialist, un-American activities. Union membership in the east decreased steadily throughout the conflicts.
Elsewhere, by the late 1920s, most of the mines in Illinois and Colorado were unionized, but mine companies continued to battle strikes through the use of the leverage provided through the company town system. Union strike funds were insufficient to support most extended work stoppages without outside support. The coal wars and the anti-worker violence which they engendered were a long and bloody chapter in the history of labor relations in the United States, largely ignored by the history lessons in American classrooms today.