The Battle of Blair Mountain

The Battle of Blair Mountain

Rob Feltner 10-30-08 History 143- DA Professor Swenson In 1920 there was a war in the West Virginia hills, a real war with real soldiers and real deaths. It was a battle between coal miners and coal company operators. Robert Shogan, a political correspondent and historian, has told its story with The Battle of Blair Mountain. Shogan brings immediacy to the story by looking closely at details of the war and also at the larger social movements within the nation and the world. He produces a tense narrative that lets up only when the fate of the lost cause of the miners is decided in the final chapter. After the labor calm during the World War, labor tension was highest in West Virginia. Mining was inherently a back-breaking and dangerous job. The mine owners often cheated on their own work rules, deliberately fudging the loads of coals cars so that miners would get paid for less coal dug. The Stone Mountain Coal Company did everything it could to prevent unionization; it reminded the miners that they not only owed their jobs to the company but also the very houses in which their families lived, and that anyone who joined a union would lose it all. The Battle for Blair Mountain was sparked after company police came to Matewan to throw families out of their homes. Their arrival would set off a chain reaction of violence that would rock the government of West Virginia to its foundations and at the same time challenge the Federal government in Washington, testing the will and nerve of the highest officials in the nation.[1] Resentment eventually took form of a march the miners planned, and some dreamed of marching to free union organizers from the jails in which they were held and then bringing an end to martial law. Shogan writes that the uprising was “the largest armed uprising on American soil since the Civil War.” With the federal military involved, the outcome was not surprising, although it was a real battle, with roaring machine guns and pincer...

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