One By One The Mines Reopened

Governor Morgan’s frantic appeals to Washington drew a stinging rebuke from General Bandholtz, who said the miners’ march would never have been resumed had it not been for the “injudicious” behavior of Captain Brockus and his men at Sharpies. However, on Wednesday, August 31, President Harding was induced to intervene. Within two hours the news flashed that he had issued a formal ultimatum to the miners: Whereas the Governor of West Virginia represents that domestic violence exists in said state which the authorities of said state are unable to suppress … now, therefore I, Warren G. Harding, President of the United States, do hereby command all persons engaged in such unlawful and insurrectionary proceedings to disperse and retire peacefully to their respective abodes on or before 12 o’clock noon on the first day of September, 1921.…

General Bandholtz was immediately dispatched to Charleston to enforce the terms of the proclamation, copies of which were dropped over the battle lines from airplanes. At the same time regiments at Camp Dix, New Jersey, Camp Sherman, Ohio, and Fort Knox, Kentucky, were put on battle alert and special trains held in readiness to take them to the scene of trouble. An air squadron at Langley Field, Virginia, was similarly alerted.

The general and his staff arrived at the West Virginia capitol on Thursday morning. When the noon deadline came without news of whether the cease-fire had been observed—communications with the battle zone were virtually nonexistent—he set out on a personal inspection tour. Keeney and Mooney were nowhere to be found; they had been indicted for murder the day before by a grand jury in Mingo County and were hiding out from process servers. At Sharpies late that afternoon, however, Bandholtz encountered an even higher union official, Philip Murray from the national headquarters of the UMW in Washington, who told them that only a few miles farther down the road the fighting was continuing as furious as ever. “These men will give up their arms when the federal troops come in to protect them,” Murray said. “But they won’t stop now just to be slaughtered by. Don Chafin and his army of assassins.”

Shortly after midnight Bandholtz wired the War Department that the Presidential proclamation was being ignored and asked that troops be sent immediately. Within hours the regiments held in readiness began boarding trains bound for West Virginia, and soon after thirteen DeHaviland airplanes armed with bombs, machine guns, and ammunition left Langley Field to support the federal troops.

The soldiers with their packs and trucks and mule trains arrived during the day Saturday. Charleston declared a holiday to welcome the “liberators.” The streets were hastily decked with flags and bunting; church ladies and Boy Scouts offered them coffee and sandwiches; Legionnaires strutted about, and excited citizens craned their necks to stare in awe as the arriving planes roared overhead. But the soldiers had little time for such amenities. They boarded boxcars and flats in the c&o freight yards and chuffed off by varying routes in the direction of Logan. An eyewitness account of their arrival on the fighting front was supplied by Boyden Sparks in a story he wrote for Leslie’s Weekly:

…Capt. John J. Wilson’s command of 150 picked Regulars traveled by night to the scene of hostilities. The engine of the troop train pushed ahead of it three flat cars, two soldier lookouts riding at the very front. Forty-five minutes ahead of it, although Capt. Wilson was then unaware of it, there traveled a commandeered train loaded with miners going to the front.

Two hours after the start from St. Albans, the troop train entered Madison, the unionized seat of Boone County. … The bugler sounded ‘assembly.’ ‘Packs and guns!’ shouted a sergeant. ‘Fall in.’

Buckling on their heavy packs each rolled as neatly and smoothly as a stove pipe … the Regulars dropped to the cinder-covered right of way. … Outposts with machine guns were sent up and down the tracks. Sentries were stationed at 5 yard intervals 50 yards up the hillsides from the train. As the last of these took his post Blizzard appeared and accosted Capt. Wilson.

‘William M. Blizzard, subdistrict president of the United Mine Workers’ he introduced himself. He was young, wiry, dark-eyed, cordial and convincing. … [He] wore a weather-beaten black-felt narrow-brimmed hat, pulled low over his eyes. … his suit appeared to have been slept in for a week.…

‘Are you the general of the miners’ army?’ he was asked.

‘What army?’ countered Blizzard with a smile. … ‘I guess the boys’ll listen to me, all right. I just told the captain here that if he’ll send a squad of his Regulars up the line with me I can get all of our fellows out of the hills by daylight.…

Then he spoke to a man standing nearby. This individual trotted away to crank up a flivver, and a few minutes later Blizzard was on his way up the line. What he did when he arrived can only be surmised, but when the Regulars moved on up to Sharpies at daybreak a few hours later, the miner fighters were coming out of the hills. Their guns had been hidden, probably far back in the black recesses of old coal mines. Their red badges had been snatched off. They were simply a swarm of stubbly-faced men getting out of the hills and back to their homes. … But it was Blizzard who started them out.

Similar scenes occurred at other points along the battle line, and by Sunday evening the Red Neck Rebellion had passed into history. The combatants on both sides laid down their arms and turned homeward. One by one the mines reopened, the refugees came out of hiding, and life in the Logan and Mingo coalfields resumed its normal pattern. The soldiers remained for a couple of weeks, but in time they, too, returned to their home bases.

Peace had come to West Virginia, but it was a bitter, precarious peace that in the miners’ view had been imposed by force. As so often in the past “the law” had come down on the side of their “oppressors.” And in retrospect this seems to have been true. Their quarrel had been, not with the federal government, but with the private operators of the coal mines and a state administration that had conspired with them to ignore the miners’ rights. Most of the miners’ grievances, in fact, had specific remedies in state statutes—the private hiring of sheriffs’ deputies, for example, was expressly forbidden by state law—but the governor’s invariable response to such complaints was that relief should be sought through the courts. The courts were as unsympathetic toward the miners as the statehouse. They had repeatedly upheld the yellow-dog hiring contract and the “master and servant” tenancy relationship, both of which were subsequently upset by federal courts. And the political bent of the judiciary was underscored by the example of a Logan County circuit judge who resigned the bench shortly after the event to become a chief prosecution counsel for the operators in criminal action against the union leaders.

So from the standpoint of the miners the net result of federal intervention had only been to restore an unsatisfactory status quo. Hundreds of families continued to live meagerly in tent colonies. Thousands of miners were blacklisted from employment. The Baldwin-Felts men and sheriffs’ deputies were restored to authority. Keeney, Mooney, and Blizzard were dismissed from their union posts by John L. Lewis, the new UMW president, whom they had failed to consult; and the three men as well as over a hundred other leaders of the miners’ uprising were indicted for, among other things, treason against the sovereign state of West Virginia.

Their trial turned out to be a farce. After elaborate maneuvers a change of venue was granted from the openly hostile atmosphere of Logan County to the more placid environs of the old courthouse at Charles Town, which the abolitionist John Brown had made famous more than sixty years earlier. But Charles Town did not remain placid long. When the special trainload of defendants arrived and were marched manacled through the streets, the citizens created an uproar of resentment. They erupted again when, on the opening day of the trial, it developed that prosecution of the treason charge, including the payment of jurors’ fees, was exclusively in the hands of counsel for the Logan County Coal Operators Association and that there was not so much as an observer from the state attorney general’s office in attendance. The trial dissolved into a shambles when Harold W. Houston, the chief defense attorney, won a ruling from the bench that each defendant had to be tried separately and that there had to be two witnesses to each overt act of treason if the charges were to be sustained. This proved an insurmountable obstacle for the prosecution, and after many continuances and changes of venue the treason charges were dismissed, although ultimately a few miners were convicted on lesser counts.

For all their violence and suffering the miners got nothing in return. The Logan and Mingo fields continued to be off limits to the union, and in 1922 the UMW, having poured more than two million dollars into the cause, abandoned the effort to organize them. They remained predominantly nonunion until the passage of the Wagner Act in the early years of the New Deal.

The operators won the battle but lost the war. They preserved for a time the principle of the nonunion shop. But on the heels of their labor troubles came the depressions of the mid-twenties and of the nineteen thirties and after that the devastating competition from fuel oil. The industry shrivelled and scores of operators were forced to the wall, and it remained for decades a sick industry.

If there was a remnant of glory left over from this forlorn epic, it finally rested like a faded mantle about the shrunken shoulders of Frank Keeney. He had done his honest best to turn the marchers back from their foolhardy excursion—not once but several times. But his loyalty to their basic goal had been constant, and when the national union abandoned the southern counties, he broke with it and tried to organize an independent union. This, too, failed, although in the effort he sacrificed his home, his savings, and his future status with the UMW. Until late 1969, when he, too, died, he was the last survivor of the old Red Neck general staff and held occasional court on the street corners of downtown Charleston for the aging veterans of The March—the last great insurrection—who now and then wandered up to the city.

As for the state of West Virginia, its harvest was a bad name among people of good conscience. Public opinion had been largely against—or at least apathetic toward—the miners, and most other unionists as well, when the decade of the twenties began. Organized labor was equated in a vague, fearful sort of way with bomb throwers and Bolsheviks. But the march on Logan, emblazoned in the newspapers and investigated by Congress, turned up another face of the coin. The human misery of the tent colonies, the harsh peonage of the mine towns and the yellow-dog contract, the shocking spectacle of a trial for treason reputedly being conducted by private prosecutors at private expense—such “discoveries” outraged thousands of citizens across the country who had virtually no opinions about the labor movement but very strong ones about injustice. West Virginia was where it happened, so West Virginia must be responsible, they reasoned. It could be because of some lingering sense of corporate guilt that there is nowhere in the state archives at Charleston today a single official report, document, or letter relating to this historic happening, although scores of them were written.

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