The Army Came to West Virginia, and the Miners Didn't Flinch

On August 1, 1921, Baldwin-Felts Agency detectives shot Sid Hatfield dead on the courthouse steps in Welch, West Virginia. They shot his deputy, Ed Chambers, too. Both men were unarmed. Their wives were there.

Hatfield had been the police chief of Matewan, a small coal-country town in Mingo County. A year earlier, in May 1920, he had stood with union miners when Baldwin-Felts agents came to evict them from company housing. A gunfight broke out. Seven detectives died, including Albert and Lee Felts, two brothers from the family that owned the agency. Hatfield walked away. The miners called him a hero. The coal operators called him a problem to be solved.

When the Baldwin-Felts men killed him in broad daylight on the Welch courthouse steps, the coalfields answered.

Within weeks, roughly 10,000 miners gathered and marched south toward Logan County. They wore red bandanas around their necks and called themselves the Redneck Army. The red bandanas were how you knew who was with you in the trees. About a quarter of the marchers were Black. About a quarter were immigrants, many of them Italian. The rest were native-born white Appalachians. In 1921, in Jim Crow America, they marched together. That is not a small thing.

The goal was Logan and Mingo counties, the last major unorganized coalfields in West Virginia, where union men sat in county jails and the United Mine Workers of America had no foothold. The coal operators there ran company towns where you lived in company housing, bought food with company scrip at the company store, and got your children educated in company schools. The union was the only exit.

Sheriff Don Chafin of Logan County, a man on the coal operators' payroll, assembled roughly 3,000 deputies and mine guards along a 15-mile ridgeline at Blair Mountain. He had machine guns. He also chartered private biplanes and equipped them with tear gas and pipe bombs packed with nuts and bolts. Those planes flew over the miners' positions and dropped what they were carrying.

The U.S. government was watching. On September 3, President Warren G. Harding dispatched four regiments of the Army, with Air Service reconnaissance planes flying over the ridgeline. The miners had been fighting for days, had fired an estimated one million rounds, and had held their positions against the private army the operators built. Then the federal Army arrived.

The miners stood down. They would not fire on U.S. soldiers. They surrendered their rifles and went home.

Hundreds faced indictment on treason charges. Bill Blizzard, who had led the march, was acquitted. Prosecutors dropped most other charges. Sheriff Chafin and the coal operators were never charged with anything.

The aftermath was blunt. UMWA membership in West Virginia collapsed from roughly 50,000 members to fewer than 1,000 in under five years. In the nonunion mines that survived the battle, more than 400 miners died each year through the 1920s. The union did not recover in West Virginia until the New Deal gave workers the legal right to organize.

The Battle of Blair Mountain is the largest armed labor uprising in the United States since the Civil War. Almost nobody learns about it in school. The operators wanted it that way, and for a long time they got what they wanted.

What they could not erase: 10,000 workers, Black and white and immigrant, who put on red bandanas and marched together against machine guns and biplanes and the U.S. Army. The operators had all the power. The miners had each other. It took everything the state could send to stop them.

Sources

• West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, "Battle of Blair Mountain"
• West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, "August 1921: The Road to Blair"
• History.com, "America's Largest Labor Uprising: The Battle of Blair Mountain"
• Zinn Education Project, "Sept. 4, 1921: Battle of Blair Mountain Ends"
• Appalachian Voices, "The Significance of the Battle of Blair Mountain, 100 Years Later"