The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising (review)

Robert Shogan ends his well-researched book, The Battle of Blair Mountain,with this one-paragraph conclusion:

The rebellion of the West Virginia miners was defeated. But the example they set should help sustain all citizens, in and out of the labor movement, who believe that the principles the Red Bandanna Army fought for, economic fairness, political justice and human dignity, will, as Faulkner famously said of the spirit of mankind, not only endure but prevail.

The sentiment is obviously hopeful, but one wonders from whence it comes, given the tragedy Shogan paints in his book. If anything, Blair Mountain shows more evidence of the futility of such struggle under our form of capitalist democracy than anything else. Indeed, Shogan diligently explains the broad and detailed circumstances of the time and geography that created the West Virginia Mine Wars and the seemingly inevitable defeat of the miner's union in that state.

Most people interested in the American labor movement have at least a small knowledge about this dramatic and exciting, though ultimately tragic, chapter in American history, many by way of John Sayles' 1987 movie, Matewan. Slogan picks up where Sayles finished and tells the rest of the story: how some 10,000 miners marched fully armed through the mountains of southern West Virginia to release their brother miners from a jail in the town of Logan. Shogan's chapters give us a picture of the backdrop of these events in order to explain why they unfold as they do. We see Woodrow Wilson's conservative-drifting government, his intolerance of dissidents beginning with those who spoke out against World War I, the "Red Scare" and the Palmer raids, and the change of governorship in West Virginia from a politician supported by the miner's union to one supported by the mine operators. A political chess game develops with all the queens and bishops on capital's side and only pawns on labor's.

Much of the book turns on the decision whether or not to send troops to suppress the miners' march. In the end, powers in West Virginia's and the nation's capitals could not allow the possibility of a near insurrection by the miners and their supporters to sweep over the ruthless culture of the mine operators' enforcers, the Felts-Dobbs Detective Agency. The government was infuriated with Felts-Dobbs' lawlessness but sided with them when the battle became pitched between labor and capital. It causes one to search for instances when the government has ever interceded on the part of ordinary people struggling for justice.

The heart and center of this dramatic story is that of a marshal of local justice, Sid Hatfield, the chief of police of Matewan, who challenges the Felts-Dobbs agents' legitimacy in a bloody gun battle that results temporarily in the defeat of the mine owners. But the only lesson the reader can draw from this book, if taken on its own, is that such victories are temporary and in the end, capital wins.

We struggle on despite this knowledge, somehow finding inspiration within. That is what we call hope (with a small ingredient of faith) and why we do endure, if not prevail.