The history of actual American class war: When workers shot back

When progressives point to the structural inequality of the American economy — between the super-rich and the rest of us — right-wing commentators reflexively dismiss such questions with claims that critics are resorting to the loaded, divisive rhetoric of “class war.”

I’d suggest this response is simplistic at best, and self-serving and ahistorical at worst.

Over the past century and a half, the U.S. has seen an abundance of class struggle, much of it through unionization: Pacific Northwest loggers, Pullman railway workers in Chicago, West Coast longshoremen, gold and silver miners in the Rockies, copper and zinc miners in the Southwest and Midwestern steel and autoworkers. In some of these cases, bosses have resorted to violence against unarmed strikers, with gun-toting public and private enforcers.

More recent union drives — some successful, some not — have been largely peaceful: UPS drivers, auto workers, editorial employees, Amazon warehouse workers, Uber drivers, graduate student teachers and Starbucks servers. Unlike previous generations, these workers are likely seeking unionization to maintain their precarious middle-class status, rather than to elevate their economic class.

However, class struggle is one thing; class war — when workers shoot back at the bosses — is of an entirely different magnitude. While rare, literal class war is not unknown in America.

What brings this history to mind is Taylor Brown’s searing new novel “Rednecks,” about West Virginia’s 1921 “Battle of Blair Mountain.” The story is a reminder in these polarized times, a cautionary tale of what can happen in a real class war.

In this little-known episode in American history, coal miners — working under deadly dangerous conditions for low wages, dying of cave-ins and Black Lung — tried to organize under the United Mine Workers of America.

They confronted the economic and political power of the state’s “King Coal” mine operators, who commanded armed local, state and ultimately national forces to crush the effort. The operators utilized a secondary army of private detectives called “gun thugs” and local vigilantes. Their brutal efforts included mass firings, evictions, beatings and even murder. The final straw was the assassination of an unarmed law enforcement officer sympathetic to the miners — in broad daylight on county courthouse steps, a murder that went unpunished.

As a central “Rednecks” character explains the dynamic to his young son, political contributions and bribes accomplished the treachery: “The coal operators, the politicians, the state police, the county vigilantes. Money became influence, influence became policy, policy became force.”

Yet using such force has a downside. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy observed, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

And so it was in West Virginia.

The desperate miners mobilized a makeshift army of more than 10,000 workers from around the country, haphazardly armed but willing and able to shoot it out with the forces arrayed against them, who used machine guns and bombs dropped by private aircraft. Many of the working-class American men on the miners’ side of the fight had received their weapons training in the Great War.

“Rednecks” was the nickname the workers were given — not for sunburn in the fields, but for the red bandanas they wore to recognize each other in the wooded thickets that covered the mountain’s slopes. Despite the contemporary use of the term, the miners were anything but racist: The force was about 20 percent African Americans, some the children of formerly enslaved people, and one-third were European immigrants.

Brown said in an interview with me that the genesis for “Rednecks” was the 2017 “Unite the Right” demonstration by white nationalists in Charlottesville. Watching scenes of the march, Brown was particularly struck by conflicting images of the term “rednecks.” Some racists were waving the Confederate flag, while history-minded, progressive counter-demonstrators wore red bandanas in solidarity with the Blair Mountain miners. 

“How did the meaning of the word change so much in a hundred years?” Brown wondered, from progressive miners to racists.

The 1921 battle took place in a period of global instability, in the shadows of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, Germany’s Spartacists uprising and other European leftist movements. Class war was seen as a prelude to, if not a prerequisite for, its handmaiden, revolution. As Chairman Mao later observed, “A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

This country was on edge. Two years earlier, in 1919, Charlotte, N.C., police shot and killed five unarmed striking streetcar drivers who were marching peacefully. Fourteen others were hospitalized. None of the officers, including the police chief, was ever tried.

At one point, when it looked like the West Virginia strikers might be winning their battle, some believed that class war might catch fire in this country. So President Warren G. Harding declared martial law and dispatched infantry regiments and the nascent U.S. Army Air Corps to crush the strikers, which they did.

Why did episodes of class war like Blair Mountain not spread?

“The powers that be have just been very successful in quelling these things,” Brown told me.

Thus, it took decades to rebuild the union, but peacefully, and through the electoral process. It was only in the 1930s, with the advent of the pro-labor New Deal, that the United Mine Workers were able to unionize the counties around Blair Mountain.

“The battle lost on Blair Mountain had been won in Washington,” Brown writes in the novel’s concluding author’s note. “Thug rule in Appalachia was a dead beast walking, doomed. And yet the thunder of the battle can still be heard today … If you stand still and listen, truly listen, you can hear it echoing in our streets and valleys, here and abroad.”

Mark I. Pinsky is a journalist and the author of seven nonfiction books, including “A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed.”