Future Timeline

(In These Times) One hundred years ago this month, thousands of coal miners — along with hundreds of farmers, merchants and ministers — rallied south of Charleston, West Virginia, before marching southwest toward Mingo County to unionize its coal mines.

Their hero was Sid Hatfield, police chief of the town of Matewan in Mingo County. On a drizzly day in May 1920, Hatfield and some of his friends had gone toe-to-toe with security agents hired by the coal companies to evict miners from company housing. An ensuing gunfight left seven of the detectives dead on the main street of Matewan. A year later, Hatfield was murdered by coal-company security agents at a neighboring courthouse. As he climbed the steps, unarmed, they gunned him down. Hatfield’s murder set off the “March to Mingo,” the largest armed labor uprising in American history.

The miners experienced something that many of us learned from the Covid-19 pandemic. They were effectively essential workers, like those today who have risked their lives to keep hospitals and grocery stores functioning. No other peacetime occupation called upon men to subject themselves to the dangers mining entailed — the constant possibility of death from poisonous gasses, explosions and roof collapses that could entomb them deep in the earth. Yet no occupation was so central to the industrial power of the United States. And while we progressives now call on the United States to eliminate fossil fuels of every kind and shut down every coal mine to stave off the worst effects of climate change, we should recognize miners as brave and maligned workers who deserve retraining for new occupations — and financial security.

Since 1890, miners had been organizing locals of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), often at great risk. Politicians, managers, and the police all panicked at the idea of a multi-racial union made up of southern whites, European immigrants and African Americans. In violation of the state constitution, the political leadership of West Virginia allowed mining companies to brutally crush any effort by miners to unionize….