A West Virginia judge has granted Frontier Communications a temporary restraining order against its protesting employees. Roughly 1,400 Frontier Communications employees in West Virginia and Ashburn, Virginia, represented by the Communication Workers of America have been striking since March 4 after union leaders and the company failed to reach a contract agreement.
Original Story Published March 16 :
About 1,400 Frontier Employees have been on strike in various locations across West Virginia for the past two weeks.
On Thursday afternoon, March 15, telecommunications firm Frontier Communications filed an injunction in Kanawha County Circuit Court against those protesting employees, asking the court to force them to leave company property.
In the injunction, Frontier alleges that some of the striking employees “have embarked down a dangerous and lawless road throughout Kanawha County and elsewhere in West Virginia.” The company claims that there have been “threats of violence against Frontier’s employees and contractors and actual violence against Frontier’s employees and contractors.”
The Communication Workers of America, which represents the striking Frontier employees responded to the injunction, calling it “an overreaction by the company to the lawful activity of our striking members. The court has given the parties until Monday evening to come to an agreement on the parameters of that activity during this strike, and we will work to ensure that our members’ rights are protected.”
Credit Kara Lofton/ WVPB
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Frontier employees Gene Hall and Benjamin Norman, CWA union members on strike outside Frontier building in downtown Charleston.
One of the more than 1,000 workers on strike, Timmyle Larrabee, was picketing in downtown Charleston, outside the Frontier building on Lee Street on Thursday afternoon. She said better pay isn’t the main concern for her. “We’re more concerned about job stability. We’re finding more and more of our positions are going out to third-party vendors, both domestic and abroad, but certainly very few of them to our home state of West Virginia.”
West Virginia Public Broadcasting reached out to Frontier Communications, but the company declined an interview and wouldn’t disclose the number of positions the company contracts out to third-party vendors. They also wouldn’t say how many positions they’ve cut in West Virginia in the past year.
“Our objective in these negotiations has been, and continues to be, to preserve good jobs with competitive wages and excellent benefits while addressing the needs of our ever-changing business,” a Frontier spokesperson said in an email.
The company would not comment further on the status of negotiations with the union or its employees.
The nine-day teachers’ strike in West Virginia made headlines across the country, and some are wondering what the events mean for state’s political landscape. How did a widespread labor strike, a practice normally associated with Democrats, happen in a state that voted so heavily for Donald Trump?
We wanted to take a step back to explore how politics have been changing here over the past generation. West Virginia has been dubbed the heart of Trump Country, but politics here are anything but straightforward.
The strike wasn’t organized solely by Democrats or Republicans, or even union bosses. But some, like Angela Nottingham, a seventh grade social studies teacher from Cabell County, said the action changed how they plan to vote this year. Nottingham said she switched from Independent to Democrat after watching some Senate Republicans fight against the pay increase teachers were demanding.
“I know there are a lot of people out there that are Republican and kind of vote with their party. I think a lot of people are gonna look back at who supported them. And I really do think they, and the people around them, and the people they influence, will vote for the people who helped us out,” Nottingham said.
In 2016, President Trump received nearly 70 percent of votes cast in West Virginia.
Credit Kara Lofton/ WVPB
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woman attending protests at state capitol on March 6 to rally for teacher raises in W.Va.
West Virginia has a Republican governor, and Republicans control both houses of the state Legislature.
And yet, more voters in the state are registered as Democrats than Republicans. In Wyoming County, for example, President Trump won 83 percent of votes, even though more than twice as many voters in this county are registered as Democrats, compared with Republicans.
Could Democrats gain back some ground in the Mountain State?
With the midterm election around the corner, we wanted to get a sense of where we’re headed, so West Virginia Public Broadcasting polled more than 900 teachers and school personnel in an anonymous, online survey. This was not a scientific poll designed by statisticians, but it did give us some interesting insights.
About half of the teachers we surveyed said they identify as Democrats, while nearly 30 percent said they are Republicans. A majority said they voted for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as their first choice for president in 2016.
A majority (36 percent) said they plan to re-elect U.S. Senator Joe Manchin. An overwhelming majority (97 percent) of those who live in the state’s Third Congressional District in southern West Virginia — the seat currently held by U.S. Rep. Evan Jenkins, a Republican — said they plan to vote for Richard Ojeda.
Both Ojeda, who’s currently serving in the state Senate, and Manchin are Democrats. That is, West Virginia’s version of a Democrat.
A Different Kind of Democrat
Democrats in West Virginia held the majority in the state Legislature for more than 80 years. More than half of our governors have been Democrats. But, as political science professor Rob Rupp explained, the Democrats in the Mountain State have traditionally been a populist party, pro-labor and socially conservative.
Rupp, a professor at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, posited that three are three political parties in America: Republican, Democrat and West Virginia Democrat.
“And by that I mean you have kind of a hybrid party, a big tent where conservatives, moderates and liberals all joined,” unique to West Virginia.
Rupp has spent most of his career studying what he called “West Virginia’s slow motion realignment towards the red” in this state, and he said that shift has been happening for a long time. But, he argued, it rose to the surface about 15 years ago. President Bill Clinton was fairly popular here, but Democrats on the national stage since have failed to resonate with voters in this pro-coal state.
“And now [Democrats] are realizing that to many West Virginia voters, the national Democratic Party is out of touch with the state voters,” Rupp said.
This shift didn’t happen overnight. Rupp and other political scientists said one reason for the change is the declining power of unions. Labor has had a strong influence on politics here since the 1930s, and labor unions have typically sided with Democrats.
But in West Virginia, Democrats are far more conservative than the national party: They’re pro-coal, and they usually side with conservatives on social issues, like gay rights, abortion and immigration.
Rupp said now we’re seeing the breakup of that hybrid, West Virginia-style Democrat, a change that could have national implications. West Virginia may be a bellwether for rural America, and for the national Democratic party.
“And now with the loss of power was seeing a struggle between, should the Democratic Party turn left or should it turn right, now that it suddenly finds himself in minority.”
But with the recent teachers’ strike, some people are wondering if the Democrats, could stand a chance of regaining power in West Virginia. And what kind of Democrats could get elected? Ones that lean progressive? Or will they need to look more like the West Virginia Democrats of the past?
One example of the traditional-style West Virginia Democrat is state Senator Richard Ojeda. He’s running for Congress in southern West Virginia and he says he voted for Trump, but he’s been disappointed by the President’s performance. He strongly supports labor unions, and was one of the teachers’ loudest supporters during the recent strike.
But if Democrats like Ojeda want to take back power in West Virginia and across Appalachia, they’ll have to figure out one big question: how to bring back jobs to coal country.
Former coal miner Nick Mullins, who blogs at The Thoughtful Coal Miner, said liberals haven’t done enough during the past decade to appeal to working class voters in Appalachia.
“To be frank and honest [Democrats] need to come off of their moral high horses and come back down to the level of the working class,” said Mullins, a registered Independent from southwest Virginia, who said he didn’t vote in the November 2016 election.
“The working class needs help. We’re facing longer hours or stagnant wages. People aren’t enjoying life right now because they’re having to work so hard and long to just have a little bit of happiness in their lives.”
Gwynn Guilford is a reporter for Quartz, a business news site. She specializes in writing about the economy. Guilford spent 10 months researching Appalachia’s economy for an article called “The 100-year capitalist experiment that keeps Appalachia poor, sick, and stuck on coal”. Guilford dug into the history of the region’s economic ties to the coal industry, and the long-term effects this relationship has had on the people who live and are determined to stay in Appalachia.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting reporter Roxy Todd spoke with Guilford about her report.
Roxy Todd: Gwynn, let’s start with how you became interested in researching the economic landscape in Appalachia, how it affects workers, and coal bosses.
Gwynn Guilford: In early 2017, I began researching U.S. mortality rates, which were drawing a great deal of media attention due to “deaths of despair,” in particular, opioid-related deaths. I wondered whether the focus on opioid deaths — which in the grand scheme of things, don’t kill anywhere near as many people as, say, heart disease — was obscuring other trends.
Looking at national data wasn’t very helpful, given the huge variation in health from one place to the next. So I started looking at maps of health data and mortality rates and trying to learn more about conditions in geographic pockets where things were particularly grim.
Again and again, the patch that I later came to understand was central Appalachia leapt out. Though, obviously, overdose rates were indeed frighteningly high in central Appalachia, what struck me was the breadth and consistency of health problems there across the board. I thought, “Geez, there’s a much bigger story about what’s happening here than opioids alone” and started trying to learn more.
My go-to strategy for trying to figure out anything is to start studying its history. Up to that point, my familiarity with central Appalachia came from stories I’d read about coal and opioids in central Appalachia while I covered the Trump campaign for Quartz in 2016, and due to the popularity of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy as a sort of Rosetta Stone translating the source of Appalachia’s problems for outsider politicians and journalists. In other words, I didn’t know much!
I was lucky that one of the first people I happened to talk to — Nick Mullins, whom I found through his blog,The Thoughtful Coal Miner — was deeply conversant in the region’s industrial past (Nick’s family history ends up being the opening of my story). The more I learned about these (to me, bizarre) forces that shaped the region’s economy — e.g. absentee land ownership, coal camps, the drafting of the WV constitution, the patterns of coercion that gave rise to Matewan and the Battle of Blair Mountain — the more astonished I was by how little of this vital context made its way into media coverage or the wider American public’s understanding of central Appalachia’s challenges.
Credit Roger May for Quartz
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Former coal miner Nick Mullins
Two other things surprised me: First, how much of what I’d learned from writing about economic development — particularly on China’s economic growth model, deindustrialization, economic complexity, and the inclusiveness of economic and political institutions — applied to this patch of America, too. The other thing was that these problems weren’t unforeseen.
On the contrary, way back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, West Virginia politicians and tax authorities were already bemoaning what coal’s outsize influence on the state’s economic structure and incentives would do to future generations. They were clearly right to worry.
RT: How do you think Appalachia’s economy is a lesson for the rest of the country, about capitalism, and about the extractive industry?
GG: The “capitalist experiment,” as I envisioned it, was based first of all on the coal camp system — basically, the question of “what happens to social fabric and economic life when you privatize individual communities all across a region?” And the results aren’t good. Governments permitted individual companies to exert such absolute control over economic and social life that they could low-ball miners on wages in order to ensure profit margins. To use the concept pioneered by economist Joan Robinson, they enjoyed monopsony power. As the lone employer in a given town, they barred competition of other industries that might give people other economic choices and other skills to learn, thereby bidding up wages. Central Appalachia’s coal industry boomed in large part because, by suppressing workers’ wages, it outcompeted competitors from other (unionized) regions on price, encouraging even more expansion. Much of the industry’s growth came out of the pockets of mining households.
This vicious cycle crippled the long-term growth of central Appalachia’s economic base. Since most of this profit flowed out of the area, instead of being reinvested, it drained the region’s natural wealth and human capital even more. Continued reliance on the coal industry to create jobs and growth has shifted political and economic power increasingly away from all households — not just miners’ families — and radically curbed the choices and opportunities of the vast majority of central Appalachians. The public services that they should have been able to expect to nurture and support healthy, productive, educated communities either never existed in the first place or were backed by a stream of funding from coal extraction too minimal to sustain them.
These very specific conditions don’t apply in obvious ways to the rest of the U.S. But the dynamics here are instructive, and several parallels exist.
Take, for instance, the middle class, a bellwether of economic health. The U.S.’s middle class was in large part created through New Deal reforms that intertwined the interests of labor and capital, and expanded educational opportunities. By upping earning power and deepening the skills and knowledge of working-class America, these policies were a formula for balanced, self-sustaining growth. Though it was powering the consumer boom that resulted, central Appalachia never saw the emergence of a true middle class, thanks in large part to the economic and political dominance of the coal industry.
Nowadays, however, the rest of the U.S. is heading more in that direction too. For the last few decades, the American middle class has imploded, a sign that the U.S. economy, like that of central Appalachia, is becoming more and more fragile.
Another worrying similarity is how, as has long been the case in central Appalachia, America’s economic and political institutions increasingly concentrate power among the few instead of investing in the things we know drive long-term, self-sustaining growth.
As with most vicious circles of elite influence, there’s a cynical short-termism to how they distribute wealth. The latest tax cut bill is a case in point. That’s transferred wealth to corporations and their shareholders that instead should have gone toward spending on things that will expand the economy’s potential to grow — e.g. health, education, infrastructure. Meanwhile, increasing lack of regulatory accountability means that companies can easily pass on costs to the public.
This is also the consequence of the hollowing out of the local tax base in these places, which reflects U.S. leaders’ failure to help prepare communities to weather global economic and technological changes of the last few decades. Nowadays, scores of other geographic pockets of sickness and economic distress have emerged all over America. And as in central Appalachia, the implied solution is just to leave. But many don’t want to have to choose between their hometowns and a decent wage or opportunities for their kids—or, for that matter, their family’s health. Disturbingly, no leaders that I know of have come up with sound, concrete ways of confronting these problems—or even acknowledging them.
In the retreat of public leadership, we’ve also seen a shrinking of the role of public goods and services in Americans’ lives. This too is a sign of how our institutions are failing to act on behalf of the interests of a broad base of Americans. In some struggling towns, the retreat of local governments as providers of public services has been replaced by private equity firms that charge more for things like water systems, ambulance services and fire departments in struggling towns across America. (These are the sorts of arrangements supposed to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, by the way.) It’s here especially that central Appalachia’s “capitalist experiment” can teach America something important.
This push is all based on the ideology that privatizing public goods and services always makes them cheaper because, since companies are motivated by profit, they’ll use resources more efficiently. But profit is just what happens when you add up income and subtract costs; the more crucial factors in determining whether resources are used productively are the prices assigned to those resources. The question is, who or what determines those prices? In the absence of competition and regulation (which puts value on more abstract things like health and clean air) private companies do.
That’s exactly what we saw in the “capitalist experiment” of the coal camps. The prices they assigned to labor, to housing, to healthcare, to pinto beans at the company store — those had nothing to do with efficient use of those resources, and they didn’t reflect genuine value. Companies set prices that maximized their own profit. Did they use resources efficiently? Nope. They destroyed central Appalachia’s human and natural capital, and profoundly stunted its physical capital. Yet here we are as a country, embracing policies that decrease competition and regulation.
RT: Some people have said that the Appalachian coal industry can be seen as a microcosm for some of the failures of capitalism. Do you think this is true?
GG: I don’t think capitalism per se has failed. Rather, it’s the institutions designed to broadly distribute the wealth capitalism creates that have failed central Appalachians. And until those institutions are expanded to encourage political and economic participation from a vastly broader swath of its society, they’ll continue to suffer.
RT: Some people have said that coal economies in central Appalachia have been treated almost as colonies by rich coal bosses from out of state. Do you think there is any reality in this reading of coal economies?
GG: Under colonial systems, typically the oppressing country extracts cheaply produced raw materials for its domestic production, while exploiting the colony’s workers as a captive consumer base for its value-added exported goods. Beyond its obvious moral problems, colonialism is bad because it discourages manufacturing, suppresses household purchasing power, and erodes the skill base in a way that eats away at a country’s productive potential, and leaves the economy precariously reliant on one or two commodities. So, sure — I think it’s not hard to see the similarities to colonialism in the absentee ownership, coal camps, and tax systems.
That said, I spent a lot of time puzzling over this question, reading up on debates among Appalachian academics about the relevance of the analogy, and couldn’t really figure out what applying the “colonial” framework helps illuminate.
I’m open to any tips on that, of course, but ultimately, someone whose thinking I found the most insightful was the late, great writer Jane Jacobs, especiallyhersobering caution about our impulse to embrace the concept. “The trouble with loosely calling all supply regions [i.e. places rich in natural resources] ‘colonial’ economies is that the term is too optimistic,” she wrote in Cities and the Wealth of Nations in 1984. “By reverse implication, it suggests that if alien domination of some sort is thrown off, a stunted, narrow economy will no longer remain stunted and narrow, will proceed to become better rounded and capable of producing amply and diversely on its own behalf as well as for others.”
The problem isn’t really coal or no coal, colonialist or not. It’s understanding what the extractive institutions built up around coal have done, over the course of a century, to central Appalachia’s potential. Fixing those institutionsis what central Appalachia’s future hinges on—the debate about coal’s rightful role in the economy, which Trump has helped whip up, is a distraction.
RT: As you probably know, in many of these small communities the coal companies paid for schools, housing, water infrastructure, and basically built up the entire town. This can be great for communities. But on the other side of the coin, when the coal companies leave these areas, they leave a crumbling infrastructure, and in many of these towns, people still live there but they struggle with failing water systems, and other effects of the lack of investment in the infrastructure. It some cases, it almost seems as though these towns were never planned to survive 2 generations. What’s to be done for the people left behind as coal companies have abandoned these former coal communities to their own fate? Aside from the lack of jobs, there are other major trickle-down effects left behind from the downturn of coal.
GG: I’m sorry to say I don’t have an answer to your question. But I will say that this issue is, to me, the most fascinating and heartrending of everything I learned, and I do have some thoughts.
First off, many of these towns weren’t planned to survive two generations! There’s a line I quote in my story from a 1923 Congressional report investigating coal-camp life: “A manufacturing town may count upon a reasonable degree of permanency. A mining town in a region not suited to other industry is sure to have only a limited life.” Well, just because it’s “not suited” doesn’t change the human impulse to put down roots! This whole line of thinking sees people strictly as labor inputs instead of as entrepreneurs, community members, and consumers — and coal towns as basically dormitories instead of nodes of economic and social activity that will organically grow wherever people build their lives together.
That’s kind of a moral reaction. Practically speaking, infrastructure is a thorny problem, and clearly the current economic base is too weak to pay for major projects (though again, the fact that it’s been allowed to deteriorate is a reminder that more equitable political institutions would have built up a much bigger tax fund from coal severance, as other states have done via far-sighted natural resource management).
As for whether reviving that economic base is a lost cause, though I think it’s plausible that some of central Appalachia’s problems stem from the fact that the coal camp legacy settlements are in places too remote to support commercial networks that would generate tax revenue and justify infrastructure investment, I haven’t seen any empirical data making that case. And as the work of historians Wilma Dunaway and Altina Waller reveal, there was actually quite a lot of commerce and manufacturing activity in central Appalachia before extractive industry distorted land values and labor markets.
Another thing I found striking in my research was the conspicuous lack of urbanization in central Appalachia. By one measure, according to an ARC (Appalachian Regional Commission) report, it’s the most rural area in America — it’s kind of like a cell without a nucleus. This is a problem because cities are important drivers of growth for their surrounding regions. Might a city or two have developed if coal’s economic and geographic dominance hadn’t thwarted that — and if so much infrastructure planning hadn’t been geared toward helping the extractive industries? Maybe!
So it’s also possible that the problem isn’t the remoteness of where people live, but rather, the way the region’s economic structure has stymied the emergence of a growth center for them to plug into. (Of course, ARC did try to address this, but struck out—probably because cities seem to emerge organically from economic activity, not the other way around.) Speaking of plugging in, it seems to this outsider at least that an infrastructure no-brainer is improved broadband connectivity.
RT: In your report, you say that coal mining is the only way that many West Virginians can earn a decent middle-class wage. Is this true? Aren’t there plenty of other careers in things like technology, law, medicine and business available to people in Appalachia? Maybe the difference is that these careers require many years in college and advanced degrees, whereas people used to be able to go intro coal mining right out of high school and earn a decent income. Is education the answer, do you think?
GG: I was speaking of southern West Virginia (and the rest of central Appalachia). As I understand it, you can also make a good living in railways, chemicals, the law, and other industries tied to coal. The question then is, is this coal-focused knowledge base giving rise to innovation that in turn supports other economic activity? Though that wasn’t a question I reported directly on, it didn’t really seem so. One sign that isn’t happening is the exodus of talented, ambitious young people out of the region.
As for your question about education being the answer, investing in human ingenuity is a must for creating a diverse, flexible, adaptive economy. Higher education is obviously a key component of that. But I think it’s possible to see college and advanced degrees as a panacea. Yes, formal educational opportunities are important, but even more crucial is creating a wide range of opportunities for people to build diverse skills, knowledge and know-how. So is encouraging institutions that connect those people through social and professional networks.
RT: Finally, I want to ask you about health disparities in Appalachia. Your report looks at this issue deeply, and analyzes research by the Appalachian Regional Commission and other health studies- for example, you cite one recent study that shows that between 1999 and 2015, death rates across Appalachia went up drastically due to drug overdoses, suicide, and liver damage due to alcohol abuse- sometimes these are called diseases of despair. You looked at how these diseases are making life expectancy for People in Appalachia far lower than the national average.
You also touched a little on cancer rates- which may be linked to things like strip mining. Can you talk about the cost of health for the region and how you see this affecting our region’s ability to rebound economically?
GG: Health allows people to be more productive and work longer, which is good for the economy. People in central Appalachia suffer from disability and chronic diseases at higher rates than in other parts of the country, which probably helps explain why so many people don’t work. They also die earlier than folks in the rest of the U.S., which is tragic in its own right of course, but also snuffs out the potential value of their economic and social contributions. It’s hard to put a dollar sign on that impact, but it has to be enormous. This is potentially cyclical; chronic stress from economic insecurity seems likely to be linked to people getting chronic diseases at a younger age and dying prematurely. And collective ill health hurts the economy, and so on.
What’s the scariest thing to me, though, is how this cycle will evolve in coming generations. Along with education, health in early childhood is important for boosting people’s productive potential and earning power as adults. The opioid crisis and mental health problems in communities seem to be taking a frightening toll on the wellbeing of kids in central Appalachia, which I touched on a bit in my story. I suspect we’re being naive about the long-term impact of how all that’s going to play out.
On May 1, 1930, labor leader “Mother” Jones celebrated her 100th birthday at a party in Maryland. The firebrand did what she did best: ruffle feathers. On this occasion, she denounced the nation’s prohibition on alcohol, saying it violated her right as an American to drink beer instead of water.
Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was beloved by the working class and reviled by the powerful for her colorful and often profane condemnations of coal operators and politicians. She visited West Virginia many times, describing conditions as being worse than in “Czarist Russia.” Jones was jailed in Parkersburg in 1902 for violating a court injunction. During the bloody Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike, she was held under house arrest in Kanawha County.
But her stock fell with miners in 1921. At Marmet, “Mother” Jones tried to stop the armed march on Logan County before it started. The miners felt betrayed when she held up an apparently fake telegram from President Warren Harding. Despite this setback, she kept fighting for the underdog, becoming an ardent critic of child labor in the 1920s. She died seven months after celebrating her 100th birthday.
In the early 1900s, coal miners were fighting for the right to organize and to stop the practice of using mine guards. They also wanted an alternative to shopping at coal company stores and being paid in scrip, instead of money. In the early 1900’s, miners led a series of strikes in southern West Virginia, leading up to the climatic march on Blair Mountain in 1921.
“My name’s David Hatfield, I’m the great-great nephew of Sid Hatfield, who was the police chief here back in 1920. So this mine wars museum means a lot to me, and to this town, and to this whole area. And I’m just grateful to all the people who worked on it, took their time, and blood sweat and tears, to make it possible. And if they could, I’d love for everybody to come down and see it because it’s something to behold.”
David Hatfield’s ancestor, Sid Hatfield, has come to represent many things for the people of Matewan, depending on who’s telling the story. For most people, Sid Hatfield became a hero who stood up for the families of striking miners.
But for the coal company owners and the Baldwin Felts Agents who opposed him, “Smiling” Sid Hatfield was seen as a lawless, renegade cop.
Credit W.Va. Mine Wars Museum
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During the Matewan Massacre of May 19, 1920, Baldwin Felts agents approached Sid Hatfield and mayor Testerman by the railroad tracks.
“And just as they reenact here every year in Matewan, the two groups of men had a tense stand off, with the Baldwin Felts agents, asserting that they had a warrant for Sid Hatfield’s arrest, and the mayor insisting that their papers were bogus or falsified,” said Lou Martin, a historian and one of the board members of the Mine Wars Museum.
Nobody is sure which side fired first, but a gun fight erupted beside the railroad tracks in downtown Matewan.
Some of those bullet holes are still visible in the bricks in the back of the new Mine Wars Museum.
Beside the bullet holes, there’s also an audio exhibit where visitors can hear the story first hand- from interviews with Matewan residents. These interviews, as well as countless artifacts and research material from the mine wars, have been collected by local historians throughout the years. But there hasn’t been a local museum to curate them, until now.
Credit W.Va. Mine Wars Museum
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“All through the decades there have been people, especially locally, trying to preserve this history, trying to honor it. We feel them cheering us on, and we know that a lot of people have been working towards something like this for a long time,” said Martin.
And some of those people who’ve been working to preserve the Mine Wars history for many years joined up with young organizers and historians to build the new museum.
Mingo County native, Wilma Lee Steele, is one of the board members for the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Steele is a retired art teacher. For her the passion of sharing this history started from telling young activists about the history behind the word “redneck” and the red bandana. Striking miners tied Red Bandanas around their necks during the march on Blair Mountain.
Credit W.Va. Mine Wars Museum
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Wilma Lee Steele
“The thing that gets me, I guess, and what makes me want to do this, and tell other people about this, is that all these immigrants from all these different countries, they didn’t speak the same language. They did not have the same culture. And they were fighting each other and divided. But when they tied on these bandanas and marched, they became a brotherhood. And one of the things I love about the union is that the union was one of the early ones that said equal pay for blacks and whites. It’s pretty special.”
“It was strange growing up with this history because when I was first learning about it this history was not being celebrated at all,” said Chuck Keeney, a history professor at Southern Community College. He’s another one of the board members of the new museum. He’s also the great-grandson of Frank Keeney, who led striking miners in the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike of 1912–1913. These were some of the bloodiest battles of the Mine Wars.
“The first time I heard my great-grandfather’s name was I was around 8-9 years old. And it was my great aunt’s house. And it was just a family gathering, and I was actually out back behind her house and was trying to throw a little toy knife into the side of the hill. And an old man walked up to me and said to me, ‘you have to learn how to throw that thing well. Because you never know, you might have a Baldwin Felts thug after you one day.’”
“And I had no idea what he was talking about. So I asked him, ‘what’s a Baldwin Felts thug? And why would they be after me? And he said, ‘well don’t you know that you’re Frank Keeney’s great grandson?’”
During the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike, Baldwin Felts agents were sent to fight the striking miners. After the strike, Frank Keeney became the president of the UMWA District 17 in 1917.
But Frank Keeney had blood on his hands, and historians generally did not name him a hero. He was tried for treason and murder, though he was acquitted.
Until recently, the story of the Mine Wars was largely uncelebrated, even by the UMWA.
“So I mean there are enormous chunks of our own history that are just missing. It’s no wonder that the people in our state have an identity crisis; we don’t know our own story. If you don’t know your own story, how can you determine what you are?” said Chuck Keeney.
That’s why the local community and volunteers from far and wide have come together to build the Mine Wars Museum. The funds to build the museum came from the West Virginia Humanities Council, the United Mine Workers of America, the National Coal Heritage Area, Turn This Town Around, and hundreds of private donations.
And the museum, like the history, means different things for different people.
Wilma Lee Steele says she hopes the museum will become a place where people throughout the coalfields can come to reclaim their identity.
“I think that we have a lot to say, and I think we’re gonna say it. We’re gonna tell our history, and we’re gonna come together as a community.”
Credit W.Va. Mine Wars Museum
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Beginning May 23, the museum will be open on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and is located in downtown Matewan, 336 Mate Street. The museum’s board members are Greg Galford, Lou Martin, Chuck Keeney, Kenny King, Katey Lauer, Wilma Steele, Charles Dixon and Catherine Moore. Most of the museum’s designs and exhibits are by Shaun Slifer. in Matewan. For more information, visit www.wvminewars.org. Note: there are many stories about the origins of the term “redneck”. Most scholars agree that the term probably was originally used at least a century before the Mine Wars, to refer to southern farmers who were exposed to long hours in the sun while working in the fields. Do you have a story about where the term redneck came from? You can send a tweet to Roxy Todd @RoxyMTodd to join the conversation.
For years, Republicans have called for nonpartisan election of Supreme Court Justices. But the Democrats never put the issue on the agenda. Now having taken control of the House, Republicans finally got their wish.
Before confronting that issue, the house took up Senate Bill 13, which protects a landowner from liability if someone is injured on his or her property. The bill re-instates the open and obvious doctrine. It means a property owner won’t be responsible for injuries that a person sustains if it’s clear what the conditions are.
Delegate John Shott, chairman of the Judiciary committee, stood to explain that this bill would be worthwhile.
“What we’re doing here is, today if we vote in favor of this bill is saying that regardless of a few remote horror stories, we think its legitimate policy of this state to protect those people who have premises. In those situations where the injuries caused by something as well known and obvious to the person who’s injured as it would be to the person who occupies those premises,” Shott explained.
Senate Bill 13 passed 81 to 18.
Then it was on to House Bill 2010, the non-partisan election bill.
Again, Judiciary Chairman Shott explained why this is good for the state.
“This removes the taint of a partisan election from the operation of our judiciary,” Shott said, “and it extends not only to our state’s Supreme Court of Appeals, but to our circuit judges, our family court judges, and our magistrates, and this is intended to remove any perception that those individuals might be beholding to a particular party organization or a particular group of people with whom that party is perceived as being affiliated.”
Delegate Barbara Evans Fleischauer stood to oppose the bill, saying voters want to know which party their candidate is affiliated with.
“Well in our state, we’ve had some pretty bad experiences with money in judicial elections, and there have been accusations that judicial seats have been purchased by individuals. By not knowing what party a person’s in, you are deprived of information, and that you otherwise would have in any other election,” Fleischauer said.
But the bill passed overwhelmingly 90 to 9.
But there was uproar about House Bill 2217, relating to the qualifications of the commissioner of labor. This bill changes the current definition of the labor commissioner by taking out the words “labor interests of the state” and inserts “with experience in employee issues and employee-employer relations.”
Delegate Mike Caputo, a labor representative, clearly did not like the bill.
“This is nothing, Mr. Speaker, in my opinion, with all due respect but a poke in the eye with a sharp stick to the working men and women in West Virginia,” Caputo explained, “I just cannot believe that we’re about to vote on a bill that could allow a Don Blankenship to become the commissioner of labor in the state of West Virginia. I can’t believe we’re about the vote on a bill that someone who had nothing but the interest of the corporation at heart their entire adult life can now become the commissioner of labor. Now nothing against corporate executives, we need them, and they need to tend to the business of that corporation, so we can have jobs in West Virginia, but when it comes down to the grassroots level of that working mom, somebody needs to look out for her, and nobody’s going to look out for her other than someone who worked their entire adult life for a paycheck and took the interest of workers at heart.”
Delegate Michael Ihle spoke to try and reason with the word change, using an example from his own experience.
“I deal with both union and nonunion employees, and one of the accomplishments that we, and I do say we, have is a month into my term, we negotiated a labor agreement that was passed unanimously, and I say that not to brag on myself but to brag on our employees. But more relevantly, I say that to illustrate that the interest of management and the interest of labor are not always mutually exclusive,” Ihle said, “And I feel some of the rhetoric that I’ve heard from those who oppose the legislation reflects that belief that those interests must naturally conflict with each other, and I don’t believe that to be the case at all. I think if we’re to move our state forward, if we are to create an environment that is friendly to more jobs for both union and nonunion employees, all interest of labor, if we’re to do that, then we have to move beyond the mentality that labor and management are mutually exclusive.”
