In order to reconcile these irreconcilable Americas, Appalachian “otherness” became a form of deviance. As Shapiro observed, outsiders “defined Appalachia as a discrete region and the mountaineers as a distinct people, and responded to abstract dilemmas which this ‘fact’ seemed to pose without asking whether it was a ‘true’ fact, or indeed whether it was still a true fact in 1920 as it might have been in 1900 or 1870.”
For industrialists, the national perception of Appalachia as a blighted and unnatural place aided their economic expansion. The most degraded of all Appalachians were those who, by chance or intent, had not taken their rightful place in the region’s mines and mills. One community located near the Tug River along the West Virginia-Kentucky border came to be synonymous with deviance of the highest order. During a period of rapid industrial expansion, the “primitive” ways of the Tug River Valley ceased to be innocent or quaint and instead became sinister and lethal.
MURDERLAND
Not far from my home is Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a place where visitors can dig into “feudin’ fried chicken” at the Hatfield-McCoy Dinner Show, a glitzy comedic musical featuring down-home Southern fixins. The Hatfield-McCoy feud remains one of the most legendary moments in Appalachian history. This nineteenth-century epic family rivalry between the West Virginian Hatfields and the Kentuckian McCoys has served as the basis for films, cartoons, musicals, documentaries, historical fiction, and reality television shows. There’s even a reference to the feud in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft. A cottage industry of Hatfield-McCoy tourism is popular in Appalachia and one needs not travel to Kentucky or West Virginia to consume the Hatfield-McCoy spectacle. Much like fixins at the Hatfield-McCoy Dinner Show, this cultural fare is all-you-can-eat.
Popular interpretations of the feud emphasize idiosyncratic and primitive aspects of mountain culture: log cabins, bonnets and overalls, impenetrable accents, moonshine, fiddles, and banjos. The tourism industry presents the Hatfields and McCoys, and their various analogues, as patriarchal, lawless, prone to violence, uncivilized, stubborn, barely educated or articulate, highly isolated, and alarmingly impoverished. Even Vance claims, by way of explaining his family dynamics, that he is a descendent. “If you’re familiar with the famous Hatfield-McCoy family feud back in the 1860s, ‘70s, and ‘80s in the United States, my family was an integral part of that,” he writes.
In our present day, the Hatfield-McCoy feud feels folksy and humorous. We indulge in the mildest of subversive impulses by enjoying exaggerated but harmless representations of anarchy and lawlessness. But make no mistake, the feud was a real event that occurred in Appalachia at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, however, it is also a story that reflects a number of abstract dilemmas imposed on the region and demonstrates just how consumable lurid stories of Appalachian folkways can be. To spoil the plot somewhat, the Hatfield-McCoy feud is more than just a legendary example of bad blood. It is also a tale of what happened when coarse representations of an untamed “other” boomeranged back to the region.
In the most basic interpretation of the conflict, two families separated by Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River carried home Civil Warera rivalries that spiraled into a feud that lasted for the better part of twelve years. Shortly after the war ended, a former Union soldier on the McCoy side was murdered, presumably at the hands of former Confederate soldiers on the Hatfield side. Thus the feud began, with periods of dormancy interrupted by livestock theft, murder, and unwise and doomed romances between younger members of the Hatfield and McCoy families.
Local law enforcement grew tired of the families’ tit-for-tat and took to the mountains to round up what they described as a community at war. Law enforcement captured members of both families, and in 1889, the court secured the conviction of several members of the Hatfield family for murders connected to an 1888 massacre. National newspapers and curious journalists followed the feud, some traveling to the region in the hope of meeting depraved and lawless mountaineers engaging in old fashioned frontier justice. Patriarch “Devil” Anse Hatfield appeared often in menacing sketches and photographs posing with rifles, and by many accounts enjoyed his celebrity. Local developers, politicians, and business people, however, did not.
The feud provided sensational material for individuals preaching the gospel of Appalachian “otherness.” In the late-1880s, New York reporter T.C. Crawford traveled to Appalachia—which he called “Murderland”—to obtain material for a book about the feud published in 1889 as An American Vendetta: A Story of Barbarism in the United States. According to Crawford, “barbaric mountaineers” populated Appalachia, a place where a primitive race of people lived in “a blood-stained wilderness” that was “as remote as Central Africa.”
Crawford’s dispatches inspired a number of fictional accounts of blood-feuds in Appalachia, including Harvard writer John Fox, Jr.’s A Cumberland Vendetta in 1895. Fox describes his feuding protagonist as “a dreamy-looking little fellow, and one may easily find his like throughout the Cumberland—paler than his fellows from staying indoors, with half-haunted face, and eyes that are deeply pathetic when not cunning…he suffered to do his pleasure—nothing, or much that is strange without comment.”
Academics also offered their analysis of Appalachia’s primitive culture by dissecting the Hatfield-McCoy spectacle. In 1901 the University of Chicago’s S.S. MacClintock chronicled the feud in the American Journal of Sociology. After noting that “blood-revenges” are nonexistent in civilized society, MacClintock writes, “The proportion of murder to other crimes in the mountains is strikingly large. Stealing is rare, killing is common.” In MacClintock’s learned opinion, the causes of the feud are attributable to primitive kinship societies in Appalachia, the sensitivities of mountaineers, and their sheer idleness. “There are so few industries and responsibilities of any kind that even a feud is a relief from the awful monotony,” he argues. He was just one in a cohort of sad academics who wrote paper after paper trying to unlock the secrets of the universe by revealing that rural people sometimes steal livestock and hate their neighbors.
We can’t leave out locals from this group of profiteers as well. As historian Altina L. Waller notes, local businessmen and politicians benefitted from the idea that modern employment and industry were just what the region needed to clean up its act. Through their efforts to bring state “justice” to the Tug River Valley—to make the region seem more hospitable to outside developers—up-and-comers often exacerbated tensions, even during periods when the families were at peace. Today, Appalachians are free to profit off the feud through tourism, but only if we present it through the most clichéd of regional hillbilly stereotypes.
Intellectuals like MacClintock looked to other solutions when the triumph of law and order in the valley proved to be short-lived. One popular solution was simply capitalism. If Appalachians could be tamed and put to industrial purpose, these theories suggested, then they might be spared the bloodshed, vice, and moral degeneracy natural to their primitive existence. This was music to the ears of developers, who justified economic expansion by contending that modern employment would bring order and harmony to the mountains and save mountaineers from their own worst impulses in the process.
WHEN I GET TO HELL, I WILL GET THE COAL AND PILE IT UP ON THEM
A desire to “tame” Appalachians for the benefit of industry often lurked behind twentieth-century theories of Appalachian “otherness.” Although industrialists deployed region-specific narratives to justify the development of Appalachia, widely held attitudes about the social position of the poor aided them in this. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Social Darwinism, for example, posited that wealth and privilege fell naturally to those who most deserved them and that social differences between the rich and the poor reflected differences in their innate abilities.
The poor might improve their station through hard work and industry, but those of greater means owed them nothing in this struggle. This theory befit a world enthra
lled by the free market and the competitive accumulation of capital. Many industrialists felt little responsibility to their workforce, often believing that their social assistance would encourage an undesirable overpopulation of the lower classes.
By contrast, some industrialists were paternalistic in their attitudes toward the working poor who labored in their factories, mines, and mills. Industrialists demanded obedience from their workers, much like children, and in return showed their benevolence in the form of housing, entertainment, or more comfortable working conditions. What these two social attitudes shared was the belief that power and capital came naturally to those of greater ability and that safe working conditions and other residual benefits of labor were a sign of their generosity, not the obligations of a good and moral business.
In Appalachia, narratives that presented mountaineers as helpless and otherwise doomed without industrial purpose abounded. Coal barons credited their industry with bringing order and harmony to an uncivilized place, but what actually came to the mountains was a vast system of economic exploitation, facilitated through violence and malice by both outside developers and compliant local elites. The company town became emblematic of this new industrial order. Miners and other coal workers in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia—Appalachia’s historic coal fields—often lived in privately owned towns, which grew to outnumber independent and unincorporated communities.
In addition to recruiting local mountaineers, coal companies imported labor from other parts of the United States. African American miners were common in Appalachia at this time, 20 to 50 percent of the workforce. Recent European immigrants, particularly from Italy and Poland, also populated the coal fields. In coal camps and company towns, the nation’s accumulated “others” worked and lived in a coercive environment designed, as one coal operator explained, “to have men concentrated so as to have proper supervision over them, to better control them in times of labor agitation and threatened strikes.”
Proper supervision meant armed security, often drafted from private detective agencies and local law enforcement. As you might imagine, it proved difficult to convince workers to risk their lives daily in the dark holes of the earth for almost no money. Bribing local law enforcement and politicians to maintain coercive practices became part of the cost of doing business for coal companies. Political corruption flourished in the coal fields. In West Virginia, Logan County sheriff Don Chafin made $50,000 a year in his prime in kickbacks from the Logan County Coal Operators Association.
Coal companies exhibited a distinctly violent hysteria toward organized labor and suppressed union agitation by any means available. In 1912, for example, private detectives attempted to curtail a strike by repeatedly terrorizing the wives and children of miners in the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek area of West Virginia with machine gun fire. For many miners, however, unionization was a matter of life and death. One could die in the mines or march, and many chose to march. Mary “Mother” Jones, who cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World, said of West Virginia, “The story of coal is always the same. It is a dark story. For a second’s more sunlight, men must fight like tigers. For the privilege of seeing the color of their children’s eyes by the light of the sun, fathers must fight as beasts of the jungle.”
Labor agitation in West Virginia is immortalized in many songs and union anthems. “Law in the West Virginia Hills,” written around 1912, contains a verse that describes the experience of watching private detectives beat pregnant women to the point of miscarriage. “My sister saw these cruelties,” the singer explains, “as they terrorized the town. She saw them murder unborn babies and kick these helpless women down.” This is what martial law looked like in the coal fields, and it came often. Using nonunionized labor gave southern West Virginian coal companies a competitive market advantage over unionized mines and made their West Virginian coal fields frequent targets for efforts to expand the United Mine Workers of America. Each campaign brought bloodshed, but none loom larger than the uprisings of 1920 and 1921 that culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, the final chapter of West Virginia’s mine wars.
I COME CREEPING
In 1920, a group of private detectives employed by the Baldwin-Felts Agency on behalf of the Stone Mountain Coal Company traveled to Matewan, West Virginia, to evict the families of miners from their company housing after they had attempted to join the union, a common union-busting tactic. Unlike their counterparts in the notoriously corrupt Logan County, the miners in Matewan, in Mingo County, had a number of important allies. One of these was Mingo County police chief Sid Hatfield, whom journalist Hamilton Nolan recently memorialized as “a strongly pro-union man who was also a bit of a psycho killer.”
Hatfield, a legendary figure sometimes called the “Terror of the Tug,” secured arrest warrants for the crew of Baldwin-Felts agents when they couldn’t produce eviction notices, and he deputized a number of local miners to help him keep the peace. Not surprisingly, arming angry miners as a peacekeeping strategy did not work. Instead it led to a spectacular gunfight in downtown Matewan that killed Albert and Lee Felts, the villainous brothers who helped run the detective agency, along with five other private detectives. Hatfield’s reputation became outsized, a mountain David in a world of Goliaths. While awaiting trial for the murder of Albert Felts, Hatfield shot a silent film for the United Mine Workers of America in which he played himself in a re-enactment of the gunfight.
Despite being acquitted on the murder charge, Hatfield ultimately proved to be vulnerable. In 1921, Thomas Felts, aiming to avenge his brothers’ deaths, pressured McDowell County officials to indict Hatfield on charges stemming from a year-old incident. When Hatfield appeared for the trial on August 1, Baldwin-Felts agents murdered him on the courthouse steps.
A hero was dead and tensions in the coal fields reached a fever pitch. The United Mine Workers had planned a demonstration, but organizers wondered if it was wise to sponsor industrial action in such a fraught environment. Mother Jones, it appears, had the privilege of the deciding vote. The United Mine Workers rallied at the capitol in Charleston, presenting a list of demands to the governor. A week later the governor refused all union demands and coal country went to war.
By the end of August, more than 13,000 individuals stood ready to take whatever form of justice most satisfied them from the West Virginian coal fields. For some, it was the liberation of miners from economic exploitation through union solidarity. For others, it was revenge: one of the most popular songs hummed in the assembled crowds was a bright little anthem about murdering Don Chafin, set to the tune of union hymn “Solidarity Forever.”
It was the most significant labor uprising in United States history and the largest show of armed resistance in America since the Civil War. The assembled crowds included doctors, lawyers, women, farmers, children, business owners, and teachers. Their number included around 2,000 African American men and women, some who were born into slavery like George Echols who said, “I was raised a slave. My master and mistress called me and I answered, and I know the time when I was a slave, and I felt just like we feel now.” Many assembled wore red bandanas around their neck, the only insignia available, leading their enemies to call them “rednecks.” One miner wrote, “I call it a darn solid mass of different colors and tribes, blended together, woven, bound, interlocked, tongued and grooved and glued together in one body.”
This is how I prefer to remember the Battle of Blair Mountain. There was, of course, a battle; a weeklong campaign during which miners fought valiantly against a private army that the National Rifle Association would later praise for “using every type of firearm produced in the United States.” Its arsenal included not only firearms, but also gas explosives and aerial bombs deployed by private planes. But not even Mother Jones herself could call back the miners, who had to be driven off the mountain by federal troops. I have no claim of kinship to this story, but I imagine it often, the unafraid and justice-seeking united in one body snaki
ng through the mountains to reclaim themselves. “How do you come to Mingo?” the miners’ scouts asked, to identify their allies. “I come creeping,” came the answer. Like vines they went, slow and purposeful and of the earth, fed at long-last on sunlight.
A HISTORY OF THE WHOLE PEOPLE
There are a number of different ways to evaluate the Battle of Blair Mountain and what it meant to West Virginia and Appalachia, organized labor, and the larger body of exploited workers in the United States. On a practical level, the battle and the violent suppression that followed weakened the United Mine Workers of America in West Virginia. One conventional historical narrative is that organized labor in West Virginia languished until Franklin Roosevelt’s more labor-friendly administration set about creating pro-union legislation.
But there’s another side to this story, one told through the hysterical reactions of the coal industry and its political allies at the mere mention of the Battle of Blair Mountain. By the 1930s, the coal industry had spent sixty years crafting the story of Appalachia as a region and of Appalachians primed for their benevolent development. When the people tried to reclaim their narrative and write their own history, all hell broke loose.
In 1935, the government proposed an ambitious plan to commission a history for every state, written by ordinary men and women. The idea behind what became the Federal Writers’ Project’s American Guide Series was New Deal logic through and through. The project would put unemployed men and women to work, giving them relief from the Depression, and would use their labor to create something for the public good. In a time of dramatic social upheaval, many Americans—including those in the White House—felt an urgency to repurpose history to show the nation its populist roots. This, of course, was a political strategy that suited the Democrats’ new vision for America, but it was also attuned to a deeper social need to explore a shared past during a moment when many were overcome with feelings of isolation.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia Page 4