When Miners March

by William C. Blizzard

  2/6/1953 (Fifty-sixth)

  (Today’s installment continues the quotation from a magazine article describing the dispersal of one sector of the miners’ Armed March of 1921.)

  “Blizzard arose from the ranks in the coal mines to the leadership of his fellow miners. Ten years ago he worked in the mines of Cabin Creek and played an important part during the strike of 1912 and 1913. His work was recognized by the State Federation of Labor, and he was elected president of sub-district No. 1 (An error. It was No. 2 –Ed.). I first saw him when the Federal troops entered Madison. The miner’s army – the rednecks – then confronted along the serrated top of Spruce Fork Ridge the hastily recruited defending army of Logan.

  “The Coal River division, a section of the Chesapeake & Ohio, about 60 miles long, loading from St. Albans on the main lines (15 miles west of Charleston, W. Va.), south across Boone into Logan county, for two weeks had been operated as the miners dictated, except for one train a day, that carrying the United States mails. Even on that the miners had exercised a strict supervision over the passengers. It had been the miners’ main line of communication with the world outside the valley.

  “Up and down this valley foraging parties of armed miners had gone from store to store in the small towns, purchasing entire stocks of supplies with receipts promising payment from the United Mine Workers’ organization….

  “Order in Coal River Valley had been kept by armed patrols in overalls, distinguished by red bandana handkerchiefs knotted about their necks or bit of red cloth tied to their sleeves. Seven moonshine stills were found hidden in the hollows and destroyed. Blizzard knew that he could keep his men in hand only as long as he could keep them sober.

  “It was through this region that Capt. John J. Wilson’s command of 150 picked Regulars traveled by night to the scene of hostilities. The engine of the troop train pushed ahead of it three flat cars, two soldier lookouts riding at the very front. Those extra cars were intended as a protection against obstructions on the track or explosive mines. The train ran along steadily at 20 miles an hour. Forty-five minutes ahead of it, although Captain Wilson was unaware of it, there traveled a commandeered train loaded with miners going to the front.

  Prosecuting Attorney Upset

  “Two hours after the start from St. Albans, the troop train entered Madison, unionized seat of Boone County, and with a normal population of 700. This night a number of its men were up on the Spruce Fork Ridge doing their best to kill other men who dwelt in the seat of Logan County. It was civil war; no less.

  “As the train slowed down, the assistant prosecutor of Boone County swung aboard. His name was Hager, a lank, sharp-eyed little man, in a wrinkled suit of light summer ‘store’ clothes. His knitted tie, almost thick enough to deserve the title of muffler, flopped over his shoulder.

  “ ‘We’re glad you’re here,’ he said to the first soldier he saw. ‘A commandeered train went through here on the way to the fighting at Blair just 45 minutes ahead of you. It’s been just terrible.’

  “If Prosecutor Hager had been a woman, his state of mind might have been diagnosed as hysteria. His breath came convulsively.

  “The bugler sounded ‘assembly.’

  “ ‘Packs and guns!’ Shouted a sergeant, ‘fall in.’

  “Buckling on their heavy packs, each rolled as neatly and smoothly as a stove pipe, and running their fingers in a final pat over each stuffed pocket of their cartridge belts, the Regulars dropped to the cinder-covered right of way. There they waited, immobile, while half their slender number was selected for guard duty. Outposts with machine guns were sent up and down the tracks. Sentries were stationed at five-yard intervals to 50 yards up the hillsides from the train. As the last of these took his post, Blizzard appeared and accosted Captain Wilson.

  “'William M. Blizzard, sub-district president of the United Mine Workers,’ he introduced himself. (An error here. Blizzard had no middle initial –Ed.). He was young, wiry, dark-eyed, cordial and convincing. He was short, almost undersized: Jack Dalton, physically, would make two Blizzards. Yet when both men were merely coal miners with numbered brass tags to identify them, Blizzard probably loaded quite as much coal as Dalton.

  “The difference between them even then was mental. Where Dalton possessed the trading instinct, Blizzard was endowed – or accursed, as you will – with the spirit of the zealot. When Blizzard takes sides on any question I can imagine that for him the other side is effaced.

  The March Ends

  “Blizzard wore a weather-beaten, black felt, narrow-brimmed hat, pulled low over his eyes. He did not wear overalls, but his suit appeared to have been slept in for a week. A necktie was knotted wrong side out against his soiled, white collar.

  “ ‘Are you the general of the miners’ army?’ he was asked.

  “ ‘What army?’ countered Blizzard with a smile, and added: ‘I guess the boys’ll listen to me all right. I just told the captain here that if he’ll send a squad of his Regulars up the line with me, I can get all our fellows out of the hills by daylights….’

  “Captain Wilson searched Blizzard and discovered that he was carrying a pistol – ‘toting a short gun,’ as they express it in West Virginia.

  “The Army officer asked him if he had a permit. Blizzard produced one signed by the sheriff of Kanawha County. Charleston is in Kanawha. Captain Wilson returned the gun.

  “ ‘Does this mean you are going to allow only men with permits to keep their guns?’ asked Blizzard. Captain Wilson said that those were his orders.

  “ ‘The men on the other side of the ridge will keep theirs?’ “ ‘If they have permits, yes.’

  “Blizzard’s blue eyes flashed. For a moment he ceased to be the diplomat.

  “ ‘Know what that means?’ he demanded. ‘Our boys’ll be unarmed and those Baldwin-Felts thugs will just shoot ‘em down whenever they please.’

  “He thought a moment. Then he spoke to a man standing near. This individual trotted away to crank a flivver, and a few minutes later Blizzard was on his way up the line. What he did when he arrived can only be surmised, but when the Regulars moved on up to Sharples at daybreak a few hours later, the miner fighters were coming out of the hills. Their guns had been hidden, probably far back in the black recesses of old coal mines. Their red badges had been snatched off. They were simply a swarm of stubbly-faced men getting out of the hills and back to their homes as quickly as flivvers could take them. But it was Blizzard who started them out.”

  Thus ended West Virginia’s Armed March of miners, the newspaper’s penchant for the dramatic. Allowing for omissions from the above that are merely opinion, an opinion that we consider absurd. The description remains intact.

  2/7/1953 (Fifty-seventh)

  The end of the Armed March, however, was just the beginning of trouble for the coal miners. The operators seized upon the march with great eagerness as a legal means of eradicating the United Mine Workers of America from the face of the earth. That they wished to take no chances of failure is shown by the fact that somehow or other they had their own attorneys to prosecute the miners in trials growing out of the march. A.M. Belcher, for instance, was the prosecuting attorney. He had once been a UMW attorney, but had turned renegade years before and was now a faithful operator tool. Another operator attorney was John Chafin, a first cousin of Don Chafin. That something was rotten in the State of West Virginia was not merely a Shakespearian metaphor, and it wrinkled noses all over the United States, as we shall presently show.

  Just how the operators managed to get their attorneys, retained by them on a yearly basis, to prosecute William Blizzard for treason against the State of West Virginia is not now known.

  Logan’s Heavy Hand

  The evidence may have been destroyed, or it may exist in the Governor Morgan files at West Virginia University. But we print below a letter which will give a hint. It is addressed to UMW Attorney T.C. Townsend and is dated July 2, 1923:

  “Dear Sir:

  “I gave
Mr. Keeney a note to you in regard to some evidence which I accidentally ran across after leaving there which I believe would be very valuable in showing the powerful influence wielded by Logan County with our Chief Executive. Thinking that Mr. Keeney might have overlooked this matter I am writing you.

  “The Attorney General told me that he would gladly testify and exhibit the correspondence between he (sic) and the Governor in regard to his request to represent the State in these trials growing out of the Armed March.

  “I seen (sic) these letters and was very much surprised that the Chief Executive would commit himself in writing as he did. He refused to appoint the Attorney General to represent the State on account of the Prosecuting Attorney of Logan County objecting and so stated in his letter.

  “I wish you would please ask Mr. Houston to send me a typewritten copy of the statement I got from Edgar Combs as I did not get a chance to get it before I left there. Trusting that all is well with you and that e’er another week rolls by the jury will have came (sic) in with a verdict of ACQUITTAL.

  “Sincerely yours,

  “/s/P.D. Burton.”

  But we are a little ahead of our story. It will be recalled that a murder indictment was brought against Fred Mooney and C. Frank Keeney, as a result of a Mingo County killing, while the Armed March was still going on, and the two men went into hiding for a brief time. It developed that they had gone only as far as Columbus, Ohio. In late November, 1921, they voluntarily returned to Charleston and surrendered to the Governor at the State House. Blizzard, who had for a time been hunting rabbits on Cabin Creek, also surrendered, and all three were confined in Kanawha County jail.

  Meanwhile, in Logan County and elsewhere, miners were being arrested and jailed in wholesale lots. James M. Cain, then a young reporter for the “Baltimore Sun,” and later the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice and other novels, described the situation in a contemporary article:

  “Echoes of the last shots (of the Armed March –Ed.) had scarcely died away before the Logan County Grand Jury was convened in special session. Men were indicted by the hundreds for the murder of John Gore, for insurrection, for violation of the ‘Red Man Act,’ for conspiracy. Then the regular session of the grand jury was held in October and more were indicted. It was not until the January grand jury, however, that the idea was conceived of indicting men for treason. No sooner said than done, however, so that when the January grand jury was over, 543 men had been indicted in all, whom it was proposed to try and if possible to convict. At the rate the Blizzard trial went, it would have taken exactly 50 years to try all these cases, assuming that the trials are run off one right after the other without any delays incidental to the election of a new judge every six years and the employment of new attorneys as each generation goes by.”

  Home for Christmas

  It goes without saying that Keeney, Mooney, and Blizzard were charged with a multitude of sins sufficient to keep them behind bars, if convicted, for an inconvenient number of years. Through their attorneys, and through the bars of the Kanawha County jail, they learned of the imprisonment of their fellow miners in Logan. They decided that their presence in Logan might boost the morale of the miners confined there, so Keeney telephoned Chafin on Christmas Eve that they would surrender to him, but would like to spend Christmas with their families. This was arranged with the proper authorities and so it was that the mine-union leaders had Christmas dinners with their wives and children in 1921.

  On the day after Christmas the three men boarded a train for Logan and headed toward the county where no Union man had set foot without danger of mutilation or death. What treatment they would be accorded by Don Chafin they could not know, but they were aware of what was possible and it was not a pleasant prospect. Jail was certain, of course, but a good strong cell might be something of a comfort if a lynch mob got ideas.

  Keeney, Mooney and Blizzard did not remain in Logan jail for long. Attorney T.C. Townsend was busy making bond arrangements and the men left the jail in January, 1922, after being paraded through a hostile crowd from the jail to the courthouse. As Blizzard was the only one of the three actually present during the March, he seems to have been considered the most desperate “criminal” of the group. For the bonds of Keeney and Mooney were fixed at $10,000 while $20,000 was required of Blizzard. This did not include a $10,000 bond posted in Kanawha County, plus a $3,000 bond covering the issuance of a pistol license.

  During the next two months there was much legal maneuvering and at length a change of venue from Logan to Jefferson County was granted. This, of course, was important, for expecting a fair trial in Logan for a Union man was like expecting Hell to flow with cooling waters.

  2/10/1953 (Fifty-eighth)

  The coal operators now felt that their opportunity for eradication of the UMW had come. And the odds certainly appeared in their favor. For it was without doubt true that some thousands of armed men had rebelled against coal operator rule, which was conveniently garbed in the formal cloak of the state government of West Virginia. The operators had their own lawyers as prosecuting attorneys, they had money, and they had, by and large, a friendly press; although this last was not 100% true, as will be shown.

  In attempting to convict the District 17 leadership and other miners of treason to the State of West Virginia the operators were overreaching themselves, but the move was logical. That is, they felt that they had strong cases under, say, the “Red Man Act,” which is a repressive old law now obsolete as to original purpose, against individual members of the UMW. The statute has been quoted elsewhere in this work, and pertains to so-called “conspiracy.” It has proved a convenient weapon against the coal miners in the past, so much so that it yet remains a part of the Code of West Virginia.

  But the operators wanted to do more than merely send a dozen or a hundred Union men to jail, which they might have done with much less expense (for they paid the bills of these trials supposedly conducted by the State). What they wished to do was prove that the United Mine Workers of America was an organization guilty of treason. If they could succeed in this there was no telling where the decision might lead, even on the national level. It might well result in a Supreme Court order dissolving the Union, with implications that all other unions were similarly suspected, in which case the West Virginia coal operators would be blessed by all right-thinking employers everywhere. It will be remembered, too, that this was not purely a local affair, as we have already pointed out with our references to United States Steel and the network of outside capital. The treason trials at Charles Town are thus an important landmark in United States labor history.

  It was late April, 1922 that miners and coal operators began their trek toward the apple orchard country which surrounds Charles Town. The focal point was the old courthouse in which John Brown was tried and convicted of treason, which must have been a comforting thought to the defendants. On April 22 a train arrived carrying about 200 miners who had been able to secure bail, and April 23 a special train carrying 250 coal operator witnesses and attorneys steamed into the little station. It is hardly necessary to give the names of the “prominent and important” people who in part composed this group but we will note that they were headed by Gov. Ephraim F. Morgan.

  The Slaves Appear

  On this same train were UMW members who had been thrown into jail and had been unable to secure bail. It appears that these men were arrested at the time of the Sharples raid on August 27, and, held without bail, had been lying in Don Chafin’s jail ever since. There were nine of them, and they were marched from the train station to the town jail “completely surrounded by armed guards, handcuffed, locked in pairs, then shackled to a heavy iron chain.” The Charles Town residents who witnessed this barbarous treatment, perhaps dubious before, were now willing to believe the stories the miners had been telling of conditions in the southern part of West Virginia. The operators at times were stupid in publicity matters.

  The miners’ worst enemies could not say thi
s of them, for publicity had always been a prime weapon in their struggles, and they were old hands in the game. The operators had generally possessed enough brute force, plus newspaper editors afflicted with blindness characterized by green spots before the eyes, that they felt they could safely ignore public opinion. Not so the miners. They made the most of this operator’s “chain gang” incident, and with telling effect.

  And they had been busy, without any doubt, ever since they knew of the change of venue from Logan County. This writer is fairly certain that miners were sent to the Charles Town area with their pay statements and those of others, armed with arguments to show that their wages, certainly, were not the prime reason for the high price of coal. And to the farmers of the area they pointed out that they and the miners were, after all, simple working men whose interests lay in common with theirs, despite the coal company propaganda which sought to keep them apart.

  How had the 200 miners arrived in Charles Town, when their train had come in two days before Governor Morgan with the nine chained men? It is interesting to note the contrast. All the miners had been furnished with pink lapel ribbons bearing the following words: “United Mine Workers of America Defendant.” Their people who had arrived beforehand, their advance agents, so to speak, had organized a reception committee, which met them at the station. Word as to the arrival of the train had been noised about, so that a large crowd was in attendance. The reception committee marched the miners to a public hall over the fire department, where speeches were made and many of the citizens of Charles Town learned that these supposed revolutionists were after all not very different from themselves. On the following day they formulated a Resolution as follows:

  The $90,000 Team

  “Resolved, that we, the defendants in the Logan case, in meeting assembled express our most sincere thanks and appreciation to the mayor, the business men’s association and the citizens of Charles Town in general for the cordial reception tendered and their genuine hospitality in securing for us suitable accommodations at hotels and private residences and for the many other courtesies extended; be it further