Just to guarantee the captivity of their consumers, coal companies paid the miners in scrip, which only the company store would accept." (Shogan, 33). This made the workers almost entirely dependent upon the mines for their survival. However unfair such practices may have been, they did help to amplify the call for the coal miners to unite under a union. "At first glance the working conditions -- isolation, danger and piece-rate compensation -- would have seemed to make the chances of effective union organizing impossible. But other factors helped to draw the miners together, chiefly their resentment against the companies that controlled their lives, not only beneath the earth but above it." (Shogan, 33). Essentially, the companies' continued efforts to stomp out unions wherever they reared their heads seeded equal bull-headedness on the side of the workers, who became more adamant than ever in their drives for fairness.

The events in Mingo County, West Virginia became heated over a shootout between the Baldwin-Felts -- hired muscle of the coal distributors -- and Sid Hatfield's men who was backed by the United Mine Workers union. Hatfield's shooting of the Baldwin-Felts leader triggered a chain of events that climaxed in an all-out battle with federal troops. "It was Hatfield who, by gunning down Albert and Lee Felts, had turned the labor conflict to a bloody feud. It was Hatfield who had sparked the union resistance to the use of strikebreakers during the violent months...

And it was Hatfield's acquittal in the murder trial in Williamson and his defiant testimony in the Senate hearings that had sustained the miner's spirits." (Shogan, 153). When Morgan rejected the union's demands again miners began to gather just outside of Charleston, fully armed.
The battle itself mimicked World War I warfare, but the outcome for the miners was devastating, not so much in the losses or the physical ground given up, but in the near complete obliteration of the United Mine Workers union and much of America's organized labor. Shogan argues, "Its real significance is best reckoned not by the blood shed by the opposing forces but rather by its economic and political consequences. By these measurements it soon became clear that the union miners of West Virginia had suffered a staggering defeat." (Shogan, 209).

From an economic standpoint, the strike in Mingo County was doomed to failure. After all, "The fundamental problem was that artificial demand for coal stimulated by the Great War had vanished, but new mines that had opened to meet that demand still remained." (Shogan, 218). Nevertheless, Shogan's representation of the events surrounding the Battle of Blair Mountain stands as an valuable portrait of the American labor movement, its importance in American history, and perhaps, American future.

Works Cited

Shogan, Robert. The Battle of Blair Mountain. Boulder: Westview Press, 2004.