American History Tellers - Coal Wars | Charles Keeney on Restoring His Great Grandfather’s Legacy | 5

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Once the coal miners lost the Battle of Blair Mountain, the story of their uprising was suppressed, and their leader Frank Keeney eventually faded into obscurity—even among members of his own family. But historian Charles Keeney, Frank Keeney’s great grandson, has made it a personal mission to raise public awareness of the mine wars and the pivotal role his ancestor played. Charles Keeney is the founder of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum and author of The Road to Blair Mountain: Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal. He’s also the vice president of Friends of Blair Mountain, an organization dedicated to the preservation and development of the Blair Mountain Battlefield site. He and Lindsay discuss the circumstances that led to Frank Keeney’s radicalization, his friendship with Mother Jones, and why the miners’ uprising resonates with younger generations today. For more on Charles Keeney: https://twitter.com/cbelmontkeeney Listen to new episodes 1 week early and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/historytellers.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's 1949 and you're in Charleston, West Virginia, on a sticky summer evening. You've just finished a long day's work at your new job, and you want nothing more than an ice-cold mug of beer to take the edge off. You've just sat down in the Cosmopolitan Club, a smoke-filled bar that hardly lives up to its name. I'll have a lager, please. The bartender, a man in his late 60s, pours your beer and slides it across the stained bar, leaving a trail of foam behind.

Beside you, an old man is puffing on a cigar. As you take a sip, you notice a suspicious glint in his eye. You old enough to be in this bar, son? I'm 18. You take another sip, feeling the heat of the other customer's gaze. So you come in often? Almost every day. My man Keeney over here keeps his drinks cheap, and it helps he doesn't technically have a liquor license. You look at the bartender, who has busied himself wiping glasses with a dirty rag. The customer beside you shakes his head and stares into his whiskey, and to think he was once one of the most powerful men in the state. What? Who's this guy? Frank Keeney. You know Frank Keeney, of course, of the Mine Wars.

The Mine Wars? Sure, Battle of Blair Mountain, all that. Is that a Civil War battle? Oh, for a Civil War battle, God no. I'm talking about the Miners' Conflict back in 21. Don't they teach you kids anything in school? You sit up straight. Take another sip. I did just fine in school, thank you. Man shakes his head. That man there, Keeney? Men died for him. For the cause of the miners' union. And it all ended on Blair Mountain down in Logan County. 10,000 miners battled the Logan County Sheriff and his hired thugs, not to mention state police and the goddamn U.S. Army. Wait a minute, you're telling me the U.S.

Army fought a bunch of civilian miners here in West Virginia? Man gives you a wry smile. Yeah, my brother was one of them. He got out alive, but others weren't so lucky. That was the cost of joining the Union in those days. Nah, the U.S. Army wouldn't fight miners for joining a Union. I don't suppose a kid like you would understand. These miners were thrown out of their homes, forced to sleep out in tents in the winter cold, starved and plagued with disease, fired on by machine guns. Hell, they even dropped pipe bombs on them. That man Keeney, that man there, he was the miners' leader. Well, how is this the first time hearing of it?

Well, the men who run this state don't want young fellows like you getting any ideas. But us old-timers will never forget. That won't be the last time West Virginia workers will have to fight for their rights, you mark my words. You look over at the grizzled bartender with a new sense of awe. Your eyes widen as you notice the outline of a pistol in his pocket. You're wondering what these miners did to deserve the wrath of the U.S. Army, and why this story seems to have vanished from the history books. From Wondering comes a new series about a lawyer who broke all the rules. Need to launder some money? Broker a deal with a drug cartel? Take out a witness? Paul can do it.

I'm your host, Brandon Jinks Jenkins. Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers, our history, your story. Nearly three decades after the Battle of Blair Mountain brought the West Virginia Mine Wars to an end, union leader Frank Keeney had long since faded into obscurity. After being forced out of the miners' union, Keeney ran a nightclub in Charleston

and later worked as a parking lot attendant. As time wore on, younger generations forgot both Keeney and the cause he devoted his life to. For over 50 years, West Virginia's state history textbooks made no mention of the mine wars. And even today, the miners' armed uprising against corporate and government power remains a source of controversy in the state as battles continue to rage over workers' rights. Our guest today is Charles Keeney. a source of controversy in the state as battles continue to rage over workers' rights. Our guest today is Charles Keeney. He's a historian and founder of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum and former president and current vice president of Friends of Blair Mountain, an organization dedicated to the preservation and development of the Blair Mountain battlefield

site. He is also the great-grandson of West Virginia Coal Wars union organizer Frank Keeney. His upcoming book, The Road to Blair Mountain, Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal, will be available in January. We reached Dr. Charles Keeney at his home in West Virginia. During our interview, a few of the unmistakable sounds of coal country got into the microphones, but it didn't spoil the conversation. Dr. Charles Keeney, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you for having me. So prior to this series, many listeners probably had not heard of the West Virginia Mine Wars. How do you explain this series of events to people who've never heard about this chapter of our history? The Mine Wars were this struggle,

really, for basic constitutional rights, which took place in central Appalachia. During the industrial period, you had something of an industrial autocracy that existed in the coal fields in which these companies had enormous control, even really monopolies over the economy of these regions with the company town system, with the company stores and money and the private mine guards. And so you had this systematic resistance movement against this company control or the extent to which the companies controlled the lives of the individuals, the coal miners, and not just the coal miners, but their wives and their families and local business owners that kind of rebelled against this system that left them trapped in this mono-economy, in this kind of industrial police state in which they had basic freedoms, basic constitutional rights that were denied to them, such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of purchasing power, of consumerism. They didn't have any of that because they had to shop

at the company store. And at times they were given pieces of script that even dictated what specific items that they could buy. I, for example, have a piece of script at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum that says, good for one loaf of bread is the piece of script. And when you see that and realize that some individual got this on his payday, you begin to realize how and why the coal miners turned to radical action and to violent action. It is about unionism in America, but it's about much more than that and what happens when people get left out of the middle class, when they get left out of the possibility of opportunity. I think the modern audience hearing about union activism or uprising might not understand perhaps how desperate things were or how controlled these miners' lives were. How do you explain their conditions to modern audiences?

Well, I teach in the coal fields, so when I talk about coal company control, it's obviously not too hard of a self to the audience that I'm dealing with there. What I think that people find really difficult to understand is the extent to which companies had control over people's lives. That once they got into this system, for example, the debt that you were in, if you found yourself in this system, if you took a job, let's say you're an immigrant, for example. Lots of immigrants came to southern West Virginia. In fact, some of these coal towns were more ethnically diverse than places in New York City. For example, in New York City, where you would have different sections of town where different ethnic groups would live, say like a little Italy or a Chinatown,

all of those different ethnicities and groups were put into one little tiny coal town in which the different sections were basically just three or four houses here and then three or four houses right next to you. So you had this huge melting pot within these small communities. And immigrants that would come in would be told, oh, we're going to give you a house, we're going to give you a job. Then they would get here without any money. They would be told, oh, we're going to give you a house, we're going to give you a job. Then they would get here without any money. They would be fronted the money for the first month's rent for their house. They had to buy all their own equipment at the company store. They wouldn't have the money to do that, so there would be advanced credit.

So what happens is that people immediately get stuck in a credit system in which they're always in debt. Now, that is something that modern audiences can understand, right? Particularly young people, because so many young people are in debt and so many young people's lives are ruled by credit. And you begin to see how people simply cannot get ahead financially if they are stuck in a credit system in which everything in their paycheck goes towards paying towards some kind of credit. And that's what you had in the coal fields. But more than that is this industrial police state. The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency that coal companies used to

enforce their rule was really brutal. They, for example, the only way in and out of these communities was by train, and they would be guarding at all the train stations, asking people why they were coming into town or not. It was almost like a KGB. They read people's mail. They filled out people's ballots for them. You know, recently when you hear, for example, Donald Trump talk about elections being rigged and it's a fixed system and all this kind of stuff. That resonates with people that grew up in the coal fields because for decades, people didn't even fill out their own ballots. That was filled out for them by the company.

And so you really didn't have democracy here. You really didn't have people's constitutional rights that were here. My great-grandfather, who was one of the primary conspirators around the Battle of Blair Mountain and one of the leaders, said that the Battle of Blair Mountain was about re-establishing the Bill of Rights. So that really sums it up in the sense that they didn't have the rights that you're supposed to have under the Constitution. And that is a quintessential American story because so many things from civil rights to immigration rights to gender rights, all of these things deal with or fall under the umbrella, I should say, of trying to achieve the ideals that are written in the Constitution. And so that's why it's such a quintessential American story. But unfortunately, very few people know about it. So these miners facing terrible hardship rise up for their rights

and culminates in the Battle of Blair Mountain, 10,000 miners taking arms. Ultimately, they were repelled in the face of the might of the U.S. military. And they backed down. And the Union's strength in West Virginia dwindled. So they were not really successful in their efforts until the nation's economic trajectory changed and politics in Washington changed with it. So do you consider this history, these few years in West Virginia, as a tragic story or an inspiring one? It's a little bit of both. For example, they didn't lose everything in the West Virginia mine wars. For example, they didn't win the Battle of Blair Mountain, but they did win the Paint Creek, Cabin Creek strike a couple of years before

that, in which they were able to get union recognition, some of the things that they were wanting, like guardian against the long-time. They were able to get mind guards out of certain areas of the state. But yes, they were ultimately unsuccessful at the Battle of Blair Mountain. First off, it proves a number of things about the region. When you think about the Appalachian region, there was a very popular book that came out a couple of years ago called Hillbilly Elegy, which talks about the people of the region. A big part of their poverty is the fact that they're stuck in this fatalistic attitude and they don't want to change anything. Well, the history of the mind wars flies in the face of that notion

because it shows that, in fact, the people that were living here were willing to take up arms in order to try to improve their lot in lives. So there's an inspiring part of it in the sense that people were willing to fight in spite of overwhelming odds. And there was a time when people did not believe that the interests of the coal industry and the people were one and the same. And it challenged the notion of the idea of industrial progress. So there are these types of lessons that we learn from it. But then again, of course, there's a tragic part of it in the sense that the miners never really changed the power structure within the state. And the coal industry, even though they were able to

get some more rights, they were able to get unionization, and they were able to get a little bit of a better lives for themselves. Nonetheless, the industry is as dominant in West Virginia and in Central Appalachia as it ever was. And it demonstrates how difficult it can be to try to dislodge power structures that exist and that are financially, you know, very powerful and supported by politicians. You mentioned your great-grandfather, Frank Keeney, who played a major role in the mine wars as a labor organizer. So, tell us about him and his background. How did he get involved in the labor fight? Well, he came from a family that had been in the region for about 100 years, a little over 100 years when he was born. They came into the area in 1751.

And the family moved over to Cabin Creek, and they owned about 3,000 acres worth of land. And Frank Keeney's father died before he was two years old, and his family wasn't able to hold on to the land. They had it taken from them by the industry. Part of it was bought out, and part of it they were just kind of forced off their lands, which was a big part of what happened in central Appalachia. You had all these landowners, these homesteaders, and people that had been there for a couple of generations. And the industry, of course, found coal railroad companies, timber companies, they found out about the enormous natural resources that were here. And in order to kind of swindle locals out of it,

they came up with a new tool or a new device, which they began to refer to as mineral rights. Specifically, the name of it was called the Broad Form Deed, which enabled coal companies and railroad companies to buy what was underneath the feet of the people who lived on top of the land. And with the Broad Form Deeds and then this slow political takeover of the area, they were able to drive a lot of families off their land. So when you look at motivation for somebody like Frank Keeney, first of all, you see that their entire existence, their entire way of life was disrupted by this new industry coming in. And they found themselves, on one hand, being independent, being able to control their own destiny, to suddenly being confined to this system in which they don't own their own house, they don't own their own land, they don't have any control over what they want to do with their lives. So that's a big part of the motivation between somebody like Frank Keeney.

He also met Mother Jones as a young man, and Mother Jones inspired him to self-educate. Frank Keeney only went to the sixth grade in school, and he left school at the sixth grade to go to work in the mines, as many young people did, to help support their families. And a few years after that, he meets Mother Jones. And Mother Jones tells him to get out of the pool rooms and pick up a book. And he listens to that advice. And he begins to self-educate. He begins to read everything that he could get his hands on, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx and understood that education was a big part of what he could use to help bring a form of liberty to his fellow miners and his fellow West Virginians.

And so he began to be motivated by that. He saw the conditions that happened in 1902 when there were attempted strikes and an attempted union drive in 1906 when people signed on to a union and they were brutally kicked out of their homes and left out in the cold. He himself ended up being evicted in 1912, and he and his wife and two kids. His wife was pregnant. Andy had two kids, and the kids were sick. His wife was several months pregnant, and that's when Frank Kinney leaves his tent and goes to Charleston, asks for help from the UMWA district officers. They're afraid to send organizers into Cabin Creek because of the mine guards. And Kinney tells them that he's going to take over the strike if they won't help. And he

did and became a leader of the miners in that way. So there were a number of different factors from losing the family land to this oppressive system that they lived in, to watching other people suffer in it, to the influence of Mother Jones, and then finally to the desperate circumstances of living in a tent with your family and your kids sick. And so you pile all those things onto one another, and you get the recipe for radicalism and for this direct violent movement which would take place in Appalachia for these couple decades. You mentioned one of perhaps the most radical, Mother Jones. She's a fascinating character.

Tell us more about her. Yeah, Mother Jones is one co-operator referred to as the most dangerous woman in America. And she was certainly that. She was an inspiring figure. She'd worked as an organizer with the Knights of Labor. She was an inspiring figure. You know, she'd worked as an organizer with the Knights of Labor. She'd lost her family years before her husband and children had died. And she then kind of became this legendary labor activist and organizer. And when she came to West Virginia, she was moved by what she saw in West Virginia more than any other place.

She traveled all around the country, even to other countries, working as a labor organizer. She always said that wherever there was struggle, she would be there. And she was for the most part. But she kind of was really touched and moved by what she saw in West Virginia. And she said that the conditions in West Virginia were worse than she'd ever seen anywhere. And the famous thing that she always said was that she called it medieval West Virginia. She said, when I get to the other side, I'm going to tell God Almighty about medieval West Virginia, that it was just almost this forsaken land. She often referred to it as like it was Russia

and controlled by the czars and the coal operators were the czars and the coal miners were the peasants and the Baldwin-Felts detectives were the Cossacks, you know. So she really kind of latched on to West Virginia. And these coal miners had never seen anything like her. And these coal miners were a rough bunch. I've spent a lot of time around coal miners in my life. They're still a rough bunch, right? They're kind of tough, rugged individuals. And to have an old lady, by this time she was in her 80s by the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike. To have an old lady walk up to them and yell at them and scream and cuss and be so brave against the mine guards. There's a famous story about when she first came to Cabin Creek. It was Frank Keeney that brought her to Cabin Creek.

And there were a lot of death threats on her. And she got off the train in Cabin Creek at the station. She gets off with Keeney and a couple others, and everybody's out watching to see what would happen. And the mine guards had machine gun entrenchments placed all over the town. And there were guys manning machine guns. There were lots of guards standing around. She gets off the train, and she walks right up to the machine gun turret to where it's pointing directly at her chest. And she starts cussing out the mine guard, saying if any one of them lifts a finger against her, that the hills were dotted with snipers that would take them all out in a second.

And she just berates them and just, you know, looking down the barrel of gun. She was, by the way, bluffing, of course. There were no snipers in the woods, but the mine guards didn't know that. But the bravery that this old woman would have in the face of violence, in the face of oppression, greatly inspired the miners because they were afraid to stand up. And now here was this old lady coming along, standing up.

And she was also a very effective propagandist, too. She knew when to shake her fist and cuss, and she knew when to act like a vulnerable old lady, particularly, for example, when she was under house arrest in 1913. She acted like she went from being a rabble rouser and somebody that was advocating violence to, I'm just a poor old lady and they've locked me up. And she began writing letters to U.S. senators and brought national attention to the mine wars because of that. So she was clever,

she was fiery, and she was just what the miners needed. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambies and is a Best True Crime nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast Series

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Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition, wherever you get your books. Mother Jones had a bit of a falling out with the Union, but so did actually your great-grandfather, Frank Keeney, after the Battle of Blair Mountain. I'm curious, how did your family react to your great-grandfather's Union organizing? Because he has a mixed legacy. Yeah, he does. And he has a mixed legacy within the family, too, because he was kicked out of the union in 1924, he and Fred Mooney and Bill Blizzard. Bill Blizzard would eventually come back into the union in the 30s. But those were the three kind of ringleaders behind the Battle of Blair Mountain. ended, which dragged out until 1924. Two weeks after the final trials ended, John L. Lewis,

then president of the UMWA, forced Keeney and Mooney and Blizzard to all resign. Keeney and Mooney then began to join what they called the Save the Union movement. Lewis then spent the rest of the 1920s actually firing any kind of district president throughout the United Mine Workers in America that could challenge his authority. And a lot of these ousted district officials from around America formed the Save the Union Committee that was ultimately unsuccessful. Frank Kinney was actually the last district president elected in West Virginia for 50 years until the 1970s. And when he left, there were about 50,000 union miners in West Virginia, and within five years, there were less than 1,000. So during the Depression, Frank Kinney, who had been in Illinois working in the Save the Union Committee, returns and forms his own union called

the West Virginia Mine Workers and also forms the West Virginia Labor Party. And the union lasted for three years. They had a strike and they actually had about 23,000 miners join up. But this obviously put him at odds against the UMWA. The UMWA then began to refer to him as this false prophet, this dual unionist, this traitor. And so he would not be rehabilitated for a very long time in his reputation with the union. In addition, during the Depression, he spent a lot of money, personal money and finances, mortgaging his house and doing a number of other things and selling the money or using the money to buy food for starving miners and their families, bringing miners into the home. And that caused an enormous amount of friction between him and

his family. And ultimately, he chose the miners over his family. And a lot of his children never forgave him for it. He ended up having six children, and four of them wouldn't have anything to do with him late in their lives. So he did have this kind of mixed legacy, but it's really interesting because my whole life, growing up in West Virginia, I would have old people approach me. Strangers just come up to me when they'd find out who I was, and they would say, oh, I met Frank Keeney once. I shook his hand once. I heard him give a talk once. And they would talk about him like, you know, they were talking about somebody like JFK

or something, you know, in these just glowing, larger-than-life terms. And yet he was an individual that never made it into any textbook. The union that he helped build didn't want anything to do with him. His family didn't want anything to do with him. Part of my work as both an activist and a scholar has been about kind of rehabilitating not just the mine wars, but also his legacy in the union movement in America. This is actually a very personal story for you. I'm curious, how did you learn or uncover your great-grandfather's history, the history of your family?

I first heard his name at a family picnic when I was eight or nine years old. I write about this in my book that just comes out, The Road to Blair Mountain. And it was at a family picnic. Long story short, I was in behind a house. It was a Memorial Day weekend. And so it was nice outside. And I was behind the house playing with a little toy army knife, a little plastic knife, and trying to throw it up against a hillside of moss and was failing miserably at it until an old gentleman came up to me and showed me how to throw it and then told me that I need to learn how to throw a knife because I might have a mind guard after me one day,

which kind of struck me as an eight or nine year old. I forget exactly how old I was, but nonetheless, I was like, what's a mind guard? What's a Baldwin-Felts detective? And why would they be after me? And then this guy who was James Jackson, that's who he was, he was one of Frank Keeney's grandchildren, and he said, you know, you're Frank Keeney's great-grandson, and you don't know anything about mine guards? And that, you know, I ran around the front to find my dad hovering over a grill and asked him about it, and that's kind of what started it.

When I heard about it at a family reunion picnic when I was a kid. And then over time, I would get my family together, my dad, my aunts, some of Frank and his surviving children throughout high school and interview them and talk to them. And it took a while before they would open up and talk about it.

So that's how I really learned. And then, of course, I began to read what I could that had been of together and get them to reminisce and talk about it. So it's a history that's very much been passed down orally through the generations, which I think also gives it this real grassroots authenticity that it's a people's history. It's not an official history. It's a history that you really have to dig for in order to find, and that's one of the things I appreciate about it. It sounds like there might be an interesting parallel between your family history and the official history of the state. This story seems to have been at least reluctantly told if not suppressed how did you learn about it officially and through more official channels what school family community well i didn't learn about it through real official challenge uh official ways so in the eighth grade in west

virginia you have to take a west virginia studies. And usually the eighth grade West Virginia teacher was whoever in the school the principal could get to teach the class. It usually wasn't a specialist. For example, my eighth grade West Virginia history teacher was actually the Spanish teacher who didn't know a thing about history. And she'd never heard of the mine wars. She didn't know who my great-grandfather was. The mine wars were not mentioned in my textbook, West Virginia history textbook, certainly not in any kind of general American history textbook. And its absence is what really piqued me to really dive deeper into things because it was a war with no monuments. Now, we talk about civil war

monuments and revolutionary war monuments. There's monuments to wars all over the place that we hold very sacred. Battlefields like Gettysburg or Antietam or Yorktown or where the USS Arizona is at Pearl Harbor. But you don't find that with the mine wars, in part because the very existence of this history challenged the industrial power structure in America in ways that other conflicts didn't. And it was not taught in the classroom, and it was actively oppressed by the coal industry. And I have a chapter in my book where I delve deep into this suppression and how it was suppressed. There's a paper trail, literally, on Governors Homer, Adams, Holt,

Governor Morgan, Governor Cornwell, Governor Underwood, these governors that deliberately kept this stuff out of the classroom because it would give an unfavorable picture of the coal industry. And therefore, anything that would question this narrative that the coal industry was anything but wonderful didn't make its way in the classroom. They won't even let you teach about climate change in the classroom in West Virginia. So anything that challenges the idea that coal was anything but wonderful doesn't make it into the classroom. And so that's when I realized that as a teenager, that's when I really thought, well, I'm going to really actually put it into the regional and then later on a more

national spotlight by saving the place that is most closely associated with this war. You just mentioned the Blair Mountain Controversy. What was that? Well, the coal industry wanted to destroy the battlefield, the Blair Mountain Battlefield, which stretches for about 12 miles. It's a really large battlefield. They wanted to destroy it with mountaintop removal coal mining. And they were able to secure permits and very nearly pulled it off. It was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. But after the coal industry protested and used a bit of their political influence, it was taken off the National Register. And the reason that was important is because according to state code,

you cannot use mountaintop removal or surface mining on any property that's on the National Register. So they got it taken off and they actively sought to destroy it. That was just at the time when I was taking my position teaching in the coalfields at Southern, I was still working on my doctorate at the time. Still a grad student, but I decided to take a job because 2008 had just recently happened and the job market was looking horrible. And so I was going to take a job while I could. And so I saw a job opening, and so I was right in the middle of the coal fields when all of this unfolded. And I joined a group and eventually became president of a group called Friends of Blair Mountain that led this preservation movement. We had a week-long protest.

We reenacted the entire armed march on Logan for a full week. We marched 10 miles a day. At the last day, we had 1,000 people that were there that rallied and then marched up to the southern crest of Blair Mountain. But then we used a lot of political and legal maneuvering and a number of other different methods to change the narrative about it because the industry tried to paint us as environmental extremists who wanted to just destroy coal. And we had to convince coal miners that saving this battlefield was actually in their best interest as opposed to the jobs that it might create through blasting it. And we were successful

in doing that. And we got it back on the National Register in 2018. And it's protected once more. So there's not just a battle over the history itself, but there's a battle over the very soil upon which this war was waged. This is the emergency broadcast system. A ballistic missile threat has been detected inbound to your area. Your phone buzzes and you look down to find this alert. What do you do next? Maybe you're at the grocery store. Or maybe you're with your secret lover.

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Join Wondery Plus and The Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. So you started out as a grad student historian. You were president of the Friends of Blair Mountain and began an unlikely career of activism, I suppose. And then you became a founding member of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. What's the museum there for and what are your motivations to do all of this? I love the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum and I love being a part of it. It's one of my favorite things that I've ever done. It's this, you know, group of volunteers and, and a few of us are historians.

I'm not the only historian that's on our board, Lou Martin. And then some other local activists like Catherine Moore and Katie Lauer and Wilma Steele kind of came together and like, we want to create a place where this history can be told, where it's not going to be influenced by the state, it's not going to be influenced by corporations, it's going to be a people's history, and it's going to be the authentic history as well as we can do it. Kenny King, who was also a member of Friends of Blair Mountain for many years, he still is along with me, and he was the guy who really started the whole preservation movement around Blair Mountain because he had a grandfather that fought there. And he started going up there along the slopes with just a metal detector and began finding hundreds of artifacts, shell casings,

bullet shell casings, guns, you name it, all over the place that really enabled us to give an archaeological and geographic map of what happened up there. Well, anyway, he has these hundreds of artifacts, and a few others, like Wilma Steele, also has all these artifacts from the period that they've just collected over the years. We were able to use that as a base to begin creating this museum, and it's just been an extraordinary experience for the last five years. The United Mine Workers has gotten behind us. We've just redesigned and moved our building to a new building across the street from its original location. But it's right there in the middle of Mate 1, West Virginia, which is where so much of the actual history occurred.

I mean, there's still bullet holes on the walls in the little town, you know, right across the street from where we are. So it's a really authentic little place, and it's an authentic little museum, and it's become, you know, really popular locally, and we've even had people from all over America, even other countries come just to kind of make a pilgrimage down to this place. So it's been a really special project. Of all these artifacts that are being collected and assembled at the museum, do you have a favorite? I have some that are really personal to me. Obviously, I have some family artifacts. I have my great-grandfather's book of poems. Not poems that he wrote, but a

collection of poems that he had. And he had it with him during the Paint Creek Cabin Creek strike in the tent that he and his family lived in. And he kind of referred to it for inspiration. He's got underlined passages and notes written in it. And I have that in the museum now. Just for so many reasons, I think it's an important artifact. When you think of coal miners, you think of these tough and rumble, you know, whiskey drinking, gun slinging kind of guys. But their leader was in a tent reading a book of poems. And that kind of flies in the face of this notion of what you might think coal miners are. And in the midst of all this violence, you have this realization that they need education, they need enlightenment to move forward.

And so that's really a precious item for that. I mentioned the piece of script that only enables a person to buy one loaf of bread that's on display. There's also, I don't know, there's so many little things like that in our museum that I'm really proud of. And, of course, there are a couple of guns that have actually been used in the Battle of Blair Mountain that we have there that have been dug up that I think are really special. So a lot of little things. So in the museum, I'm wondering, do you have a red bandana? And what was the importance of that? We do not have an original red bandana.

In fact, there's only one original bandana I know of in existence, and I know who has it, but I can't quite get it. But anyway, we don't have an original red bandana. The red bandana tradition, it's kind of hazy on where it got its original start. Workers using red bandanas when they went on strike and wearing them around their necks. It was first documented in 1877, actually, at the railroad strike in Martinsburg, West Virginia. That would become the great railroad strike of 1877 that would stretch across the country. It was the first national strike in American history. So that's the first documented case I've been able to find. Why specifically they chose a red bandana is a bit shrouded in mystery. We know that there were some Scottish and Irish Protestants who were using red bandanas to protest the Catholic Church,

and we know that there were Scottish and Irish railroad workers that were using the red bandana and the strikes, and maybe there's a connection with that. We really don't know how or why it specifically got started or why that specific symbol. Maybe red because red was, you know, the collar of socialism or whatever, but we don't really know. But it resurfaced in the Pink Creek-Cabin Creek strike, then at the Battle of Blair Mountain. There were coal miners that donned red bandanas during the Black Lung Association in the 60s. You had red bandanas that were used by environmentalists when they began to protest mountaintop removal coal mining in the 90s and early 2000s. And then we adopted the red bandana as a symbol in our protest march and then as a symbol of preserving the Blair Mountain battlefield. And teachers in 2018, when the teachers went on strike and started that national strike wave, many of them wore red bandanas also, hearkening back to the days of Blair Mountain.

They were very vocal about that, too, the West Virginia teachers. So it's kind of the scarlet thread throughout the regional history that people see it as a symbol of resistance, a symbol of solidarity. I've been using a term called identity reclamation and that the red bandana is a symbol of us kind of reclaiming our own identity and our own history that was kind of taken from us by these official state histories that don't really tell the truth and by an industry that has controlled our culture for a hundred years. And I think that's been robbed of us. And the bandana is our symbol of kind of taking that back. It's also a symbol of this long struggle against industrial forces. And that doesn't mean that all industrial forces are bad. What I mean is the way the situation was in Appalachia is people were not able to have any

kind of upward mobility or any kind of a chance, no matter how hard they worked. They weren't given access to basic freedoms. And this bandana was a symbol of fighting for that. And that's something that we try to carry on with. Whenever students come to the Mine Wars Museum, Wilma Steele gives all of them a red bandana, and they take red bandanas home with them. It's kind of become this larger symbol over time, but it's a very important piece of the history symbolically. Finally, as we noted, modern ears will hear the words labor activists differently than they did in earlier times. Why is it important to know the history of the labor movement today? Well, first of all, today you have the largest wealth inequality that you've had since the

industrial era of the early 1900s. So wealth inequality has returned to the time when you had violent labor direct action and violent strikes throughout America, the most violent of which occurred in West Virginia. Now that you are seeing this huge wealth gap that we haven't seen in a century, you are beginning to see, of course, people being drawn towards more extreme ideologies on both the political left and the political right. When people do not have access to the middle class, when they don't have upward mobility, when they don't have a voice in the workplace, then they tend to go towards more extreme ways of trying to fix the system or take down the system and bring on something new. So we are not so distant from the radical days of the mine wars is what we might think. And even mine guards, when you look at the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency and the Pinkertons, that's what the railroad companies used.

They used Pinkertons. And Pinkertons are still alive and well today. They were hired out by state governments actually to hack emails and to monitor teachers that went on strike in 2018. Pinkertons are also being hired by major oil companies to protect their rigs. Chinese companies have their own versions of mine guards in eastern and southern Africa right now. They have their own version of company towns, basically, with their own private militaries, not Chinese militaries, but their own, these businesses have their own little militaries in places like Indonesia,

the South Pacific, Eastern and Southern Africa, that very much mirror what happened in the coal towns of West Virginia. So Blair Mountain isn't about the way things were. It's about the way things are. And we have to understand that in order to see the present with a lot clearer lenses. Dr. Charles Keeney, thank you so much for talking to me. It was my pleasure, and thank you for shedding some light on this history. That was my conversation with Charles Keeney, who is a historian, founder of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, and currently vice president of Friends of Blair Mountain. He is also the great grandson of Frank Keeney. His upcoming book, The Road to Blair Mountain, Saving a Mine Wars

Battlefield from King Coal, is available January 2021. From Wondery, this is episode five of The Coal Wars from American History Tellers. On the next episode, author Jim Bendall joins us as we look back at America's presidential inaugurations. We'll explore the current friction between the nation's outgoing and incoming president, the Capitol Hill breach on January 6th, and how inaugurations have served as a powerful reminder of the strength of American democracy, even in times of crisis. can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. This episode was produced by Denise Guerra.

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