Though little remembered today, The Battle of Blair Mountain remains the largest workers' uprising in American history, and the most massive insurrection on American soil since the Civil War. In August 1921, more than 10,000 union coal miners packed into Model T Fords and commandeered trains, and poured into southern West Virginia to fight for striking miners and avenge the death of Smilin' Sid Hatfield, the Mingo County police chief who had been murdered by coal company operatives. Hatfield's crime was challenging the company-hired thugs who had fired the miners for attempting to unionize, evicted their families from their homes at gunpoint, herded them into jails, and driven them into crowded tent camps. When the amassing miners converged in West Virginia coal country to do battle with gun thugs, Logan County deputies, Vigilance Committee militia, the West Virginia National Guard, air-striking planes, and ultimately a U.S. Army regiment, the fighting force that came to be known as the "Redneck Army" for the red bandannas around their necks joined a struggle years in the making.
The roots of the conflict were complex, involving interstate price competition in the coal industry and a postwar recession, and "yaller dog" contracts West Virginia miners were forced to sign forbidding them from joining the United Mine Workers of America or any other union. The contracts forced on miners in Mingo County required them to live on company land in company cabins, accept payment in scrip, and shop only in the company store—all for the privilege of doing deadly work for starvation wages.
In his stirring and spellbinding new novel Rednecks, Montana Prize-winning novelist Taylor Brown thrusts readers into the fast-beating heart of miners' battle with all of the fierce human drama that suffused earlier books like The River of Kings and Wingwalkers. Rednecks convincingly mingles colorful historical figures like Mother Jones, Sid Hatfield, reporter Boyden Sparkes, and union organizer Bill Blizzard, with the powerful stories of two fictional Mingo County families. One centers around a Black miner and World War II veteran named Big Frank. The other concerns a Lebanese-American doctor drawn from Brown's own Appalachian ancestry, who breaks with the local merchant militia and sides with the miners, risking life and limb to treat the wounded in their camp.
As Brown revisits a pivotal event downplayed in the national press in its time, and derided in The New York Times as another Hatfield-McCoy shoot 'em up started by locals who couldn't help themselves, Rednecks portrays its namesakes in an entirely different light. You know you're reading a different a different sort of West Virginia coal wars story when a Black soldier in the miners' army commends a Lebanese-American boy for his bravery and service in the workers' struggle by putting a fallen comrade's red bandanna around his neck and paying him the highest compliment he can: "You're a real redneck now."
In this interview, I spoke with Taylor Brown about how, as a novelist, he found his way to the Battle of Blair Mountain, and how he put his unique stamp on the story. We also explored how he managed to bring the miners' struggle to life for readers without burying them in heavy historical context and detail.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
The history of the mine wars that led up to the Battle of Blair Mountain is long and complex. How do you set the stage for a story like this, without drowning readers in politics and exposition about how things got so dire in West Virginia coal country?
Taylor Brown
It's a giant story, and a lot of the books that are out there just don't get across the human element that well because there is so much to the story that you get lost in it. In earlier drafts, I had more of that. I had a couple of early readers who said it reads too much like a history book. So I streamlined it where I could, focusing on shorter chapters to make it move more quickly. Like someone carving a surfboard or a block of wood, I had to contour it and shave it off, a little here, a little there. I tried to drop into the action really fast.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
You've got most of the historical figures in there—Mother Jones, Smilin' Sid Hatfield, Bill Blizzard, the Baldwin-Felts thugs—but it's very much a story of two families, Big Frank's and Doctor Muhanna's. And "Doc Moo" is essentially your family. Can you talk a little bit about your connection to this story and this character?
Taylor Brown
Originally, the book had a contemporary storyline braided in with the historical storyline that basically took place a hundred years later and had a march a hundred years later. And I submitted that book to my editor in 2021, and he rejected it and said, "I think this is too much for one book. The historical story doesn't need a contemporary story to make it powerful, but it does need some other characters brought in. We need more than Mother Jones and Sid Hatfield, people we can really connect with." And so he keyed in on a couple of side characters. He said, "I'm really interested in this Lebanese-American physician."
When he turned down the book it was like a sledgehammer blow—here's ninety-something thousand words that I've spent five and a half years on that have been rejected by my editor. But in the midst of reassessing, I realized he was right.
He did not know that I had based that physician, Doc Moo, on my great-grandfather and that I had wanted to write about him for years. We have the same birthday. He was born 107 years before me. I have many memories of sitting at my grandma's kitchen table and listening to her stories of him. He was not at Blair Mountain, but he was a doctor treating miners in Kentucky at the right time. And there was a physician who arranged a truce at Blair Mountain, though I could never figure out who it was.
What my editor said about Doc Moo was my "Eureka!" moment. That was the light bulb in the darkness. I pulled him into the heart of the book and it was as if it was meant to be the whole time.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
A lot of the coal wars histories describe the Redneck Army as an integrated one. There's a moment in Rednecks where Big Frank thinks of the battle they're fighting as another war of emancipation. Are you aware of Black miners who talked about the West Virginia mine wars this way?
Taylor Brown
There's a book by Joe Trotter about Black miners in Appalachia called Coal, Class, and Color, that brings in the voices of a lot of different people. I don't remember specifically somebody saying "This is like another war of emancipation," but I gathered that impression from reading the various things. On the other hand, let's not act like this is uncomplicated, or some grand story of a multicultural, integrated army. I tried to avoid idealizing that too much.
But there's an article from 1921 by a reporter who went to Matewan right after the shooting of Sid Hatfield. He's on the train with an old white man next to him, and a Black worker sits down. And the reporter said he knew immediately that the white man next to him must be from West Virginia and not from Old Virginia because he didn't change his body language, he didn't make a face, he didn't say anything. They had a common enemy there, and I think that helped them be more unified.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
One of the historical figures who really comes to life as a character in Rednecks is the legendary labor leader Mother Jones. The Battle of Blair Mountain wasn't her best moment. When the miners catch her reading them a fake telegram from President Harding telling them to stand down, a lot of them begin to see her as a traitor. Was that one reason you made her a major character in the book, to make sure readers understood how important she actually was?
Taylor Brown
I found that a lot of historians focus on just that moment with the telegram, but she was around, and she really went and talked to the Secretary of War and all that stuff. So I felt like the story that gets told about Mother Jones isn't the full story. She didn't talk about it a whole lot either, because she was really hurt. She had a nervous breakdown after this happened, which I try to show in the book when she's having the panic attack. She had been such a force and part of it for so long, and I wanted to get that across. I was trying to understand why she did that, and it's still unclear. You've got conflicting accounts, but my feeling was she knew that this was a trap. [The coal company] wanted the Redneck Army to come in and they wanted it to get crushed.
I wanted to show that she was there on Christmas, when she collected money to bring them Christmas hams in the tent camp. I wanted her to have a little redemption. I felt like she deserved it. One thing we can do with fiction is look beyond those pivotal moments, and dig into all those times between that you don't usually see.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
The Battle of Blair Mountain has been described as the largest insurrection since the Civil War, in that 10,000 miners poured into Logan County armed to the teeth. But when the U.S. army arrives—the same army so many of them served in during World War I—it's not just that they're outnumbered. There's also a line the Redneck Army just won't cross.
Taylor Brown
I felt that [their World War I service] was a spur for this all happening. You've got all these guys that went abroad and served, and it's a true statistic that it was more dangerous to serve in a coal mine in West Virginia than it was to serve overseas in the United States military in World War I, which we know was a horrific war. Coal miners were exempt from the draft and these miners volunteered to go anyway. And then they came home battle-scarred and were treated this way [by the coal company]. As Mother Jones told them in her speeches, you went over there to take down the Kaiser and you came back home to a bunch of American kaisers that made all their money off of your blood and sweat and they're treating you like slaves.
So they were trained to fight and they weren't afraid of violence. But when the army came in, they said, "That's as far as we can go." That was the line they wouldn't cross, and it was pretty firm. And I think they also knew that if they fought the army, they would lose any public sympathy that they might have had.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
And I imagine some of that lack of sympathy had to do with how the events were covered at the time. One thing you show when the reporters arrive in the last quarter of the book is how the story was suppressed, like it never happened. As you write, "A million rounds fired, unheard."
Taylor Brown
Even today, no one knows about the Battle of Blair Mountain. When I was on a book tour in 2022, everyone asked, "What are you working on?" And I asked, "Have you ever heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain?" Two people raised their hands in 20 events, and these are folks that read books and come to book events. It just goes to show how this story got buried.
And it was buried because they lost. I've been working on an essay about how it got buried that I don't fully get into at the end of the book. It goes on beyond that censorship. The coal company brought in the KKK and held rallies with the evangelist Billy Sunday, and paid him a thousand bucks to talk about how great they were. He said some pretty horrible stuff about the miners. There was a lot more than I could fit in.With a story like this, it's tough to fit everything in. You find all these nuggets in the historical record and you want to somehow weave them in there. I found stuff everywhere that seemed to have some significance, and it was saying, "Put me in."Like when Big Frank jams [the nub of] a weigh pencil [a pencil used to mark the weight of a carload of coal] into a shell casing and [uses it to] write the note that goes to Doc Moo. That's based on a real artifact that they have at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. You want to include everything, and you can only do so much or you're going to lose the reader. Or you ought to be writing a different kind of book.
FICTION
Rednecks
by Taylor Brown
St. Martin's Press
Published May 14th, 2024
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