The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

Recently the PBS series "American Experience" featured a documentary based largely on the content of this fine book. As a native West Virginian, I am always interested in the history of my home state, but this part of its history was something of which I had only been vaguely aware, until now. Few people know that America's largest armed insurrection, aside from the Civil War, took place in the southern West Virginia coal fields, in 1921, culminating in the "Battle of Blair Mountain," which pitted nearly 10,000 armed miners against local authorities armed with World War I era machine guns and even bombers (the one and only aerial bombardment of Americans on American soil). It's the story of the rise of the UMWA, Mother Jones, the Matewan massacre, and a gigantic cast of real characters that spanned 40 years. James Green tells the tale in great detail, with an easily readable narrative flow, and plenty of documentation for those who wish to dig deeper into the story. Whether you are interested in West Virginia specifically or labor history, in general, this book is a fine introduction to a little-known aspect of our country's heritage.

To think that there was literally open warfare, with machine guns, snipers and bombs, taking place on and off for three + decades in southern West Virginia, and that this hasn't become as central to Americans' understanding of our history as the Civil War!If you want to know how the eight hour work week, workers' safety and basic workers' rights that we take for granted today came to pass, you need to read this amazing, thrilling history.Mr. Green brings to life the awful working and living conditions of the coal miners of Appalachia and their struggle to move from virtual slavery to freedom. We learn all about the greedy coal mine operators and their brutal private armies which committed audacious acts of violence, often with impunity. Only when the miners bravely started organizing and going on strike, led in the early years by Mother Jones, did they start making traction in their quest to be treated with basic fairness. The United Mine Workers of America, finally was absorbed into the massive AFL-CIO in the '30s, and became a powerhouse of labor strength for decades to come.This is an really good book, which tells you all about the important strikes, negotations, politics and legislation, but without ever getting bogged down in the minutia. This is a story of a proud, hard, strong people who didn't stop demanding their rights.

Being the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners in the Ohio Valley, this book was of great interest to me. It was a wonderful accounting of the Coal Wars and mistreatment of the miners by the mine owners.Author James Green went into great detail - sometimes too great of detail. In his zeal to tell as many details as he was able to uncover, sometimes the narrative got lot in the details.Nevertheless, if you have an interest in the history of coal mining or West Virginia, this book is definitely for you!

Everything was good. The bookmark as mentioned in the headline, a great addition. I always lose older ones.

Green has written one of the better histories of West Virginia's coal mining industry and its brutal relations with the men who actually went into the pits to dig the black gold. Paint Creek, the Matewan Massacre of 1920, the Battle of Blair Mountain, Sheriff Chafin, Mother Jones, Baldwin-Felts thugs, they're all here in greater detail and clarity than other books, such as "Night Comes to the Cumberlands," have rendered them. There is no way to read "The Devil Is Here in These Hills" and continue to believe in the rightness of pure capitalism, for West Virginia history is a relentless tally of wartime indignities against working people and corruption on a large scale. Sadly, things haven't changed, as evidenced more recently in the crimes (mostly unpunished) of Massey Energy's Don Blankenship, perhaps the most villainous of coal company scumbags, as well as the wholesale destruction of southern West Virginia by strip mining conglomerates with shovels as big as skyscrapers. Sadly, the people of West Virginia have become even more conservative in recent years, as if the past horrors of corporate greed have been forgotten. One feels the only reprieve for this star-crossed state will be the decline and collapse of coal as a means of energy.

This is an incredible account of a lawless era that rivals anything that happened in the old West. All the more amazing is that it happened in the 20th century 200 miles from Washington DC. When coal was king, there was no freedom or rule of law for most people. Shocking to read of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and American workers being machine gunned and bombed!