Speaker 1: What you're hearing right now is an old newsreel from
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five.
Speaker 2: We have small coffees in Pennsylvania live billions of buns
Speaker 2: of unlined goal.
Speaker 1: Mitch Troutman, author of the book The Bootleg Coal Rebellion,
Speaker 1: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, plays this footage
Speaker 1: to start the talks that he gives about his book.
Speaker 3: The footage of this newsreel is just incredible. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's all a reenactment. These are bootleg miners in as
Speaker 3: far as I know. Those are cops in it who
Speaker 3: had a confrontation just a few months prior to the
Speaker 3: newsreels showing up and wanting to do this little spot
Speaker 3: that ends up being six minutes shown across the country
Speaker 3: in theaters.
Speaker 2: Long before federal and state governments began handing out billions
Speaker 2: of dollars for relieve, these people found the way to
Speaker 2: help them sell.
Speaker 1: Bootleg mining is a phenomenon that started before the Great Depression,
Speaker 1: but became commonplace in coal country after the stock market
Speaker 1: crash of nineteen twenty nine. Cynthia economy into chaos, and
Speaker 1: mine started closing down without any jobs, money, or ways
Speaker 1: to heat their homes. The miners started independently working the mines.
Speaker 1: But one industry that actually did well during the depression
Speaker 1: was movie theaters, and this newsreel about bootleg miners would
Speaker 1: have been shown to board and unemployed movie audiences across
Speaker 1: the country.
Speaker 3: Because people were eager to spend a little bit of
Speaker 3: money to forget about things. And you know, having audio
Speaker 3: with your video was somewhat new, So the bootleggers got
Speaker 3: to go watch themselves on film. You see them coming
Speaker 3: out of the hills, coming out of their own bootleg holes.
Speaker 3: It looks really wild.
Speaker 2: When depressed from people, the miners want to step further.
Speaker 3: You see them rallying at a meeting of bootleg miners.
Speaker 3: You even see a negotiation between them and the company,
Speaker 3: hosted by the editor of the local newspaper, and that's
Speaker 3: a role that a couple of the region's editors played.
Speaker 3: What they don't show you is that the reenactment they're
Speaker 3: doing in real life ended with them dynamiting company property
Speaker 3: and the company retreating.
Speaker 2: That might they sold their stolen goals, the local merchants
Speaker 2: will realized that the legal coal business might keep families alive.
Speaker 3: This is emblematic because the bootleggers were ignoring and rejecting
Speaker 3: property rights, and as time went on, you know, over
Speaker 3: like this twelve fifteen year span, they just gained more
Speaker 3: and more power locally to the point where they were
Speaker 3: basically immune from enforcement of property right laws that belonged
Speaker 3: to the coal company, especially in two counties in particular,
Speaker 3: it was the primary industry happening.
Speaker 4: So in this scenario, when their organization is able.
Speaker 3: To push the company cops away, and I mean the
Speaker 3: company cops are honestly scared at this point, That's really
Speaker 3: how things were going. And that's why this history was
Speaker 3: so crazy that it was buried for so long, because
Speaker 3: it really is a rebellion, not in the sense that
Speaker 3: they were trying to overthrow the government, but in the
Speaker 3: sense that they had decided certain laws just don't apply,
Speaker 3: and local judges, even local police were enforcing those laws anymore.
Speaker 2: The boat leggers were, I believe, they are only taking
Speaker 2: what belongs to them.
Speaker 1: Throughout the Great Depression and its aftermath, stealing coal from
Speaker 1: the companies, which started out of a need for survival
Speaker 1: and as a strike tactic, would grow into a full
Speaker 1: fledged industry of unionized independent miners. It was a community
Speaker 1: effort born out of solidarity with one another, a culture
Speaker 1: of dangerous and often deadly work, a desire to reclaim
Speaker 1: the commons in a time of extreme poverty, and an
Speaker 1: understanding that laws are arbitrary rules made by the ruling
Speaker 1: class whose only interest is the protection of capital. This
Speaker 1: is working class History.
Speaker 5: Alamatina haena all belag Child, The lag Child, the Lagilama.
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Speaker 4: The bootleg miners.
Speaker 3: They get half a sentence in a People's History of
Speaker 3: the United States, and I really couldn't find much else
Speaker 3: on it.
Speaker 4: There wasn't much written.
Speaker 1: Mitch stumbled upon the relatively unknown story of bootleg mining
Speaker 1: during a break after getting burnt out as a rural
Speaker 1: community organizer in central Pennsylvania. He took a carpentry job,
Speaker 1: started a blog, and I was using it to highlight
Speaker 1: the many cultural oddities of the region, which people in
Speaker 1: central Pennsylvania think are normal, but most people wouldn't.
Speaker 4: One is the amount of house fires.
Speaker 3: Right every winter in these towns, whole blocks will burned
Speaker 3: down because the housing stock is so old because it
Speaker 3: was built by companies made out of wood, you know,
Speaker 3: and so one electrical fire will spread throughout the others.
Speaker 1: Another one of these oddities is the way people tend
Speaker 1: to treat coal company land as if it belongs to
Speaker 1: the public.
Speaker 3: Just the fact that there's this culture there of using
Speaker 3: the coal company lands as your own, or not as
Speaker 3: your own, more of as a commons Like that's that's
Speaker 3: how it exists today. Is people will go out into
Speaker 3: the abandoned mindlands and have a picnic, have a party,
Speaker 3: go racing, race trucks or whatever, go swimming. And I
Speaker 3: really wanted to figure out, like where's this come from?
Speaker 3: Like to people here, this is normal, but where where's
Speaker 3: the root of that.
Speaker 1: The book also came out of Mitch's curiosity about his
Speaker 1: own family history. He had heard family members talk about
Speaker 1: so called bootleg mining, which these days has become shorthand
Speaker 1: for a small group of people, usually all related, who
Speaker 1: run a small, legal, independent mind. As he dug further
Speaker 1: into the origins of the phrase, he learned that both
Speaker 1: his mom and dad's sides of the family had a
Speaker 1: more radical history than he thought. And he learned that
Speaker 1: the word bootlegging held the answer to his questions about
Speaker 1: the commons as well.
Speaker 3: And it turns out they both came from the same place.
Speaker 3: And so I read everything I could find, every little
Speaker 3: obscure thing I could find on bootleg mining. I wrote
Speaker 3: a blog post that became quite popular locally, and a
Speaker 3: friend of mine just kept encouraging me to dig in more,
Speaker 3: dig in more, And I thought I had found everything I.
Speaker 1: Could, but there wasn't much to find. Research and history
Speaker 1: on bootleg mining was hard to come by, and the
Speaker 1: phenomenon seemed to be really poorly documented until he stumbled
Speaker 1: upon the work of a man named Michael Cazera, who
Speaker 1: had been working on a book about bootleg miners in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties and nineties. Michael was a member of
Speaker 1: the Industrial Workers of the World or IWW, the son
Speaker 1: of bootleg coal truckers, and he had been collecting oral
Speaker 1: histories from bootleg miners. When he tragically died in a
Speaker 1: car accident and I.
Speaker 3: Managed to find the phone number for his widow, I
Speaker 3: called her up and she was so happy someone called.
Speaker 3: She had saved all his materials, some of which were
Speaker 3: put into a library and the rest of which were
Speaker 3: in her basement. And managed to get all that and
Speaker 3: once I had these forty odd interviews with people who
Speaker 3: are dead now, a friend of mine said, that's a
Speaker 3: whole book right there. And I certainly hadn't thought of
Speaker 3: it as a book up until that point. But because
Speaker 3: there wasn't something like that already, I decided to go
Speaker 3: for it, and my own curiosity kind of forced me
Speaker 3: to do it.
Speaker 4: Anyway I needed to know more.
Speaker 1: One of Mitch's big questions was why isn't there all
Speaker 1: ready a book about this? One reason was that the
Speaker 1: person who'd been working on one had died. But another
Speaker 1: reason is that the story itself hadn't really survived well locally.
Speaker 1: The story just hadn't been told or passed down.
Speaker 3: I think one reason for that is anti communism. After
Speaker 3: World War Two, there were a lot of Communists involved
Speaker 3: in this. The FBI was all around trying to weed
Speaker 3: those people out, and so they didn't necessarily want to share.
Speaker 3: But another thing, more generally is that for America, the
Speaker 3: Great Depression, people who lived through it share a lot
Speaker 3: of like little anecdotes, but not so much the stories,
Speaker 3: because nineteen fifties America is like the American Decade, you know,
Speaker 3: it's all about people coming up, people having more stuff,
Speaker 3: consumer America, and the actual stories of the depression, like
Speaker 3: the sad ones where people were powerless, weren't often shared.
Speaker 1: Throughout his research, Mitch learned that part of this lost
Speaker 1: history included both sides of his face, and for their
Speaker 1: own reasons, they had just never talked about it. He
Speaker 1: was determined to tell their story, as well as the
Speaker 1: story of all the bootleg miners who had fought so
Speaker 1: hard to take care of themselves in their communities when
Speaker 1: their employers and the government abandoned them during the Great Depression.
Speaker 3: The book starts with these two quotes, things happen in
Speaker 3: the Bootleg coal region that are almost unbelievable for anyone
Speaker 3: not familiar with the whole story. Without their background, they
Speaker 3: sound utterly preposterous. They probably never happened anywhere before. They
Speaker 3: couldn't have happened except in such a region, in such
Speaker 3: a set of circumstances. That's the New York Times nineteen
Speaker 3: thirty five. We don't know, we don't care who's supposed
Speaker 3: to own the land. God put that coal there, not
Speaker 3: the Philadelphia and Redding Coal Company. It's a quote from
Speaker 3: Mike McCloskey, a bootleg miner, And those two quotes just capture.
Speaker 4: The whole thing.
Speaker 3: To me, Like, if you only hear those two quotes,
Speaker 3: it gives you a good sense. I love how obstinate
Speaker 3: the bootleg miner is, and how kind of funny and
Speaker 3: religious he is, and how he just puts it all
Speaker 3: right into that we don't care about who owns the land.
Speaker 3: In all the interviews, people don't say that they stole anything.
Speaker 3: They say it was questionable, it wasn't clear who owned
Speaker 3: the land, or they didn't care who owned the land,
Speaker 3: or the company might have the paperwork, but they stole
Speaker 3: it at some point.
Speaker 4: And so that attitude is in there.
Speaker 3: And then just the specifics, God put that coal there,
Speaker 3: not the Philadelphia and Running Coal company.
Speaker 1: And in a way God did put it there three
Speaker 1: hundred million years ago.
Speaker 3: So this history is like profoundly shaped by geology. None
Speaker 3: of this would have been possible without the geology, and
Speaker 3: in fact, the geology created the situation. Coal isn't dead dinosaurs,
Speaker 3: his dead plant material that Eonzigo sank to the bottom
Speaker 3: of oceans and then was compressed over time. Most of
Speaker 3: the coal in the United States is either bituminous coal,
Speaker 3: which you know that's West Virginia, Kentucky that kind, or lignite,
Speaker 3: which is like a lower quality coal that.
Speaker 4: They have out west.
Speaker 1: And then there's anthracite, which is found only in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: Anthracite was put under a lot more pressure as the
Speaker 1: Appalachian Mountains formed, and through that process it was purified
Speaker 1: more than other coals. It has the highest carbon content
Speaker 1: of any coal.
Speaker 3: Where the geography comes in is that squashing that forming
Speaker 3: of the mountains makes it so that it runs in
Speaker 3: these up and down wavy patterns through the land. Like
Speaker 3: coal in West Virginia Western Pennsylvania is more or less
Speaker 3: running horizontal, and so people get in there and mine
Speaker 3: it horizontally and also lends itself much more to mechanization,
Speaker 3: whereas in the anthracite it's more like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: think of the edge of like Lasagna pasta.
Speaker 4: The way it's wavy like that.
Speaker 1: This our regular pattern of coal makes it in some
Speaker 1: ways harder to mine, but it also leads to the
Speaker 1: coal taking on all sorts of weird shapes that the
Speaker 1: coal companies didn't bother trying to get to.
Speaker 3: And so mining anthracite coal, if you're at the bottom
Speaker 3: of the top of the arc, you're relatively horizontal, but
Speaker 3: then there's all these slopes that can get really steep,
Speaker 3: almost vertical.
Speaker 4: Well, that meant a lot of things.
Speaker 3: It meant that there was coal that it wasn't worth
Speaker 3: the company's time to go after because it was too
Speaker 3: technically involved to mine vertically.
Speaker 4: It meant that it was less able to be automated.
Speaker 1: But it also meant that there were veins of coal
Speaker 1: that were easier to access without mining equipment.
Speaker 4: And then this is a big deal.
Speaker 3: It meant that there's outcroppings everywhere, meaning that the coal
Speaker 3: comes up to the surface and you can see where
Speaker 3: it is. And the companies that are going after the
Speaker 3: big veins, the thick veins that are like you know,
Speaker 3: up to one hundred feet wide maybe, and there's all
Speaker 3: these other veins that are only a foot or two wide,
Speaker 3: and because of the outcroppings, you can just go up
Speaker 3: in the mountain and see where they are. And this
Speaker 3: is what made it possible for bootleggers to operate, because
Speaker 3: in other places in the country, the horizontal seems you
Speaker 3: can see like the company controls the entrance to that
Speaker 3: whole mine, whereas the bootleg miners were able to create
Speaker 3: their own entrances all over the mountain.
Speaker 1: Historically speaking, everything that we've talked about in previous episodes
Speaker 1: with bituminous coal company housing script, various waves of immigration
Speaker 1: tends to happen earlier in the Anthracite region, and.
Speaker 3: So they started mining coal back before the Civil Wars started.
Speaker 3: It really helps fuel the industrial revolution, helps fuel the
Speaker 3: what would become the American war machine.
Speaker 4: All these things, and just like.
Speaker 1: In our other coal episodes, the coal companies preyed on
Speaker 1: and tricked desperate people into getting stuck in situations where
Speaker 1: every aspect of their life, from where they lived to
Speaker 1: where they shopped, what their children learned in school, what
Speaker 1: they heard in the churches, were under company control. Many
Speaker 1: companies didn't even pay their workers in US currency, offering
Speaker 1: instead to pay them in company script, which they could
Speaker 1: only spend at the company store. Many miners were tricked
Speaker 1: into predatory contracts where they take a job and have
Speaker 1: to go into debt at the company's store, buying all
Speaker 1: their own equipment, only to never get paid a high
Speaker 1: enough wage to actually pay off that debt.
Speaker 3: At first, it was mostly English and Welsh immigrants doing
Speaker 3: this coal mining, and then the first big wave of
Speaker 3: immigration came after the Irish potato famine. You get lots
Speaker 3: of Irish coming to what's now the coal region, going
Speaker 3: down into the mines.
Speaker 1: The Irish famine, like most famines, was largely man made,
Speaker 1: as British colonial authorities continued to export food from Ireland
Speaker 1: while the population starved.
Speaker 4: The miners at the time they tried to unionize.
Speaker 3: They tried to make these miserable conditions better for themselves
Speaker 3: through groups like the Worker's Benevolent Association, which was an
Speaker 3: early attempt at unionizing coal miners in America. But the
Speaker 3: Workers Benevolent Association was just crushed, just really crushed by
Speaker 3: the coal companies.
Speaker 1: The Workers Benevolent Association was an attempt to organize not
Speaker 1: just one mine, but all the mines in the region
Speaker 1: in order to prevent open minds from undercutting others that
Speaker 1: were on strike. It was organized through an Irish group
Speaker 1: called the Ancient Order of Hyperions, and being Irish, they
Speaker 1: weren't about to take this union busting line down.
Speaker 3: And so when the unionization is crushed, the Irish miners
Speaker 3: turned to what they know from their home country, which
Speaker 3: is sort of midnight justice. And it's hard to know
Speaker 3: what to say about the Molly mcguires because most of
Speaker 3: what we know about the Molly mcguires comes from very
Speaker 3: very corrupt court cases where the coal companies owned everything
Speaker 3: but the gallows.
Speaker 4: Basically, what we.
Speaker 1: Do know about the Molly mcguires, or whatever decentralized group
Speaker 1: came to be known and perceived as the Molly mcguires,
Speaker 1: is that in lieu of being able to unionize and
Speaker 1: go on strike, they turned to sabotage.
Speaker 3: They would give demands to a mind boss or a
Speaker 3: company owner, and if those demands weren't meant, they might
Speaker 3: assassinate a mind boss or a company owner, or they
Speaker 3: might burn down some equipment. What we don't know is
Speaker 3: how tightly organized any of this was. Right, we don't
Speaker 3: even know if the Molly mcguires really technically existed, but
Speaker 3: the coal companies made a good case for them existing
Speaker 3: in court and use that to execute all their leaders.
Speaker 3: And those leaders, coincidentally or not coincidentally, were leaders of
Speaker 3: the Worker's Benevolent Association in the ancient Order of Hiberian
Speaker 3: So they use it to wipe out the Irish leadership basically,
Speaker 3: whether they had been involved in that stuff or not.
Speaker 1: Here's minor Jack Champion in an interview with Michael Cazera.
Speaker 6: The Molly mcguires, Yeah, theyse failed and Ireland the potato
Speaker 6: market or whatever. The crop failed. The Irish migrated into
Speaker 6: America in droves. This is where it was.
Speaker 1: The work.
Speaker 6: The cold mining was in its heyday, coal mining, and
Speaker 6: there was jobs here of plenty for them. The big
Speaker 6: companies build homes for these families. Of course, then when
Speaker 6: you work for the companies, when you got your pay,
Speaker 6: they got their book out, said well, you owe rent,
Speaker 6: you owe for boots, you owe for a work, clothes
Speaker 6: you got, you owe for your lunch bucket, and everything
Speaker 6: went to the company store, as the old song went
Speaker 6: for that company's softmore region. But it was true, you
Speaker 6: owe your life to the company's store. The Morney maguire's
Speaker 6: got a bum rap and they were to ask that
Speaker 6: the movie put them made them out to be. And
Speaker 6: they came into the mines and the mines is very,
Speaker 6: very tough. Yeah, safety was unheard of. And that's when
Speaker 6: the Bow and Anon reason. The miner got sick and
Speaker 6: he didn't show up for work. Where is that man?
Speaker 6: He's at home sick. They go and drag him out
Speaker 6: of bed and drag him to work. They forced them
Speaker 6: in the well, we got unionized. That's what the Marllies get.
Speaker 6: They were the forerunners of unionism in America, and they
Speaker 6: got a bum racked. They were for the miners and
Speaker 6: the companies were really.
Speaker 1: Ball champion told because that the Molly mcguires are a
Speaker 1: prime example of the way coal miners are often misunderstood.
Speaker 6: This nation thinks we are a bunch of rascals, the miners.
Speaker 4: So we're stand enough for your rights.
Speaker 6: You were fighting for.
Speaker 4: Justice, that's right.
Speaker 6: Yeah. All we wanted was a fair wage, and they
Speaker 6: wouldn't give you a fair way. I mean I didn't
Speaker 6: work in the days in the mines, in the days
Speaker 6: of the company store, but like our fathers didn't. And
Speaker 6: everybody waits for pay them when you can no pay,
Speaker 6: here's a slip. I owed them twenty five cents, so
Speaker 6: maybe I got seventy five cents. But your gros was
Speaker 6: taken care of. You could buy anything in their general stores.
Speaker 6: The company stores had everything. They had mining supplies, everything,
Speaker 6: see you how to buy or rain dynamite, then your
Speaker 6: own fuels, your own blasting gaps.
Speaker 4: So then people were left with.
Speaker 3: Nothing, and the lessons of the Molly mcguires would come
Speaker 3: into play a lot for the bootleg miners, because the
Speaker 3: thing about the Mollies is once they were destroyed, no
Speaker 3: one talked about it. Every the generations that were alive
Speaker 3: for that didn't speak of it. And it wasn't until
Speaker 3: the early nineteen hundreds that the history of the Modeley
Speaker 3: mcguires even came to be history again, because to speak
Speaker 3: of the Molly mcguires after that period was to blacklist yourself,
Speaker 3: was to make yourself run out of the core region.
Speaker 3: And so it stayed quiet, although some people called the
Speaker 3: bootleg miners, called.
Speaker 4: Them the with Molly McGuire's.
Speaker 1: Sometime after the Molly mcguires had been crushed, the United
Speaker 1: Mineworkers formed in the bituminous coal region of Illinois as
Speaker 1: an attempt to unionize across many mines. They sent organizers
Speaker 1: to the Anthracite region around nineteen hundred. One of the
Speaker 1: key moments in their attempts to organize the Anthracite region
Speaker 1: would become known as the Latimer Massacre.
Speaker 3: This is kind of traditional with minor strikes, is if
Speaker 3: it started at one mine, the miners would shut down
Speaker 3: production there and then just march to another mine and
Speaker 3: call those people out on strike, and from there march
Speaker 3: to another one and another one to see to get
Speaker 3: their strike as big as possible. And Latimer was a
Speaker 3: small town, a company town near Hazelton, and they were
Speaker 3: marching from mind to mind calling everyone out on strike
Speaker 3: when company police opened fire.
Speaker 4: On a group of marchers and kill a large number of.
Speaker 3: Them, and that sort of the anger over this singular
Speaker 3: event really ended up helping fuel organizing.
Speaker 4: In that region.
Speaker 1: As we've discussed in other episodes about coal mining solidarity
Speaker 1: as a part of mining culture to his very core,
Speaker 1: and especially during strikes or mind closures, taking care of
Speaker 1: each other was a community effort, with families, women and
Speaker 1: children all playing important roles.
Speaker 3: And also we have a lot of great stories, some
Speaker 3: of which are in this book of like how the
Speaker 3: communities were at that time and who was playing key roles,
Speaker 3: particularly women, and how I think it was in Latimer
Speaker 3: particularly where like the men didn't largely want to go
Speaker 3: on strike, but the women of the town demanded that
Speaker 3: they did and drove them out there and held the
Speaker 3: picket lines to make sure no men crossed over.
Speaker 4: Into the mind that was on strike here.
Speaker 1: Miners William H. Adams and Andrew Dubika discussed the role
Speaker 1: of families and this culture of solidarity and mutual care.
Speaker 7: Whenever someone would be in toumb the women were always
Speaker 7: on the job and with coffee and lanuages and always
Speaker 7: helping to do whatever they could do and help out.
Speaker 7: Even children in the summer when they were weren't going
Speaker 7: to school would be around the coal holes to help
Speaker 7: the get the coal out and crack the cone on
Speaker 7: the outside.
Speaker 8: Well, now, if the women were at work at the
Speaker 8: coal hole, who did the cooking at home? Well, they
Speaker 8: both have been when they get home and get done.
Speaker 8: Is there any any cooking at the at the at
Speaker 8: the mine, at the coal hole lunch, say there was fire,
Speaker 8: especially in the winter time, there'd be a fire there.
Speaker 8: They have coffee pots and roast potatoes and stuff like
Speaker 8: that at night.
Speaker 6: The rescue work was always close to my heart. I
Speaker 6: mean I ever since that in the industry.
Speaker 9: I felt strong about rescue work, and I always felt
Speaker 9: like I would want to do as much as I
Speaker 9: could for someone else because of that was me. I'm
Speaker 9: sure somebody in the industry would have done the same
Speaker 9: for me.
Speaker 2: So it was just more or less the dry and
Speaker 2: put some effort back into something in the street that
Speaker 2: was pretty good for us.
Speaker 1: Here Mitcherie's a section of the book about a legendary
Speaker 1: woman named Big Mary, so.
Speaker 4: This is about Latimer.
Speaker 3: Big Mary believed Latimer miners were too docile. She formed
Speaker 3: a women's group to enforce the strike, joined by one
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty to three hundred women, on any given day,
Speaker 3: they marched on calleries as far as ten miles away,
Speaker 3: sometimes visiting four in one day. They were on with clubs, rocks,
Speaker 3: strap iron pots and pants, and wooden spoons. Another women's
Speaker 3: group formed in nearby Honeybrook, led by Missus McCrone, who
Speaker 3: wore no shoes and often smoked a pipe while marching.
Speaker 3: The women's groups gave strike breakers warnings to leave, after
Speaker 3: which they attacked the collieries and bloodied the strike breakers
Speaker 3: they could get their hands on. Sometimes they forced their
Speaker 3: way into company offices and pulled the shift whistle. At night,
Speaker 3: men and women marched through their sets together, banging pots
Speaker 3: and pans, making everyone very aware that no one should
Speaker 3: go to work tomorrow.
Speaker 1: The Latimer Massacre inspired many Anthracite miners to fight for
Speaker 1: their rights, and by nineteen oh two the United Mine
Speaker 1: Workers had organized a huge strike that would become a
Speaker 1: major turning point for the coal industry.
Speaker 3: The Latimer Massacre eighteen ninety nine, I believe, and then
Speaker 3: over the course of the next few years they managed
Speaker 3: to organize everywhere from Scranton all the way down to
Speaker 3: the lower regions near Harrisburg. The strike itself lasts about
Speaker 3: six months before they're able to create a universal contract,
Speaker 3: meaning not a contract between these miners in this company
Speaker 3: these miners in that company. But they're able to force
Speaker 3: all the large companies to the table to sign a contract,
Speaker 3: which then smaller companies have to follow as well. And
Speaker 3: the strike of nineteen oh two is important in a
Speaker 3: lot of ways for the American labor movement's history because
Speaker 3: this is the first strike that a president intervened on.
Speaker 4: It was all so important in.
Speaker 3: The Anthra site because it managed to unite people from
Speaker 3: all these different ethnicities. By this point, you had many
Speaker 3: more Eastern Europeans coming, you had Italians coming, and honestly,
Speaker 3: you just had random people from all across the globe
Speaker 3: who are working in these coal mines. And one of
Speaker 3: the slogans for the nineteen oh two strike was, it's
Speaker 3: not Irish coal, it's not Polish coal, it's not Lithuanian coal.
Speaker 4: It's just coal, and you mine it.
Speaker 3: And through organizing across these ethnic groups rather than organizing
Speaker 3: just the Irish, they were able to build like a
Speaker 3: tremendous solidarity That also built a lesson into the miners
Speaker 3: that the bootleg miners would follow too, which is that
Speaker 3: we have these different enclaves. We're not trying to break
Speaker 3: these enclaves. We're not trying to homogenize per se, but
Speaker 3: we know that it's all of us or none of us,
Speaker 3: regardless of whether we have a grudge against you or whatever.
Speaker 1: By the time the nineteen oh two strike ended, the
Speaker 1: entire Anthracite region had been unionized. Every company mine had
Speaker 1: become a union mine. But the outcomes of the successful
Speaker 1: strike weren't all positive. It also laid the foundations for
Speaker 1: the creation of what would eventually become the state Police.
Speaker 3: At this time, you have the Coal and Iron Police,
Speaker 3: who are a company controlled police with the power of
Speaker 3: the state, and aside from like a local sheriff, that's
Speaker 3: all there is. And the brutality of the nineteen oh
Speaker 3: two strike really puts gives the Coal and Iron Police
Speaker 3: a bad public image, we'll say. And then there's people
Speaker 3: within the state government, particularly some socialists from like Redding,
Speaker 3: who pushed to have a state police force created instead
Speaker 3: that would in theory, be less corrupt. And nineteen oh
Speaker 3: five they established the state Police. But the thing is,
Speaker 3: the state police just end up being a strike breaking
Speaker 3: force that is controlled by the governor and moved all
Speaker 3: across the state.
Speaker 1: Here's my Jack Champion in an interview with Michael Casera
Speaker 1: talking about community resistance to the Coal and Iron Police,
Speaker 1: and particularly an incident where miners blew up a barricade
Speaker 1: that the police had set up.
Speaker 6: Then the reading Bow and Iron, the dreaded red Bull
Speaker 6: and Iron Police, which always wore you the points of
Speaker 6: your arm, they came and they welded a barricade of
Speaker 6: steel rails, sixty to eighty pounds steel rails. They worked
Speaker 6: for days setting them in concrete, weld in this big
Speaker 6: barrier like a gateway. As who as was complete that night,
Speaker 6: they were blashed at level with the ground. Oh yeah,
Speaker 6: they were blashed at level with the ground. And I
Speaker 6: see that with my own eyes, I mean seeing them
Speaker 6: build it, and I see the next day when it
Speaker 6: was blown away, blasted with a way.
Speaker 1: Mitch says that this culture of resistance and solidarity stems
Speaker 1: at least in part from the very nature of the
Speaker 1: work the miners do.
Speaker 3: If you've ever had a job doing one thing and
Speaker 3: you leave that job get a job in a different
Speaker 3: industry or something, you know, your life changes. It just
Speaker 3: changes how you see the world in experienced life, and
Speaker 3: coal mining was very much that. There's a reason that
Speaker 3: all through the world, all through history, underground miners are
Speaker 3: some of the most militant workers.
Speaker 1: Mitch says the part of this was due to the
Speaker 1: fact that anthracite mining is an extremely high skilled task,
Speaker 1: to the point that before unionization, many miners would stop
Speaker 1: work entirely whenever the foreman was around in order to
Speaker 1: avoid giving him the knowledge it would take to replace.
Speaker 3: Them, and so miners had a lot of freedom underground,
Speaker 3: controlling their own labor, and they also took extreme risks,
Speaker 3: especially where the coal's vertical. You're blasting dynamite in a
Speaker 3: coal vertically is falling. There's a million ways to dynamine,
Speaker 3: and miners know that every day they go underground could
Speaker 3: be their last day of life. You know, it might
Speaker 3: not be the top of your mind, but you know
Speaker 3: it's a possibility. And accidents and deaths happened frequently enough
Speaker 3: that it really gives people a sense of like, we
Speaker 3: need to get what we want now.
Speaker 4: Who cares about next week? I might not be here
Speaker 4: next week.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 3: It also gives people a strong sense of I rely
Speaker 3: on the other miners around me for my own life,
Speaker 3: whether that guy over there, whether I even like him
Speaker 3: or not, whether I want to talk to him when
Speaker 3: we're on the surface or not. Down here, we have
Speaker 3: each other's backs because it's the only way to survive,
Speaker 3: and it's it's those kind of working conditions that build
Speaker 3: this baseline solidarity that exists even when there's no unionization happening.
Speaker 3: And it also leaves a lot of space for while
Speaker 3: the while a skilled miner's teaching an apprentice the trade,
Speaker 3: they're also teaching them the history. So that just builds
Speaker 3: this like this structure, this social structure. That's right for organizing,
Speaker 3: it's right for organizing a union, but it's also right
Speaker 3: for organizing small workplace actions.
Speaker 1: Reason that miners were so militant in their organizing is because,
Speaker 1: unlike many other industries, they actually had the power to
Speaker 1: essentially shut down production and grind huge parts of the
Speaker 1: economy and infrastructure to a halt simply by withholding their labor.
Speaker 1: All of these cultural dynamics unique to anthracite mining give
Speaker 1: the people of the region a baseline of solidarity, independence, militancy,
Speaker 1: and a disregard for property laws that would later help
Speaker 1: them take bootlegging, stealing coal from the companies and using
Speaker 1: it or selling it themselves, from a criminal enterprise to
Speaker 1: essentially its own legal, legitimate, and unionized industry. Here's Jack
Speaker 1: Champion talking about the necessity of bootlegging coal. When mines
Speaker 1: were shut down first by strikes and then by the
Speaker 1: Great Depression, well.
Speaker 6: They were very bitter. They couldn't understand why all these
Speaker 6: bald mines shut down. But that's when the bootlegg has started.
Speaker 6: The bootleggers actually supplied the source of heat, coal which
Speaker 6: was burned at the break cities like rating or printed
Speaker 6: out your boss, and they.
Speaker 9: All burned cold.
Speaker 3: Well, you know a lot of people say that you
Speaker 3: were all criminals, but you were outlawed.
Speaker 6: Well, I guess that's why they named the bootleg. And
Speaker 6: it came for the days of bootleg and woonshine, you know,
Speaker 6: which went on in this area too. People stuck together.
Speaker 6: No one rated on normal. You gotta eat, you gotta
Speaker 6: have bloating through your children. People were proud to see
Speaker 6: a guy dig a hole. They dig down that hole.
Speaker 6: Maybe if you and your family or father, your brothers
Speaker 6: take you once.
Speaker 3: So I tried to look for the earliest cases of
Speaker 3: bootleg mining, but I couldn't find anything, because it just
Speaker 3: seems to go farther back in time. Even in the
Speaker 3: nineteen or two strike, there were some mentions in newspapers
Speaker 3: that while miners weren't strike, they weren't just picketing and marching,
Speaker 3: but they were also going up in the mountain and
Speaker 3: getting their own coal for personal use, for barter around
Speaker 3: the neighborhood, for helping out the elderly and the firm.
Speaker 1: Later during another strike in nineteen twenty five, bootleg coal
Speaker 1: was a common enough phenomenon, but it was even being
Speaker 1: mentioned in newspapers.
Speaker 3: So the newspaper says, every night lights can be seen
Speaker 3: flickering about on the mountain side surrounding this town, pointing
Speaker 3: out the miners as they went their way homewards with
Speaker 3: a wheelbarrow full of coal. Those who are boulder and
Speaker 3: who openly run the risk of being arrested by the
Speaker 3: coal and iron company officials operate on a much larger scale.
Speaker 3: During the early hours of the night. These men mine
Speaker 3: their coal, and then about midnight truck drivers crumb with
Speaker 3: their machines and haul the coal away by tons. So
Speaker 3: the nineteen twenty five strike is at least in records
Speaker 3: when I could find that bootlegging started happening on a
Speaker 3: massive scale. They weren't necessarily calling it bootlegging, but it
Speaker 3: was a basic strike tactic of theirs, not only to
Speaker 3: go mine your own coal elsewhere, but also for the
Speaker 3: workers to enter their own workplaces, not as scabs, asves
Speaker 3: essentially mining coal out.
Speaker 1: Of that mine, but to the miners and their families,
Speaker 1: bootlegging was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, it
Speaker 1: grew out of a practice that many of them had
Speaker 1: already been doing for ages.
Speaker 3: Now there's like a long tradition of when they get
Speaker 3: this coal out of the ground, it's sorted in the breaker,
Speaker 3: and coal that's of lower quality or maybe too small
Speaker 3: to be commercially viable, gets dumped on these piles called colmbanks.
Speaker 3: They have different names other places. Some places might calm
Speaker 3: slag heaps, but these combanks are big piles awayte coal
Speaker 3: and traditionally older people, injured, people, sick people and children
Speaker 3: would go pick coal from the bank to burn for
Speaker 3: their winter fuel. And this was tradition as far back
Speaker 3: as we know, possibly as far back as coal mining
Speaker 3: goes miners in particular are felt that this was a
Speaker 3: commons this was a communally owned thing, the bank, because
Speaker 3: every spec of rock that was on there was deducted
Speaker 3: from their own pay they had minded already. It was
Speaker 3: just sitting up there, and the companies were generally okay
Speaker 3: with this too, because it was a social support for
Speaker 3: the community, you know, it helped, it helped hold things together,
Speaker 3: and just to be honest, like a lot of a
Speaker 3: lot of more locally based bosses, not the well three people.
Speaker 3: They were sympathetic to others being able to survive anyway,
Speaker 3: so it was it was common practice. And then during
Speaker 3: strikes they would also be picking up the combanks and
Speaker 3: doing a much more industrial job of sorting through all that.
Speaker 1: Here's bootleg minor Jack Champision in an interview with Michael Kazera.
Speaker 6: I went to school. When we called from school, we'd
Speaker 6: sad his school. We'd pick it. Then that the only
Speaker 6: stript minds came and what they left we went in.
Speaker 6: We sunk hole. We started sinking their own. A great
Speaker 6: depression came in nineteen thirty two. All the calls just
Speaker 6: come to a halt. They shut down. Then the people
Speaker 6: had to live. There was no unemployment, there was no welfare.
Speaker 6: And since the pole was in the ground and we
Speaker 6: all knew where it was at, the veins are carefully plotted.
Speaker 6: They run throughe so people start digging their own poles.
Speaker 10: And some of the guys I talked to said the
Speaker 10: call and iron police tried to stop.
Speaker 6: Yes they did. Yeah, we'd see to knowabeil. There was
Speaker 6: too many of us and not enough of them. And
Speaker 6: when they take into the can, the judges had more
Speaker 6: mercy on us because we were trying to eat out
Speaker 6: of living. See. In other words, they kind of turned
Speaker 6: their head the other way. A little somebody had We
Speaker 6: had to eat. They couldn't stop. They try. Now when
Speaker 6: we were I wish young men, I'm our fathers are wrong.
Speaker 6: Our neighbors were mine. And they come out with a
Speaker 6: motorcycle with a side car, and they go down after
Speaker 6: the bootleggers, and they go down and we shove the
Speaker 6: motorcycle over to do we were rolled mine or roll bootlegging.
Speaker 6: We were waiting for them.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it was the only way to live
Speaker 1: in It made sense that, given the history of utilizing
Speaker 1: excess coal, the practice would grow during times of desperation
Speaker 1: like strikes or economic collapse.
Speaker 3: And then so as you get to the Great Depression
Speaker 3: and the mind starts shutting down in this time, it's
Speaker 3: just natural that people are going to start bootlegging, first
Speaker 3: on their own, first little holes, first in secret, but
Speaker 3: also breaking into colories that are closed, either mining the
Speaker 3: coal in there or stealing the tools, stealing the timbers,
Speaker 3: stealing everything to on their own operations.
Speaker 4: Strip minds are sort of a new thing at this period.
Speaker 3: And there's cases of people breaking into strip mindes and
Speaker 3: running the machinery at night when the workers aren't there
Speaker 3: to mind their own coal. It just once the Great
Speaker 3: Depression comes around, it just snowballs. There's something about the
Speaker 3: Great Depression that's just so American because the economy collapses
Speaker 3: in nineteen twenty nine and most of the country is
Speaker 3: worse off, but still for somehow for years, kind of
Speaker 3: like the two thousand and eight housing recession with the
Speaker 3: foreclosure crisis. You know, there wasn't like an instant response
Speaker 3: to it. For years after the depression began, people really
Speaker 3: blame themselves. They felt down on their luck for their
Speaker 3: own personal failings even if they saw this bigger thing
Speaker 3: going on. But also the government would be denying it too.
Speaker 3: They would say, oh, the reason there's a depression is
Speaker 3: just because we're not acting positive enough. We just need
Speaker 3: to sound more positive in the soulfall fix itself. And
Speaker 3: then as years go by that doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: Here's bootleg miner Mike Samanchik also talking with Michael Cazera.
Speaker 9: People got to know each other, they were involved in
Speaker 9: the same thing.
Speaker 4: Then you got a little braver.
Speaker 8: You know, you're a little more nerve because you were
Speaker 8: people involved.
Speaker 6: Then you define it.
Speaker 8: That's when you start putwing the trouble.
Speaker 10: So motorcycles must recall before we had our city police
Speaker 10: or town police, or don't come in the patches for instance,
Speaker 10: looking around or act you anyway there. Coal and iron
Speaker 10: cops had come in there and actually arrest people clubs.
Speaker 10: Look what they had to They carried guns and they'd
Speaker 10: take it a jam the company. Nobody liked them, you know,
Speaker 10: amongst people. They didn't care too much for the goal
Speaker 10: in iron cops, and it didn't take much to get
Speaker 10: a gang together to oppose them.
Speaker 3: So one of the things happening with the bootleg miners
Speaker 3: is they're radicalizing themselves through all these actions. Every time
Speaker 3: they do something bolder, every time they get away with something,
Speaker 3: every time they see the size and scope of their
Speaker 3: own power, they're more radicalized. And so it's not that
Speaker 3: they were all reading marks or really anything in particular,
Speaker 3: but that they were doing it and seeing it in practice.
Speaker 3: And so, yeah, you had like communists, socialists, they who
Speaker 3: would say the coal company has no right to these lands,
Speaker 3: but you also had conservatives.
Speaker 4: You also.
Speaker 3: You also had a lot of religious Catholics who were
Speaker 3: saying the same thing. And it's not that they influence
Speaker 3: each other on a like logical ideological level, but that
Speaker 3: they were working it out in practice and coming to
Speaker 3: run things on their own. And they didn't decide that
Speaker 3: no laws have any value or that shouldn't be recognized.
Speaker 3: But they were working it out on their own. But
Speaker 3: the bootleg mining, though, actually goes back before the depression,
Speaker 3: goes back to the twenties when the Anthracite company he
Speaker 3: saw the writing on the wall, and they also saw
Speaker 3: during World War One the how oil was much more
Speaker 3: useful in a way than coal was, and so they
Speaker 3: began purposely shutting down operations while maintaining a monopoly on
Speaker 3: the land, and so they were producing less coal to
Speaker 3: keep the value the price of that coal up. And
Speaker 3: that's another thing that miners in these whole communities resented,
Speaker 3: is that the companies were knowingly putting them out of work.
Speaker 3: That there was more demand for coal and they could
Speaker 3: prove it by selling bootleg coal.
Speaker 1: Bootleg miner Mooch Kashner talking with Michael KASERA one time was.
Speaker 9: Originally I spent a night in jail from bootleg and coal.
Speaker 4: What happened there.
Speaker 9: I got caught all in coal from from Miam or
Speaker 9: Bickery Ridge and Cool, and cops took me down city
Speaker 9: Hall here in Schmok and locked me up till the
Speaker 9: next morning. Then I wouldn't pay the fine and I
Speaker 9: went to subbody to took my summary jail, and I
Speaker 9: got out as you get out on commission. I call
Speaker 9: it conic commission. So they locked me up for Moonleg
Speaker 9: and Coal call award, and you should let that many go.
Speaker 5: Alamatina, Oh, the La child, bela child, the La child
Speaker 5: Chi Alamatino.
Speaker 1: That's all we've got time for in this episode. Join
Speaker 1: us in Part two, where we talk more about strikes
Speaker 1: and militant action and the development of Bootleg Coal into
Speaker 1: its own independent and unionized industry. Part two is available
Speaker 1: now for early listening for our supporters on Patreon. It
Speaker 1: is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us
Speaker 1: to make these podcasts, So if you appreciate our work,
Speaker 1: please do think about joining us at patreon dot com
Speaker 1: slash working Class History link in the show notes. In
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Speaker 1: favorite podcast app. If you'd like to learn more about
Speaker 1: bootleg mining or about militant labor action in Cold Country,
Speaker 1: check out the web page for this episode, where you'll
Speaker 1: find further reading and more. You can also get Mitch's
Speaker 1: book The Bootleg col Rebellion The Pennsylvania Miners Who Sees
Speaker 1: An Industry nineteen twenty five to nineteen forty two, and
Speaker 1: you can get ten percent off that and anything else
Speaker 1: using the discount code wh Podcasts links in the show notes.
Speaker 1: Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltzman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda,
Speaker 1: Jeremy Kusamano, and Nick Williams. Our theme tune is Balichow,
Speaker 1: Thanks for permission to use it from Diski del Sole.
Speaker 1: You can buy it or stream it on the links
Speaker 1: in the show notes. This episode was written and edited
Speaker 1: by me Tyler Hill. That's it for today. I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed the episode and thanks so much for listening.
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