Speaker 1: Welcome back to part two of our double episode on
Speaker 1: the Bootleg cole Rebellion. If you haven't listened to part
Speaker 1: one yet, then I recommend you go back and listen
Speaker 1: to that first.
Speaker 2: Alamatina hap penalcha oh, bela child, bela child, bela child,
Speaker 2: Chow chow Alamatino.
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Speaker 1: the show notes at the end of part one. We
Speaker 1: left off during the Great Depression, when miners in the
Speaker 1: Anthracite coal region had already been engaging in increasingly mill
Speaker 1: labor action as they established a union across all mines
Speaker 1: in the area after a massive and bloody strike in
Speaker 1: nineteen oh two. It was around this time that bootleg
Speaker 1: mining started to become a common practice, which would eventually
Speaker 1: grow into its own industry, independent of the major mining companies.
Speaker 1: Mitch Troutman, author of The Bootleg Coal Rebellion, The Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: miners who sees an industry says that although bootleg mining
Speaker 1: was technically illegal, the authorities trying to stop it just
Speaker 1: couldn't keep up with how widespread it was. Not to
Speaker 1: mention that even when the mines were closed, everyone still
Speaker 1: needed coal to survive.
Speaker 3: As the mind starts shutting down and people begin to
Speaker 3: bootleg full time, not on a strike, but indefinitely. At first,
Speaker 3: they're hiding it, they're trying to camouflage their activity. They're
Speaker 3: only doing it at night, and they're getting arrested. The
Speaker 3: company police, the coal and iron police are coming around
Speaker 3: controlling the properties, finding these people and hauling them off
Speaker 3: to jail when they can. But the thing is as
Speaker 3: more bootleg coals being produced, it's being sold for one
Speaker 3: to three dollars less per ton than company coal. And
Speaker 3: it's literally the same stuff, literally the same coal, from
Speaker 3: the same places, and it's the depression. More and more
Speaker 3: people want that are buying it, and so there's cases
Speaker 3: where the bootleg miners get hold into jail and that
Speaker 3: very jail is burning bootleg coal to heat itself. But
Speaker 3: then as time goes on, the jails are filling up.
Speaker 3: They don't have any more places to put people. The
Speaker 3: judges are growing more sympathetic, and there's a great story
Speaker 3: in the book about a cop who takes a bootleg
Speaker 3: miner into jail, and then as the cop leaves, he
Speaker 3: sees that same miner he just arrested standing out back
Speaker 3: of the jail, laughing at him because they just let
Speaker 3: him write out the back. And increasingly the bootleg miners
Speaker 3: would we find maybe a dollar for trespassing and theft
Speaker 3: or whatever the charges were, and maybe even given a
Speaker 3: year to pay it off, with the judges knowing full
Speaker 3: well how they were going to make that money to
Speaker 3: do it. This is part of the coal and iron
Speaker 3: police like losing their power and losing their effectiveness.
Speaker 1: Overall, the Great Depression was a time of militant labor
Speaker 1: action even outside of coal country, as people came together
Speaker 1: as communities to take care of each other and push
Speaker 1: back against the people in power who tried to blame
Speaker 1: the working class for their own poverty.
Speaker 3: Bootleg coal isn't the only thing from the Depression that
Speaker 3: hasn't had enough written about it, though. There's all sorts
Speaker 3: of things that start to pop up, especially after nineteen
Speaker 3: thirty two or so. There's the farm Holiday movement, who
Speaker 3: are trying to declare a moratorium on foreclosures, especially in
Speaker 3: the Midwest Iowa specifically. They have this great little jingle.
Speaker 3: I guess it's more of a poem. They say, let's
Speaker 3: call a farmer's holiday a holiday will hold. We'll eat
Speaker 3: our wheat and ham and eggs and let them eat
Speaker 3: their gold. There's also milk strikes across the country, where
Speaker 3: the price of milk is dropping so low that it's
Speaker 3: not worth it for farmers to sell the milk anymore,
Speaker 3: and so farmers start blockading highways and railroad tracks and
Speaker 3: just dumping off all the milk they see in order
Speaker 3: to bring up the price. There's a general strike happens
Speaker 3: in Minneapolis, there's a general strike in San Francisco. And
Speaker 3: all these things deserve way more, way more written about them.
Speaker 1: Here's bootleg miner Mooch Kashner talking about a group of
Speaker 1: miners blowing up a shovel, which is a large piece
Speaker 1: of excavation equipment used in coal mining.
Speaker 4: There was a bunch of mines in there, and they
Speaker 4: moved to shovel in there to dig them out, and
Speaker 4: of course the people were hurting, like everybody else at
Speaker 4: the time. You know, they wanted to make a living
Speaker 4: and that's where they were making it. And then they
Speaker 4: moved to shovel in and they were supposed to start
Speaker 4: digging the next morning there with that shovel but they
Speaker 4: never did because they blowed it the night before. You know,
Speaker 4: the guys get together and talk it over. Yeah, a
Speaker 4: couple of guys and just a couple of guys, because
Speaker 4: it was better than everybody knowing about that. It was
Speaker 4: better than anybody. A couple of guys knew about that.
Speaker 4: I'm not to say I would say four people at
Speaker 4: the most. And I was one of them that knew
Speaker 4: about it, but I was didn't participate.
Speaker 3: So militant action is like again worldwide throughout time, part
Speaker 3: of part of coal mining struggles or just mining struggles
Speaker 3: in general. I'm really fascinated by down in Bolivia, the
Speaker 3: silver miners, who various times have been illegal, sort of
Speaker 3: bootleg style, but a thing they often do when they
Speaker 3: have marches, they just throw dynamite, you know, and you'd think, like,
Speaker 3: you think that would be planned out or something, but
Speaker 3: it's not. I have a friend who went down there
Speaker 3: say it's legit scary to be out of march where
Speaker 3: people are just throwing dynamite. But it does get like,
Speaker 3: it does get the level of seriousness across to what
Speaker 3: kind of risks people are willing to take, what type
Speaker 3: of stakes people feel like they're fighting on. And so
Speaker 3: that the bootleggers did any of this is honestly not
Speaker 3: shouldn't be surprising if you if you know coal.
Speaker 1: Mining history, bootleg miner Jack Champion talking with Michael Kazera.
Speaker 5: We were a very closed group, the gold miners. It
Speaker 5: was always help each other and keep your mouth let
Speaker 5: well and off alone. He's banking and hon us living
Speaker 5: as we always thought it was. We thought we'd a
Speaker 5: ride to this great resource tool as much as the
Speaker 5: big companies.
Speaker 3: You know, coal mines need to have multiple entrances for ventilation,
Speaker 3: and so there were a lot of ways in and
Speaker 3: out of a mine. But also it was happening on
Speaker 3: such a large scale that the companies couldn't always stop it.
Speaker 1: And because the companies couldn't stop the scale at which
Speaker 1: bootlegging was happening, the practice only continued to grow.
Speaker 3: And nineteen twenty five, you see all sorts of things happen.
Speaker 3: So and another important part of anthracite is he's used
Speaker 3: for home heat, and at this time the entire East
Speaker 3: Coast or Northeast Coast is using anthracite for their home heat.
Speaker 3: So when the strikes are on nineteen oh two, nineteen
Speaker 3: twenty five and others, it's a big deal. They try
Speaker 3: to strike through the winters when they have the most power,
Speaker 3: and that means that New York City, Baltimore, Boston, they're
Speaker 3: going without heat, and so these bootleggers are well, they're
Speaker 3: at this point, they're just strikers. These strikers are able
Speaker 3: to funnel coal out and get some money for that
Speaker 3: or get other things.
Speaker 1: Once people in the major cities started buying bootleg coal,
Speaker 1: the miners had essentially cut out the mentalman and could
Speaker 1: more or less round their own independent coal industry.
Speaker 3: I found some great stories, ones of a Philadelphia carpenter
Speaker 3: who reports to the newspaper that, yeah, I ran out
Speaker 3: of coal, and so I actually just went up to
Speaker 3: the coal region myself and some guys showed me how
Speaker 3: to start my own little mind, and I mind enough
Speaker 3: to keep my operations going down here in Philly. There's
Speaker 3: another story of someone who Boston businessman I believe, who
Speaker 3: arranges to buy a load of this stolen coal and
Speaker 3: even has a put on a train. He hasn't marked
Speaker 3: his potatoes until the Red and Coal and Iron Company
Speaker 3: find that their own train is being used to move
Speaker 3: bootleg coal during the strike. It doesn't end up getting shipped,
Speaker 3: but there's just tons of that going on.
Speaker 1: Bootleg minor William H. Adams told folklors George Corson in
Speaker 1: this oral History that his bootlegging became more of a
Speaker 1: commercial enterprise than a subsistence one. Miners used to also
Speaker 1: steal equipment from the mines to keep up with demand.
Speaker 6: The most tool used would be the pick and shovel
Speaker 6: and the bar. They would use the pick and shoveler.
Speaker 6: I will first use the bar to find out where
Speaker 6: the outcrop of the vein would be, drive it down
Speaker 6: to the ground until you could get the black stuff
Speaker 6: on the end of the bar, and just starts sinking
Speaker 6: a hole with the pick and shovel and using dynamite
Speaker 6: whenever you could get it, which was hard in the
Speaker 6: beginning to get The first bootlegger would either go and
Speaker 6: steal the dynamite or go and have someone who still
Speaker 6: worked at the callery to bring him some along from
Speaker 6: the calleries during the youth.
Speaker 1: Much Kashner says that bootleggers are the only reason a
Speaker 1: lot of the people in the Anthracite region made it
Speaker 1: through the Great Depression at all.
Speaker 4: They were the backbone of the whole cold thing, the
Speaker 4: whole thing during the depression. They were it. They saved
Speaker 4: the everything. They saved everything. They saved the business, they
Speaker 4: saved the market, they saved the towns, they did everything.
Speaker 4: Why did you turn to bootlegging in the first place. Well,
Speaker 4: I'll tell you a lot. When I during the depression,
Speaker 4: this is when I was old enough to go to work,
Speaker 4: I was fourteen years old, I was bootlegging color and
Speaker 4: we used to go in in two three o'clock in
Speaker 4: the morning with my brother in laws and we'd screened
Speaker 4: coal inside that mine and carry it out in bags.
Speaker 4: And they leave me there by myself, at that age
Speaker 4: at fourteen, kind of small bags of co out while
Speaker 4: they'd be taking a trip to sell it at that
Speaker 4: time in the morning, to have arrange with free arrangements
Speaker 4: made to stay away from the coal iron police, you know.
Speaker 4: And that's what we've done. We've done that for a
Speaker 4: much two years before I ever started work any other place.
Speaker 4: You know, we was doing that and it never got caught.
Speaker 4: Of course, we was doing it that long. And I
Speaker 4: they always leave me there and I all kinds of
Speaker 4: noises at two or three o'clock in the morning. It's scary.
Speaker 4: You know, you'd be scared. And that was an experience
Speaker 4: in itself.
Speaker 1: Even at fourteen, Kasher managed to somehow juggle going to
Speaker 1: school and bootlegging to help support his family.
Speaker 4: He went one year, just started, didn't even finish the
Speaker 4: first year of high school. And I started to work
Speaker 4: around the mines, which I was going to school. I
Speaker 4: was bootlegging. I cold too, and I you know, we're
Speaker 4: carrying those bags out.
Speaker 2: In the morning.
Speaker 4: Didn't get up in the morn to go to school
Speaker 4: after working an hour or two hours carrying a bag.
Speaker 4: You go home and go to wash and go to
Speaker 4: bed and get up, yeah, and go to school. And
Speaker 4: then we walk to school in that buses. Then we
Speaker 4: walked a mile and a half of school.
Speaker 3: So as bootleg begins to grow, women and children aren't
Speaker 3: just helping at home. They're going into the mines. There's
Speaker 3: some great stories of children who run mines after school
Speaker 3: on their own. There's women and children working on the
Speaker 3: surface level of the mine, hauling the coal up, processing
Speaker 3: it there. But then there's also women and children going underground.
Speaker 3: There's a few cases of women being miners in their
Speaker 3: own right. And there's also this breakdown as you go
Speaker 3: from having a job at the colliery to having this informal,
Speaker 3: illegal industry where the lines between what's home and what's
Speaker 3: work are breaking down, and so food is cooked at
Speaker 3: the mine and life is lived on the rhythm of
Speaker 3: the bootleg mining.
Speaker 1: Jack Champison, of course, and I was born.
Speaker 5: It was a great depression in America and.
Speaker 4: Coal was all over.
Speaker 5: We were surrounded by cold mines and coal.
Speaker 4: Even when we.
Speaker 5: Were children, we were learning how to recover this mineral coal.
Speaker 5: We used it in our furnaces and if we sold
Speaker 5: what excess we couldn't use, we more or less stole
Speaker 5: from the companies. It was their coal, but as poor citizens,
Speaker 5: they didn't stop us.
Speaker 4: Really, it was.
Speaker 5: Very abundant. It was everywhere coal. You know, there was
Speaker 5: big banks, but all around high piles. You know, that's
Speaker 5: why they called it goopling. We were stealing. Actually that
Speaker 5: all men turned their heads the other way because well,
Speaker 5: you know, we were helping ourselves.
Speaker 4: We were feeding our families.
Speaker 5: That's what they like, you know.
Speaker 4: But they got to be pretty.
Speaker 5: Numerous boot leggers, and then they started sort of for
Speaker 5: their own vie.
Speaker 1: But as impossible as it was for authorities to stop
Speaker 1: widespread bootlegging, they did occasionally try, which cashnary again.
Speaker 4: When they arrest us, you know, in any way, shape
Speaker 4: or form, we would try to reciprocate. Okay, we went
Speaker 4: around ready and shutting union jobs down, and they shut down,
Speaker 4: you know, And of course they didn't like the shut down,
Speaker 4: but they did in sympathy. And they know they probably
Speaker 4: had somebody in them, somebody in their family working on
Speaker 4: move leg. You know. You don't know. We had a
Speaker 4: mine where you'd set along the road waiting for a
Speaker 4: trucker and I almost kiss his rear to buy a
Speaker 4: load of coll off. Yeah, you know, so you get
Speaker 4: rid of it. It was hard to get rid of
Speaker 4: cold when this first started, until until these more breakers
Speaker 4: got put up and the people, the truckers start a
Speaker 4: haul to the city. People started by cold trucks.
Speaker 1: Here bootleg miner William H. Adams tells folklorus George Corson
Speaker 1: about some of the conflicts with the coal and Iron
Speaker 1: police in the early days of bootlegging, and how the
Speaker 1: miners had strength in numbers.
Speaker 6: In the first place. When it started, the coal and
Speaker 6: iron police would come and blow the hole shot and
Speaker 6: arrest the men if they caught him in the daytime,
Speaker 6: and would take them to the squire, and of course
Speaker 6: they'd take them haven't pleaded, gilly and take them to jail.
Speaker 4: And what they charge you with trespassing.
Speaker 6: Trespassing that's all they couldn't hold them for and stealing coal.
Speaker 6: They got that many in jail. And this thing continued
Speaker 6: that long that the men got together and started mobbing
Speaker 6: the coal and iron police. And later on why they
Speaker 6: couldn't get law and couldn't stick them in jail anymore,
Speaker 6: why they just stopped and they used to go night
Speaker 6: and make coal at night rather than daytime. But then
Speaker 6: in around nineteen thirty three, this thing went that far
Speaker 6: that they even mobbed and chased the group of coal
Speaker 6: and Iron police and coal and iron officials from good
Speaker 6: Spring right back into the sneak gup through the bush.
Speaker 6: The people knew their paths and sneak up through and
Speaker 6: make the coal and hide it and then turn around,
Speaker 6: hide their tools, closed the hole, cover the hole up
Speaker 6: and stand trees in the road where the road was
Speaker 6: and cut limbs and leaves and stuff and close it
Speaker 6: laid over the road so they couldn't see the tracks.
Speaker 6: And there's different ways that it was done.
Speaker 4: There replanning it. Were there women in this at night?
Speaker 6: Though, women were in it at night as well as
Speaker 6: in the daytime.
Speaker 1: And as we've mentioned before, now, part of life in
Speaker 1: the Anthracite region, especially during the day depression was anything
Speaker 1: less than a community effort. Women and children were heavily
Speaker 1: involved in the bootleg industry and then helping their families
Speaker 1: and communities survive.
Speaker 6: Some places why the wives and the daughters were on
Speaker 6: top and hoisted the buckets up with windless and even
Speaker 6: in some places the wives and daughters and sisters went
Speaker 6: inside and helped the load the coal up and send
Speaker 6: it out. That was the first time that the women
Speaker 6: ever worked in.
Speaker 4: A coal mine.
Speaker 6: That's the first time any female ever was around the
Speaker 6: collery or worked at a collery outside of maybe clerking
Speaker 6: in an office or a nurse at the hospital where
Speaker 6: they'd give first date if somebody was hurt.
Speaker 3: So when you get the coal out of the ground
Speaker 3: for the company. You send it to the breaker, where
Speaker 3: again it's sorted by size, it's maybe cleaned, and then
Speaker 3: it's marketed sold to where it needs to go. When
Speaker 3: you bootleg coal or take coal from the combanks or
Speaker 3: rob it from a the company already, mind, you still
Speaker 3: have to process it. And so much of this processing
Speaker 3: was done, especially in the early days of bootlegging, done
Speaker 3: at home in the backyard. The coal would be brought
Speaker 3: there and then it would be typically older people, women
Speaker 3: and children who would crack it with hammers, sorted by size,
Speaker 3: and then bag it up, sell it, use it whatever.
Speaker 3: And women and children play. They play a huge role
Speaker 3: in the bootleg coal industry.
Speaker 1: Women and children were also subjected to the dangers of
Speaker 1: bootleg mining.
Speaker 6: There were a lot of serious incidents, that's for sure,
Speaker 6: but fighting the shovels in the strip and end of it,
Speaker 6: and having the women getting the bucket and keeping the
Speaker 6: operator from strip, and not that there was.
Speaker 4: About how do they do it?
Speaker 6: When the shovel operator empty the bucket and dropped the
Speaker 6: bucket down, the women jumped in the bucket, and of
Speaker 6: course the operator was afraid to move the bucket with
Speaker 6: the women in, so course that would help them.
Speaker 4: You mean, this is the big bucket that takes a
Speaker 4: bite out of the side of the mountain, that's right.
Speaker 4: How many women would get in there.
Speaker 6: Oh four or five and the operator wouldn't wouldn't hist
Speaker 6: them up?
Speaker 4: Well, didn't anybody push them out or try to push
Speaker 4: them out?
Speaker 6: No, they didn't try to push them out with the
Speaker 6: women in, but they were arrested, but they got over
Speaker 6: it all right. Well, any women arrested at the coal
Speaker 6: holes individual coal holes, not an individual coal holes, but
Speaker 6: at these stripping incidents, there were women arrested as well
Speaker 6: as men.
Speaker 3: So these veins that the bootleg miners are working in,
Speaker 3: they you know, they run downward, but they also side
Speaker 3: to side stretch out. And so if I want to
Speaker 3: open a bootleg mine, the best place I know to
Speaker 3: find coal is where there's already bootleg mine. Go down
Speaker 3: maybe another one hundred feet and start mining right there
Speaker 3: in the same seam, and there's stretches where there started
Speaker 3: to be hundreds of minds in the same place. And
Speaker 3: these people start coordinating in Shimok and Pennsylvania. They even
Speaker 3: like they have their own security guards, they have their
Speaker 3: own mind inspector. Like the bootleggers do amongst themselves. They're
Speaker 3: interconnecting their minds underground to help create airflow to keep
Speaker 3: each other safe, and they're absolutely helping rescue each other
Speaker 3: when there's accidents.
Speaker 1: Russian help after an accident was also a community effort,
Speaker 1: with minus from all over stopping what they were doing
Speaker 1: and sacrificing their days pay to help out sometimes even
Speaker 1: when there was nothing that could be done.
Speaker 4: Every accident, every mine accident in this.
Speaker 7: Area, I was there worked for free too. I left
Speaker 7: my job where I was earning money. They go help
Speaker 7: that person out. It was trapped without.
Speaker 4: Pay that you get paid. So as there was an
Speaker 4: accio that they come to my mind and I went,
Speaker 4: I had away and then I dropped everything and left and
Speaker 4: stayed there. I was at the mine rescue operations already
Speaker 4: thirty five hours without coming home. Stayed right there. I
Speaker 4: don't think there was one escape, so that we didn't
Speaker 4: train the first aid. Then we started getting them in
Speaker 4: that mine rescue and from that time on the mine
Speaker 4: accents reduced terrific in this area. Before that, we had
Speaker 4: quite a few of mine accents that sometimes a couple
Speaker 4: every month, and then after we started training these guys
Speaker 4: and teach them while we were training, to teach how
Speaker 4: to mind safe and do things safe in lines, and
Speaker 4: that reduced the mine accents terrifically.
Speaker 1: And the women in town were often just as militant,
Speaker 1: if not more so than their male counterparts.
Speaker 6: The street in front of our house here was dirt,
Speaker 6: and of course the strivens started and called their cold
Speaker 6: past them to loaded in the railroad cars the ship
Speaker 6: to the breaker, and of course they raised not much
Speaker 6: does then this dust got on the tomatoes dogs. There
Speaker 6: are potatoes dogs that you didn't need a spray because
Speaker 6: the tomato or the potato bugs to get the sun
Speaker 6: on them out and they wouldn't hurt the stalk. The
Speaker 6: women couldn't wash. The house would be dusty from the
Speaker 6: front of the back. So they finally closed the road off,
Speaker 6: and of course the women. The women closed the road
Speaker 6: off put benches across the street.
Speaker 1: The community solidarity and bootleg mining communities also extended to
Speaker 1: the few people who still had company jobs.
Speaker 3: Also, as mines are shutting down, you have people in
Speaker 3: town who are working for the company mine UMW members,
Speaker 3: and then you have people living on the same block
Speaker 3: who are bootleg mining, and you you really can't hide it.
Speaker 3: It's a big operation. It involves a lot of moving
Speaker 3: heavy things around. But there was a lot of solidarity
Speaker 3: between the working miners and the bootleg miners because the
Speaker 3: working miners knew at first when bootleg mining small, it's
Speaker 3: still people in town aren't selling each other out. They're
Speaker 3: not reporting it to the company, they're not calling in
Speaker 3: the coal and iron police because they respect that their
Speaker 3: neighbors need to do what they need to do to
Speaker 3: get by. And they also see the fact that they're
Speaker 3: mining it themselves, whether they own the ground or not,
Speaker 3: they see that as legitimate. They're putting in their labor,
Speaker 3: they're putting in their risk to get that. You still
Speaker 3: have people in towns working at the company mines, having
Speaker 3: UMW jobs in the mines, and while the company and
Speaker 3: occasionally the union tried to drive a wedge between union
Speaker 3: miners and bootleg miners, the bootleg miners a lot of
Speaker 3: them were still paying their union dues, a lot of
Speaker 3: them are still card carrying UMW members, and the UMW
Speaker 3: members who are still actively working. Sometimes they would raise
Speaker 3: money to try to support the unemployed in town, but
Speaker 3: ultimately they knew tons of people who were bootleg mining,
Speaker 3: and if anything, many of them felt guilty for still
Speaker 3: having that really good job when other well, relative it's
Speaker 3: a coal mine, but still really still having that legal
Speaker 3: job that pays well when other people are having to
Speaker 3: do all this dangerous work to get by. And you
Speaker 3: end up having union miners working at a colliery then
Speaker 3: moonlighting as bootleggers at night, often for free, just to
Speaker 3: help assist their family, their friends, and neighbors who are
Speaker 3: living off bootleg coal itself. And there was nobody the
Speaker 3: companies hated more than an employed miner who was also.
Speaker 1: Bootlegging throughout the Great Depression. As bootleg mining grew and grew,
Speaker 1: it eventually went from an open secret to something that
Speaker 1: the authorities had to recognize as a legitimate practice.
Speaker 3: And as bootleg becomes the majority industry in a few counties,
Speaker 3: the politicians know where their bread is buttered. They have
Speaker 3: to start showing up to bootleg union meetings in order
Speaker 3: to address their constituents. The union doesn't really endorse people specifically,
Speaker 3: but so they're essentially being elected by the bootleg vote,
Speaker 3: and that's where this immunity starts coming from. And as
Speaker 3: you have more people and more people doing it. As
Speaker 3: you have more and more immunity, people just start bootleg
Speaker 3: mining during the day openly.
Speaker 1: And as bootlegging became more legitimate, the miners had to
Speaker 1: balance a practical approach with their radical roots. But Mitch
Speaker 1: says that this was nothing new for them. It was
Speaker 1: already a part of their culture.
Speaker 3: Bootlegging is this constant balance between radical and practical, and
Speaker 3: like the practical actions they take become more and more
Speaker 3: radical as they make more sense, become common sense as
Speaker 3: they have the power to do them. But the whole time,
Speaker 3: like the bootleggers unions, they're mostly electing really respected miners
Speaker 3: and also communists who kind of have some vision for things,
Speaker 3: but they're never on accord. They're never like endorsing Soviet
Speaker 3: Russia or anything like that. And at some point they
Speaker 3: write a bootleg or constitution that I ever think they
Speaker 3: actually governed anything by it. It might have just been a
Speaker 3: thing they tried out. But the document itself is in
Speaker 3: the book and is pretty amazing because it embodies both
Speaker 3: of these things. It talks about how bootlegging is like
Speaker 3: for survival, and the reason they're doing it is just
Speaker 3: raw survival. But then it also says we will stand
Speaker 3: with unemployed people throughout the country like to demand a
Speaker 3: better government for ourselves.
Speaker 1: And eventually the miners started taking steps not only to
Speaker 1: govern themselves, but to create a world where they could
Speaker 1: remain in charge of their own labor and generated value.
Speaker 3: Towards World War Two, there starts to be more factionalism
Speaker 3: in the bootleg unions. On one side are the more
Speaker 3: communist aligned ones who tend to favor militant action, and
Speaker 3: then on the other side are more conservative ones. And
Speaker 3: an interesting thing is the more radical one their demand
Speaker 3: remains as it had been the whole time. Hire us
Speaker 3: reopen the colleries and we don't need a bootleg anymore.
Speaker 3: We'll go back to having union jobs, right, And then
Speaker 3: more conservative ones that they start to lean more towards
Speaker 3: you know what, we like this independent mining thing. We
Speaker 3: like being our own bosses. Let's figure out how we
Speaker 3: can just legalize what we're already doing and stick with
Speaker 3: this and never go back to having company colleries. And
Speaker 3: you can probably imagine those goals. They start to butt
Speaker 3: heads over things like that.
Speaker 1: Bootleg hole, especially once I reached the cities, also gave
Speaker 1: rise to other bootleg industries like trucking.
Speaker 3: So as bootlegging grows and essentially becomes its own industry,
Speaker 3: there's two other facets other than mining. There's bootleg breakers
Speaker 3: who are more organized fashion cleaning and sorting that coal.
Speaker 3: And then there's bootleg truckers who are taking the coal
Speaker 3: from the hills and delivering it to cities from Boston
Speaker 3: down to Virginia, Maryland. And the way the bootleg trucker
Speaker 3: starts really, I mean, for one, the coal companies they
Speaker 3: own the rail lines, so they want to stick with rail.
Speaker 3: They're not trying to have trucks, which are sort of
Speaker 3: this new thing, get involved. And so the bootlayers have
Speaker 3: a great niche by getting into trucks. And so somebody
Speaker 3: might work at a bootleg mine, save up some money,
Speaker 3: get a truck. What they would do is get the
Speaker 3: coal and just drive to a place where they thought
Speaker 3: there'd be a market and go literally door to door,
Speaker 3: just knocking on doors asking who wants to buy bootleg coal, again,
Speaker 3: it being the depression, it being cheaper. They quickly build
Speaker 3: up a customer base that way, in places where they
Speaker 3: didn't necessarily know anybody before, and then the reverse starts
Speaker 3: happening too, where there's truckers, particularly from the cities, who
Speaker 3: are driving up to the Anthracite region, just driving around
Speaker 3: the mountains looking for bootleg miners and the bootleg miners.
Speaker 3: That's often the job, like the one of the younger
Speaker 3: kids in a family would have, is to stand outside
Speaker 3: on the road and try to flag down truckers and
Speaker 3: get them to come back to the mine.
Speaker 1: The relationship between bootleg mining and bootleg trucking, it was
Speaker 1: one of the rare instances in cold country where the
Speaker 1: working class collaborated across racial divides, not just the intra
Speaker 1: European solidarity of the anthracite miners, but with black truckers
Speaker 1: who worked in the cities as well.
Speaker 3: And fascinating thing is a lot of these bootleg truckers,
Speaker 3: particularly from Baltimore and also from Philly, are black, and
Speaker 3: they build these relationships like that, and they become pretty steady,
Speaker 3: you know, like the same miners and truckers who link up.
Speaker 3: They stick together once they find a good working relationship,
Speaker 3: and it's a honestly, it's like a racist time. It
Speaker 3: can be a racist place for sure, but this mutual dependence,
Speaker 3: this relationship they build together really really makes this thing work,
Speaker 3: you know, and I find it incredible.
Speaker 1: Together, the bootleg miners and truckers built in industry independent
Speaker 1: of the large mining companies that was almost unstoppable.
Speaker 3: At its peak, bootlegging produces about ten of all anthracite
Speaker 3: coal at the time, which is the same as the
Speaker 3: largest anthracite coal company only has ten percent of the market.
Speaker 3: So it's massive. And the companies, unable to stop bootlegging
Speaker 3: at home, turn to trying to stop the bootleg truckers,
Speaker 3: trying to stop distribution in different cities, and so they
Speaker 3: try to pass laws in Baltimore, for example, making it
Speaker 3: illegal to sell bootleg coal.
Speaker 1: And once again decentralization, solidarity, and creative resourcefulness worked in
Speaker 1: their favor.
Speaker 3: And then the companies they're trying to stop bootleg truckers
Speaker 3: on the highways, but the bootleg truckers start coming up
Speaker 3: with systems to warn each other where there's going to
Speaker 3: be cops and where it needs to be avoided. They
Speaker 3: would have like bandanas on their trucks to signal things
Speaker 3: there was like gas stations would have tanks and barrels
Speaker 3: that they would align certain ways to let people know
Speaker 3: which way they should be going. It got really elaborated,
Speaker 3: and again part of the decentralized nature of it is
Speaker 3: what helped it stay so big, because people were this
Speaker 3: was all risk taking, and people were getting caught, people
Speaker 3: were going to jail, people were having their coal dumped
Speaker 3: and things like that. But the coal was there, the
Speaker 3: market was there, you know, and all somebody had to
Speaker 3: do was put in the work, and they were willing
Speaker 3: to keep doing it.
Speaker 1: Eventually, the bootleg coal industry grew so big that the
Speaker 1: independent miners even formed their own unions as part of
Speaker 1: the previously mentioned effort to come up with a code
Speaker 1: and rules for their trade.
Speaker 3: I did a lot of research trying to map out
Speaker 3: how and where the bootleg unions formed, but many local
Speaker 3: bootleg unions formed, like town by town. Within two years,
Speaker 3: there were maybe ten of them that formed, all for
Speaker 3: different but related reasons. Some formed to help regulate the
Speaker 3: price of coal so that bootleggers weren't undercutting each other.
Speaker 3: Some formed to fight a specific company who was pursuing them.
Speaker 3: But essentially it was all like hyper high paper, specific
Speaker 3: to their circumstance. Until the coal companies started pushing laws
Speaker 3: in Harrisburg, the state capital, against the bootleggers. That's when
Speaker 3: they decided to form the Independent Miners Association, which was
Speaker 3: a coalition of all these bootleg unions. And bootleg unions
Speaker 3: kind of a misnomer because they're not employed by anyone, right,
Speaker 3: so you could call it an association instead of a
Speaker 3: union if you want, but it was the same spirit,
Speaker 3: and so the Independent Miners Association would have representatives from
Speaker 3: all the different the local bootleg unions.
Speaker 1: The unions also helped protect bootleggers from legal ramifications.
Speaker 3: One of the things they did was pull money to
Speaker 3: hire lawyers to get people out of jail. They would
Speaker 3: have those lawyers work on local bootlegger cases, but they
Speaker 3: would also as people bought trucks and started trucking bootleg
Speaker 3: coal around the Northeast, they would hire lawyers to go
Speaker 3: to in those states too to help protect the bootleg
Speaker 3: truckers where they were selling the coal.
Speaker 1: The bootleg union was called the Independent Miners Association and
Speaker 1: they became powerful enough to be recognized by state officials.
Speaker 3: The IMA ultimately has two marches on Harrisburg that have
Speaker 3: about ten thousand people each. They ride down the back
Speaker 3: of coal trucks wearing their dirty coal mining stuff just
Speaker 3: to do a show of force in Harrisburg. But ultimately
Speaker 3: the state government was turning against the coal companies too,
Speaker 3: partly because they knew the easiest way to deal with
Speaker 3: the problem of bootlegging was to ignore it let it
Speaker 3: go on. Also, they had a long history of dealing
Speaker 3: with these companies and the companies were assholes basically. But thirdly,
Speaker 3: there's like a legal issue with trying to pass a
Speaker 3: law making something illegal which is already illegal.
Speaker 1: Much Kashner again, And.
Speaker 4: We just won the show strength and show how many
Speaker 4: people were involved. You know. This changed the money to
Speaker 4: a lot of government officials when they seeing a number
Speaker 4: of men, because sometimes there was five, six, seven hundred
Speaker 4: people at least small minds went on caravans, you know,
Speaker 4: and we just wanted to show spread.
Speaker 3: Ultimately, they end up winning the ear of three straight governors,
Speaker 3: not all of whom want to support them necessarily, but
Speaker 3: they're they're a force to be reckoned with in that
Speaker 3: part of the state. One governor was even intending to
Speaker 3: crack down on them, and then didn't. He just went
Speaker 3: along with President. But the second governor, Earl he specifically
Speaker 3: said the coal companies, like you guys can fix this.
Speaker 3: All you have to do is hire them again.
Speaker 1: Here's I am a member, Andrew Dribika talking about how,
Speaker 1: just like any union, sometimes organizing the Pootleggers was discouraging
Speaker 1: work that involves lots of compromise.
Speaker 8: You went to a meet many times, you worked for
Speaker 8: something you didn't write agree with that. That's what the
Speaker 8: majority wanted. It's a majority root room with it. I
Speaker 8: mean you couldn't You couldn't hold any Adams Lee or
Speaker 8: anything like that because of.
Speaker 4: You. You would have wound up dead in five years.
Speaker 4: You had to learn the grin and bear. My model
Speaker 4: was always, well.
Speaker 8: I lost that time I didn't do too good at
Speaker 8: a job of set.
Speaker 4: I'll have to work harder next time.
Speaker 8: And many times, I mean you were grinning and smiling
Speaker 8: when you didn't really want it. You know, many times
Speaker 8: I would get discouraged. I would have to say, many
Speaker 8: times as a meeting, you know you really lost, when
Speaker 8: you really wanted something, you lost. I always felt, well, gee,
Speaker 8: I wasn't a good enough salesman, you know, so I'll
Speaker 8: have to try again to do it, because I always
Speaker 8: felt like the industry itself deserved better. Supportial moter God
Speaker 8: but in the same token, I realized that everybody walked
Speaker 8: their way up from the bootstraps, so that would automatically
Speaker 8: whether you wanted to be or not, made you a
Speaker 8: selfish thinker.
Speaker 1: One thing that was remarkable to me about reading Mitch's
Speaker 1: book is the way that the bootleg miner saw the
Speaker 1: call as a kind of commons to be reclaimed without
Speaker 1: needing any lofty theory. They knew from their own lives
Speaker 1: and work that something about the way the industry claimed
Speaker 1: ownership over the value they generated just didn't make sense.
Speaker 1: Their culture of solidarity and resistance, combined with their lived
Speaker 1: experience as workers, allowed them to build and run a
Speaker 1: huge and profitable industry on their own, democratically and without
Speaker 1: the need for bosses or the state. And as Mitch mentioned,
Speaker 1: I think this has summed up really beautifully by the
Speaker 1: sentiment that many of these miners mentioned in their oral histories.
Speaker 1: The coal doesn't belong to the companies. God put it there.
Speaker 1: It's for everyone.
Speaker 3: The miners weren't using the word the commons, but that
Speaker 3: was basically how they were thinking of it. Is that
Speaker 3: this coal company land, they would call it, supposed coal
Speaker 3: company land is a community resource it's like a company
Speaker 3: shouldn't control it, but it's also not yours or mine
Speaker 3: to individually control. It's a resource that we're all benefiting from.
Speaker 3: Granted of course they're exploiting it, they still have that
Speaker 3: mindset for sure. This is what's amazing that survives in
Speaker 3: the spirit of the Anthracite region to this day is
Speaker 3: that the coal company only has so much legitimacy. And
Speaker 3: ultimately it's our ancestors who built that did that work,
Speaker 3: and we have more right to it by our own
Speaker 3: labor and by the fact that we live here rather
Speaker 3: than Wall Street, to use it for what we will.
Speaker 3: And it's really incredible. It's really incredible that people decided
Speaker 3: what made the most sense, what made common sense, was
Speaker 3: that these laws property laws don't apply to coal companies.
Speaker 1: Andrew Dubika, again, we.
Speaker 4: Were stealing the coals, That's what we were doing.
Speaker 8: But what was the difference. They were going to push
Speaker 8: it with the dose rabbed the way because there was
Speaker 8: no loaders it, so they just pushed it over the way.
Speaker 4: They got very hair. So I felt like we were stealing.
Speaker 4: I just felt like we were salvage at something. I have
Speaker 4: to say, I.
Speaker 8: Earn my bread and butter.
Speaker 3: Doing that, I guess the nice whereas you got to
Speaker 3: be a little bit cocked.
Speaker 8: You know, Yeah, you were a will of to fight
Speaker 8: for because he, yeah, he with shoes on.
Speaker 4: Everybody had to wear shoes. What other choices did get
Speaker 4: had there? There weren't too many.
Speaker 3: Those companies only owned that land because of various ill
Speaker 3: dealings in the past. There were lots of cases where
Speaker 3: the companies, with their their money, you know, could lawyer
Speaker 3: up and basically rob somebody of their home, rob somebody
Speaker 3: who already owned land of that land. And also sometimes
Speaker 3: the bootleggers would say, if they went to court, they
Speaker 3: would say, okay, show us the deed, chow us the
Speaker 3: deed that the company owns this land. And more often
Speaker 3: than not, that deed couldn't be pulled up anyway.
Speaker 1: Though the tradition and culture of independent mining lives on
Speaker 1: to some extent today, bootleg mining in the Anthra site
Speaker 1: mostly died off after World War two. Is the economy
Speaker 1: recovered from the depression and jobs were less scared. Not
Speaker 1: to mention, oil was starting to lower the demand for coal.
Speaker 3: It comes back after the war, but is never quite
Speaker 3: as big, but it kind of climaxes, not with just
Speaker 3: the drafts and these are all unemployed people technically, but
Speaker 3: also with more and more standoffs with the companies, specifically
Speaker 3: around strip mining and when they bring in stripping shovels.
Speaker 3: You can think of like a steam shovel, except by
Speaker 3: now they're run on oil. The companies could use a
Speaker 3: strip mine to both one mind coal cheaper than doing
Speaker 3: it underground with US employees. They could also use to
Speaker 3: destroy the entrances to the bootleg holes. And so bootleggers
Speaker 3: throughout the thirties keep surrounding these shovels, and I think
Speaker 3: about twelve times it happens where they dynamite them or
Speaker 3: destroy them in some way. But the bootleggers, thanks to
Speaker 3: their marches on Harrisburg and thanks to their conversations with
Speaker 3: the governors, have an agreement with the state police where
Speaker 3: the state police agree not to get involved so long
Speaker 3: as the bootleggers don't start shooting anybody. And towards nineteen
Speaker 3: thirty nine nine eineteen forty, these confrontations are happening more
Speaker 3: and more around stripping shovels and them getting blown up,
Speaker 3: and there eventually is a little bit of shooting that
Speaker 3: goes on and things like that, and so the state
Speaker 3: police also start cracking down around that time.
Speaker 1: As things got more violent and legal consequences became more common,
Speaker 1: the industry itself continued to shrink. But in writing this book,
Speaker 1: Mitch says one of the biggest lessons he's learned is
Speaker 1: about the importance of preserving working class stories.
Speaker 3: One thing that definitely stood out is the importance of
Speaker 3: keeping memory alive and how wild it is that this
Speaker 3: was forgotten. And the events I've done for this book
Speaker 3: around the coal region have been amazing. I remember this
Speaker 3: one town which during the thirties was like the communist hotbed.
Speaker 3: I told them that at an event in a fire hole,
Speaker 3: and one woman just goes, huh, communists in our town.
Speaker 3: Who knew?
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: And whether this ends up having a practical effect on
Speaker 3: the world or not, I don't know. But people like
Speaker 3: knowing their history, knowing that this is part of their histay,
Speaker 3: I think really lends itself to seeing solidarity, Like when
Speaker 3: you go back to the relationship between the black bootleg
Speaker 3: truckers and the bootleg miners, like those are our people.
Speaker 3: When Freddy Gray gets killed in Baltimore, like those are people.
Speaker 3: If we had remembered and maintained that connection, we would
Speaker 3: know that.
Speaker 1: Freddy Gray was a twenty five year old black man
Speaker 1: from Baltimore who was beaten and arrested then killed when
Speaker 1: police didn't properly secure him in the back of the
Speaker 1: van they used to transport him.
Speaker 3: But the more we forget our history, forget our connections,
Speaker 3: the more we accept what TV says we are, you know,
Speaker 3: the more individual we are, the more isolated, the more
Speaker 3: solidarity is like a really abstract idea of an idea
Speaker 3: at all.
Speaker 1: Mitchpoints to places like the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum
Speaker 1: in Maitland, which we discuss in episodes fifty seven and
Speaker 1: fifty eight about militant labor among coal miners in West Virginia,
Speaker 1: as an example of a project that's trying to keep
Speaker 1: this radical regional history alive and even as the powers
Speaker 1: be try to erase it, the knowledge of these past
Speaker 1: struggles remains extremely relevant.
Speaker 3: So I think keeping that kind of history alive is
Speaker 3: really important, Like this book is part of that. But
Speaker 3: a really great example of that is the West Virginia
Speaker 3: Mind Wars Museum and everything they've been doing with not
Speaker 3: only uncovering some very militant history in West Virginia, but
Speaker 3: also like building that knowledge up throughout the state, and
Speaker 3: then they have such a tremendous moment with the teacher
Speaker 3: strikes of like a decade or so ago, with that
Speaker 3: kind of knowledge being part of that.
Speaker 1: Mitch also says that one of his goals with the
Speaker 1: book was to show how although educating ourselves and reading
Speaker 1: theory can be important, sometimes lived working class experience is
Speaker 1: enough for people to radicalize themselves. As the saying goes,
Speaker 1: I may not have read Marx as capital, but I
Speaker 1: have the marks of capital all over my body. And
Speaker 1: the bootleg miners are a great example of how effective
Speaker 1: self taught grassroots radicals can be.
Speaker 3: Another big lesson I think from this is like the
Speaker 3: effects of solidarity coming from action rather than rhetoric. These
Speaker 3: people aren't arguing with each other to convince each other
Speaker 3: of things. They're acting together. They're taking risks together, They're
Speaker 3: pursuing the same goals together, and that's where this intense
Speaker 3: solidarity comes from. I mean, these are people have all
Speaker 3: sorts of ethnicities, all sorts of political persuasions, all sorts
Speaker 3: of religious persuasions, who don't necessarily like each other. That's like,
Speaker 3: I can't emphasize that enough. In small towns, people don't
Speaker 3: get along a lot, you know. But this solidarity isn't
Speaker 3: built through convincing each other that they need to do it.
Speaker 3: It's through doing it. And I think that's so important,
Speaker 3: especially today, because we can be so focused on rhetoric
Speaker 3: and so focused on who has what position on what thing.
Speaker 3: And it's important how the bootleggers were radicalizing them their
Speaker 3: own selves through the actions they take and their positions
Speaker 3: develop over time, not because they went to college.
Speaker 1: And those of us who do know a little bit
Speaker 1: of theory can learn a lot from people like the
Speaker 1: bootleg miners when it comes to stopping our abstract squabbling
Speaker 1: and actually getting things done.
Speaker 3: There's like a whole fascinating subsection of this book that's
Speaker 3: about like the practicality of some of the communists who
Speaker 3: were involved in this, about how they had their orders
Speaker 3: they had, like the national plan and even the international
Speaker 3: plans that they were working on, but then they also
Speaker 3: recognize they could have all these other effects working through
Speaker 3: the bootleggers and working with unemployed people, even though it
Speaker 3: wasn't part of the party. Line or even necessarily like
Speaker 3: immediate communist goals, that they were able to push things
Speaker 3: much farther in a somewhat organic way, and I find
Speaker 3: that really inspiring.
Speaker 1: This non dogmatic perspective allowed many of the socialists and
Speaker 1: communists who help organize in the Anthracite region to adapt
Speaker 1: their goals to fit the actual needs of the community,
Speaker 1: which ultimately made them more successful in their own goals.
Speaker 3: There's a communist organizer, Steve Nelson, who's in the Anthracite
Speaker 3: Region for a while during this period, and one of
Speaker 3: the things he emphasizes is like, yo, lay off the religion.
Speaker 3: So many of these miners and families are Catholic, Like,
Speaker 3: stop talking shit on Catholicism. You know that's counterproductive, and
Speaker 3: like let's meet people where they're at and organize where
Speaker 3: they're at. And and that practice worked, you know. The
Speaker 3: communists like from the beginning days of Bootleg and we're like,
Speaker 3: you know what we should do with this bootleg and
Speaker 3: we should form a union. And I think early on
Speaker 3: people were like that's crazy, what are you talking about.
Speaker 3: But then when it became apparent that they needed to
Speaker 3: act together, like those communists were there to help form
Speaker 3: how those things happened, but just as like as an
Speaker 3: organization that has a political mission that's trying to achieve
Speaker 3: it through hard, hard work and vision, you know, whether
Speaker 3: that's communist, socialist, anarchists, whatever, I think there's some like
Speaker 3: great lessons in that too about conforming to how do
Speaker 3: people operate and organizing from that place?
Speaker 2: Alamatina all the child, Ela Child, Ela Child, Child child lamming.
Speaker 1: That brings us to the end of this double episode.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Mitch Troutman for taking the time to talk
Speaker 1: to us and to share so much of his research
Speaker 1: with us. We highly recommend you get a copy of
Speaker 1: Mitch's book, The Bootleg Cole Rebellion The Pennsylvania Miners Who
Speaker 1: Seized An Industry nineteen twenty five to nineteen twenty four. Conveniently,
Speaker 1: it's available in our online store and you can get
Speaker 1: ten percent off that and anything else using the discount
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Speaker 1: you'd like to learn more about bootleg mining or radical
Speaker 1: labor movements in Cold Country, check out the web page
Speaker 1: for this episode, where you'll find further reading and more.
Speaker 1: Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast
Speaker 1: possible special thanks to Jamison D. Saltzman, Jazz Hands, Fernando
Speaker 1: Lopez Ojeda, Jeremy Kusamano, and Nick Williams. Our theme tune
Speaker 1: is Belichow, Thanks for permission to use it from Diski
Speaker 1: del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on
Speaker 1: the links in the show notes. This episode was edited
Speaker 1: and written by me Tyler Hill. Anyway, that's it for today.
Speaker 1: Hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 2: By lutchou By luck Out By luck out Out, Padi
Speaker 2: Jon