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