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