December 4, 2024 • 46 mins
During the Great Depression in the US, facing mass job losses and abject poverty, thousands of coal miners in Pennsylvania took direct action and began digging their own mines on company property. We tell their story in this two-part podcast.
Our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory
With Mitch Troutman, author of the excellent book, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925–1942, we learn how these workers and their families fought against company guards, police, coal bosses and the legal system, formed a union, and organised an entire industry – not for profit, but for meeting human needs. We also hear from the miners themselves, in audio recorded by Michael Kozura, and shared with Mitch by Michael’s widow. Part 2 covers attempts to repress the movement, the development of bootleg mining as a major industry, the involvement of women and children in the movement, and miners’ collaboration with truck drivers.
More information
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/working-class-history--5711490/support.
Our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory
With Mitch Troutman, author of the excellent book, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925–1942, we learn how these workers and their families fought against company guards, police, coal bosses and the legal system, formed a union, and organised an entire industry – not for profit, but for meeting human needs. We also hear from the miners themselves, in audio recorded by Michael Kozura, and shared with Mitch by Michael’s widow. Part 2 covers attempts to repress the movement, the development of bootleg mining as a major industry, the involvement of women and children in the movement, and miners’ collaboration with truck drivers.
More information
- The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925–1942 – Mitch Troutman – get hold of Mitch’s book here in our online store, with global shipping.
- Full information, show notes and eventually a transcript on the webpage for this episode: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e95-96-bootleg-miners/
- Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman, Fernando López Ojeda, Jeremy Cusimano and Nick Williams.
- Produced and edited by Tyler Hill
- Episode graphic: Bootleg miners. Courtesy Jack Delano/Library of Congress
- Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/working-class-history--5711490/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Alamatina hap penalcha oh, bela child, bela child, bela child,
Chow chow Alamatino.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Before we get started, just a reminder that our podcast
is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters
fund our work and in return get exclusive early access
to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted
merch and other content. Join us or find out more
at patreon dot com slash working Class history link in
the show notes at the end of part one. We
(00:54):
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.
(01:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
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
(01:58):
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
(02:18):
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
(02:40):
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
(03:01):
police like losing their power and losing their effectiveness.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
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.
(03:38):
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
(04:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
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
(04:45):
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
(05:07):
about it, but I was didn't participate.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
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
(05:31):
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
(05:53):
that the bootleggers did any of this is honestly not
shouldn't be surprising if you if you know coal.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Mining history, bootleg miner Jack Champion talking with Michael Kazera.
Speaker 5 (06:03):
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
(06:25):
big companies.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And because the companies couldn't stop the scale at which
bootlegging was happening, the practice only continued to grow.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
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,
(07:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
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
(07:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
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.
Speaker 6 (08:29):
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
(08:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
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.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
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,
(09:34):
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.
(09:55):
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.
(10:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Even at fourteen, Kasher managed to somehow juggle going to
school and bootlegging to help support his family.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
In the morning.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
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.
(11:36):
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
(11:59):
the bootleg mining.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Jack Champison, of course, and I was born.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
It was a great depression in America and.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Coal was all over.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
We were surrounded by cold mines and coal.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
Even when we.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
Really, it was.
Speaker 5 (12:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
We were feeding our families.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
That's what they like, you know.
Speaker 4 (12:57):
But they got to be pretty.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
Numerous boot leggers, and then they started sort of for
their own vie.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
But as impossible as it was for authorities to stop
widespread bootlegging, they did occasionally try, which cashnary again.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
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
(13:34):
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
(13:58):
haul to the city. People started by cold trucks.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
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.
Speaker 6 (14:13):
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.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
And what they charge you with trespassing.
Speaker 6 (14:32):
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,
(14:53):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:39):
laid over the road so they couldn't see the tracks.
And there's different ways that it was done.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
There replanning it. Were there women in this at night?
Speaker 6 (15:51):
Though, women were in it at night as well as
in the daytime.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
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.
Speaker 6 (16:09):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
A coal mine.
Speaker 6 (16:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:26):
in the bootleg coal industry.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Women and children were also subjected to the dangers of
bootleg mining.
Speaker 6 (17:32):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
About how do they do it?
Speaker 6 (17:50):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
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.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
Oh four or five and the operator wouldn't wouldn't hist
them up?
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Well, didn't anybody push them out or try to push
them out?
Speaker 6 (18:19):
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
(18:39):
as men.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
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
(19:01):
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
(19:24):
when there's accidents.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
Every accident, every mine accident in this.
Speaker 7 (19:40):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
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
(20:11):
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
(20:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
And the women in town were often just as militant,
if not more so than their male counterparts.
Speaker 6 (20:50):
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
(21:11):
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
(21:33):
off put benches across the street.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
The community solidarity and bootleg mining communities also extended to
the few people who still had company jobs.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
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
(22:02):
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
(22:23):
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
(22:44):
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,
(23:06):
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
(23:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
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
(24:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
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,
(24:59):
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
(25:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
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
(26:03):
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
(26:26):
heads over things like that.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Bootleg hole, especially once I reached the cities, also gave
rise to other bootleg industries like trucking.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
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
(26:59):
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
(27:20):
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
(27:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
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
(28:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Together, the bootleg miners and truckers built in industry independent
of the large mining companies that was almost unstoppable.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
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
(29:18):
try to pass laws in Baltimore, for example, making it
illegal to sell bootleg coal.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
And once again decentralization, solidarity, and creative resourcefulness worked in
their favor.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
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
(29:53):
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
(30:16):
do was put in the work, and they were willing
to keep doing it.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
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.
(30:52):
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
(31:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
The unions also helped protect bootleggers from legal ramifications.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
The bootleg union was called the Independent Miners Association and
they became powerful enough to be recognized by state officials.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
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
(32:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Much Kashner again, And.
Speaker 4 (32:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
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.
(33:30):
All you have to do is hire them again.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
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.
Speaker 8 (33:42):
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.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
You. You would have wound up dead in five years.
You had to learn the grin and bear. My model
was always, well.
Speaker 8 (34:07):
I lost that time I didn't do too good at
a job of set.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
I'll have to work harder next time.
Speaker 8 (34:13):
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
(34:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
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
(35:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
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.
(35:55):
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
(36:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Andrew Dubika, again, we.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
Were stealing the coals, That's what we were doing.
Speaker 8 (36:37):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
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.
Speaker 8 (36:54):
Earn my bread and butter.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Doing that, I guess the nice whereas you got to
be a little bit cocked.
Speaker 8 (37:00):
You know, Yeah, you were a will of to fight
for because he, yeah, he with shoes on.
Speaker 4 (37:10):
Everybody had to wear shoes. What other choices did get
had there? There weren't too many.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
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
(37:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
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
(38:24):
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
(38:46):
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
(39:08):
goes on and things like that, and so the state
police also start cracking down around that time.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
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.
(39:49):
Who knew?
Speaker 4 (39:51):
You know.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
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.
(40:12):
When Freddy Gray gets killed in Baltimore, like those are people.
If we had remembered and maintained that connection, we would
know that.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
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
(41:25):
strikes of like a decade or so ago, with that
kind of knowledge being part of that.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
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
(41:52):
self taught grassroots radicals can be.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
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
(42:16):
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,
(42:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
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
(43:25):
immediate communist goals, that they were able to push things
much farther in a somewhat organic way, and I find
that really inspiring.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
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
(44:07):
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
(44:30):
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?
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Alamatina all the child, Ela Child, Ela Child, Child child lamming.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
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
(45:29):
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
(45:50):
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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.
(46:12):
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
(46:32):
and written by me Tyler Hill. Anyway, that's it for today.
Hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
By lutchou By luck Out By luck out Out, Padi
Jon
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.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Alamatina hap penalcha oh, bela child, bela child, bela child,
Chow chow Alamatino.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Before we get started, just a reminder that our podcast
is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters
fund our work and in return get exclusive early access
to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted
merch and other content. Join us or find out more
at patreon dot com slash working Class history link in
the show notes at the end of part one. We
(00:54):
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.
(01:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
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
(01:58):
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
(02:18):
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
(02:40):
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
(03:01):
police like losing their power and losing their effectiveness.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
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.
(03:38):
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
(04:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
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
(04:45):
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
(05:07):
about it, but I was didn't participate.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
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
(05:31):
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
(05:53):
that the bootleggers did any of this is honestly not
shouldn't be surprising if you if you know coal.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Mining history, bootleg miner Jack Champion talking with Michael Kazera.
Speaker 5 (06:03):
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
(06:25):
big companies.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And because the companies couldn't stop the scale at which
bootlegging was happening, the practice only continued to grow.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
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,
(07:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
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
(07:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
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.
Speaker 6 (08:29):
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
(08:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
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.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
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,
(09:34):
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.
(09:55):
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.
(10:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Even at fourteen, Kasher managed to somehow juggle going to
school and bootlegging to help support his family.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
In the morning.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
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.
(11:36):
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
(11:59):
the bootleg mining.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Jack Champison, of course, and I was born.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
It was a great depression in America and.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Coal was all over.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
We were surrounded by cold mines and coal.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
Even when we.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
Really, it was.
Speaker 5 (12:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
We were feeding our families.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
That's what they like, you know.
Speaker 4 (12:57):
But they got to be pretty.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
Numerous boot leggers, and then they started sort of for
their own vie.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
But as impossible as it was for authorities to stop
widespread bootlegging, they did occasionally try, which cashnary again.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
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
(13:34):
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
(13:58):
haul to the city. People started by cold trucks.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
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.
Speaker 6 (14:13):
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.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
And what they charge you with trespassing.
Speaker 6 (14:32):
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,
(14:53):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:39):
laid over the road so they couldn't see the tracks.
And there's different ways that it was done.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
There replanning it. Were there women in this at night?
Speaker 6 (15:51):
Though, women were in it at night as well as
in the daytime.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
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.
Speaker 6 (16:09):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
A coal mine.
Speaker 6 (16:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:26):
in the bootleg coal industry.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Women and children were also subjected to the dangers of
bootleg mining.
Speaker 6 (17:32):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
About how do they do it?
Speaker 6 (17:50):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
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.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
Oh four or five and the operator wouldn't wouldn't hist
them up?
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Well, didn't anybody push them out or try to push
them out?
Speaker 6 (18:19):
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
(18:39):
as men.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
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
(19:01):
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
(19:24):
when there's accidents.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
Every accident, every mine accident in this.
Speaker 7 (19:40):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
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
(20:11):
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
(20:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
And the women in town were often just as militant,
if not more so than their male counterparts.
Speaker 6 (20:50):
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
(21:11):
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
(21:33):
off put benches across the street.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
The community solidarity and bootleg mining communities also extended to
the few people who still had company jobs.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
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
(22:02):
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
(22:23):
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
(22:44):
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,
(23:06):
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
(23:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
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
(24:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
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,
(24:59):
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
(25:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
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
(26:03):
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
(26:26):
heads over things like that.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Bootleg hole, especially once I reached the cities, also gave
rise to other bootleg industries like trucking.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
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
(26:59):
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
(27:20):
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
(27:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
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
(28:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Together, the bootleg miners and truckers built in industry independent
of the large mining companies that was almost unstoppable.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
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
(29:18):
try to pass laws in Baltimore, for example, making it
illegal to sell bootleg coal.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
And once again decentralization, solidarity, and creative resourcefulness worked in
their favor.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
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
(29:53):
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
(30:16):
do was put in the work, and they were willing
to keep doing it.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
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.
(30:52):
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
(31:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
The unions also helped protect bootleggers from legal ramifications.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
The bootleg union was called the Independent Miners Association and
they became powerful enough to be recognized by state officials.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
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
(32:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Much Kashner again, And.
Speaker 4 (32:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
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.
(33:30):
All you have to do is hire them again.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
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.
Speaker 8 (33:42):
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.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
You. You would have wound up dead in five years.
You had to learn the grin and bear. My model
was always, well.
Speaker 8 (34:07):
I lost that time I didn't do too good at
a job of set.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
I'll have to work harder next time.
Speaker 8 (34:13):
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
(34:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
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
(35:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
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.
(35:55):
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
(36:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Andrew Dubika, again, we.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
Were stealing the coals, That's what we were doing.
Speaker 8 (36:37):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
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.
Speaker 8 (36:54):
Earn my bread and butter.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Doing that, I guess the nice whereas you got to
be a little bit cocked.
Speaker 8 (37:00):
You know, Yeah, you were a will of to fight
for because he, yeah, he with shoes on.
Speaker 4 (37:10):
Everybody had to wear shoes. What other choices did get
had there? There weren't too many.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
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
(37:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
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
(38:24):
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
(38:46):
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
(39:08):
goes on and things like that, and so the state
police also start cracking down around that time.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
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.
(39:49):
Who knew?
Speaker 4 (39:51):
You know.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
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.
(40:12):
When Freddy Gray gets killed in Baltimore, like those are people.
If we had remembered and maintained that connection, we would
know that.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
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
(41:25):
strikes of like a decade or so ago, with that
kind of knowledge being part of that.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
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
(41:52):
self taught grassroots radicals can be.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
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
(42:16):
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,
(42:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
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
(43:25):
immediate communist goals, that they were able to push things
much farther in a somewhat organic way, and I find
that really inspiring.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
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
(44:07):
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
(44:30):
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?
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Alamatina all the child, Ela Child, Ela Child, Child child lamming.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
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
(45:29):
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
(45:50):
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.
(46:12):
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
(46:32):
and written by me Tyler Hill. Anyway, that's it for today.
Hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
By lutchou By luck Out By luck out Out, Padi
Jon
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