E95-96: Bootleg miners

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.

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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.

Episodes

E95: Bootleg miners, part 1 – historical background, the Depression, the process of mining, mine workers and struggles, and the beginnings of the bootleg coalmining movement. Listen without ads here on Patreon.

E96: Bootleg miners, part 2 – 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. Listen without ads here on Patreon.

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.

Acknowledgements

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.

Transcript

Part 1

Newsreel begins

What you’re hearing right now is an old newsreel from 1935…

Newsreel: In six small counties in Pennsylvania lie billions of tons of unmined coal.

Mitch Troutman, author of the book The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, plays this footage to start the talks that he gives about his book.

Mitch: The footage of this newsreel is just incredible. I mean it’s all a reenactment. These are bootleg miners and, as far as I know, those are cops in it. They had a confrontation just a few months prior to the newsreel showing up. I wanted to do this little spot that ended up being six minutes shown across the country in theaters.

Newsreel: Long before federal and state governments began handing out billions of dollars for relief, these people found a way to help themselves.

‘Bootleg mining’ is a phenomenon that started before the Great Depression but became commonplace in coal country after the stock market crash of 1929 sent the economy into chaos and mines started closing down. Without any jobs, money, or ways to heat their homes, the miners started independently working the mines. One industry that actually did well during the Depression was movie theaters and this newsreel about bootleg miners would’ve been shown to bored and unemployed movie audiences across the country.

Mitch: …because people were eager to spend a little bit of money to forget about things and having audio with your video was somewhat new. So the bootleggers got to go watch themselves on film. You see them coming out of the hills, coming out of their own bootleg holes and it looks really wild.

Newsreel: When the Depression deepened, the miners went a step further.

Mitch: You see them rallying at a meeting of bootleg miners. You even see a negotiation between them and the company, hosted by the editor of the local newspaper. That’s a role that a couple of regions’ editors played. What they don’t show you is that the reenactment they’re doing, in real life, ended with them dynamiting company property and the company retreating.

Newsreel: At night, they sold their stolen coal to local merchants who realized that this illegal coal business might keep families alive.

Mitch: This is emblematic because the bootleggers were ignoring and rejecting property rights and as time went on, over like this 12, 15 year span, they just gained more and more power locally to the point where they were basically immune from enforcement of property right laws that belonged to the coal company. Especially in two counties in particular, it was the primary industry happening. So in this scenario, when their organization is able to push the company cops away, the company cops are honestly scared at this point. That’s really how things were going. That’s why this history was so crazy that it was buried for so long because it really is a rebellion, not in the sense that they were trying to overthrow the government but in the sense that they had decided certain laws just don’t apply and local judges, even local police weren’t enforcing those laws anymore.

Newsreel: The bootleggers firmly believe that they are only taking what belongs to them.

Throughout the Great Depression and its aftermath, stealing coal from the companies, which started out of a need for survival and as a strike tactic, would grow into a full-fledged industry of unionized, independent miners. It was a community effort born out of solidarity with one another, a culture of dangerous and often deadly work, a desire to reclaim the commons in a time of extreme poverty, and understanding that laws are arbitrary rules made by the ruling class whose only interest is the protection of capital. This is Working Class History.

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Mitch: The bootleg miners get half a sentence in the People’s History of the United States and I really couldn’t find much else on it. There wasn’t much written.

Mitch stumbled upon the relatively unknown story of bootleg mining during a break after getting burnt out as a rural community organizer in Central Pennsylvania. He took a carpentry job, started a blog, and was using it to highlight the many cultural oddities of the region which people in Central Pennsylvania think are normal but most people wouldn’t.

Mitch: One is the amount of house fires. Every winter in these towns, whole blocks will burn down because the housing stock is so old and it was built by companies made out of wood. So one electrical fire will spread throughout the others.

Another one of these oddities is the way people tend to treat coal company land as if it belongs to the public.

Mitch: Just the fact that there’s this culture there of using the coal company lands as your own or not as your own but more as a commons. That’s how it exists today and people will go out into the abandoned mine lands and have a picnic, have a party, go truck racing or go swimming. I really wanted to figure out where this came from. To people here, this is normal but where’s the root of that?

The book also came out of Mitch’s curiosity about his own family history. He had heard family members talk about so-called ‘bootleg mining’ which these days has become shorthand for a small group of people, usually all related, who run a small, legal, independent mine. As he dug further into the origins of the phrase, he learned that both his mom and dad’s sides of the family had a more radical history than he thought. He learned that that word ‘bootlegging’ held the answer to his questions about the commons as well.

Mitch: It turns out they both came from the same place. So I read everything I could find and every little obscure thing I could find on bootleg mining. I wrote a blog post that became quite popular locally. A friend of mine just kept encouraging me to dig in more and dig in more. I thought I’d found everything I could.

But there wasn’t much to find. Research and history on bootleg mining was hard to come by and the phenomenon seemed to be really poorly documented until he stumbled upon the work of a man named Michael Kozura who had been working on a book about bootleg miners in the 1980s and 90s. Michael was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, and the son of bootleg coal truckers. He had been collecting oral histories from bootleg miners when he tragically died in a car accident. .

Mitch: I managed to find the phone number for his widow. I called her up and she was so happy that someone had called. She had saved all his materials; some of which were put into a library and the rest of which were in her basement. I managed to get all that and once I had these 40-odd interviews with people who were dead now, a friend of mine said, “That’s a whole book right there.” I certainly hadn’t thought of it as a book up until that point but because there wasn’t something like that already, I decided to go for it. My own curiosity kind of forced me to do it anyway because I needed to know more.

One of Mitch’s big questions was ‘Why isn’t there already a book about this?” One reason was that the person who’d been working on one had died but another reason is that the story itself hadn’t really survived well locally. The story just hadn’t been told or passed down.

Mitch: I think one reason for that was anti-communism after World War II and there were a lot of communists involved in this. The FBI was all around trying to weed those people out and so they didn’t necessarily want to share. Another thing, more generally, is that for America during the Great Depression, people who lived through it shared a lot of little anecdotes but not so much stories because 1950s America is the American decade. It’s all about people coming up, people having more stuff and consumer America but the actual stories of the Depression, like the sad ones where people were powerless, weren’t often shared.

Throughout his research, Mitch learned that part of this lost history included both sides of his family. For their own reasons they had just never talked about it. He was determined to tell their story as well as the story of all the bootleg miners who had fought so hard to take care of themselves and their communities when their employers and the government abandoned them during the Great Depression.

Mitch: The book starts with these two quotes: ‘Things happened in the bootleg coal region that are almost unbelievable for anyone not familiar with the whole story. Without their background, they sound utterly preposterous. They had probably never happened anywhere before. They couldn’t have happened except in such a region and in such a set of circumstances’. That’s from The New York Times, 1935. ‘We don’t know and we don’t care who’s supposed to own the land. God put that coal there, not the Philadelphia and Redding Coal Company’. That is a quote from Mike McCloskey, a bootleg miner. Those two quotes just capture the whole thing to me. If you only hear those two quotes, it gives you a good sense. I love how obstinate the bootleg miner is and how kind of funny and religious he is and how he just puts it all right into that. ‘We don’t care about who owns the land.’ In all the interviews, people don’t say that they stole anything. They say it was questionable. It wasn’t clear who owned the land, they didn’t care who owned the land or the company might have the paperwork but they stole it at some point. So that attitude is there and then there are just the specifics like ‘God put that coal there, not the Philadelphia and Redding Coal Company’.

In a way, God did put it there…300 million years ago…

Mitch: This history is profoundly shaped by geology. None of this would’ve been possible without the geology, in fact, the geology created the situation. Coal isn’t dead dinosaurs. It’s dead plant material that, eons ago, sank to the bottom of oceans and then was compressed over time. Most of the coal in the United States is either bituminous coal from West Virginia and Kentucky or lignite, which is like a lower-quality coal that they have out West.

And then there’s anthracite which is found only in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Anthracite was put under a lot more pressure as the Appalachian mountains formed. Through that process, it was purified more than other coals and it has the highest carbon content of any coal.

Mitch: Where the geography comes in is when that squashing and that forming of the mountains makes it so that it runs in these up and down wavy patterns through the land. Coal in West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania is more or less running horizontally so people get in there and mine it horizontally. It also lends itself much more to mechanization; whereas with the anthracite coal, it’s more like… think of the edge of lasagna pasta and the way it’s wavy like that.

This irregular pattern of coal makes it, in some ways, harder to mine but it also leads to the coal taking on all sorts of weird shapes that the coal companies didn’t bother trying to get to.

Mitch: So in mining anthracite coal, if you’re at the bottom of the top of the arc, you’re relatively horizontal but then there are all these slopes that can get really steep and almost vertical. That meant a lot of things. It meant that there was coal that it wasn’t worth the company’s time to go after because it was too technically involved to mine vertically. It meant that it was less able to be automated.

But it also meant that there were veins of coal that were easier to access without mining equipment.

Mitch: This was a big deal because it meant that there are outcroppings everywhere which means that the coal comes up to the surface and you can see where it is. The companies are going after the big, thick veins that are up to a hundred feet wide maybe. There are all these other veins that are only a foot or two wide and because of the outcroppings, you can just go up into the mountain and see where they are. This is what made it possible for bootleggers to operate because, in other places in the country where there are the horizontal seams, you can see that the company controls the entrance to that whole mine; whereas the bootleg miners were able to create their own entrances all over the mountain.

Historically speaking, everything that we’ve talked about in previous episodes with bituminous coal, like company housing, scrip and various waves of immigration, tends to happen earlier in the anthracite region.

Mitch: So they started mining coal back before the Civil War started. It really helps fuel the industrial revolution and helps fuel what would become the American war machine.

Just like in our other coal episodes, the coal companies preyed on and tricked desperate people into getting stuck in situations where every aspect of their life, from where they lived to where they shopped, what their children learned in school and what they heard in the churches were under company control. Many companies didn’t even pay their workers in US currency, offering instead to pay them in company scrip which they could only spend at the company store. Many miners were tricked into predatory contracts where they’d take a job and have to go into debt at the company store from buying all their own equipment, only to never get paid a high enough wage to actually pay off that debt.

Mitch: At first, it was mostly English and Welsh immigrants doing this coal mining and then the first big wave of immigration came after the Irish potato famine. You get lots of Irish coming to what’s now the coal region going down into the mines.

The Irish famine, like most famines, was largely man-made as British colonial authorities continued to export food from Ireland while the population starved.

Mitch: The miners, at the time, tried to unionize. They tried to make these miserable conditions better for themselves through groups like the Workers’ Benevolent Association which was an early attempt at unionizing coal miners in America but the Workers’ Benevolent Association was just crushed by the coal companies.

The Workers’ Benevolent Association was an attempt to organize not just one mine but all the mines in the region in order to prevent open mines from undercutting others that were on strike. It was organized through an Irish group called the Ancient Order of Hibernians and, being Irish, they weren’t about to take this union busting lying down.

Mitch: When the unionization is crushed, the Irish miners turn to what they know from their home country which is a sort of a midnight justice. It’s hard to know what to say about the Molly Maguires because most of what we know about them comes from very, very corrupt court cases where the coal companies owned everything but the gallows basically.

What we do know about the Molly Maguires, or whatever decentralized group came to be known and perceived as the Molly Maguires, is that in lieu of being able to unionize and go on strike, they turned to sabotage.

Mitch: They would give demands to a mine boss or a company owner and if those demands weren’t met, they might assassinate a mine boss or a company owner or they might burn down some equipment. What we don’t know is how tightly organized any of this was. We don’t even know if the Molly Maguires really technically existed but the coal companies made a good case for them existing in court and used that to execute all their leaders. Those leaders, coincidentally or not coincidentally, were leaders of the Workers’ Benevolent Association and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. So they use it to wipe out the Irish leadership, basically, whether they had been involved in that stuff or not.

Here’s miner Jack Chamption in an interview with Michael Kozura.

Jack: The Molly Maguires, yeah. When things failed in Ireland with the potato market, or whatever, the potato crops failed. The Irish migrated to America in droves. This is where the work was in coal. Coal mining was in its heyday and there were jobs here aplenty. The big companies built homes for these families. Of course, then when you worked for the companies and got your pay, they got their book out and said, “Well, you owe rent, you owe for booze, you owe for work clothes you got and you owe for your lunch bucket”. Everything went to the company store, as the old song went, [17:41 – unclear] region. But it was true. You owed your life to the company store. The Molly Maguires got a bum rap. They weren’t the rascals that the movie made them out to be. They came into the mines and the mines were very, very tough on them. Safety was unheard of and that’s when the [18:05 – unclear] a miner got sick and he didn’t show up for work, they’d say, ‘“Where is that man?” He was at home sick. They’d go and drag him out of bed and drag him to work. They forced him into work. We got unionized. That’s what the Molly Maguires did. They were the forerunners of unionism in America and they got a bum rap. They were for the miners and the companies were really awful.

Chamption told Kozura that the Molly Maguires are a prime example of the way coal miners are often misunderstood.

Jack: This nation thinks the miners are a bunch of rascals.

Michael: You were standing up for your rights. You were fighting for justice.

Jack: That’s right, yeah. All we wanted was a fair wage and they wouldn’t give you a fair wage. I didn’t work in the mines in the days of the company store but our fathers did. Everybody waited for payday and when you came home with no pay but a slip saying I owed them 25 cents or maybe you got 75 cents but your groceries were taken care of. You could buy anything in the general stores. The company stores had everything. They had mining supplies and everything. You had to buy your own dynamite, your own fuel and your own blasting caps so then people were left with nothing.

Mitch: The lessons of the Molly Maguires would come into play a lot for the bootleg miners because the thing about the Mollys is once they were destroyed, no one talked about it. The generations that were alive for that didn’t speak of it. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that the history of the Molly Maguires even came to be history again because to speak of the Molly Maguires after that period was to blacklist yourself and it was to make yourself run out of the coal region. So it stayed quiet, although some people called the bootleg miners the second Molly Maguires

Some time after the Molly Maguires had been crushed, the United Mineworkers formed in the bituminous coal region of Illinois as an attempt to unionize across many mines. They sent organizers to the anthracite region around 1900. One of the key moments in their attempts to organize the anthracite region would become known as the Lattimer Massacre.

Mitch: What is kind of traditional with miners’ strikes is that if it started at one mine, the miners would shut down production there and then just march to another mine and call those people out on strike. From there, they would march to another one and another one to get their strike as big as possible. Latimer was a small town, a company town near Hazelton, and they were marching from mine to mine calling everyone out on strike. The company police opened fire on a group of marchers and killed a large number of them. Some of the anger over this singular event really ended up helping fuel organizing in that region.

As we’ve discussed in other episodes about coal mining, solidarity is a part of mining culture to its very core and, especially during strikes or mine closures, taking care of each other was a community effort with families, women and children all playing important roles.

Mitch: Also, we have a lot of great stories, some of which are in this book, of how the communities were at that time and who was playing key roles, particularly women. I think it was in Latimer, particularly, where the men didn’t largely want to go on strike but the women of the town demanded that they did and drove them out there. They held the picket lines to make sure no men crossed over into the, into the mine that was on strike.

Here, miners William H Adams and Andrew Drebitka discuss the role of families in this culture of solidarity and mutual care.

William H Adams to George Korson about accidents and women helping with accidents

William: Whenever someone would be entombed, the women were always on the job with coffee and sandwiches and always helping to do whatever they could do and help out. Even children, in the summer when they weren’t going to school, would be around the coal holes to help to get the coal out and crack the coal on the outside.

George: If the women were at work at the coal hole, who did the cooking at home?

William: They’d both chip in when they got home and get it done.

George: Was there any cooking at the mine or the coal hole like lunch?

William: Especially in the winter time, there would be a fire there with coffee pots, roast potatoes and stuff like that.

Andrew: Rescue work was always close to my heart. Ever since I’ve been in the industry, I felt strongly about rescue work. I always felt like I would want to do as much as I could for someone else because if that was me, I’m sure somebody in the industry would have done the same for me. It was just, more or less, to try and put some effort back into the industry that was pretty good for us.

Here, Mitch reads a section of the book about a legendary woman named Big Mary.

Mitch: This is about Lattimer. Big Mary believed Lattimer miners were too docile. She formed a women’s group to enforce the strike. She was joined by 150-300 women on any given day. They marched on collieries as far as ten miles away, sometimes visiting four in one day. They were armed with clubs, rocks, scrap iron, pots and pans, and wooden spoons. Another woman’s group formed in nearby Honeybrook led by Mrs McCrone who wore no shoes and often smoked a pipe while marching. The women’s groups gave strikebreakers warnings to leave, after which they attacked the collieries and bloodied the strikebreakers they could get their hands on. Sometimes they forced their way into company offices and pulled the shift whistle. At night, men and women marched through their town streets together banging pots and pans and making everyone very aware that no one should go to work tomorrow.

The Lattimer Massacre inspired many anthracite miners to fight for their rights and by 1902, the United Mineworkers had organized a huge strike that would become a major turning point for the coal industry.

Mitch: The Lattimer Massacre was in 1899 I believe and then over the course of the next few years, they managed to organize everywhere from Scranton all the way down to the lower regions near Harrisburg. The strike itself lasted about six months before they were able to create a universal contract; meaning not a contract between these miners in this company and these miners in that company but they were able to force all the large companies to the table to sign a contract which then smaller companies had to follow as well. The strike of 1902 is important in a lot of ways for the American labor movement’s history because this is the first strike that a president intervened in. It was also important in the anthracite region because it managed to unite people from all these different ethnicities. By this point, you had many more Eastern Europeans coming, you had Italians coming and, honestly, you just had random people from all across the globe who were working in these coal mines. One of the slogans for the 1902 strike was ‘It’s not Irish coal. It’s not Polish coal. It’s not Lithuanian coal. It’s just coal and you mine it’. Through organizing across these ethnic groups rather than organizing just the Irish, they were able to build a tremendous solidarity that also taught a lesson to the miners that the bootleg miners would follow too, which was that they had these different enclaves. They were not trying to break these enclaves and they were not trying to homogenize per se but they knew that it was all of them or none of them regardless of whether they had a grudge against them or whatever.

By the time the 1902 strike ended, the entire anthracite region had been unionized. Every company mine had become a union mine. But the outcomes of the successful strike weren’t all positive. It also laid the foundations for the creation of what would eventually become the state police.

Mitch: At this time, you have the Coal and Iron Police who are a company-controlled police with the power of the state and aside from a local sheriff, that’s all there is. The brutality of the 1902 strike gives the Coal and Iron Police a bad public image, we’ll say. There are people within the state government, particularly some socialists from Redding, who pushed to have a state police force created instead that would, in theory, be less corrupt. In 1905, they established the state police but the thing is, the state police just end up being a strikebreaking force that is controlled by the governor and moved all across the state.

Here’s miner Jack Chamption in an interview with Michael Kozura talking about community resistance to the Coal and Iron Police and, particularly, an incident where miners blew up a barricade that the police had set up.

Jack: The Redding Coal and Iron Police, who always wore uniforms and were armed, came and they welded a barricade of 60-80 lbs steel rails. They worked for days setting them in concrete and welding, this big barrier like a gateway. As soon as it was complete, at night, they were blasted level with the ground. They were blasted level with the ground and I saw that with my own eyes. I mean I saw them build it and I saw, the next day, when it was blown away, blasted away.

Mitch says that this culture of resistance and solidarity stems, at least in part, from the very nature of the work that miners do.

Mitch: If you’ve ever had a job doing one thing and you leave that job and get a job in a different industry or something, your life changes. It just changes how you see the world and experience life. Coal mining was very much that. There’s a reason that, all through the world and all through history, underground miners are some of the most militant workers.

Mitch says that part of this was due to the fact that anthracite mining is an extremely high-skilled task; to the point that, before unionization, many miners would stop work entirely whenever the foreman was around in order to avoid giving him the knowledge it would take to replace them.

Mitch: So miners had a lot of freedom underground controlling their own labor and they also took extreme risks. Especially where the coal is vertical, you’re blasting dynamite in a coal vertically. It’s falling. There’s a million ways to die in a mine and miners know that every day they go underground could be their last day of life. It might not be at the top of your mind but you know it’s a possibility. Accidents and deaths happen frequently enough that it really gives people a sense of ‘We need to get what we want now. Who cares about next week? I might not be here next week’. It also gives people a strong sense of ‘I rely on the other miners around me for my own life. Whether I even like that guy over there or not or whether I want to talk to him when we’re on the surface or not, down here we have each other’s backs because it’s the only way to survive’. It’s those kinds of working conditions that build this baseline solidarity that exists even when there’s no unionization happening. It also leaves a lot of space so that while a skilled miner is teaching an apprentice the trade, they’re also teaching them the history. So that just builds this social structure that is ripe for organizing. It’s ripe for organizing a union but it’s also ripe for organizing small workplace actions.

Another reason that miners were so militant in their organizing is because, unlike many other industries, they actually had the power to essentially shut down production and grind huge parts of the economy and United States infrastructure to a halt simply by withholding their labor. All of these cultural dynamics unique to anthracite mining gave the people of the region a baseline of solidarity, independence, militancy and a disregard for property laws that would later help them take bootlegging – stealing coal from the companies and using or selling it themselves – from a criminal enterprise to essentially its own legal, legitimate, and unionized industry. Here’s Jack Champton talking about the necessity of bootlegging coal when mines were shut down first by strikes and then by the Great Depression.

Jack: Well, they were very bitter. They couldn’t understand why all these coal mines shut down but that’s when the bootleggers started. The bootleggers actually supplied the source of heat coal which was burned in the big cities like Redding, Philadelphia and Boston. They all burned coal.

Michael: A lot of people say that you were all criminals and that you were outlaws.

Jack: I guess that’s why they named them bootleggers that came for the days of bootlegging moonshine which went on in this area too. People stuck together. No one ratted on anyone. You’ve got to eat. You’ve got to have clothing for your children. People were proud to see a guy dig a hole. You dig, dig, dig down that hole and maybe you, your family, your father, your brothers would take you months.

Mitch: So I tried to look for the earliest cases of bootleg mining but I couldn’t find anything because it just seems to go farther back in time. Even in the 1902 strike, there were some mentions in newspapers that while miners were on strike, they weren’t just picketing and marching but they were also going up in the mountains and getting their own coal for personal use, for bartering around the neighborhood and for helping out the elderly and the firm.

Later, during another strike in 1925, bootleg coal was a common enough phenomenon that it was even being mentioned in newspapers.

Mitch: The newspaper says ‘Every night lights can be seen flickering about on the mountain side surrounding this town, pointing out the miners as they wend their way homewards with a wheelbarrow full of coal. Those who are bolder and who openly run the risk of being arrested by the Coal and Iron Company officials operate on a much larger scale. During the early hours of the night, these men mine their coal and then at about midnight, truck drivers come with their machines and haul the coal away by tons’. The 1925 strike is at least in records when I could find that bootlegging started happening on a massive scale. They weren’t necessarily calling it bootlegging but it was a basic strike tactic of theirs; not only to go mine your own coal elsewhere but also for the workers to enter their own workplaces, not as scabs but as thieves, essentially, mining coal out of that mine

But to the miners and their families, bootlegging was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, it grew out of a practice that many of them had already been doing for ages.

Mitch: Now there’s a long tradition of when they get this coal out of the ground, it’s sorted in the breaker and coal that’s of lower quality or maybe too small to be commercially viable gets dumped on these piles called culm banks. They have different names in other places. Some places might call them slag heaps but these culm banks are big piles of waste coal and, traditionally, older people, injured people, sick people and children would go pick coal from the bank to burn for their winter fuel. This was a tradition as far back as we know; possibly as far back as coal mining goes. Miners, in particular, felt that this was a commons. This was a communally-owned thing – the culm bank – because every speck of rock that was on there was deducted from their own pay. They had minded it already. It was just sitting up there. The companies were generally okay with this too because it was a social support for the community and it helped hold things together. To be honest, like a lot of the more locally-based bosses – not the Wall Street people – they were sympathetic to others being able to survive anyway. So it was common practice and then during strikes, they would also be picking up the culm banks and doing a much more industrial job of sorting through all that.

Here’s bootleg miner Jack Champion in an interview with Michael Kozura.

Jack: I went to school and when we’d come from school, we’d salvage this coal and we’d pick it. The early strip mines came and what they left, we went in and sunk a hole and we started [34:59 – unclear]. When the Great Depression came in 1932, all the collieries just came to a halt and they shut down. The people had to live but there was no unemployment and there was no welfare. Since the coal was in the ground and we all knew where it was at as the veins were carefully plotted and they ran through so people started digging their own coal holes.

Michael: Some of the guys that I talked to said the Coal and Iron Police tried to stop you. Yes, they did but to no avail. There were too many of us and not enough of them. When they took you into the can, the judges had more mercy on us because we were trying to eke out a living. In other words, they kind of turned their heads the other way a little bit because we had to eat. They couldn’t stop us and they tried. I was young then and our fathers, our uncles, our neighbors were miners. The police would come out with a motorcycle with the sidecar on and they’d go down after the bootleggers. They’d go down and we’d shove the motorcycle over the bank [laughter]. We were pro-minor and pro-bootleg. We were rooting for them. It was the only way to live then.

It made sense that, given the history of utilizing excess coal, the practice would grow during times of desperation, like strikes or economic collapse.

Mitch: So as you get to the Great Depression and the mine starts shutting down, in this time, it’s just natural that people are going to start bootlegging on their own first little holes and in secret but also breaking into collieries that are closed, either mining the coal in there or stealing the tools, stealing the timber and stealing everything to run their own operations. Strip mines are sort of a new thing in this period and there are cases of people breaking into strip mines and running the machinery at night when the workers aren’t there to mine their own coal and once the Great Depression comes around, it just snowballs. There’s something about the Great Depression that’s just so American because the economy collapsed in 1929 and most of the country is worse off but still somehow for years. It was kind of like the 2008 housing recession with the foreclosure crisis. There wasn’t like an instant response to it for years after the Depression began. People really blamed themselves and they felt down on their luck for their own personal failings, even if they saw this bigger thing going on. Also, the government would be denying it too. They would say, “The reason there’s a depression is just because we’re not acting positively enough. We just need to sound more positive and it will fix itself”. As years go by, that doesn’t happen.

And here’s bootleg miner Mike Semanchick, also talking with Michael Kozura.

Mike: People got to know each other that were involved in the same thing, then you got a little braver. You got a little more nerve because you had more people involved and then you defied it. That’s when you start blowing motorcycles up. You must recall that before we had our city police or town police out in the patches, for instance, [38:32 – unclear], the Coal and Iron cops would come in there and actually arrest people and club them if they had to. They’d carry guns and they’d take you to jail. The company cops, nobody liked them. They didn’t care too much for the Coal and Iron cops. It didn’t take much to get a gang together to oppose them.

Mitch So one of the things happening with the bootleg miners though is they’re radicalizing themselves through all these actions. Every time they do something bolder, every time they get away with something and every time they see the size and scope of their own power, they’re more radicalized. So it’s not that they were all reading Marx or really anything in particular but that they were doing it and seeing it in practice. You had communists and socialists who would say the coal company had no right to these lands but you also had conservatives and a lot of religious Catholics who were saying the same thing. It’s not that they influenced each other on an ideological level but that they were working it out in practice and coming to run things on their own. They didn’t decide that no laws had any value or that shouldn’t be recognized but they were working it out on their own. Bootleg mining, though, actually goes back to before the Depression. It goes back to the 1920s when the anthracite companies saw the writing on the wall. They also saw, during World War I, how oil was much more useful in a way than coal was. So they began purposely shutting down operations while maintaining a monopoly on the land so they were producing less coal to keep the value and the price of that coal up. That’s another thing that miners and these whole communities resented, which was that the companies were knowingly putting them out of work, that there was more demand for coal and they could prove it by selling bootleg coal.

Bootleg miner Mooch Kashner, talking with Michael Kozura.

Mooch: One time I was arrested and I spent a night in jail for bootlegging coal.

Michael: What happened there?

Mooch: I got caught hauling coal from a mine over in Hickory Ridge. The Coal and Iron cops took me down to city hall here in Shamokin and locked me up till the next morning. I wouldn’t pay the fine and I went to Sunbury. They took me to Sunbury jail and I got out.

Michael: How’d you get out?

Mooch: County commissioner. I called the county commissioner and I told him, “They locked me up for bootlegging coal”. He called the warden and said, “Let that man go”.

[Theme music]

That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. Join us in Part 2 where we talk more about strikes and militant action and the development of bootleg coal into its own independent and unionized industry. Part 2 is available now for early listening for our supporters on patreon.

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If you’d like to learn more about bootleg mining or about militant labor action in coal country, check out the webpage for this episode where you’ll find further reading and more. You can also get Mitch’s book, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925–1942, and you can get 10% off that and anything else using the discount code WCHPODCAST. Links in the show notes.

Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D Saltsman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Jeremy Cusimano and Nick Williams.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao. Thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was written and edited by me, Tyler Hill.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks so much for listening.

Part 2

Welcome back to Part 2 of our double-episode on The Bootleg Coal Rebellion. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, then I recommend you go back and listen to that first.

[Intro music]

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.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes.

At the end of Part 1, we left off during the Great Depression when miners in the anthracite coal region had already been engaging in increasingly militant labor action as they established a union across all mines in the area after a massive and bloody strike in 1902.

It was around this time that bootleg mining started to become a common practice which would eventually grow into its own industry, independent of the major mining companies. Mitch Troutman, author of The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized 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 if the mines were closed, everyone still needed coal to survive.

Mitch: As the minds start 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 patrolling the properties, finding these people and hauling them off to jail when they can. The thing is, as more bootleg coal’s being produced, it’s being sold for $1-3 less per ton than company coal and it’s literally the same stuff. It’s literally the same coal from the same places. It’s the Depression and more and more people want that and are buying it. So there are cases where the bootleg miners get hauled into jail and that very jail is burning bootleg coal to heat itself. 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. There’s a great story in the book about a cop who takes a bootleg miner into the jail and then as the cop leaves, he sees that same miner he just arrested standing out back of the jail laughing at him because they just let him right out the back. Increasingly, the bootleg miners would be fined maybe a dollar for trespassing and theft or whatever the charges were and maybe even given a year to pay it off with the judges knowing full well how they were going to make that money to do it. This is part of the Coal and Iron police losing their power and losing their effectiveness.

Overall, the Great Depression was a time of militant labor action even outside of coal country as people came together as communities to take care of each other and push back against the people in power who tried to blame the working class for their own poverty.

Mitch: Bootleg coal isn’t the only thing from the Depression that hasn’t had enough written about it though. There are all sorts of things that start to pop up, especially after 1932 or so. There’s the Farm Holiday Movement that is trying to declare a moratorium on foreclosures, especially in the Midwest and Iowa specifically. They have this great little jingle but I guess it’s more of a poem. They say, “Let’s call a Farmer’s Holiday. A holiday we’ll hold. We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs and let them eat their gold”. There are 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. So farmers start blockading highways and railroad tracks and just dumping off all the milk they see in order to bring up the price. A general strike happens in Minneapolis and there’s a general strike in San Francisco. All these things deserve way more written about them.

Here’s Mooch Kashner, talking about a group of miners blowing up a shovel which is a large piece of excavation equipment used in coal mining.

Mooch: There were a bunch of mines in there and they moved a shovel in there to dig them out. Of course, people were hurting like everybody else at the time. They wanted to make a living and that’s where they were making it. They moved the shovel in and they were supposed to start digging the next morning there with that shovel but they never did because they blew it up the night before.

Michael: Did the guys get together and talk it over?

Mooch: Yeah, a couple guys. It was just a couple guys because it was better than everybody knowing about that. It was better than everybody knowing. Only a couple guys knew about that. I would say four people at the most and I was one of them that knew about it but I didn’t participate in it.

Mitch: So militant action is, again, worldwide throughout time and part of coal mining struggles or just mining struggles in general. I am really fascinated in Bolivia and the silver miners who, at various times, have been illegally bootleg style but a thing they often do when they have marches is they just throw dynamite. You’d think that would be planned out or something but it’s not. I have a friend who went down there who said, ‘It’s legitimately scary to be at a march where people are just throwing dynamite”. It does get the level of seriousness across [laughter] as to what kind of risks people are willing to take and what type of stakes people feel like they’re fighting for. So that the bootleggers did any of this honestly shouldn’t be surprising if you know coal mining history.

Bootleg miner Jack Chamption talking with Michael Kozura

Jack: We were a very close group in the coal mines. It was always to help each other and keep your mouth shut. Let well enough alone if he’s making an honest living, as we always thought it was. We thought we had a right to this great resource too… as much as the big companies.

Mitch: Coal mines need to have multiple entrances for ventilation so there were a lot of ways in and out of a mine but also, it was happening on such a large scale that the companies couldn’t always stop it.

And because the companies couldn’t stop the scale at which bootlegging was happening, the practice only continued to grow.

Mitch: In 1925, you see all sorts of things happening. Another important point about anthracite is it’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 in 1902, 1925 and others, it’s a big deal. They try to strike through the winters when they have the most power and that means that New York City, Baltimore and Boston are going without heat. So these bootleggers… or, at this point, they’re just strikers and they’re able to funnel coal out and get some money for that or get other things.

Once people in the major cities started buying bootleg coal, the miners had essentially cut out the middle men and could more or less run their own independent coal industry.

Mitch: I found some great stories. One is of a Philadelphia carpenter who reports to the newspaper and says, ‘I ran out of coal so I actually just went up to the coal region myself and some guy showed me how to start my own little mine. I mined enough to keep my operations going down here in Philly”. There’s another story of a Boston businessman, I believe, who arranges to buy a load of this stolen coal and even has it put on a train. He hasn’t marked his potatoes until the Redding Coal and Iron Company find that their own train is being used to move bootleg coal during the strike [laughter]. It doesn’t end up getting shipped. There’s just tons of that going on.

Bootleg miner William H Adams told folklorist George Korson, in this oral history, that as 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.

William: The most tools used would be the pick, the shovel and the bar. They would use the pick and shovel. Well, first they’d use the bar to find out where the outcrop of the vein would be. You’d drive it down into the ground until you could get the black stuff on the end of the bar.

You’d start sinking a hole with the pick and shovel and using dynamite whenever you could get it which was hard in the beginning to get. The first bootlegger would either go and steal the dynamite, or get someone who still worked at the colliery to bring them some along from the colliery where they used it.

Mooch 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.

Mooch: They were the backbone of the whole thing during, during the Depression. They were it and they saved everything. They saved everything. They saved business. They saved the market. They saved the towns. They did everything.

Michael: Why did you turn to bootlegging in the first place?

Mooch: During the Depression, this was when I was old enough to go to work. When I was 14 years old, I was bootlegging coal already. We used to go into a mine at night at two or three o’clock in the morning with my brother-in-laws and we’d screen coal inside that mine and carry it out in bags. They’d leave me there by myself at the age of 14 and I’d be carrying small bags of coal out while they’d be taking a trip to sell it at that time in the morning. They’d have pre-arrangements made. They’d stay away from the Coal and Iron Police. That’s what we did and we did that for about two years before I ever started to work at any other place. We were doing that but never got caught, of course. We were doing that for that long. They’d always leave me there were all kinds of noises at two or three o’clock in the morning. Boy, it would scare you. You’d be scared and that was an experience in itself.

Even at 14, Kashner managed to somehow juggle going to school AND bootlegging to help support his family.

Mooch: I went one year and started but didn’t even finish the first year of high school. I started to work around the mines. Of course, I was going to school while I was bootlegging coal too and carrying those bags out in the morning. You’d get up in the morning and go to school after working an hour or two hours carrying the bags. You’d go home, wash and go to bed and get up to go to school. We walked to school because we didn’t have buses. We walked a mile and a half to school.

Mitch So as bootleg begins to grow, women and children aren’t just helping at home. They’re going into the mines. There are some great stories of children who run mines after school on their own. There are women and children working on the surface level of the mine hauling the coal up and processing it there but then there are also women and children going underground. There are a few cases of women being miners in their own right. 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. So food is cooked at the mine and life is lived to the rhythm of the bootleg mining.

Jack Chamption.

Jack: Of course, when I was born it was the Great Depression in America and coal was all over. We were surrounded by coal mines and coal. Even when we were children, we were learning how to recover this mineral coal. We used it in our furnaces and we sold what excess we couldn’t use. We more or less stole from the companies. It was their coal but, as poor citizens, they didn’t stop us really. It was very abundant and coal was everywhere. There were big banks but all around, there were high piles. That’s why they called it bootlegging. We were stealing, actually,but the law men turned their heads the other way. We were helping ourselves. We were feeding our families. That’s what they’re like. The bootleggers got to be pretty numerous and then they started to sort of form their own union.

But as impossible as it was for authorities to stop widespread bootlegging, they did occasionally try. Mooch Kashner again.

Mooch: When they harassed us in any way, shape or form, we would try to reciprocate. We went around and shut union jobs down and they shut down. Of course, they didn’t like to shut down but they did this in sympathy and they knew it. They probably had somebody in their family working a bootleg hole. You don’t know. We had a mine where you would sit along the road waiting for a trucker and almost kiss his rear to buy a load of coal off you so you could get rid of it. It was hard to get rid of the coal when this first started until more breakers got put up and the truckers started to haul to the city and people started to buy coal trucks.

Here, bootleg miner William H Adams tells folklorist George Korson 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.

William: In the first place when it started, the Coal and Iron Police would come and blow the hole shut and arrest the men if they caught them in the daytime and would take them to the squire. Of course, they’d have him plead guilty and take him to jail.

George: What did they charge him with? Trespassing.

William: Trespassing. All they could hold him for was stealing coal. They had that many in jail and this thing continued that long that the men got together and started mobbing the Coal and Iron Police. Later on, they couldn’t get law and couldn’t stick them in jail anymore. They just stopped it. They used to make coal at night rather than the daytime but then around 1933, this thing went so far that they even mobbed and chased a group of Coal and Iron Police and Coal and Iron officials from Good Spring right back to… they’d sneak up through the bushes. The people knew the paths and would sneak up through, make the coal and hide it. They’d then turn around and hide the tools, close the hole, cover the hole up and stand trees in the road where the road was. They lay tree limbs and leaves over the road so they couldn’t see the tracks. There were different ways that it was done.

George: Replanting, yeah?

William: That’s right.

George: Were there women there at night too?

William: Women were there at night as well as in the daytime.

As we’ve mentioned before, no part of life in the anthracite region, especially during the Depression, was anything less than a community effort. Women and children were heavily involved in the bootleg industry and in helping their families and communities survive.

William: In some places the wives and the daughters were on top and hoisted the buckets up with [16:14 – unclear]. Even in some places, the wives, daughters and sisters went inside and helped to load the coal up and send it out.

George: That was the first time that the women had ever worked in a coal mine, wasn’t it?

William: That’s the first time any female ever was around the colliery or had worked at a colliery outside of maybe clerking in an office or a nurse at a hospital where they’d give first aid if somebody was hurt.

Mitch: 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 and sold to where it needs to go. When you bootleg coal, take coal from the culm banks or rob it from a thing the company already mined, you still have to process it. So much of this processing was done, especially in the early days of bootlegging, at home in the backyard. The coal would be brought there and then it would typically be older people, women and children who would crack it with hammers, sort it by size and then bag it up, sell it, use it or whatever. Women and children play a huge role in the bootleg coal industry.

Women and children were also subjected to the dangers of bootleg mining.

William: There were a lot of serious incidents, that’s for sure… involving fighting the shovels and the stripping end of it. The women got in the buckets to keep the operator from stripping, that [17:46].

George: How did they do it?

William: When the shovel operator emptied the bucket and dropped the bucket down, the women jumped in the bucket. Of course, the operator was afraid to move the bucket with the women in, so of course that would help.

George: Do you mean the big bucket that takes a bite out of the side of the mountain?

William: That’s right.

George: How many women would get in there?

William: Oh, four or five. The operator wouldn’t hoist them up.

George: Didn’t anybody push them out or try to push them out?

William: No, they didn’t try to push them out with the women in but they were arrested. They got over it alright.

George: Were there any women arrested at the individual coal holes?

William: Not at the individual coal holes but at these stripping incidents, there were women arrested as well as men.

Mitch: So these veins that the bootleg miners are working in run downward but they also side to side stretch out. So if I want to open a bootleg mine, the best place I know to find coal is where there’s already a bootleg mine. You would go down maybe another a hundred feet and start mining right there in the same seam. There are stretches where there are starting to be hundreds of mines in the same place. These people start coordinating and in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, they even have their own security guards and mine inspector which the bootleggers do amongst themselves. They’re interconnecting their mines underground to help create airflow, to keep each other safe and they’re absolutely helping rescue each other when there are accidents.

Rushing to help after an accident was also a community effort with miners from all over stopping what they were doing and sacrificing their day’s pay to help out, sometimes even when there was nothing that could be done.

Mooch: Every mine accident in this area, I was there and worked for free too. I left my job where I was earning money to go and help that poor person out that was trapped without pay. I didn’t get paid. As soon as there was an accident, they would come to my mind and I went right away. I dropped everything, left and stayed there. I was at the mine rescue operations for 35 hours without coming home. I stayed right there. I don’t think that there was one escape that we didn’t train our first raiders for. We started getting them in the mine rescue and from that time on, the mine accidents reduced terrifically in this area. Before that, we had quite a few of mine accidents and sometimes a couple every month. After we started training these guys and teaching them how to mine safely and do things safely, that reduced the mine accidents terrifically.

The women in the town were often just as militant, if not more so, than their male counterparts.

William: The street in front of our house here was dirt and, of course, the strippers started to haul their coal past here to the ramp, load it in the railroad car and ship it to the breaker. Of course, they raised that much dust, this dust got on the tomato stalks and potato stalks that you didn’t need to spray because the tomato or the potato bugs would get the sand in their mouth and they wouldn’t hurt the stalks. The women couldn’t wash the house because it would be dusty from the front to the back so they finally closed the road off.

George: The women did it?

William: The women closed the road off and put benches across the street.

The community solidarity in bootleg mining communities also extended to the few people who still had company jobs.

Mitch: Also, as mines are shutting down, you have people in town who are working for the company mine who are UMW members and then you have people living on the same block who are bootleg mining. You really can’t hide it. It is a big operation. It involves a lot of moving heavy things around but there was a lot of solidarity between the working miners and the bootleg miners because the working miners knew. At first, when bootleg mining is small, people in town aren’t selling each other out. They’re not reporting it to the company. They’re not calling in the Coal and Iron Police because they respect that their neighbors need to do what they need to do to get by. They also see the fact that they’re mining it themselves, whether they own the ground or not, and they see that as legitimate. They’re putting in their labor and 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. The company, and occasionally the union, tried to drive a wedge between union miners and bootleg miners; a lot of the bootleg miners were still paying their union dues. A lot of them were still card-carrying UMW members like the UMW members who were still actively working. Sometimes they would raise money to try to support the unemployed in town but, ultimately, they knew tons of people who were bootleg mining and if anything, many of them felt guilty for still having that really good job [laughter] – it’s relative because it’s a coal mine – and legal job that pays well when other people are having to do all this dangerous work to get by. You end up having union miners working at a colliery, then moonlighting as bootleggers at night, often for free, just to help assist their family, their friends and neighbors who are living off bootleg coal itself. There was nobody the companies hated more than an employed miner who was also bootlegging.

Throughout the Great Depression, as bootlegging grew and grew, it eventually went from an open secret, to something that the authorities had to recognize as a legitimate practice.

Mitch: As bootlegging 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 adjust their constituents. The union doesn’t really endorse people specifically so they’re essentially being elected by the bootleg vote. That’s where this immunity starts coming from and as you have more and more people doing it and as you have more and more immunity, people just start bootleg mining during the day openly.

As bootlegging became more legitimate, the miners had to balance a practical approach with their radical roots but Mitch says that was nothing new for them. It was already a part of their culture.

Mitch: Bootlegging is this constant balance between radical and practical and the practical actions they take become more and more radical as they make more sense and become common sense as they have the power to do them. The whole time, the bootleggers unions are mostly electing really respected miners and also communists who kind of have some vision for things but they’re never of one accord. They’re never endorsing Soviet Russia or anything like that. At some point they write a bootlegger constitution, not that I ever think they actually governed anything by it. It might have just been a thing they tried out. The document itself is in the book and it’s pretty amazing because it embodies both of these things. It talks about how bootlegging is for survival and the reason they’re doing it is just raw survival but then it also says ‘We will stand with other unemployed people throughout the country to demand a better government for ourselves’.

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 generate value.

Mitch: Towards World War II, 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. The interesting thing is that the more radical ones’ demand remains as it had been the whole time. ‘Hire us, reopen the collieries and we won’t need to bootleg anymore. We’ll go back to having union jobs’. The more conservative ones start to lean more towards saying ‘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, stick with this and never go back to having company collieries’. You can probably imagine those goals… and they start to butt heads over things like that

Bootleg coal, especially once it reached the cities, also gave rise to other bootleg industries, like trucking.

Mitch: So as bootlegging grows and essentially becomes its own industry, there are two other facets other than mining. There are bootleg breakers who are in a more organized fashion to clean and sort that coal and then there are bootleg truckers who are taking the coal from the hills and delivering it to cities from Boston down to Virginia and Maryland. The way the bootleg truckers start is really interesting. I mean, for one, the coal companies own the rail lines so they want to stick with rail. They’re not trying to have trucks get involved which are sort of this new thing. So the bootleggers have a great niche by getting into trucks. Somebody might work at a bootleg mine, save up some money and get a truck. What they would do is get the coal and just drive to a place where they thought there’d be a market and go literally door to door just knocking on doors asking who wants to buy bootleg coal. Again, being the Depression and it being cheaper, they quickly build up a customer base that way in places where they didn’t necessarily know anybody before. The reverse starts happening too where there are truckers, particularly from the cities, who are driving up to the anthracite region and just driving around the mountains looking for bootleg miners. For the bootleg miners, that’s often the job that one of the younger kids in a family would have which would be to stand outside on the road, try to flag down truckers and get them to come back to the mine.

The relationship between bootleg mining and bootleg trucking was one of the rare instances in coal 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.

Mitch: The fascinating thing is that 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. The same miners and truckers who link up stick together once they find a good working relationship. Honestly, it’s like a racist time and it can be a racist place, for sure, but this mutual dependence and this relationship they build together really makes this thing work. I find it incredible.

Together, the bootleg miners and truckers built an industry independent of the large mining companies that was almost unstoppable.

Mitch: At its peak, bootlegging produces about 10% of all anthracite coal at the time which is the same as the largest anthracite coal company which only has 10% of the market. So it’s massive. The companies are unable to stop bootlegging at home or to stop the bootleg truckers and to stop distribution in different cities. So they try to pass laws in Baltimore, for example, making it illegal to sell bootleg coal.

Once again, decentralization, solidarity, and creative resourcefulness worked in their favor.

Mitch: The companies are trying to stop bootleg truckers on the highways but the bootleg truckers start coming up with systems to warn each other where there are going to be cops and where needs to be avoided. They would have bandanas on their trucks to signal things. There were gas stations which would have tanks and barrels that they would align in certain ways to let people know which way they should be going. It got really elaborate and, again, part of the decentralized nature of it is what helped it stay so big because this was all risk taking and people were getting caught. People were going to jail and people were having their coal dumped and things like that but the coal was there and the market was there. All somebody had to do was put in the work and they were willing to keep doing it.

Eventually the bootleg coal industry grew so big that the independent miners even formed their own unions as part of the previously mentioned effort to come up with a code and rules for their trade.

Mitch: I did a lot of research trying to map out how and where the bootleg unions formed but many local bootleg unions formed town by town. Within two years, there were maybe ten of them that formed all for different but related reasons. Some formed to help regulate the price of coal so that bootleggers weren’t undercutting each other. Some formed to fight a specific company that was pursuing them. Essentially, it was all hyper-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. Bootleg union is kind of a misnomer because they’re not employed by anyone. So you could call it an association instead of a union if you want but it was the same spirit. The Independent Miners’ Association would have representatives from all the different, local bootleg unions.

The unions also helped protect bootleggers from legal ramifications.

Mitch: 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 also, as people bought trucks and started trucking bootleg coal around the Northeast, they would hire lawyers to go to those states too to help protect the bootleg truckers where they were selling the coal.

The bootleg union was called the Independent Miners’ Association and they became powerful enough to be recognized by state officials.

Mitch: The IMA ultimately has two marches on Harrisburg that have about 10,000 people each. They ride down in the back of coal trucks wearing their dirty coal mining stuff just to have a show of force in Harrisburg. Ultimately, the state government was turning against the coal companies too, partly because they knew the easiest way to deal with the problem of bootlegging was to ignore it and let it go on. Also, they had a long history of dealing with these companies and the companies were assholes, basically. Thirdly, there is a legal issue with trying to pass a law to make something illegal which is already illegal.

Mooch Kashner again.

Mooch: We just wanted to show strength and show how many people were involved. This changed the mind of a lot of government officials when they saw the number of men. Sometimes, there were between 500-700 people when some of these small mines went down on their caravans. We just wanted to show strength.

Mitch: Ultimately, they end up winning the ear of three state governors, not all of whom want to support them necessarily but they’re a force to be reckoned with in that part of the state. One governor was even intending to crack down on them but then didn’t and he just went along with precedent. The second governor, Earl, specifically said to the coal companies, “You guys can fix this. All you have to do is hire them again”.

Here’s IMA member Andrew Drebitka talking about how, just like any union, sometimes organizing the bootleggers was discouraging work that involved lots of compromise.

Andrew: When you went to a meeting, many times you worked for something you didn’t quite agree with but that’s what the majority wanted. The majority rule ruled with it. I mean you couldn’t hold any animosity or anything like that because of it. You would have wound up dead in five years. You had to learn the grin and bear it. My motto was always ‘I lost that time. I didn’t do too good of a job of selling that .I’ll have to work harder next time’. Many times, you were grinning and smiling when you didn’t really want to be. Many times I would get discouraged. I would have to say that many times at a meeting, you really lost. So when I really wanted something and I lost, I always felt like ‘I wasn’t a good enough salesman so I’ll have to try again to do it’. I always felt like the industry itself deserved better support than what it got. By the same token, I realized that everybody fought their way up from their bootstraps. So that would automatically, whether you wanted to be or not, made you a selfish stinker.

One thing that was remarkable to me about reading Mitch’s book is the way that the bootleg miners saw the coal as a kind of commons to be reclaimed. Without needing any lofty theory, they knew from their own lives and work that something about the way the industry claimed ownership over the value they generated just didn’t make sense.

Their culture of solidarity and resistance, combined with their lived experience as workers, allowed them to build and run a huge and profitable industry on their own, democratically, and without the need for bosses or the state. As Mitch has mentioned, I think this is summed up really beautifully by the sentiment that many of these miners mention in their oral histories: the coal doesn’t belong to the companies. God put it there. It’s for everyone.

Mitch: The miners weren’t using the word ‘commons’ but, basically, how they were thinking of it was “This coal company land (they would call it supposed coal company land) is a community resource and the company shouldn’t control it but it’s also not yours or mine to individually control. It’s a resource that we’re all benefiting from”. Granted, of course, they’re exploiting it and they still have that mindset, for sure. 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. Ultimately, it’s our ancestors who built that and did that work. We have more right to it by our own labor and by the fact that we live here, rather than Wall Street, to use it for what we will. It’s really incredible that people decided what made the most sense and what made common sense was that property laws don’t apply to coal companies.

Andrew Drebitka again.

Andrew: We were stealing the coal. That’s what we were doing. But what was the difference? They were going to push it with the dozer out the way because there were no loaders then. So they just pushed it over out the way and [36:45 – unclear]. So I just felt like we were stealing [36:48 – unclear] felt like we were salvaging something. I have to say, I earned my bread and butter doing that. I guess you had to be a little bit cocky. You were willing to fight for it because you had to eat. Jesus, there were no ifs, ands or buts. You had to eat and put shoes on. Everybody had to wear shoes.

George: What other choices did you have?

Andrew: Yeah, there weren’t too many.

Mitch: Those companies only own that land because of various ill dealings in the past. There were lots of cases where the companies, with their money, could lawyer up and basically rob somebody of their home or rob somebody who already owned land. Also, sometimes when the bootleggers went to court, they would say, “Okay, show us the deed. Show us the deed that the company owns this land”. More often than not, that deed couldn’t be pulled up anyway.

Though the tradition and culture of independent mining lives on to some extent today, bootleg mining in the anthracite mostly died off after World War II as the economy recovered from the Depression and jobs were less scarce. Not to mention, oil was starting to lower the demand for coal.

Mitch: It comes back after the war but is never quite as big. It kind of climaxes, not with just the draft (and these are all unemployed people technically) but also with more and more standoffs with the companies, specifically around strip mining. When they bring in stripping shovels (you can think of a steam shovel except, by now, they’re run on oil), the companies could use a strip mine to both 1) mine coal cheaper than doing it underground with less employees and 2) they could also destroy the entrances to the bootleg holes. So bootleggers, throughout the 1930s, keep surrounding these shovels. I think about 12 times it happens where they dynamite them or destroy them in some way. Thanks to the bootleggers’ marches on Harrisburg and thanks to their conversations with the governors, they 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. Towards 1939/40, these confrontations are happening more and more around stripping shovels and them getting blown up. Eventually, there is a little bit of shooting that goes on and things like that so the state police also start cracking down around that time.

As things got more violent and legal consequences became more common, the industry itself continued to shrink. But in writing this book, Mitch says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned is about the importance of preserving working-class stories.

Mitch: One thing that definitely stood out is the importance of keeping memory alive and how wild it is that this was forgotten. 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, and I told them that at an event in a fire hall and one woman just goes, “Huh, communists in our town. Who knew?” Whether this ends up having a practical effect on the world or not, I don’t know but people knowing their history and knowing that this is part of their history I think really lends itself to seeing solidarity. When you go back to the relationship between the Black bootleg truckers and the bootleg miners, those are our people. When Freddie Gray gets killed in Baltimore, those are our people. If we had remembered and maintained that connection, we would know that.

Freddie Gray was a 25 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.

Mitch: But the more we forget our history, forget our connections, the more we accept what TV says we are, the more individual we are, the more isolated, then the more solidarity is a really abstract idea of an idea at all.

Mitch points to places like the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, which we discuss in episodes 57-58 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. Even as the powers that be try to erase it, the knowledge of these past struggles remains extremely relevant.

Mitch: So I think keeping that kind of history alive is really important. This book is part of that but a really great example of that is the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum and everything they’ve been doing with not only uncovering some very militant history in West Virginia but also building that knowledge up throughout the state. They have such a tremendous moment with the teacher strikes of a decade or so ago with that kind of knowledge being part of that.

Mitch also says that one of his goals with the book was to show how, although educating ourselves and reading theory can be important, sometimes lived working-class experience is enough for people to radicalize themselves. As the saying goes ‘I may not have read Marx’s Capital but I have the marks of capital all over my body’. The bootleg miners are a great example of how effective self-taught, grassroots radicals can be.

Mitch: Another big lesson I think from this are 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 and they’re pursuing the same goals together. That’s where this intense solidarity comes from. I mean these are people of all sorts of ethnicities, all sorts of political persuasions and all sorts of religious persuasions who don’t necessarily like each other. I can’t emphasize that enough. In small towns, people don’t get along a lot, you know but the solidarity isn’t built through convincing each other that they need to do it. It’s through doing it. I think that’s so important, especially today, because we can be so focused on rhetoric and so focused on who has what position on what thing. It’s important how the bootleggers were radicalizing themselves through the actions they take and their positions develop over time and not because they went to college.

Those of us who do know a little theory can learn a lot from people like the bootleg miners when it comes to stopping our abstract squabbling and actually getting things done.

Mitch: There’s like a whole fascinating subsection of this book that’s about the practicality of some of the communists who were involved in this and about how they had their orders, they had like the national plan and even the international plans that they were working on. They also recognized 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 immediate communist goals, that they were able to push things much farther in a somewhat organic way. I find that really inspiring

This non-dogmatic perspective allowed many of the socialists and communists who helped 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.

Mitch: There’s a communist organizer, Steve Nelson, who’s in the anthracite region for a while during this period. One of the things he emphasizes is “Lay off the religion like this. So many of these miners and families are Catholic. Let’s stop talking shit on Catholicism because that’s counterproductive. Let’s meet people where they’re at and organize where they’re at”. That practice worked. From the beginning days of bootlegging, the communists were saying, “Do you know what we should do with this bootlegging? We should form a union”. I think early on people said, “That’s crazy. What are you talking about?W But then when it became apparent that they needed to act together, those communists were there to help form how those things happened but just as an organization that has a political mission that’s trying to achieve it through hard work and vision. Whether that’s communists, socialists, anarchists or whatever, I think there are some great lessons in that too about conforming to how people operate and organize from that place.

[Theme music]

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 heartily recommend you get hold of a copy of Mitch’s book, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925–1942. Conveniently, it’s available in our online store and you can get 10% off that and anything else using the discount code WCHPODCAST. Links in the show notes.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory. Link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch and more. If you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem. Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

If you’d like to learn more about bootleg mining or radical labor movements in coal country, check out the webpage for this episode where you’ll find further reading and more.

Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D Saltsman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Jeremy Cusimano and Nick Williams.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao. Thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by me, Tyler Hill.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks for listening.

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E95-96: Bootleg miners

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E96: Bootleg miners, part 2 – Working Class History

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E95-96: Bootleg miners

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E95: Bootleg miners, part 1 – Working Class History

E96: Bootleg miners, part 2 – Working Class History

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Acknowledgements

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Part 1

Part 2

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Published by Working Class History