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PBS Frontline: The Mine Wars, Chapter 1
This is coming up on PBS's Frontline next week. It is probably viewable whenever you feel like watching it, if you have a smart TV.
The Mine Wars, Chapter 1
Airing 01/26/16 Rating: NR
When labor organizer Mother Jones arrived in a West Virginia coal town in 1901, residents were skeptical and mine guards were hostile. The United Mine Workers of America had successfully organized other mining operations in the U.S., but West Virginia remained tightly controlled by the coal company operators. "The Mine Wars" premieres January 26 at 9/8c on PBS American Experience.
Airing 01/26/16 Rating: NR
When labor organizer Mother Jones arrived in a West Virginia coal town in 1901, residents were skeptical and mine guards were hostile. The United Mine Workers of America had successfully organized other mining operations in the U.S., but West Virginia remained tightly controlled by the coal company operators. "The Mine Wars" premieres January 26 at 9/8c on PBS American Experience.
‘The Mine Wars’ Review: Trading the Pickax for a Gun
A struggle for West Virginian miners’ right to unionize that exploded into violence.
Coal miners in front of a mine entrance in Red Star, W. Va. Photo: Library of Congress
By Dorothy Rabinowitz
Dorothy.Rabinowitz@wsj.com
Jan. 7, 2016 5:53 p.m. ET
“The Mine Wars,” an “American Experience” documentary, not surprisingly begins with one of the great names in American labor history—“Mother” Jones, as Irish immigrant Mary Harris came to be called in the course of her intrepid service in the West Virginia miners’ battle for the right to a union.
“I have no home except where there is struggle,” she said. She proved it, too, in the course of her tireless efforts to stiffen the spines of miners daunted by the prospect of punishment by blacklisting and loss of all livelihood, miserable as it was, if they violated the iron law set by mine owners in southern West Virginia, the toughest of all places to form a union. Instead of acting like “cringing serfs,” she told them, they should defy the bosses and join the United Mine Workers of America.
But this documentary by Randall MacLowry, producer/director, and Mark Zwonitzer, writer, moves on from that beginning to a remarkably detailed view of this struggle, which lasted from the early 1900s to the 1930s. It is a history, above all, of the wars involved, some of them extensive armed conflicts between the increasingly militant miners and the armies of private guards, hired by mine owners, who policed the company towns in which the miners worked.
....
One of the most compelling aspects of this documentary is its extraordinarily detailed chronicle of the miners’ growing militancy. The men had moved on from the kind of passive acceptance that had caused “Mother” Jones to implore them not to behave like cringing serfs. They became an organized, battle-hardened force, willing to risk all to get themselves a union. But it was not only the men who enlisted in this war. The women, the filmmakers make clear, were unyielding combatants. Mine owners’ scabs sent in to break a strike found no more deadly enemy greeting them than the mining-town women, who assaulted them not with guns, but with weapons from their kitchens and perhaps the most fearful weapon of all, the depths of their fury.
A struggle for West Virginian miners’ right to unionize that exploded into violence.
Coal miners in front of a mine entrance in Red Star, W. Va. Photo: Library of Congress
By Dorothy Rabinowitz
Dorothy.Rabinowitz@wsj.com
Jan. 7, 2016 5:53 p.m. ET
“The Mine Wars,” an “American Experience” documentary, not surprisingly begins with one of the great names in American labor history—“Mother” Jones, as Irish immigrant Mary Harris came to be called in the course of her intrepid service in the West Virginia miners’ battle for the right to a union.
“I have no home except where there is struggle,” she said. She proved it, too, in the course of her tireless efforts to stiffen the spines of miners daunted by the prospect of punishment by blacklisting and loss of all livelihood, miserable as it was, if they violated the iron law set by mine owners in southern West Virginia, the toughest of all places to form a union. Instead of acting like “cringing serfs,” she told them, they should defy the bosses and join the United Mine Workers of America.
But this documentary by Randall MacLowry, producer/director, and Mark Zwonitzer, writer, moves on from that beginning to a remarkably detailed view of this struggle, which lasted from the early 1900s to the 1930s. It is a history, above all, of the wars involved, some of them extensive armed conflicts between the increasingly militant miners and the armies of private guards, hired by mine owners, who policed the company towns in which the miners worked.
....
One of the most compelling aspects of this documentary is its extraordinarily detailed chronicle of the miners’ growing militancy. The men had moved on from the kind of passive acceptance that had caused “Mother” Jones to implore them not to behave like cringing serfs. They became an organized, battle-hardened force, willing to risk all to get themselves a union. But it was not only the men who enlisted in this war. The women, the filmmakers make clear, were unyielding combatants. Mine owners’ scabs sent in to break a strike found no more deadly enemy greeting them than the mining-town women, who assaulted them not with guns, but with weapons from their kitchens and perhaps the most fearful weapon of all, the depths of their fury.
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