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Legal Resources of Striking Miners: Notes for a Study of Class Conflict and Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Frank Munger
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Extract

Union miners stand together,

Heed no operator’s tale.

Keep your hands upon the dollar,

And your eyes upon the scale.

—verse from “Miner’s Lifeguard” [Silverman 1975: 389]

In 1895, Fayette County, West Virginia, a leading coal county in the southern West Virginia coal fields, experienced widespread strikes by miners. The strikes were remarkable because, in an American industry known for violent labor relations and intensive union organizing since the appearance of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania before 1880, this was the first major strike in southern West Virginia. We might attempt to understand the role of law and public authority in these strikes in terms of legal repression by means of the labor injunction, labor conspiracy laws, and strikebreaking by the police and military. But none of these occurred in Fayette in 1895, though the later history of labor conflict in West Virginia is replete with all of them. In another way, however, the legal events accompanying these strikes are far more remarkable and challenge us to examine more subtle connections between class conflict and law.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Spring 1991 , pp. 1 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1991 

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