Red Necks and Red Bandanas: Appalachian Coal Miners and the Coloring of Union Identity, 1912-1936

Western Folklore, Winter 2006 by Huber, Patrick

Moreover, coal operators consciously tried to retard unionization efforts by adopting employment practices deliberately designed to accentuate the racial and ethnic differences of miners. Coal operators in the eastern and midwestern fields employed black southerners-as well as Italians, Hungarians, and Poles-as strikebreakers against UMWled strikes specifically to fuel existing racial and ethnic tensions among miners. In 1895, for example, officials at a Pocahontas, Virginia, coal mine recruited 400 Italians from northeastern cities to work its struck mine under the protection of state troops (Woodward 1951:268). West Virginia coal companies, in another example, actively recruited black laborers from Virginia and the Carolinas not only because of the shortage of local white miners but also, as historian Ronald D. Eller writes, to purposefully create what coal operators called a "'judicious mixture' of whites, blacks, and immigrants, in order to forestall unionization by segregating the men and playing one group off against another" (1982:171). As one coal operator explained in 1933, "(We) get the best results where one class (of miners) is looked [down] upon by the others and try to get advantage of the other class in the way of good places and responsible positions which pay more money." Hiring a "judicious mixture" of competing racial and ethnic groups, coal operators believed, would encourage native-born white miners to identify with the racial interests they shared with their employers rather than to identify with the class interests they shared with black and immigrant miners. Coal companies in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, where state constitutions contained segregation statutes, further intensified racial and ethnic divisions among miners by segregating the company housing they provided their employees. The company town at Stonega, Virginia, for example, contained enclaves with such revealing nicknames as "Hunk Hollow," "Little Italy," and "Nigger Town" (Lewis 1987:147-48).

Coal companies sought to prevent their workers from organizing through institutionalized employment and housing practices, but their tactics did not end there. Beginning around the Red Scare of 19191920, coal operators increasingly resorted to red-baiting in order to discredit the United Mine Workers and its more radical rival unions, some of which, such as the National Miners Union, were actually affiliated with the Communist Party USA. As a result, the epithet redneck began to assume more inflammatory connotations including "anarchist," "Bolshevik," and "Communist" (Lane 1921:83-84, 104). In November 1931, when Theodore Dreiser and a delegation of writers and journalists visited Harlan and Bell counties in Kentucky during a period of particularly intensive efforts by coal operators and local officials to crush the newly formed, Communist-organized National Miners Union (NMU, formed in Pittsburgh in 1928), the group found redneck in widespread usage as an epithet. Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields, which contained the testimony that Dreiser's investigative committee collected from black-listed miners and their wives, reveals that redneck was variously defined in eastern Kentucky as "a Communist," "an agitator," or "a member of the N.M.U." (1932:94, 108, 109, 293). "They accuse you of being from Pennsylvania, if you work for the N.M.U. They call you agitators from Pennsylvania. They call you a red neck," declared the wife of a miner who had been arrested by sheriffs deputies, severely beaten, and then run out of Harlan County by hired gunmen because of his union activities (ibid. 109). Coal operators, company guards, and strikebreakers also employed redneck contemptuously to ridicule those miners who were members of the United Mine Workers or die National Miners Union. And although its derivation in this sense is ambiguous, redneck clearly evoked associations with Red, a well-known colloquialism for "a Communist" or "one with Communist sympadiies" (DAS 1967:423). Indeed, one miner told a member of Dreiser's team that the coal operators derided NMU members as "Rooshun Red Necks" (Walker 1932:22).