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

Western Folklore, Winter 2006 by Huber, Patrick

But clearly the multiracial unionism symbolized by redneck and the red bandana had its limits. Although some white coal miners did join racially and ethnically inclusive labor unions, these men were at the same time constantly pulled toward identification with their whiteness and, ultimately, a self-defeating racism. Persistent pressure on white miners to prize their racial identity more than class solidarity consistently undermined the cohesiveness of these organizations. It would be a mistake, then, to see white miners as invariably choosing to identify steadily with either racial or class solidarity. Despite sporadic episodes of multiracial and multiethnic cooperation, however, the history of the American labor movement, especially in the American South, has clearly been one of overwhelming racism (Roediger 1994:134-39). As C. Vann Woodward has observed, southern white workers in the textile, railroad, and other industries staged at least 50 "hate strikes" between 1882 and 1900 to protest the employment of black workers in any but the dirtiest, lowest-paying and most physically difficult jobs (1951:222). Given this tragic history, then, coal miners' reformulation of redneck and their modest success with multiracial unionism in southern West Virginia and western Pennsylvania is all the more remarkable. Their redefinition of the epithet redneck into an emblem of union identity and class solidarity also reminds us that workers' struggles for better lives have been fought on many fronts, not the least of which has been the day-to-day level of name-calling and insults, and that in their struggles on this level, the personal truly has been political.

This article draws heavily upon the late Peter Tamony's rich research files on redneck housed in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I thank for critical reading, encouragement, and suggestions, Kate Drowne, David Roediger, Archie Green, Robert McCarl, Susan Porter Benson, Elaine J. Lawless, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Leon Fink, Daniel Patterson, Steven L. Fisher, Connie C. EbIe, David A. Corbin, Ivan Tribe, Abra Quinn, Karen Hayes, Randy Roberts, Andrew Arnold, David M. Anderson, Freda Williams, Elaine Purkey, Martin Halpern, Stephen Myer, Lisa Yarger, Midge Huber, and the late Paul A. Huber. An early version of this article tided "Redneck A Short Note From American Labor History" appeared in American Speech 69 (Spring 1994):106-10.

NOTES

1. On redneck's usage in the 1912-1913 southern West Virginia strikes, see, for example, Merrick 1913, 19, 20, 21; and Mooney 1967, 31, 33, 95, 114, 117; for examples from the 1913-1914 southern Colorado strike, see Fink 1914, 85, 86; and Papanikolas 1982, 92, 225, 227, 243. The usage of redneck as an epithet appears more complicated, however, at least in the West Virginia strikes. Not only did coal operators and company guards deride the striking union miners as "rednecks," but, according to Fred Mooney, who served as secretary-treasurer of UMW District 17 in West Virginia from 1917 to 1924, the union miners also used the epithet to ridicule strikebreakers. J. W. Hess, in his brief annotations to Mooney's autobiography, explains: "Guards called miners Red Necks and strikes called strike breakers Red Necks" (168, n. 4).