Date
6-17-2026
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Master of Arts in History - Thesis (MA)
Chair
Seth Bartee
Keywords
Coal, Treason, Blair Mountain, West Virginia, Treason Trials, UMWA, United Mine Workers, Martial Law, Coal Miners, Appalachia, Baldwin-Felts, Labor, Labor Disputes, Mine Wars, Battle of Blair Mountain, Logan County, Constitutional Crisis
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Fix, Ryan Gregory, "Just Hillbillies: State Power, Private Militarism, Coal, and Constitutional Crisis in the West Virginia Treason Trials, 1919-1937" (2026). Masters Theses. 1509.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/masters/1509
Abstract
In August 1921, roughly ten thousand armed coal miners marched toward Logan County, West Virginia, in the largest armed labor uprising in American history. When the fighting at Blair Mountain ended, the state prosecuted union leaders for treason against the state of West Virginia. This thesis examines that legal campaign of 1921–1923 and its long aftermath, arguing that the treason trials functioned less as a search for individual guilt than as an instrument for fixing the meaning of Blair Mountain before the miners could define it themselves. Where decades of gubernatorial proclamations and martial law had exposed the limits of emergency rule, the courtroom offered a durable mechanism: it translated a diffuse mass uprising into the language of insurrection, embedded that narrative in indictment records and press coverage, and reasserted the state’s monopoly over legitimate violence and the boundaries of political citizenship. Tracing the conflict from the thinly governed coalfields of the 1890s through the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike, the postwar criminalization of unionism, and the trials at Charles Town, the study situates the prosecutions within a broader political economy in which private capital, county enforcement, and state authority were mutually reinforcing. It contends that although the treason charges produced only one major conviction, the campaign succeeded politically by exhausting the United Mine Workers financially and by writing the vocabulary of rebellion permanently into the legal and historical record. Reading an archive built largely from operators’ accounts against the grain, and recovering the testimony the prosecutorial apparatus was designed to foreclose, the thesis reconstructs how this narrative monopoly was established, what it cost the coalfield communities, and why one of the defining episodes of American labor history was suppressed from public memory for half a century.
