Harvard Ayers: CNN snubs Blair Mountain, misses story - Charleston Gazette
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Before CNN's special feature "The Battle for Blair Mountain," most Americans knew little or nothing about it. The national audience for this prime-time show can be forgiven if they still wondered at the end of the feature what this struggle of brave coal miners fighting and dying on Blair Mountain was, and why this has any relevance today.
Instead, host Soledad O'Brien and the producers of the feature presented something that would more properly be titled, "Stopping Mountaintop Removal Costs Coal Jobs." Using the decades-old industry excuse for destroying communities and mountains of "environmentalists versus jobs," CNN insulted the people of the coalfields of Appalachia. They pitted the logic of stopping this incredibly destructive mining practice of mountaintop removal against the emotional plea of a family who would lose a job, and who had no concern at all for impacts on their neighbors and their mountains.
Mountaintop removal actually costs coal jobs, and the industry prefers it to deep mining for one reason -- it's cheap, as explosives and giant machines do most of the work. Essentially, every mountaintop removal job eliminates as many as two underground mining jobs. It all boils down to maximizing profits.
This is the same sentiment that cost 29 miners their lives at the nearby Upper Big Branch mine in April of last year. That terrible accident had absolutely nothing to do with the inherent dangers of underground coal mining and everything to do with cutting corners on safety to maximize profits.
The actual "Battle 'for' Blair Mountain" is a fascinating story that has little to do with environmentalists or jobs. It begins with the original 1921 battle itself, and the reasons the coal miners were eager to lay their lives on the line. West Virginia coal companies, unlike companies in Illinois and other nearby states, hated unions. The reason? You guessed it -- cutting corners on safety and labor costs maximizes profits.
Sure, you have to hire "mine guards," or what miners called "gun thugs." The Baldwin Felts "Detective Agency" ruthlessly dominated miners in southern West Virginia in their struggle for a decent life, and denied them the most basic constitutional rights, like the freedom of speech and the right to assemble. In Colorado in 1913, Baldwin Felts agents fired into a tent colony of striking coal miners and their families, killing dozens of men, women and children. Similar attacks, though not as deadly, occurred in West Virginia about the same time at Paint Creek and Cabin Creek.
The Battle of Blair Mountain lasted for less than a week, and over one million shots were fired by the 15,000 combatants. Based on recent archeological evidence, the battle likely ended only when the U.S. Army intervened to prevent the miners from over-running the coal operator's positions along the battlefront. The miners went home rather than fight the Army.
So what is the present-day "Battle for Blair Mountain?" Historians and archeologists, not environmental activists, have led the charge. In 2006, local amateur archeologist Kenny King and I conducted research and discovered 14 separate battle locations along the eight-mile battle front, the artifacts from which -- mostly hundreds of shell casings -- faithfully told the story of the defending coal operator forces stretched to the max by the attacking miners. Based on this and the voluminous documentary evidence of the battle, historian Barbara Rasmussen and I wrote a nomination of the 1,600-acre battlefield to the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. The Keeper, part of the National Park Service, officially listed the site on the National Register on March 30, 2009.
But when the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Officer Randall Reid-Smith complained a week later that he had, after the fact, discovered more letters of landowner opposition to the National Register listing, he requested that Blair Mountain's protection by the National Register listing be revoked, thus exposing Blair Mountain to mountaintop removal mining. The Keeper agreed and the battlesite, despite strong evidence that the list of opposing landowners was illegitimate, was removed from the National Register on December 30, 2009.
Environmentalists as well as historical preservation organizations such as the Friends of Blair Mountain have sued the Keeper's office for breaking their own regulations in several ways, including their uncritical acceptance of the list of opponents, which was actually created by the coal companies themselves. The five-day, 50-mile march on Blair Mountain in June was done to support the preservation of Blair Mountain by getting many American citizens to back our effort to have Blair Mountain relisted on the National Register.
Ayers is professor emeritus of archeology at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C.
28 Aug, 2011--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNHcUsVpj0JczugUv2_YFW_YDlnJYw&url=http://wvgazette.com/Opinion/OpEdCommentaries/201108261467
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