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Gordon Simmons, "Mutiny in the Mountains: West Virginia Public Workers, 1969-2019" (PM Press, 2026)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Network hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host Michael Stauch, and today I'm here with Gordon Simmons to talk about his new book, Mutiny in the Mountains West Virginia Public Workers 1969-2019, which is out now from PM Press. Gordon Simmons is a retired union organizer and president of the West Virginia Labor History Association. He's now employed as an investigator for the Human Rights Commission for the State of Virginia of West Virginia and as an adjunct professor in philosophy at Marshall University. Gordon, welcome to the show.
- [01:42]
C
Thanks Michael, and I really appreciate the opportunity to have have a conversation with you.
- [01:46]
B
No, I'm delighted. I'm delighted to do it. I wanted to start by asking you how you came to this topic, why this book about public workers in West Virginia and why now?
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C
Actually, there are a couple of personal reasons. I've been a public worker myself, beginning when I was first working as an adjunct at state universities in 1989 and then I actually started a full time job at the state house in 2000. And quite honestly, my mom was for much of her life a city employee. So it may have been something genetic, I don't know. But also in grad school I had studied under one of the really great labor historians of West Virginia, the late Frederick Barkey and He was a founder, for example, of the West Virginia Labor History association, which I am now the president after him after. But Fred was, on more than one occasion, made a point to me of saying that someone needs to write a history of the state's public workers. He said someone with emphasis and that. And then he would also occasionally give me different books or documents or articles related to the public sector. And so, finally, being slow to the debate, I took the hint and the question, why now? It really gelled after the dramatic upheaval, the 2018 West Virginia Public school strike, which was a wildcat strike. And that, in turn, those familiar with it inspired some invitations subsequently across the country. So it seemed like, well, maybe some historical reckoning ought to be done now, enough time. And one of the questions being, where did all this unprecedented, unpredictable upsurge come from? And so the history seemed about the best way to approach that.
- [04:05]
B
Great, great, great. Well, I love that answer because it's. There's something powerful about mentorship, keeping alive traditions, passing on, you know, conversations about, like, why something is relevant and all this kind of thing. My. My own. I don't want to insert myself here too much, but I. I'm also very interested in wildcat strikes. I think they're really something that we should pay close attention to as labor historians and all this kind of stuff. So getting onto that, you got. The book is called Mutiny in the Mountains. So what do you mean by. By that? Why did you choose that for the title of the book?
- [04:37]
C
Well, to be completely honest, the title was from my publisher that it was their idea.
- [04:44]
B
Okay.
- [04:46]
C
And I think they thought maybe Rebellion Against Government, which was my working title, that using while researching and writing the book and when I submitted it, a rebellion against government might be a little too ambiguous a phrase. You know, political misinterpretation might sneak in there. And. And so, just as a background, I ran across the phrase rebellion against government in a 1970 federal court decision that ruled against the West Virginia highway worker walkout that took place in 69. And as it turned out, in reading the law, the legal documents, and the decision that had been lifted in turn as a quote from a 1949 Cleveland, Ohio, court decision involving some local transit workers, basically used as a dismissive label for any kind of public worker strike. You know, it's a rebellious government. And that is sort of confirmed in 70, because 1970, because that was when the head of the Federal Reserve at the time labeled the national postal wildcat strike as being an insurrection against government. Pretty much the same phrasing But I really like my publisher's suggestion. They came up with Muni in the Mountains. One reason is it pays homage to one of the really great books about labor history in West Virginia, which is Lon Savage's Thunder in the Mountains that cover the 1920, 21 West Virginia mine War.
- [06:26]
B
Well, I love that. Okay, great. That's helpful now. Well, you've just kind of like delved into a little bit of this, but maybe we could. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit on what you call a brief labor history of West Virginia that you lay out in the beginning of the book. So you mentioned labor conflicts that stretched from the great upheaval in 1877 to what you call the black lung insurgency of 1969. So how does this title help us, you know, sort of set up the themes of the book? That comes after.
- [06:56]
C
Well, actually, to be sort of wonky and academic. One of the great books on US labor history is, in my opinion, Jeremy Brecher's book Strike that began with the 1877 Martinsburg, West Virginia rail strike, which had very quickly and spontaneously grew to be the first general strike in the United States. But the common element in that particular event and then the subsequent coal mine wars that I cover in the Brief History, as well as the Black Lung Uprising and Miners for Democracy, the sort of common theme to me is that of a rank and file insurgency. In other words, you get ordinary working people organizing themselves and collectively struggling against whatever powers that be face them. And in West Virginia it's been noted that the school textbooks used to teach the state's history at eighth grade level for decades were purged of any reference whatsoever to all these particular episodes of popular rebellion. So I used the introductory chapter about the state's labor history to provide a context for what I want to concentrate on and try to record. But the examples cited are examples which public workers clearly could draw and did draw at times, inspiration for their own efforts. And there's the sort of subsidiary purpose, I guess, is I want to dispel the myth that West Virginians have always been complacent or resigned or willing to acquiesce stoically to preordain fate or whatever, which is really a fairly common stereotype about people in Appalachia generally. The happy slaves grateful for whatever crumbs fall from the master's table. So it seemed to me that any recovery of the subterranean history of revolt had a kind of subversive value in and of itself.
- [09:12]
B
Sure, sure, that makes sense. Well, while we're on the subject could you talk a little bit more about a wildcat strike? What is that exactly?
- [09:18]
C
Okay. Basically, when we're talking about wildcat strike, we're talking a strike that's usually illegal, but either because the laws prohibit it or because the contract of those workers are under, if they're collectively bargaining, call for no strike. And so it's both illegal from the standpoint of the state, but it's also unauthorized by the union. In most cases. They decide at the level of ordinary life. We were going out on strike, and they were commonly occurring in West Virginia during the 60s and 70s among coal miners. It was a fairly common event and tended to produce desired results for the most part, because sooner or later the employing company would want to, you know, they want to. They want to keep making money. They want to go back to work or put these people back to work. And they use injunctions that use state police back in the early part of the 20th century. They use hired companies. They call them gun thugs, basically company guards or the local authorities. So it's a fairly, I guess, a simple definition, an unauthorized and probably illegal strike.
- [10:59]
B
Sure, sure. That that's directed in some ways against the company, but also against the union and the contract, Is that right?
- [11:05]
C
It can be. And it can be against the government itself. For example, there was a huge wildcat strike in West Virginia in the late 60s that had to do with gasoline ration. Actually, early 70s gasoline was rationed during the oil crisis by the governor. And that meant, for instance, that if you drove very far to your mine site, if you were a coal miner, you could run out of gas before you get back home because you had to have a fairly empty tank to fill up. So there was a big wildcat over rationing and it went away.
- [11:44]
B
Right, right. Well, you've gotten that. That's really helpful because you've got. Now with that, you're talking about. One of the ways that the book is organized is kind of after this introduction that sets up, you know, this. This period from 1969 to 2019, which you describe in your subtitle. So after that introduction, we get into like a decade by decade, blow by blows of. Of different job actions in the public, but also the private sector. So, you know, what accounts for that kind of thing? Do you associate particular lessons with particular decades? Or, you know, maybe you could talk a little bit more about these strikes that happened. Sanitation workers in Charleston in the 1970s, teachers across West Virginia in the 1980s. Tell us a little bit more about how the book is organized and its relationship to these strikes. Yeah.
- [12:37]
C
And I think, well, taking that decade by decade, or taking that chronological approach, one of the things that becomes apparent is that quite apart from, say, historic memory or stories passed down through generations, which I'm sure both occurred, a lot of the people that engaged in very specific struggles in their own time were also cognizant. They were very much aware of what was going around on around them or just during their lives. So, for example, the highway workers in 1969, they were very existentially concerned about their own jobs because they were at the time excluded from civil service protection. They could be fired at will. But because of that sort of spoils tradition of political patronage, you know, a new governor of a different party signaled to them that they could be easily let go and replaced by supporters of that governor. But nevertheless, they were willing to strike illegally and maybe even lose those jobs. And many of them did to defy the incoming administration. But they had. What's key here is they had also witnessed at that point in time, close at hand, the black lung strike union democracy struggles that the coal miners were beginning at that time. And I think you have to say, if you look at where the highway strike was strongest, it was in the southern counties. That just so happens to be a heavily concentrated area for coal mining in that period as well. So I can't help but think there was some permeation or seepage from one to the other. You mentioned the Charleston city sanitation workers. They were on strike in 1972, and they were certainly mindful of sanitation strikes that had occurred earlier, most famously in Memphis and elsewhere, though. And when they walked out, their demand was dignity. So now, given, even given the fact that the Charleston strike was a real clear demonstration of solidarity between the white and black workers in sanitation here, that didn't mean that they didn't take some inspiration from that civil rights campaign that led up to it that had embroiled the whole country. So I kind of think they not only embodied Martin Luther King's turn toward the poor people's movement, a sort of pivot to class, but also a very long standing tradition since the founding of the umwa, really, of interracial organizing that had taken place in the coal fields. And so, and I think maybe getting to that point, one of the most visible features of historical memory I could cite would be in the 2018 public school strike, the wearing of the red bandana, striking picketers. Well, that was a clear, explicit reference to the coal miners who'd marched en masse on Blair Mountain in 1921 that was their uniform is wearing a red bandana. And I remember an article by Jane Slaughter at the time Time. Really good article that talked about the influence of examples from the coal mine insurgencies of the 60s and 70s that could be seen in the public school wildcat occurring then.
- [16:29]
B
Okay, yeah, well that's interesting because I mean, I like the way that you're describing this then. It's the context. One of the things that organizing in this way does is it gives us a sense of the context that workers are taking these actions within. Is that right?
- [16:44]
C
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you can call it spontaneous and many times whatever happens was spontaneous in the sense it was unpredicted. But that doesn't mean there's not knowledge and influence and tradition that informs it.
- [17:03]
B
Sure, sure, yeah, that makes sense.
- [17:06]
D
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B
A lot of the action in this book actually takes place, somewhat surprisingly, in the courtroom. I noticed that many passages where there's a struggle and it kind of culminates in the courtroom as labor unions contest decisions by state and local government. So can you talk a bit about the relationship between organized labor and the law in the context of West Virginia?
- [18:56]
C
Well, I think it's not just the West Virginia context, but particularly the fact that I'm looking at public Sector workers from Arizona. And they are of all workers, subject to statutes, civil service policies and traditions and standards. And in other words, a lot of legal apparatus weighs down upon public sector work now, saying that working people generally have long had a problematic relation with the legal system. So you have job actions like strikes or union organizing itself historically in the US have been treated by political authorities, often as illegal, period. And just as an example, it took about a half century from the 1886 Chicago Demonstration on behalf of the Eight Hour Day, which turned into a police riot. It took another half century to the 1930s before we got laws establishing work hours. That's a long struggle. So the idea that judicial branch is somehow a neutral, unbiased or fair interpreter of law, I don't know if that holds up under any kind of historical scrutiny, really. I recall hearing once an anecdote that at the turn of the 20th century, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed in his own day that whenever a case of a worker hurt on the job was decided in a court by a judge, the employee's claim was generally denied, but if it was put in front of a jury of fellow citizens, the claim was generally awarded. So that gives you some sense of gets the political weight or slant that can happen in a judicial context. So early on, courts would generally rule against unions and strikes, usually using the pretext of the common law, which favors employer property rights since the middle of the 18th century or 19th century. But when that turned out not to be enough, it seems the states began to prohibit workers activities explicitly in law themselves. So in West Virginia, for example, in 1919, there was passed what was in that day called a criminal syndicalist law. Basically, it had been to target the industrial workers of the world, but the idea of militant unionism generally kind of fell prey to that. But in the wake of Great Depression, as I mentioned earlier, about hourly statutes. So in the 1930s, you get this national reform of labor law in the New Deal and in stuff like what was called the Wagner act, which kind of aimed at infusing democracy into the workplace. But what's important for our purposes for this book is that even at that point, the public sector was excluded from the protections written into the Wagner Act. And so while, say, in West Virginia, private sector workers like coal miners could benefit, at least initially, from NLRB mechanisms of things like union recognition or collective bargaining, public workers still remained outside of that and had to rely on, hopefully, the introduction or slow progress of, say, civil service standards and statutes that favored them or gave them more rights and benefits. And in that context, judicially decided disputes often boiled down to whether the judge was relatively proud labor or anti labor. Kind of a crapshoot, you know.
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B
Right, right, right. Do you think that wildcat strikes are like a particularly, you know, like useful form of struggle for public sector workers then because of the relationship to like the contract and labor law?
- [23:21]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's a practical necessity in a sense because generally a public worker strikes the illegal period, contract or not, like the bargaining or not, it's just illegal. And so in a sense, every time there is a strike by public workers, it is a rebellion against government. It is an act of insurgency because there's no legal warrant for it. What makes the difference is how well organized and how well held together the strike is. The 2018 strike proves that. I mean, no teacher got fired, no teacher went to jail, although legally all those options would have been available as we're talking.
- [24:11]
B
I'm kind of curious here maybe to kind of further delineate or define the period that you describe. No, it's West Virginia Public Workers, 1969-2019. What are the big events that bookend that?
- [24:28]
C
The highway strike. In 69 you had a couple of thousand highway workers actually fired for refusing to return from the strike. So that's the 69 origin of this article. 2019 is. Was a. There was a sort of after strike from the 2018 Teachers and Public school strike that it was much shorter, but it did result in a pay increase and it did sort of confirm they weren't going to go away quietly.
- [25:07]
B
Got it, Got it. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that's helpful. I think that's just, just for listeners. So we know what's. What kind of is setting the stage for this period that you're describing. So I think that's really helpful. In what ways then kind of moving on. There's this really interesting incident involving a guy named William Webb that I found just really revealing about kind of what's going on here. There's a cultural influence also. In what ways is a dress code for public employees about more than the length of a person's hair or the clothes that they wear. Can you talk a little bit more about. Yeah.
- [25:45]
C
The Webster incidents or case wasn't just wasn't the first where dress code was implicated in some sort of. Some sort of dissent within the workforce. And it certainly wasn't the last, but it was. It kind of upped the ante in terms of. Of because it was so. It evoked so openly the sort of cultural distinctions and issues that came out of the 1960s, it was very upfront and how those were upfront issues and how it was dealt with. But if you think about it, the public sector workplace and be every bit as authoritarian as some other social spaces. And one way to assert hierarchical control in a workplace is to impose conformity, obedience. And that can be through dress codes or other seemingly superficial means. Hair length, whatever. But conversely, ever since this 1960s and the web cases illustrate this, there was a within American society, a counterculture and is usually identified with the anti war or civil rights movement. One way to defy authority had come to be through the rejection of arbitrary rules or directives that arguably were unrelated to job performance or competence. I'm old enough to remember people's say, question authority. It's like, okay, this is the new directive here, question authority. And so impositions of dress codes, or conversely, resistance to those impositions Turns out to be surprisingly recurring and persistent. A thread, if you excuse the pun, since the 1960s. So one plausible explanation might be that the exercise of power depends heavily on sort of outward or apparent shows of obedience, Irrespective of maybe any sincere compliance. And for example, when Joe Manchin became governor in the early 2000s, he imposed not only a blanket freeze on pay increases, but also imposed a business casual dress code on all state employees accepting highway workers who couldn't dress up on the job. But it banned wearing blue jeans. Specific. And so when Manch was asked by a reporter, like, how can the workers whose wages are frozen afford to buy nicer clothes? And his answer was this sort of flip it. Well, they can shop at Gabe's. Well, Gabriel Brothers is this discount store that was all over the. It's still all over the place state. And I heard more than one public worker say, I'm already down the shopping at Goodwill. Okay, it's that bad. Incidentally, also put out some directives. Whenever the governor or cabinet secretary would enter a state office or a work site, the employees were to stop wherever they're doing it, stand up at attention. Sort of a throwback the military regimentation, if you will, or maybe royalty for all I know. But so in the early 2000s, there were lots of grievances filed at state nursing homes and hospitals, in particular, challenging mansions blue jean ban. You can wear black jeans, by the way, but not blue ones. They would get for that reason. They would be granted in the grievance system as being arbitrary, but then reversed in circuit court. But it continues to go on. I mean, in 2015, for example, teachers in Lewis county won A grievance over wearing blue jeans. It was upheld that particular time in circuit court. But I do know there was a sort of unwritten habit of union stewards going into a grievance hearing, making sure they were wearing blue jeans into the hearing. So it's a symbol, but it's a potent symbol.
- [30:13]
B
Yeah, definitely. And that was just to clarify, that's what William Webb did. Can you tell us a little bit more about his story?
- [30:19]
C
Yeah, there was actually a series of grievances. He was told by the school or by the principal that they had to wear ties and they couldn't wear jeans. And I think they may have had to wear jackets. I was a pretty restrictive code. He beat it the first time because it had not been approved by the school board. Then go back and get it approved by the school board. He challenged it again and ultimately he ended up having to challenge them because he had, you know, he had been working at the school a long time and he lived in Ohio, around the border from. From. In Mesa county from the school. His daughter was going to the school where he was teaching, which made sense because he could transport her. And they decided they were going to charge her now for being an out of state student. And so he actually won that case too. But it was like he was dogged in assertion of rights.
- [31:23]
B
Yeah, sure, it sounds like. It sounds like it. Now you mentioned Manchin. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the Democratic Party in West Virginia. In addition to your observations about public employees and their struggles, the book also has some important insights into the Democratic Party, especially this sort of new Democratic Party that emerges in the 1990s with Bill Clinton and Joe Biden as. As key figures. So can you talk a little bit about the gubernatorial race of 1996 that involved Charlotte Pritt and its kind of relationship to this changing character of the Democratic Party in this period?
- [31:59]
C
Yeah, the 1996 was a really important event and give some background to it. Democratic Party up until then had been fairly dominant in West Virginia at state level. There was a New Deal faction within the party, but it was weaker than the party establishment, which was generally conservative, pro business and backed by the coal industry, to be honest. So, you know, more like Dixiecrats than Democrats in the modern sense. Well, so the so called New Democrats or neoliberals, I think really can be seen as essentially a continuation of that pro business dominant establishment within the West Virginia's Democratic Party. Gaston Caperton's administrations would be examples of that even before Manchin. Not quite as severe as Manchin but similar, but shot. Fritt's 1996 capture the Democratic nomination for governor was a real surprise and a real exception to that typical dominance by pro business interests. Now, she was backed by school teachers and coal miners, but also by the state's main public worker union at the time, which was afscme. And AFSCME really looked to her to implement for the first time a statewide collective bargaining provision for the public sector via an executive order. Well, as opposed to passing it through the legislature, in other words, which had never been done, even Democratic dominance. So the problem, of course, with that, in retrospect, is that Kentucky did that one governor put in an executive order and the next governor avoided it. I think Indiana went through the same experience, but in West Virginia, the neoliberal Democratic establishment faction really coalesced around Joe Manchin. He's the one who had opposed Pritt in the primary for the governor's position and lost out to her. So he very noisily and openly led the support for getting behind a Republican candidate, Cecil Underwood, and even the lame duck Caperton administration was tacitly involved in that. And so the business interests that have dominated the State House since that time, sort of, they took a lot of, you know, the anti print emphasis was basic to that, to that dominance. And Underwood's election really signaled the end, therefore, to kind of the remnants of the old New Deal oriented political forces in the Democratic Party. It wasn't any anyway.
- [35:00]
B
Okay, all right, got it.
- [35:02]
D
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- [35:32]
B
Now you. Another thing that was really important that I, that I wanted to hear more about is this, this school strike of 2018. Can you give us some context? What, what were some of the issues that were at stake with that? How was it organized? Because there's some really interesting information about how exactly the strike in 2018 takes place and how it's organized that I'd like to hear more about, and among other things. So just talk about that. I have a couple other questions, but let's get that stuff out first.
- [36:01]
C
Sure, sure. Well, given this thing I've been talking about since Underwood, the sort of Republican dominance of the State House. And now it's fairly trumpist, to be honest. So you have sort of three decades since Underwood, and then the 2018 public school strike is this huge surprise. It's like, where did that come from? First of all, the strike was actually organized and sustained by the rank and file of public school employees. Secondly, and this is really key, it wasn't confined to teachers. The strikes that broke out in. In 1980 or 1990 after that had been mostly teachers or exclusively teachers, to be honest. But in 2018, you had bus drivers and other school service workers joining in the strike, you know, in fairly large numbers, which effectively shut down every single school district in every single county of the state. Because, you know, you can say, well, we're going to keep the schools open. You know, several superintendents tried to say that, but they weren't going to take their cars around and scoop up students in the hallways to bring them to school. So the fact that it wasn't even started or supported really, by the leadership of the three education unions is also key. The strike really began and spread by means of ordinary workers, using a Facebook group group they set up to communicate and mutually coordinate the strike. And so in a mountain state, mountainous rural state like West Virginia, the workers themselves had devised a means for this collective, spontaneous action. And the political bosses were really caught completely off guard by that. They thought they could just go to the union leaders and say, you know, get them back to work. And the union leaders were booed down. I mean, it didn't happen. So the actual trigger, the actual trigger for 2018 was, of course, low pay, which had been a trigger in earlier strikes, but also a continuing weakening of the public sector, health insurance. And that had been also something that. The 1990 teacher strike had kind of helped hold that back a bit. But by this time, the push to erode it or eventually privatize it had been renewed through Underwood and then Manchin and then following them. So by the time we get to 2018, public employee health benefits were less and less a draw for people to seek or happily remain in public sector jobs. And maybe another key factor for 2018 would be the overwhelming support for public school workers by the general public. You had things like school cooks or other volunteers prepared meals to be delivered by the bus drivers to school students, because school lunches were such a principal mainstay during the school year for those children. And so the food deliveries were example, were, I think, a big example of what we would call mutual aid. And the public, in turn, responded favorably by bringing boxes and boxes of pizza or pepperoni rolls or whatever food they wanted to pick up to the picket lines to feed the strikers. And so, and also, and I alluded to this earlier, the effects of that strike weren't just in West Virginia because you had school walkouts in Kentucky and Oklahoma and Arizona. And the strikingly ended after two weeks when the state legislature caved into the demand, not for just raising salaries in the school districts, but also they included all state public employees as part of the demand. So every state employee got a raise, the same as teachers and bus drivers.
- [40:32]
B
Right, right. Would you say that's one of the big lessons from that strike?
- [40:38]
C
I personally benefited myself from that lesson, yes. If you want to teach solidarity, that's a really good way to do it. Now, granted the governor's promise that he was going to, you know, if they go back, he'd show up, the health benefits, that was pretty much broken. And so I wouldn't be shocked at a recurrence of something around that issue.
- [41:06]
B
Yeah, got it. Okay.
- [41:07]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [41:08]
B
Now, you mentioned that you benefited from this yourself. I mentioned at the start in your biography, you were once a union organizer yourself and you even served as the first, first chief steward of the West Virginia Public Workers Union. How do you bring those experiences into the book? How did that influence the book?
- [41:24]
C
Well, it influenced the book in so far as it gave me access to people to interview, documents to consult. It's a great location of resources that I could draw upon, and I did. I probably interviewed four times as many people as I actually even cited having interviewed. Just, you know, what's your recollection? Or how did this come to be? Or what's. What's your, you know, your experience of that? But, you know, overall, it's not just in giving me raw material and sources for the book. I have to say that the time I spent being an organizer and being a steward have taught me a lot, mainly need for patience, the importance of solidarity, and really what it really means to do some hard work. I'm going to be honest, too many staff, union staff people come in full of idealism, determination, and fire. And after a while, the long slog of that kind of work eventually wears them down. They could get cynical, they could get complacent, or, you know, obviously the case where they just sell out to the boss. And so working for any kind of social change is probably not a cushy career you could just settle into. I'm seriously, if you're looking to advance yourself up the social ladder, the best way is to have a rich daddy. The other is, you know, don't hold on too tight to any scruples you might have grown up with. But that said, I think there are genuine, enduring satisfactions that can be found in engaging in these sorts of struggles. You know, even if the goal seems distant or unattainable at the time. You really learn a lot of skills. You experience, I would say, a certain kind of joy from just representing fellow workers in a grievance proceeding or participating in a march or a rally, or being on a picket line. I think any group activity, the more you do it, the more you get a taste for this sort of collective hell raising. And there's a pleasure in that.
- [43:58]
B
Yeah. Well, that is great because as you know, as we, as we're kind of reaching an end here, I wanted to ask you how you think the history you've written might show the way forward to workers struggling against bosses or even struggling against union officials today. What are the lessons that people should take from this book about building a. Building a different world, building a better world? And you've suggested that the struggle itself, is that right?
- [44:23]
C
Yeah. There's a old IWW organizer right across a quote from him, and he said, you know, the. The goal that we seek might be worth striving for, but in the struggle itself lies the happiness of the fighter. You know, and, and I've read accounts of, say, May 68 student uprisings or the, or. Or listen to the coal miners in Mingo talking about the things strike against Massey. All kinds of situations where there's a sense of exhilaration they communicate from having engaged in a struggle, even if the outcome is not what they sought or what they had hoped for.
- [45:06]
B
But
- [45:09]
C
in my old age, I've come to understand what Camus meant when he said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Well, yeah, okay, I kind of get that. But as far as lessons, really the biggest lesson for me, both from my personal experience that you referenced and just from doing this book, is that unions are a necessary but not sufficient means for advancing the interests of working people, generally speaking. So they can't, for example, be a potential seedbed for a mass popular insurgency. But they won't necessarily or always be that. But I think that kind of insurgency is what it takes for things to really ever get better. And what is evident from the outset of this 50 year period I cover, without the UMWA, there would not have been the Black lung movement and strike, there would not have been minors for democracy. Now, saying that none of that is any Credit to Tony Boyle. Okay. The corrupt union leader that murdered the Jablonskis. So that's maybe my, I'd say that's my biggest lesson, is that we've got to have unions, but we need to realize that there are a component or potential, but not the realization of what we're going to do. And I think secondarily, I would say it doesn't pay to shortchange the inventiveness, if you will, the imagination of working people. I mean, who would have thought that Facebook could be turned to such an unpredictable and unintended purpose as it had been during the 2018 strike? Right. It was there to make money or something. Or, for example, the school bus routes could be repurposed to deliver meals to students instead of delivering students to school. You know, so it would seem to me that insurgency takes a whole lot, at least many different forms. You don't always know what they're going to be or where they're going to come from or when they're going to come. But at least for the 50 year period that I looked at in this book, it seems to be something that keeps on coming.
- [47:35]
B
Right, right, right.
- [47:37]
C
Well, I love that.
- [47:38]
B
It's like these insurgencies make it possible to imagine a different world. Right, Exactly.
- [47:43]
C
They actually help to realize it. Even on just an episodic scale. They embody the what you want to get to as a society.
- [47:57]
B
Great. Well, let's end there for now. This is a great book. It's full of these kinds of rich lessons about engaging in struggle, and it's really been a pleasure doing history with you. Thank you for your time.
- [48:07]
C
Thank you, Michael.
- [48:08]
B
Well, for our listeners, Mutiny in the Mountains, West Virginia Public Workers, 1969-2019 is available now from PM Press, and you can find it wherever the finest books are sold. Gordon, I thank you again for being on the show. Congratulations on the book.
- [48:21]
C
Appreciate it, man. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes
- [48:37]
D
on our website, newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle
- [48:42]
C
ebooksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.
- [49:05]
D
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