Rednecks by Taylor Brown

 

This is the story of the battle to unionize the coal industry of West Virginia. Miners were little better than indentured servants.  They lived in company houses from which they could be thrown out of at a minute's notice.  They were paid in company script which could only be spent in the company store with outrageous prices.  The miners seldom saw sunlight, entering the mines before sunrise and only emerging after sunset.  The mines were dangerous places with few safety devices and if a man was injured, he was done working.

A few men were willing to do whatever it took to make things better  They talked to the others and the miners decided to go out on strike.  The company responded by kicking them out of their houses to live outside with their families in tents in the freezing West Virginia winter.  Scabs were hired to break the strike and the union leaders had to go into hiding when several of them were beaten to within a beat of their lives.  Hard men who didn't care about the law were brought in to break the miners' will, no matter how far they had to go. 

The local law enforcement was on the miners' side.  Sidney Hatfield, from the Hatfield and McCoy family feuds, was the local sheriff.  When the company's men came to town with guns and the desire to use them, a fight broke out, leaving company men dead as well as some of the townspeople.  This brought things to a head.  Soon hundreds of miners from all over come to support the men of West Virginia.  It turns into a battle that ends with the largest battle ever fought on American soil outside of the Civil War.  

Taylor Brown was born in the South and his novels have focused on those who settled the land and built the country.  His work has been awarded various prizes and this work was a revelation to me.  I vaguely knew that there had been violence while unionizing but had no idea of the magnitude of the fight.  Historical figures were featured such as Sidney Hatfield and Mother Jones, a female union organizer who traveled the nation fighting for rights for working men until she was in her nineties.  Even those characters who were fictional were based on real men such as the author's grandfather who immigrated from the Middle East and was a doctor in the area and a composite figure who was legendary in the battle.  

The book also gave a reason for the term redneck.  Growing up, we always thought that the term came from farmers in the field who wore hats but their necks were unprotected and got red from the constant sun.  But these brave men also used the term, wearing red bandanas around their necks to distinguish themselves in the fight from those determined to break them.  This book is recommended for historical fiction readers