The work­ers want­ed a union and bet­ter lives for their fam­i­lies and bet­ter work­ing con­di­tions for them­selves. Backed by the pow­er of the state and fed­er­al gov­ern­ments, deploy­ing troops armed with the lat­est weapons from machine guns to planes with bombs, the mine own­ers won that first Bat­tle of Blair Moun­tain. Yet decades lat­er, the min­ers pre­vailed, at least by mak­ing their union, the Unit­ed Mine Work­ers, one of the strongest and most influ­en­tial unions in Amer­i­can history.

Tele­vi­sion shows rarely tell much about the lives of work­ing class Amer­i­cans, past or present. But Tues­day evening, the Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing Sys­tem (PBS) offers a spec­tac­u­lar­ly well-made his­to­ry of one of the largest, most vio­lent con­fronta­tions of Amer­i­can work­ers against busi­ness pow­er, the rapa­cious coal com­pa­nies in south­ern West Vir­ginia and their armed agents.

The Mine Wars, pro­duced and direct­ed by Ran­dall MacLoury for The Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence, is one of the best tele­vi­sion his­to­ry doc­u­men­taries in the his­to­ry of this series, which itself is among the best pro­gram­ming offered by the Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing Sys­tem. It tells a sto­ry, not wide­ly known despite its recount­ing in sev­er­al his­to­ries (James Green’s The Dev­il Is Here in These Hills is the film’s pri­ma­ry ref­er­ence), sev­er­al nov­els and the great ear­ly film of direc­tor and nov­el­ist John Sayles.

For two decades at the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry, coal min­ers in south­ern West Vir­ginia fought against the bru­tal con­di­tions of work — long hours, low pay, sig­nif­i­cant dan­ger and con­stant pres­sure to work faster — that mine own­ers insist­ed they need­ed to com­pete with mines in Penn­syl­va­nia and oth­er coal­fields clos­er to their main mar­kets. Coal was the polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic king at that time. It was the essen­tial fuel for homes, indus­try and war. The pres­sures of World War I pro­duc­tion, which increased stress but also pay, and the new lever­age work­ers could exer­cise with their role in an essen­tial pro­duc­tion helped revive union orga­niz­ing dri­ves that employ­ers had tem­porar­i­ly suppressed.

Demand­ing that the own­ers rec­og­nize the Unit­ed Mine Work­ers as their union, the West Vir­ginia min­ers went out on strike in sol­i­dar­i­ty with min­ers else­where while fight­ing for their own demands. They want­ed bet­ter con­di­tions in the drea­ry coal camps where they lived on com­pa­ny land with com­pa­ny stores that made them con­tin­u­al­ly ​“anoth­er day old­er and deep­er in debt.” They want­ed to end the coal company’s rule over the camps and the often vio­lent and arbi­trary enforce­ment of the own­ers’ will by pri­vate guards, main­ly from the Bald­win-Felts agency.

With the help of the fabled ​“angel of the coal­fields,” Moth­er Jones, and tough, savvy local lead­ers like Frank Keeney, who had dropped out of school at age 9 to work in the mines, min­ers struck in 1902, then in 1912 – 1913, despite com­pa­ny evic­tions of strik­ers’ fam­i­lies from the coal camps and attacks from armed pri­vate mine guards that the state gov­ern­ment ignored. Those min­ers who did not already have guns for hunt­ing armed themselves.

Min­ers fought back, forc­ing the gov­er­nor to inter­vene and guar­an­tee some new pro­tec­tions for min­ers. But when UMW pres­i­dent John L. Lewis start­ed a new orga­niz­ing dri­ve in 1920, the mine own­ers resumed their old tac­tics — evict­ing min­ers’ fam­i­lies from their homes, declar­ing a lock-out of min­ers from their jobs and resort­ing to vio­lence through their Bald­win-Felts guards.

But at the local lev­el, espe­cial­ly in legal­ly incor­po­rat­ed Mate­wan, some offi­cials were sym­pa­thet­ic to the union. When Sher­iff Sid Hat­field tried to block evic­tions by the own­ers’ pri­vate guards, a shootout burst open near the town’s train sta­tion, leav­ing sev­en detec­tives, two min­ers and the may­or dead. A few months lat­er, mine guards brazen­ly killed Sher­iff Hatfield.

The con­fronta­tion quick­ly esca­lat­ed on both sides, and 10,000 min­ers pre­pared to march to near­by Min­go Coun­ty to free min­ers held there under mar­tial law. The marchers were divid­ed about con­tin­u­ing, but an attack by a Logan Coun­ty sheriff’s force pre­cip­i­tat­ed the two-day Bat­tle of Blair Moun­tain.

The ranks of the UMW in West Vir­ginia shrank dur­ing the 1920s from 50,000 to 1,000, but in the next decade they grew again, and their union was a key play­er in sup­port­ing the for­ma­tion of the CIO and the union­iza­tion of oth­er industries.

The Labor Wars goes far beyond the nar­ra­tive of the armed con­flicts and the his­to­ry of orga­niz­ing to deal with issues like the role of women, the struc­ture of the coal indus­try and min­er cul­ture. Race is one of the most impor­tant: the sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of black min­ers were more accept­ed at work and in the UMW than in many oth­er unions, and the film ends with a pho­to of two young min­ers look­ing direct­ly into the cam­era — one black, one white.

The film relies most heav­i­ly, and ably, on an incred­i­ble wealth of still pho­tos and ear­ly mov­ing pic­tures that cap­ture the scene, the peo­ple and even aspects of many his­tor­i­cal events. Even if the events are not wide­ly known now, they were wide­ly cov­ered at the time, and the film­mak­ing crew has done a spec­tac­u­lar job of min­ing those archives.

As in most such doc­u­men­taries, the film is dri­ven by an intel­li­gent nar­ra­tion, accom­pa­nied by a mourn­ful Appalachi­an-inspired score by Andrew Willis, ampli­fied by short inter­views with a wide assort­ment of insight­ful his­to­ri­ans includ­ing James Green, Rose­mary Feur­er, Charles Kean, David Corbin and others.

The Mine Wars con­cludes with the vision that though the min­ers lost in their bat­tle with big pow­ers, and lead­ers like Keaney were some­times shunned by their own union, they all won a mea­sure of dig­ni­ty by fight­ing back. And their ​“cul­ture of resis­tance” laid the ground­work for the huge surge of orga­niz­ing in the next decade.

Even as the indus­try declines, min­ers them­selves deserve the kind of trib­ute The Mine Wars pro­vides — for the gains made by them­selves and oth­er work­ers through that cul­ture of resis­tance. As the labor move­ment shrinks and los­es pow­er again today, as it did in the ​‘20s, we can only hope that enough of that cul­ture per­sists among work­ers to take advan­tage of what­ev­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for orga­niz­ing that open up again.