Ian Byers-Gamber

March of Progress

Antique vitrines, vintage history textbooks, antique reticulated bookstand, memorandum (letter press on artist-made bleached abaca paper)

The state textbooks in these vitrines, while purporting a comprehensive account of West Virginian history, make tidy work of the Mine Wars. In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel‑Rolph Trouillot outlines the strategies that authors and historians employ to silence histories that do not align with state interests. He categorizes them, broadly, as "formulas of erasure" and "formulas of banalization." These books make use of both.

Each is turned to the page on which the Mine Wars appear, or should. The earliest, published only a decade after the Battle of Blair Mountain, completely omits these recent events—presumably compelled by the kind of state pressure described by John D. Newsome in his 1940 memorandum, relevant excerpts from which I've reproduced as a gallery takeaway. In fact, it omits any mention of the conditions of twentieth century coal mining. Miners compelled to live in company towns, especially, faced the constant threat of at-will firing, eviction, and blacklisting, after which the company scrip that constituted their measly pay became worthless. It was an existence outside of the bounds of what might be termed human rights, literally without legal protections: in Hitchman Coal Coke Co. v. Mitchell, 1917, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of coercive labor contracts that violated federal protections—by citing medieval English Common Law regarding the rights of masters to servile labor.

Where the latter books mention the Mine Wars, they minimize these intolerable conditions, as well as the socialist politics and strike tactics to which miners turned in response.

This work is a reinterpretation of a West Virginia Mine Wars Museum display by artist and creative director Sean Slifer.

On Blair Mountain

Silver gelatin print, Nielsen Profile 34 Matte Black frame

Front Facade of the Matewan National Bank, now the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum

Silver gelatin print, Nielsen Profile 34 Matte Black frame

Matewan, WV from the site of the original railroad depot

Silver gelatin print, Nielsen Profile 34 Matte Black frame

Smilin' Sid's Tombstone (With Offerings)

Archaeology From Below

5x7 glossy postcards, vinyl, artist-made red oak shelves

The Mine Wars are excluded from history textbooks, but physical evidence of the struggle lies beneath the still-contested earth. Citizen archaeologist and retired coal mining engineer Kenneth King began surveying Blair Mountain in the 1990s; his findings and expertise have become invaluable to the archaeological efforts of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which now seek not only artifacts of violence but of tent camps and other traces of life in the struggle.

Artifacts from Blair Mountain not only deepen our understanding of the conflict, but may also form a legal basis for protect the land from the ravages of mountaintop removal mining. As it stands, historians of the conflict are fighting the clock—and the same coal companies—to preserve this literally endangered history.

Commit Sabotage!

Antique RCA Radiola radio cabinet, antique stereograph viewer, Sintron KAI-638 coin acceptor, HO-scale model (Walthers Diamond Coal Corporation Kit, acrylic paint, rigid foam insulation, Woodland Scenics ballast, Woodland Scenics coal, Woodland Scenics foliage), Pepper's Ghost installation (Canal Plastics two-way mirror, Raspberry Pi 4, Arduino Uno, LED lights, Lilliput 10.1" FA1011-NP/C/T monitor), signboard by A. Jinha Song (found lumber, gold leaf, Plexiglas, acrylic paint, silver gelatin print of a West Virginian coal tipple, Mylar)

Companies would attempt to fill strike‑emptied mines by luring recent immigrants and out‑of‑towners, unaware of local hostilities, with lies of easy work and good pay. Miners responded with various tactics, from the familiar—forming picket lines and unionizing newcomers—to the now-unthinkable—destroying equipment, collapsing mine mouths, and attacking the train cars and tearing up the tracks on which scabs arrived and coal left.

Matewan Police Chief Sid Hatfield was accused by coal company lawyers of blowing up a coal tipple, the structure that loads coal onto train cars. He was a strike supporter, stalwart opponent of the coal companies and their hired guns, and national folk hero for his role in the Battle of Matewan. On the courtroom steps preceding his trial, Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers, flanked by their wives, were gunned down and killed by Baldwin-Felts "gun thugs." It was a calculated hit, devised with the support of the local judiciary and county sheriffs; despite a preponderance of evidence, no agents were convicted.

Hatfield and Chambers, ages 28 and 22, died August 1, 1921. The first skirmishes in the Battle of Blair Mountain broke out on the morning of August 25, 1921.

The Battle of Matewan / The Matewan Massacre

Silver gelatin prints, Nielsen Profile 93 Silver frame

On May 19, 1920, thirteen Baldwin-Felts agents, including two of founder Thomas Felts' brothers, rode a coal train into Matewan, WV. The group bore submachine guns in their luggage. The Stone Mountain Coal Company, emboldened by the recent Supreme Court ruling, had enlisted this paramilitary force to evict, at gunpoint, the families of miners recently fired for pledging to unionize. Matewan, however, is an independent municipality founded prior to the proliferation of company towns, and therefore boasted a small local government and basic legal protections.

Mayor Cabell Testerman and police chief Sid Hatfield, flanked by a group of hastily deputized miners, disputed the legitimacy of the agents' eviction papers. Both parties produced warrants for the other's arrests. When Testerman decried the agency's papers as "bogus," wild gunfire broke out on the street, and miners waiting in ambush fired from doorways and open windows. The agents killed two unarmed miners and mortally wounded Testerman; Hatfield and his deputies killed seven agents, including both of Felts' brothers.

Hatfield and his deputies became national folk heroes after a lengthy and sensationalized trial; "Two-Gun Sid," or "Smilin' Sid," so-called for his gold teeth, dominated national media coverage for months. All were acquitted of all charges. Matewan lore has it that one juror, after delivering the verdict, reported that "he was ready to sit there all year before he'd vote to convict a single Matewan boy."

These events, from contemporary reportage to present-day histories and monuments, go by varying names that betray varying sympathies. This diptych asks the viewer to consider that "massacre" is always political.

Matewan Post Office Markings

Hydrocal Plaster

Casts are recordings—photographs that record a duration, not of light, but of texture. Said duration compasses all the touch, weather, and decay that makes up an object's life.

There remain a series of pockmarks in the brick wall of Matewan's post office, signs of bullets fired at the Baldwin-Felts. At some point in an enterprising museological turn, a local businessowner inserted round bits of rod into these marks. They represent the slugs themselves, frozen at the moment of impact, just beginning to deform.

Here are two of them, transposed in space and reinterpreted in plaster. A brick wall, shot up in 1920, lurking beneath the sheetrock of the white cube.

Vittoria o Morte

Hand appliqué on unbleached cotton muslin, red LED bulb

In 1909, Calabrian miners in Boomer, WV took to the streets bearing a red and black anarcho-syndicalist flag emblazoned "Vittoria o Morte": victory or death. Though dismissed by both local press and mine operators as a riot, this march was in fact just one front of a skillful work stoppage, during which miners also seized control of a rail line and a crucial blacksmith shop. Their direct actions were "a portent of a far more violent uprising.

This flag was conceived in collaboration with and sewn by A. Jinha Song.

Transmission

Archival inkjet print on Canson Photo HighGloss, artist frame (red oak, spent 9mm casings) silver gelatin contact print from digital negative of Library of Congress-held glass plate negative (call number LC-F82- 7372, originally titled "Group of striking union miners & the familys living in tents, Lick Creek, W.Va., [4/12/22]")

The striking workers of the Mine Wars, fired and evicted, lived with their families in communal tent camps supported by local efforts and by the United Mine Workers of America. Coal companies had long hired as widely as they could, especially from the ranks of recent immigrants and Black Americans, in the hopes that racial and linguistic barriers would promote competition and stymie the union drive. In fact, these conditions produced a West Virginian working class nearly unique, at the time, for its diversity. The tent camps, polylingual and interracial, appalled so-called "local respectables." Not only did they live together and share resources, they congregated and socialized and protected each other as best they could through terrible conditions.

The color photograph was taken at All Power Books, a communist bookstore, organizing space, and free clinic founded by a few of the organizers among whom I first learned of the Mine Wars. During the recent Hurst and Eaton fires in Los Angeles, All Power Books numbered among the many mutual aid networks that stepped up to feed, shelter, clothe, and otherwise support the community. Meanwhile the city government, which had only last year defunded the fire department while increasing the already-distended police budget, was busy deploying cops to defend private property from spectral looters.

We protect us.

Self Portrait

Archival inkjet print on Canson Photo HighGloss, artist frame (red oak, spent 9mm casings), silver gelatin contact print from digital negative of Library of Congress-held glass plate negative (call number LC-F82- 7375, originally titled "Tents, Lick Creek, W.Va., [4/12/22]")

In the history of the United States of America, the Battle of Blair Mountain is arguably the largest insurrection barring the Civil War. Its absence from school curricula speaks to its continuing potency—its danger. These miners literally took up arms against their intolerable working conditions, against the allied violence of capital and state. If this history remains unthinkable to power, the people must unravel what, specifically, makes it so; could it be that the invulnerability of power is now, as then, just a convincing narrative?

My own politics are rooted in the conviction that liberation for all people is not merely ideologically preferable but literally possible. I trace this belief, which has guided me to direct action and to mutual aid (especially) during times of seemingly ubiquitous political cynicism, directly to histories like that of the Mine Wars.

Target pictured, "Richard Sackler B-16 Equivalent," by David Noel.