The Power of "Working Through" for the U.S. Labor Movement

A mountain torn apart by MTR (from Jim West)

        
        On June 1st, 2011, about 90 years after 10,000 striking miners marched to Blair Mountain, a group of hundreds of activists left Marmet, West Virginia and began to retrace the steps of that ill-fated march. A mixture of environmentalists fighting mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining processes, history buffs, and union miners marched in hopes of drawing attention to the precarious situation at the Battle of Blair Mountain historical site. For years, local activists had been attempting to have the site of the battle listed in the National Register of Historic Places, in large part as a tactic to save the ridge from being destroyed by a mining company through MTR mining. MTR is a process used to quickly and cost-effectively access coal in the heart of a mountain. First, the vegetation and topsoil are blasted off of the top of the mountain with explosives, then a dragline pulls a large shovel bucket across the remains of the hill, scraping it to its core. The debris is sifted through for coal then dumped into neighboring valleys, often clogging and contaminating streams. A National Register of Historic Places designation would not permanently protect the site, but it was seen as a good place to start. However, one week after it was added to the Register, it was removed when archaeologists hired by the coal company who planned to mine there, Arch Coal, claimed it did not yield any information on the battle. Unsurprisingly, outside archaeologists disagree, finding that the majority of the site remains academically useful. In an attempt to bring attention to this situation, activists organized a march that replicated the path taken by miners so many years ago (Brown 2016).
In her 2020 article entitled “Marking Time in Memorials and Museums of Terror: Temporality and Cultural Trauma,” Christina Simko forwards two different ways groups commemorate traumatic events and, specifically, “how the carriers of trauma mark time” (Simko 2020:55). She calls these two types “acting out” and “working through.” “Acting out” involves freezing time at the exact moment of the event, viewing the event as particular and unique, attempting to experience the emotions of the event, and viewing the victim group’s trauma as a whole as particular to that group. “Working through,” on the other hand, holds the goal of “develop[ing] the capacity to remember the past as past rather than treating it as part of the present” (Simko 2020:54). In doing so, Simko writes, we can hope to establish “an open acknowledgment of past suffering without striving to continuously replicate and sustain the emotional force of the original event” (Simko 2020:55). She argues that “acting out” trauma limits our ability to generalize our experiences and empathize with others, while “working through” has the potential to create moral universalism.

When I learned about the 2011 march, I quickly connected it with Simko’s concept of “working through.” The activists directly retrace the steps of the striking miners before them, leaving from the same spot, heading to the same end, even camping at night just like the victims they are remembering did. The Battle at Blair Mountain is a unique event in U.S. history, and the modern activists certainly saw it that way. By re-experiencing the march that the miners undertook, in some way they might be able to understand their emotions as well. However, after further consideration, I realized that while the 2011 march certainly acted out the 1921 march, a more helpful way to analyze the event is through the “working through” lens. The goal of the 2011 march is not simply to remember and relive the original event. Instead, the participants hope to connect the past trauma to ongoing but different trauma stemming from MTR processes. These mining practices render the area, one of the most biologically diverse in the country, almost unlivable, causing poor health including cancer, environmental degradation, and the loss of jobs (MTR uses far less human labor, one reason why it is more profitable for coal companies)(Brown 2016). By connecting the plight of current residents of the coal fields to that of miners gunned down by coal companies years ago, the activists hope to inspire empathy in others through a generalization of different experiences. This provides an important lesson for the labor movement. Working people have endured hundreds of years of trauma under the system of wage labor. By “working through” that history and connecting individual events to the broader themes, we can hope to create essential solidarity in a cohesive movement.

References

Brown, Richele C. 2016. “Power Line: Memory and the March on Blair Mountain.” Pp. 86-107 in Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and Forgetting, edited by M. T. Starzmann and J. R. Roby. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.

Simko, Christina. 2020. “Marking Time in Memorials and Museums of Terror: Temporality and Cultural Trauma.” Sociological Theory 38(1):51–77.