The “bootleg coal rebellion,” to take up Troutman’s phrase, was a wave of unauthorized small-scale coal mining that swept the anthracite region during the long 1930s, at precisely the moment the coal monopolies withdrew and the industry supposedly died. From the northern “Panther Valley” coalfield to Troutman’s Lower Anthracite, ordinary miners banded together, making use of the bonds forged in earlier waves of class struggle to occupy and illegally mine company land. Anthracite coal stoves remained in use for home heating throughout the Great Depression, and so a vast network of highway smugglers delivered the fruits of the miners’ insurgent labor to places like New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In this way, the laid-off miners survived, even flourished.
At the same time, their collective appropriation of the means of production challenged capitalist legality in the coal region. By mining and marketing coal in the absence of capitalist investment, the self-organized bootleggers undermined the very property relations that maintained the monopolies’ power. The bootleg coal rebellion lasted from about 1925 until the Second World War. While the reversal of fortunes it engendered could only be partial and temporary, as a collective experience it was deliriously dramatic—and instructive—for the people involved. While the ballad of the bootleggers is nowadays a story seldom told, its cultural aftereffects still linger. There remain a handful of headstrong “independent miners,” hometown heroes all, on the Lower Anthracite field today.
Troutman narrates this history with the careful pacing of a novelist, drawing on a voluminous personal archive as well as a precious set of oral history recordings made decades ago by the deceased local historian Michael Kozura. (Like Kozura, Troutman can identify a bootlegger or two in his family tree, a fact which may have facilitated his access to these closely guarded materials.) In successfully rewriting the final chapter of the anthracite story, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion is an undeniable triumph. It gives the lie to the bourgeois fantasy of a cowed and starveling class of dirty-faced miners who stoically accepted their lot by fading pacifically into the past.
Still, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something missing from Troutman’s book, another mistold story that deserves some revisionist attention too—one that sits closer to the fecund beginning of the anthracite industry than to its austere conclusion. The laid-off miners banding together, their reclamation of the home soil’s underground resource, their heroism in the face of capitalist intransigence—all this I have no trouble believing. What I can’t believe is the conventional wisdom about the anthracite industry’s beginnings, with its emphasis on steam transit and efficient home heating. Something about that story is too innocent.