Faith Leone: Today is Tuesday, August 6th, 2024. My name is Faith Leone. I’m in Charleston,
West Virginia interviewing Gordon Simmons for the Fred Barkey Oral History Collection with
the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Mr. Simmons, could you spell your first and last name
for me?
Gordon Simmons: G O R D O N S I M M O N S.
FL: So, we just went over the written consent form for the recording and preservation of this
interview, and I also just want to take a second to emphasize here that we can stop or take a
break at any time and you’re free to skip any question.
GS: Thank you.
FL: So, to get started, can you tell me a little bit about yourself like, where you’re from, what
year you were born?
GS: Yeah, I was born in Texas in Amarillo in 1954. And I moved here to West Virginia in 1976
and I’ve been here since.
FL: What brought you to West Virginia?
GS: My wife [laughs].
FL: How did you become involved in labor organizing and labor history work in West Virginia?
GS: Well I was taking grad school as soon as I moved here actually. It’s now called Marshall
University Graduate College, but it was called the West Virginia College of Graduate Studies at
that time. And that’s how I met Fred Barkey actually, he was one of my professors. So I took a
class in American Labor History from Dr. Barley in, I guess, 1978 maybe? And so, we got on
pretty well, and he recruited me into the West Virginia Labor History Association and was sort
of my intellectual mentor, academic mentor, first. In my areas of interest, he really encouraged
me a lot. I can’t say I just learned from him in the classroom. I learned from him ever since then,
too.
FL: What was he like as a professor?
GS: He was great. He was very approachable. He’d tell stories, and they were usually funny. But
they were serious stories. He knew his stuff, he could pretty seamlessly discuss whatever the
subject of the day was, the particular class session. And if you asked him questions, you couldn’t
really distract him from the topic too much, but he could elaborate or deal with almost anything
that piqued your interest. So if he mentioned something and you asked him about it, he’d go in-
depth on it. But then he’d sprinkle his discussion with stories he heard when he did, he did a lot
of oral history. Stuff like that. He would relay stuff to you that was, it was a lot more outside the
textbook I guess I’d say [laughs]. Like personal stories of people he interviewed and knew and
stuff. It was very open-ended and very relaxed and very informative and very interesting.
FL: And did you go into that class already with an interest in labor history or was that sort of–
GS: Yeah, I went in and was already reading a lot about the history of the IWW [Industrial
Workers of the World]. And as soon as he knew that, man, he was like, you gotta read this book,
you gotta do this, or even outside class he’d talk to me about stuff that he knew about. So yeah,
he would encourage whatever you were interested in, he would find a way to supplement that
and give you some direction. And that continued even after I was no longer his student. For
example I went to work for the state in 2001. I became a shop steward. He was like, ‘ah, okay,
shop steward.’ That’s maybe good for about 8-9 years and they burn out, but here’s the stuff you
need to know.’ And he would give me material and then eventually he started pushing me toward
doing something to do with public sector workers in West Virginia history. And gave me
materials, and sort of pushed me in that direction. Like I say, ultimately ended up I did a book.
And he was the seed for all that, the source for a lot of it to be honest. Encouragement was his
middle name. He knew how to like take what you were already interested in and give you all
kinds of resources and direction on it that would reinforce it.
FL: And from what I understood when we were going through some of the materials that were
donated to the museum was that he was not only teaching at the college and graduate school
level, but from what I understand he also did union workshops and education?
GS: He’d do union locals and stuff, he’d do stuff through the AFL-CIO when they’d do summer
training here in West Virginia. They call it, not summer academy, but summer institute or
something. I had done a couple years of that. He did that kind of thing. He’d go to schools,
public schools, and do stuff. He was pretty good at relating to just about any age or kind of
audience you put him in front of. He had a real engaging way about him, that he could relate to
anybody. I can see why he did a lot of oral history himself, because I can just imagine him sitting
down with people, and they would just tell him stories all day long [laughs] and he’d take it
down, he would absorb it, and he’d relay it back to us in the classroom. He was a great resource,
a great inspiration actually.
FL: Can you tell me more about, you said he got you involved with the Labor History
Association, can you tell me more about that time when you got involved with that, and where
that led?
GS: It was an interesting group from the beginning. I think it was in ‘76, it was still a pretty
young organization at that point. But it had a mixture of academic people like Fred, or students
like me, and then people who’d been long time activists in labor from various unions. So it was
kind of mixed, it reminds me of the Appalachian Studies movement when I’d go to their
conferences and stuff. It was a combination of people who were in the community doing things,
with people who were academics studying the subject. And that’s a kind of neat model in the
sense that there’s a give and take in the subject matter, like labor history, that you wouldn’t get if
it were just academics, or if it was just activists from the union movement. You’re getting both.
And they’re interacting. It leads to a broader understanding of things. One of the first lessons I
think I ever learned from Fred is that labor history is not just the history of particular
organizations or unions. It’s anything to do with the working class. It could be home life, it
could be communities, leisure time, it could be all sorts of things. And he had this expansive
notion of what labor history was. So one of the later projects he was working on–I think a good
deal of it got pretty well done–he called it ‘ethnic sampler.’ Because West Virginia had been,
when the industrialization occurred with first timber and then the coal industry, a lot of people
came in. You had Blacks from the southern farm fields, you had people from Italy and Hungary
and other parts of Eastern Europe. You just had a big amalgam, a multicultural amalgam of
people coming in, connected with the economic activity. Glass making–he did a whole
monograph about Belgian Glass Workers that’s just a really cool look at something nobody had
ever paid attention to before. And it’s very enlightening to read that and have him talk about it to
you. Like I said, it’s a very expansive notion of what the working class was, historically. Kind of
reminds me… he was sort of a local version of E.P. Thompson, if you’ve heard of E.P. Thompson.
FL: Yeah I was going to say, this is like the ‘new labor history’ school, right?
GS: Yeah, so E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, which is a book he
encouraged me to read actually [laughs], looked at sort of the agency of working people. That
they weren’t just the passive subjects of whatever was happening economically around them.
They actually, unions are an example of–that’s one form of pushing back, or making some sort
of initiative that doesn’t render them simply the passive victims of whatever is happening. And
he was that way. He was in that line of thinking, I guess. Another thing, in addition to this
expansive notion of the working class that he was really good at communicating and explaining,
he had done a great dissertation about the history of the early socialist party in West Virginia
around the turn of the century, late 1800s early 1900s. And his take on that was really, reminded
me of, there’s a book I read early on by an author called Jim Green called Grass-Roots Socialism
which was about the socialist party, in those same days, in the same era, in the American
Southwest, where I came from. And it opened up my eyes to history I had no idea about. Fred
did the same thing for West Virginia, to show, you could read about Eugene Debs and the
socialist party nationally back then, but there were peculiarities to the West Virginia context that
differ, that made it distinctive.
FL: And I’ve heard from… I can’t remember who told me this, but I heard that even before Dr.
Barkey’s dissertation was made into a book that people were reading the dissertation and really
that was a new model for labor studies in the state.
GS: I saw him cited in some French philosopher’s book, or sociolocialgist’s book. So yeah, it
was influential even before it became a published book. And the main point, or one of the main
points he made about that whole period was that there were two sort of distinct tendencies inside
the socialist party. And one has to do with, and was more prevalent in the northern part of the
state, more of a social democratic reformism. You know, the Reuther brothers in Wheeling were
kind of exemplary of that. But in the southern coalfields, and other scholarship picked up on this
like David Corbin and so on, it was much more like the IWW. He told me a lot about this
because he knew I was interested in the IWW. There were like, in Huntington, and Kanawha
County, and even Parkersburg and the southern coalfields generally, they were way more
revolutionary syndicalists than they were like reformist sort of social democrats. So there’s this
big tension that was evident in the West Virginia context that, I’m not saying it didn’t exist
nationally or elsewhere in the socialist party, but was really pronounced here. So if you look
back, for example, Star City outside of Morgantown, for a very long time the city government
was socialist party. Or you have people like Hu Maxwell, who was a West Virginia historian as
well, wrote a lot of these county and local histories up there–they were all more like the Reuthers
and sort of moderate in their socialism. Whereas in the southern part of the state, they were ready
to march on Blair Mountain. They were like, the rowdy types. So it kind of set the tone for a lot
of labor organizing particularly for the mine workers in West Virginia. It sort of set the tone for
it. And his study was just fascinating. It really bears up. I’m glad it got published eventually.
FL: In 2012, right? I saw in the introduction that you were listed in the acknowledgements as
being important to the completion of the book. And also, that you have an interview [“A Forty
Year Retrospective: Dr. Fred Barkey interviewed by Gordon Simmons”].
GS: Yeah, I did an interview with him, we were trying to sum it up and all of that and, you
know, he emphasized that: the local color of socialism in West Virginia versus the way things
were going on in other parts of the country in that same movement. But that’s the example also
of his expansive definition of the working class. I mean it was tied to the labor unions, it came
out of the labor movement, but it was, regardless of what tendency you talk about, there was a
political dimension, and local dimension, and community-based dimension to them that sort of
escapes a lot of historical accounts of that period and that movement. So it was pretty neat. He
even did some research and a great essay about fraternal organizations in the coal fields being,
how should I put it, spaces in which working people could get together outside the workplace,
but was tied to their class situation. Like the Fraternal Order of Red Men, or something like that.
Whoever heard of them? But it’s like, Odd Fellows, or some of the Masonic groups, which also
become forums for working people to express their culture, express their politics, express their
points of view, that were not strictly, formally, labor unions.
FL: Right, and this is the idea of this ‘new labor history’ looking at spaces like that, and not just
unions.
GS: Right. That’s where you find the working class. They’re not just at the union hall or on the
work floor. They’re actually in these other places too. So he was great on that stuff.
FL: I wanted to ask you something else about your role in the Labor History Association. I read
that you were involved in State and Federal lawsuits to relist Blair Mountain Battlefield as a
historic place after it was delisted.
GS: Right. The Association became a party to… well what happened, here’s the irony of it. I was
working at the, when this all started, I was working at the West Virginia Division of Culture and
History, which was the sort of state conduit for the listing of historic sites, right? So, I’m
working there and the head of that agency becomes instrumental in getting it delisted–Blair
Mountain–delisted as a historic site. Because they wanted to mine it, basically. And the state
government in West Virginia is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the coal industry. Even now, when
the coal industry doesn’t employ that many people, you think, ‘oh, there [inaudible],’ but no,
politically, they’re not. And so the Labor History Association, we joined as a party to restore its
designation to the historical register. And that worked ultimately. But it took a long time.
FL: What was that fight like? What was the day-to-day like?
GS: It was mainly in the courts, to be honest. That’s where it all played out ultimately. But it
meant undoing the decision of the state agency I was working at to de-list it and restore it. It was
a little heated at work sometimes [laughs]. I was already in trouble for representing people as a
shop stewart. So it was just par for the course.
FL: What year was this?
GS: I started in 2001 and then left in 2008, so it was toward the end of my employment there that
this became an issue.
FL: And then the Battlefield ultimately was relisted, correct?
GS: Yeah, thanks to people like Chuck Keeney, in large part. But it was a coalition of groups.
Environmental groups and the Labor History Association signed on too. We lent our name more
than anything [laughs]. But you know, we were interested in providing any kind of historical
information that would support the claim. So, it was ultimately successful. This was the same
commissioner I was working under, he’s now a secretary, at the state who got in trouble for
having the governor’s dog put in a mural. They put these murals in the state capitol, right?
FL: That was–
GS: So the guy who made that happen, that put the dog in this historical mural of West Virginia,
was the same guy that delisted Blair Mountain those years ago [laughs]. Things don’t change.
FL: Can you tell me more about your time as a shop steward? What’s your background been like
in labor organizing in the state?
GS: As a shop steward, my main learning curve was in representing in the grievance procedure.
And the grievance procedure has been around since I think the ‘90s or maybe the ‘80s. But it was
pretty cumbersome as a first step level. It applied to all state employees and a lot of county
employees. And so, as a shop steward in that context, besides signing people up or getting people
organizing in shop meetings, it mainly involved investigating, researching, and presenting a
grievance in a sort of semi-formal setting of a hearing. And I got to go to some meetings when
the legislature was thinking about revamping it, changing it, reforming the grievance procedure.
And it ultimately did in 2007, and became a lot better than it had been before. Still not great, but
a lot better than it had been before. One of the things that we got was that any employee had the
right to have their shop steward or representative they designate at any grievance proceeding, but
also any meeting that the boss calls and they might end up, you know, issuing discipline, you
could have a representative there. It’s similar to the Weingarten Right in the private sector. So
that was a big deal, to get that right. It gave me a whole lot more to do as a steward, because they
could have me in the meeting–they couldn’t get me out. So you can go in there and you can
advocate for your employee. You can go in there and advocate for your fellow member in the
union. And pose questions to them, you know? Make them to prove, if they have something to
accuse someone of, what’s your evidence? It’s like being a jailhouse lawyer [laughs]. Fred was
very helpful in getting me up to speed on being a steward. Just the practicalities of it, you know.
He knew so much about that, what they call arbitration training in the private sector. He was so
good at that, and he really gave me a whole lot of help [laughs]. It was like my secret weapon
that I never told them about–I’m getting help from my old professor! [Laughs]. But I did, and he
was fabulous for that.
FL: And what about the ways that, as a mentor and as an educator, he’s influenced your work?
You have a book coming out soon on public sector organizing.
GS: Yeah, it would not have happened without him. Not just because the material he gave me
along the way, but he pushed me, you know. He said ‘this needs to be done,’ is what he would
say. ‘This really needs to be done.’ ‘Oh you’re in that! You’re in the public sector. What do you
think?’ He wouldn’t say ‘you do this,’ he would say, ‘listen, this is really interesting stuff, this
needs to be done. This never has been dealt with. I’ve got some material you can look at and see
what I mean.’ More or less like, ‘you need to write this.’ [Laughs]. ‘You need to research this,
investigate this, you need to write this.’ And that’s what happened, so, it worked. But he was that
kind of a mentor. He would take what you were already involved with or interested in and offer
you resources that would help you in that. Whether it was being a shop steward, or doing
research on the public sector, or you name it. Like I said, my initial interest in the IWW–he
really really helped me on that.
FL: And what kind of methods were you using for this research?
GS: Well, thanks to him, one of the things I did was to actually call up and interview people who
had been involved in different things. So for example, in the early ‘70s there was a sanitation
strike in West Virginia, in Charleston. Everybody knows about the Memphis sanitation strike,
because we think of Martin Luther King Jr. But there were strikes like that in Philadelphia, and
South Carolina, all over the place. Well I didn’t know that there had been one in Charleston,
because I didn’t move here until ‘76, so I missed it. And, you know, Fred gave me a great
example. He said ‘you know the guy that who led that strike, that was one of the workplace
leaders of that strike, he’s still here.’ So I the interviews with Hollie Brown. He was the guy. So
there was a lot of that. There was a lot of government material studies that were done at various
times on collective bargaining. There’s a history of the AFL-CIO in West Virginia. Fred would
give me these materials and was like, ‘there’s something in here that you can use if you want to
do this.’ And, you know, I’d say half the bibliography for what I ended up doing came through
Fred.
FL: That’s a huge impact.
GS: Yeah. It wouldn’t have happened period if it weren’t for his encouragement and his
identifying this as something that needs to be done. And, ‘oh don’t you work in this’ [laughs].
‘You’ve been a shop stewart, what do you think?’ He encouraged it.
FL: I’m really excited for this book to come out!
GS: I am too, I know books are considered to be a bygone thing, but hey I still collect vinyl
albums [laughter]. What the heck.
FL: This is going to be an awesome contribution to labor studies in this state.
GS: Well, we’ll see [laughs].
FL: Are there any other stories about Dr. Barkey, or your work together, or your own work that
we haven’t talked about, that you’d want to talk about?
GS: Oh, there’s probably tons I could tell you. He was just interested in anything and everyone.
He had great stories, many of them were quite humorous, some of them I probably don’t want to
put on the record because they involved illegal activities that he was made privy to. But he would
tell you those in conversation, and it was just like–he was one of the best conversationalists I’ve
ever met.
FL: He brought was he was teaching to life.
GS: He could sit and talk to anybody number one. You didn’t have to be an academic or
anything like that. But number two, the way he communicated, and the interest he showed in
what was communicated to him, is pretty remarkable. It was pretty neat.
FL: From what you remember, what was that classroom environment like? Were all the students
sort on the edge of your seats?
GS: Well, it was not a big class. It was a graduate class. People were from different backgrounds.
I remember we had a public school teacher in there, and me, and there was another state worker
in there. I wasn’t a state worker at that time, but they were in there. And some older folks from
the glass union and stuff like that, retired people. As well as just graduate students. So it was
kind of a mixed class.
FL: And this was in Huntington?
GS: Well actually it was held here in Charleston, to the graduate school. They have a campus
that’s now in South Charleston. But we would conduct our classes over at the University of
Charleston, we’d use space over there. The class was mixed the same way the Labor History
Association was a mixture of academics and non-academics. So was that class, really, which
made it pretty lively. Because people would break the rules of academic setting all the time
[laughs]. Which he positively loved. He would not hold us to any kind of formalities. You could
speak freely in his class. He did not discourage that at all. But we managed to cover the topics,
you know, we stayed on track. He was a marvelous teacher, a marvelous conversationalist, just a
marvelous person. A good research. He dug up stuff, and some of it hopefully is going to be
archived some day. He dug up stuff that nobody had looked at or thought was worth looking
at–like the Belgian glassworkers. Who would of thought that that was an area, that was a thing?
But he saw it, and wrote it up, researched it and wrote it up. So he was a pretty neat person all
around. And I think he was the heart of the Labor History Association. We’re gonna try to keep
going, but it seemed like no effort when he was around. It just carried forth. And he was, for a
long, the president of it. And then as he got older, he somehow convinced me I wanted to be the
treasurer of it, which I don’t know how that happened. But he did. And he said, ‘you need to take
over president. I’ll do the treasurer.’ Well, okay [laughs].
FL: What year was that, that you became president of the Association?
GS: I’d have to look that up, I’m not absolutely certain. Maybe about ten years ago, I could
check it. But he was still the heart and soul of it after that. You know, we’re going to be hard
pressed to continue without him. He was just such a force in that. He was one of the founding
members.
FL: Well his influence is definitely evident in how many local historians that I’ve spoken to have
cited how important he was to their own journeys.
GS: Absolutely. He was that was with everybody. Even if you didn’t meet him in an academic
setting, he was someone who could get you interested in history, and look at it different than you
had before. You mentioned, he would do these classes for the unions, they would do some kind
of union education classes. He told me some stories like that–he’d be out at Point Pleasant or
somewhere with a bunch of union guys in there from the plant who were in there doing this
class. They’d get all riled up when he was talking about labor history! They’d be pounding the
table, ‘they can do that!’ You know, they’d be into it. He could relate to anybody, he really
could, he could communicate with anybody.
FL: And to make that history relevant, it sounds like.
GS: Yeah, it wouldn’t be some kind of abstract, ‘oh that’s interesting, maybe.’ Or, ‘that doesn’t
affect me.’ Nobody left one of his classes of any kind with that impression. ‘I’m gonna keep
reading this stuff, I’m gonna keep studying this stuff, I’m gonna keep thinking about this stuff.
I’m gonna keep doing stuff in my workplace.’ Or whatever. He was an inspiration. Sorely
missed.
FL: Well, I really appreciate you sharing these stories, and your own work as a history keeper
and a fighter for West Virginia’s working people. I and the Mine Wars Museum are really
grateful for time and contributions. Is there anything else you wanted to say?
GS: I could probably sit here all night and tell you Fred stories [laughs].
FL: Hey, I’m here, that sounds great [laughs].
GS: But I don’t want to [laughs], sorry, it’s not you, okay, I just… yeah, I could do it [laughs].
But, I think the important thing is, is that he could be this positive influence in all of these
different kinds of people. He certainly was for me. He was like my number one mentor. And,
you know, from the moment I had his class on after that. I don’t mind telling people, ‘I was a
student of Fred Barkey.’ It’s almost like, ‘I was a follower of Fred Barkey.’ You know what I
mean? [laughs]. It was that good, that inspirational, and that life-changing in some ways. Yeah.
He was something else. And I hope that the work that–I know that he probably has all kinds of
notes and articles and things laying about. I know the museum got a lot of that stuff. I hope that
that gets archived and made available widely, digitally, whatever it takes.
FL: Absolutely.
GS: For one thing, his Belgian glassworkers monograph. It’s really, really good. And that should
be on the internet. That’s just a great piece of West Virginia history. It’s also a great piece of
labor history, and it’s also a great example of how something that sounds very obscure and sort
of specialized is in fact wonderful material that anybody would find interesting once they looked
into it. It’s not obscure. And he had a way of communicating that. I understand he got knighted
for that [laughs]. The irony! That the King of Belgian would acknowledge your work on these
socialists that came over [laughs] to blow glass and make windows and do all stuff.
FL: That’s pretty incredible.
GS: It’s pretty wild. And that led to some really good work, Ken Fones-Wolf has done some
further work on the glass industry in West Virginia that Fred laid the groundwork for. He’s
influenced so many different people, so much scholarship that’s come along too.
FL: Exactly. I never got the chance to meet him or learn from him directly, but I do feel like I
learn from him through the history keepers that I meet, the things that I read, already the
influence is very evident.
GS: To personally get a real good picture of him, there’s a documentary that was done by PBS
called Even the Heavens Weep. He is one of the talking heads. It was kind of a Ken Burns-type
treatment of the Mine Wars. He and Corbin and some of these other people–Lon Savage is in
there–were talking heads, and you really get a sense of Fred from his contributions to that
documentary, when he’s being filmed and talking. It’s kind of neat, you know. I went and
showed it to a Montesorri school class that was studying West Virginia. It was like watching
Fred again, this is after he died. And it was just perfect. It was great. So, watch that. I think they
have it at the library here [Kanawha County Main Branch]. I know they do, because I checked it
out to show it to the class.
