By Gordon Simmons
In the late hours of February 25, 2025, West Virginia labor historian David Alan Corbin died. First published in 1981, David’s Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880-1922, was one of the first comprehensive explorations of the West Virginia Mine
Wars and remains as the unsurpassed standard treatment of that topic even today.
Life, Work, and Rebellion began an era in which this dramatic episode in history, long ignored and even actively suppressed in West Virginia, was now pushed into popular awareness in novels, film and general audience and scholarly publications since 1981. In the late 1980s, as a bookseller specializing in what is generally termed Appalachian Studies, I was dismayed to find that David’s publisher, the University of Illinois Press, had allowed his book to go out of print. I placed a call to his editor at Illinois, Richard Wentworth, who, like me, was surprised to learn of its unavailability.
Wentworth agreed with my suggestion that the book be reissued as a trade discount paperback to enhance its availability to the reading public and that is what happened. A new and expanded edition was eventually issued by West Virginia University Press in 2015, which remains available.
In 1990, working with Charleston writer Topper Sherwood in a small press, Appalachian Editions, we collaborated with David as editor to produce a compilation of Mine Wars-era documents titled The West Virginia Mine Wars: An Anthology, with cover art by Charly Jupiter Hamilton. In 2011, an expanded version was published by PM Press as Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars.
Included in the PM Press edition was a booklet that David had written and published as a student at Marshall University in 1971, The Socialist and Labor Star: Huntington, W. Va. 1912-1915. That early work chronicled the history of a workers’ newspaper that had served as the voice of insurgent coal miners during the first round of the Mine Wars, until it was forcibly destroyed by the authorities of the day. David had published the booklet, appropriately enough, with an IWW cooperative press begun by students of Marshall’s SDS chapter, Appalachian Movement Press.
David’s commitment to our state’s labor history did not wane over time. This is evident in a spirited debate in 1993 in the pages of the regional journal, West Virginia History. The exchange was Between David and a British academic who had taken issue with David’s 1978 appraisal in the Journal of American History of the betrayal of striking miners by the all-too moderate leadership of the Socialist Party during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strikes. As in his 1981 account, David marshalled the factual evidence for an autonomist reading of working-class self-activity. Montani semper liberi.
For all of his seminal contributions to our labor history, it is regrettable, and inexplicable, that David was never recruited as a faculty member by any of our state’s universities. Instead, apart from a stint with
the University of Maryland, David spent much of his working life as an aide and speechwriter for Senator Robert C. Byrd. This seemingly incongruous career was once summed up by David in an anecdote about his first day in Byrd’s office. David was continually amused, retelling this incident, to have realized at that encounter that the senator apparently recognized him. Byrd remembered David as having been among the protesting students confronting Byrd during a Vietnam-era visit he’d made to Marchall
University. He hired him anyway.
