Dear Mr. President

While this might not be an article or a video, this poem, Dear Mr. President, holds a very powerful meaning. Although there are only three stanzas, sometimes the smallest things have the strongest meanings. This poem is set in 1921 at Blair Mountain, West Virginia, around the conflict that occurred at Blair Mountain; otherwise known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. Blair Mountain was a desired location for coal miners.

Dear Mr. President takes the effect of a poem in the form of a letter, as if it were really written and sent off in the mail to President Warren G. Harding (1921-1923). The first stanza introduces the author as a soldier of the Great War, where he [the assumption is that the author is a male due to the fact that women weren’t allowed to fight in battle during the 1910’s] states that while the President of the United States did not know him, that he knew the president. However, although President Harding was his “commander-in-chief when [he] served” he took his orders in battle from Sargent Platt. He, as a soldier, saw some devastating things in war, torturous acts- “even when the plane come, with gas” on the enemy. 

The poem transitions in the second stanza to his return back to the states, back to West Virginia where the coal mines are. The author provides a comparison to the death of some coal miners who are “all lop-headed and limp-armed” to the “boys in France”. He states that they are so used to seeing death, that it almost comes naturally; that although he saw “men drug by a mule through a pocket of black damp” that their deaths didn’t even phase him. In fact, it didn’t phase anyone in the town, because coal mining, while it is a vigorous and dangerous job, it pays the bills and it is more of a love of the land and community that those people possess. They won’t be stopped from coal mining, even if it results in their husband’s, uncle’s, brother’s, or even friend’s death.

The third stanza appears to represent the conflict between the coal miners and the President’s orders to drop the gas (i.e. Battle of Blair Mountain). It could be said that those in France who screamed “like their lungs was a spider web lit on fire” from the gas is much like what is to happen to those at Blair Mountain, both at the hand of the President. Because most of the men at Blair Mountain, WV have already faced the danger of the coal mines and the War they will not be scared by the president. Thus the author leaves President Harding by stating, “You can kill us, Mr. President, we all know that. But what in the world makes you think you can scare us?”.

Dear Mr. President is a thought-provoking poem that shares with the audience the outlook of a man who was both a soldier in the Great War and a coal miner, faced with some similar dangers (gas). It shows how supportive coal mining can be for a community that they are willing to die over it.