The Battle of Blair Mountain

The railroad that transported the agents to Matewan was part of the reason for their mission. More than thirty years before, the well-tailored, smooth-talking agents of the Norfolk and Western had descended on southern West Virginia like locusts, their checking accounts fattened by funds from Philadelphia and across the sea in the City of London, and systematically bought up all the land they could lay their hands on. And not just the land. They were careful to secure the mineral rights, too. That was, after all, the point. On their heels came another invasion sponsored by the railroad. These men were a rougher sort, crude in dress and manner. They were construction workers, some 5,000 of them, and they set to work laying the Norfolk and Western trunk line, putting up more than sixty bridges and carving eight tunnels out of the Appalachian foothills, opening up the region and its fabulous deposits of coal. The 190 miles of tracks pushed through valleys of crooked streams penetrating a rugged wilderness that lacked even wagon roads. The hill country farmers turned away from their corn and beans, signed up for the mines and made their homes in cabins along the right of way. Their wives bought overalls and groceries in the company stores while their children played amidst the slag heaps that tarnished the once verdant land. Mules, horses and oxen hauled their work to the surface. Coal cars rumbled along the hillsides, dumping their loads at massive tipples, where it would be stored and then shipped out to markets around the country. Investors, well-fed men in rich tweeds and polished boots, came from all over to tour the valley, inspect the mines and lay out their money, certain of a bountiful return. The coal mines proliferated and thrived. No one could question the riches that lay beneath the earth. Some called the region the "El Dorado" of Appalachia.

Coal was big business, but now it was in big trouble. It was this crisis that called the Baldwin-Felts agents to Matewan. Baldwin-Felts prospered by doing the bidding of the coal companies of West Virginia, serving more or less as their private police force. Tom Felts was sending these men to Matewan, in Mingo County, because there, as in the rest of southern West Virginia, the coal companies, whose output fueled the national economy, and the United Mine Workers of America, the nation's most powerful labor union, were at each other's throats.

By this date, Wednesday, May 19, 1920, America had been at peace abroad for more than eighteen months. The last doughboys of the American Expeditionary Force had long since shipped out of Brest, bound for home, hoping to return to normalcy. The huzzahs from the victory parades on America's Main Streets had long since died out. But at home there was no peace between business and labor. The trade unions were up against it. During the war, with the help of Washington officialdom eager to keep production rolling, the unions had gained in prestige and numbers, gains that had translated into hard cash for the rank and file. But now labor was on the defensive. Struggling against rising prices, which shrunk their paychecks, and slumping demand, which threatened to take away their jobs altogether, many workers looked to their unions for salvation. But the nation's captains of industry would have none of that. Instead they were eager to reassert their prewar hegemony over the economy, rid the unions of their newfound illusions and power and boost their profits, already lifted by the war, to even greater heights. Looking at the world around them, the more prescient among the leaders of corporate America sensed that they were on the right side of history, at one of the great turning points in the nation's life story. The idealism that infused Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and his crusade to make the world safe for democracy was in the process of being repudiated by a rigorous rightward shift, breathtaking in its scope. Its most conspicuous feature was the Red Scare launched by Wilson's own attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, which smothered dissent of all kinds. But the conservative trend was also marked by an enhanced reverence for free enterprise, its leaders and all their works, an attitude that served to reinforce the resistance of these worthies to the demands of labor.

The collision of labor's desperation with management's intransigence had triggered an unprecedented wave of strikes, more than 3,000 walkouts all told in 1919 involving more than four million workers. Steelworkers "hit the bricks," as did coal miners and printers. Even police walked off the job. "I really think we are facing a desperate situation," worried the normally sanguine junior senator from Ohio, Warren Harding. "It looks to me as if we are coming to crisis in the conflict between the radical labor leaders and the capitalistic system under which we have developed the Republic."

The following year, 1920, brought no letup in strife. Labor tensions mounted around the land, but nowhere were the stakes as high as in West Virginia on the day that Tom Felts dispatched his men to Matewan. Their journey was only fifty miles and took little more than an hour. But it would open a new and bloody chapter in the annals of American history. Their arrival would set off a chain reaction of violence that would rock the government of West Virginia to its foundations and at the same time challenge the Federal government in Washington, testing the will and nerve of the highest officials of the nation. It would take months to run its course and conclude only after 10,000 armed miners set out to defy the government of the state and the companies that controlled their lives in the largest armed uprising on American soil since the Civil War.

It was no accident that this upheaval would burst forth when and where it did, in Matewan in Mingo County. This county was the center of West Virginia's richest coalfield. Within twenty-five miles of the county seat, Williamson, about seventy-five mines produced twelve million tons of bituminous a year, a healthy share of total national production. Nearly all these mines were non-union, many opened during the past few years to meet the nation's growing demand for coal during the war.

When the war ended, the mines remained, productive and unorganized, to threaten the UMW's power elsewhere in the country by selling coal at a discount against the prices charged by unionized operators. Unless the UMW could organize all of West Virginia, the union's leaders realized, the nationwide strength it had spent nearly half a century building would dwindle and eventually disappear.

Sprawling beyond Mingo's borders, the Williamson Field reached across the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River into Kentucky's Pike County to the west, and into the West Virginia counties of McDowell to the south and Logan to the east. Indeed, the coal seams in Logan were even richer than in Mingo and the mines employed more than twice as many men.

But Logan was the base of the mine operators' power. The operators subsidized Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin's department; in return Chafin's deputies did all they could to protect them against the union and its organizers. Outrage over the sheriff's strong-arm tactics had boiled over in the summer of 1919, about nine months before the Baldwin-Felts agents boarded the train for Matewan. Union headquarters in the state capital of Charleston, about fifty miles north of the Williamson field, seethed with stories that Chafin's deputies were beating and murdering the organizers the UMW had dispatched to Logan County, trying to cut out the boil that threatened its welfare and future. On Thursday September 4, angry miners began gathering in the town of Marmet, on the outskirts of Charleston, for a march on Logan County. By the next day, Friday, September 5, their numbers had grown to 5,000. Most were armed to the teeth.

This was enough to get West Virginia Governor John J. Cornwell to rush to the scene. Cornwell, a newspaper editor turned politician, had been elected on the Democratic ticket in 1916 with the help of miner support. He had won their votes by promising to give the UMW a fair hearing and curb the excesses of the guards hired by the coal operators. "Boys throw your support to me and I will do everything in my power to remove the gunmen from the state," Fred Mooney, secretary treasurer of District 17, which represented most of West Virginia's union miners, recalled the candidate saying. Cornwell had made token efforts to keep his promise, but in the judgment of the union men he had not done nearly enough. Actually Mooney, like other union leaders, believed that the mine guard system was so deeply entrenched that "only a superman, such as Oliver Cromwell or Napoleon Bonaparte would have been able to prevent its functioning."

Far from being a superman, Cornwell was only a hack officeholder and a journeyman orator, as he demonstrated when he arrived at Marmet on Friday in the dead of night and clambered on top of a soft drink truck to address the rebels. They crowded around the impromptu podium, and with the moonlight glistening on their gun barrels listened to Cornwell with fast-diminishing patience. Mindful that many in his audience had fought under their country's flag in France, Cornwell appealed to them as patriots and law-abiding citizens. "Boys do you not know that everyone of you is acting in violation of every law against bearing arms and that you are taking the law into your own hands?" he demanded.

That argument did not impress. "There is no law in West Virginia except the law of the coal operators," one miner shouted.

Ignoring him, Cornwell pressed on, vowing to crack down on the mine owners and their guards if only the rebels would take their rifles and go home. But those promises had an all too familiar ring to the miners. They heard Cornwell out, but when he finished and headed back to Charleston, they signaled their defiance by firing their weapons in the air, the din drowning out the protesting voices of Fred Mooney and the president of District 17, Frank Keeney.

Cornwell got the message. Back at the capital on Saturday, September 6, the governor put through a call to President Wilson's Secretary of War, Newton Baker, and asked for Federal troops to deal with the incipient rebellion. Since the birth of the Republic such requests had been considered a serious departure from constitutional norms and had required presidential approval. But when state national guards were called to the colors after the United States plunged into the Great War, worries mounted that governors would not be able to cope with domestic disturbances. To help them out in such emergencies, the intervention process had been simplified and expedited by eliminating the requirement for direct presidential involvement. Under the emergency policy known as "direct access," once Baker heard from Cornwell, he bypassed the Oval Office and instead sent word of the threatened uprising directly to General Leonard Wood. Wood, who had won his first star fighting Aguinaldo's guerrillas in the Philippines at the turn of the century, had been deemed too old for duty with the AEF in France. Instead he had been given command of the troops assigned to deal with labor disputes and other domestic disorders. Looking ahead to his prospects for gaining the 1920 Republican presidential nomination, Wood was eager for action and public attention. Within a few hours he reported to Baker that a force of 1,600 men had been assembled and was ready to march.

Informed of the deployment by Cornwell, Mooney and Keeney realized they faced the toughest challenge of their dual stewardship of District 17. Along with their Irish heritage they shared a common upbringing. Both had been raised in the mining camps of the state, worked in the mines since they were boys and joined the union early on. And both had been bloodied in the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912–1913. Back then thousands of miners in the Kanawha Valley, just north of the Williamson Field, walked out demanding higher wages and recognition of their union, leading to what was, up to that time, the cruelest and most protracted dispute in West Virginia labor history. Keeney, sharp featured and square jawed, at thirty-five was the older by three years, the more articulate and the more aggressive. He was a quick thinker and also quick to anger. In 1912 he had fought against the local leadership's initial attempt to settle the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike as offering only meager gains to the union and for his pains was blacklisted.

But he returned in 1916 to take command of a full-scale revolt by members of the local who condemned District 17's leaders as "drunkards and crooks," then seceded, and formed their own local.

The lean, sallow-faced Mooney, though more deliberative and restrained than Keeney, was no shrinking violet himself. He too had attacked the original Paint Creek–Cabin Creek settlement proposal and after the strike finally concluded, had helped to foment the rebellion against the District 17 hierarchy. In the midst of his travails his wife died, leaving him to care for their three young children. Nevertheless Mooney along with Keeney pressed their insurgency. Ultimately an investigation by the national union confirmed their charges that the rulers of the local had sold out the rank and file during contract negotiations to line their own pockets. When District 17 elected new officers Keeney and Mooney agreed that Keeney, because he had led the secession movement, would seek the president's job, while Mooney would run for secretary-treasurer.

The two were strong willed but they were not pigheaded. Pondering the warning from Cornwell that the Army was on the way they realized they had no choice but to stop the march. They spent that day alternating between frantic phone conversations to Charleston, pleading with Cornwell for more time, and frantic speeches to their members, urging them to listen to reason. Finally, armed with a fresh promise from Cornwell to appoint a commission, headed by West Virginia's adjutant general, Thomas B. Davis, to investigate the allegations against the mine owners, the union men heeded the urgings of their leaders and agreed to disband.

Hopes for Cornwell's inquiry, never too bright to begin with, were further dimmed almost immediately. He seemed to give little weight to the miners' complaints. Instead, the governor told the New York Times that "some mysterious radical influence" was responsible for the march, sparking what he described as "false reports" of the rumors of atrocities against the union organizers. A fortnight after his interview with the Times, addressing a trade association convention in White Sulphur Springs, Cornwell underlined his suspicions of the labor movement, warning that radical labor leaders were at work on a deliberate plan to overthrow the government and install a communist system. "They do not intend to try to have their policies put into force through a popular vote," he said. "That would be too slow," and it would never happen. Laying the groundwork for the conspiracy, Cornwell said, was the union drive to shorten the work week, which he argued would inevitably reduce production and raise prices.