1920 (16 page)

In fact, the strikes almost always ended up solidifying the power of the company while at the same time weakening the power of the union, if there even was one and if it had ever had any power to begin with. The strike might have been a weapon for the employee, as people still liked to think, but its edge was dull, and most employers were too strong to be permanently affected by its thrusts.

Nonetheless, the anti-management, anti-establishment momentum had long been building among America's working men, and after the Great War it would reach a peak that it would not attain again for several decades.

THERE ARE FEW JOBS AS
demoralizing as coal-mining, and so it is no surprise that it was probably the most strike-riddled of occupations. In 1902, the industry made headlines and struck fear into the marrow of Americans, when more than 140,000 miners in Pennsylvania laid down their picks and shovels. They did so just as an abnormally cold winter was about to begin, “to protest low wages, harsh working conditions and long hours.” It took the possibly unconstitutional mediation of President Theodore Roosevelt to settle the walkout on the verge of a great national freeze-out.

In 1920, although in better weather, coal miners in West Virginia decided they had had enough. It was the year after the much-publicized Boston Police Strike, in which many of that city's law enforcers watched for two or three nights, without so much as flinching, as store windows were smashed, the stores' contents looted, and violence awaited anyone who tried to make the case for order. And so it was the year in which Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge, best known for seldom opening his mouth, opened it long enough to denounce the police with the famous words “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” The phrase caught on, and as a result so did the previously—and continuously—nondescript Coolidge; in 1920, he was selected by the Republicans to be their vice-presidential nominee.

The year after the police strike, with Americans on edge, wondering which laboring men would strike next, disrupting capitalism, and perhaps even threatening civil war, it turned out to be West Virginia coal miners. They made their case against the owners eloquently. But the very nature of their duties made justice almost impossible for them. How do you fairly compensate a man who spends his entire day underground, descending before dawn, climbing out after dusk, never seeing so much as a ray of sunshine? How do you compensate him for breathing air that is thick with pollutants and chemical fumes, rather than crisp with the breezes of spring or autumn? How do you compensate him for feeling his health and strength slip away week by week, month by month, actually feeling himself get older more quickly than the calendar seems to permit? He will die young. He knows he will die young. Almost all miners do. Pick a miner at random, and the odds are that he has replaced his father, who went to his grave early. His son or sons will replace him when
his
grave is dug, and their lives too will end prematurely. It is the way of things in coal country, and in 1920 West Virginia was its heart.

But coal was one of the key ingredients in the American recipe of success, growth, and domination. And so it would remain for many years to come. Nothing, then, could be allowed to interfere with removing it from the ground, and there was as yet no other way to do it than to send men down into the earth to get it.

Back in 1920, when the West Virginia miners struck, Attorney General Palmer, who sensed the influence of radicals underground as well as atop, was among the most concerned. It was the last gasp for the anti-American forces, he seemed to think. It was also his own last gasp as a presidential candidate, what with other politicians having surpassed him in the public consciousness and his health having noticeably begun to ebb. So great was the matter, Palmer believed, that he insisted on talking personally with President Wilson. Mrs. Wilson agreed to give him a few minutes with her husband, but she was not happy about it. He, on the other hand, was not happy about so short a period with the chief executive. Biographer Robert K. Murray speculates on their conversation:

What actually was said at this meeting is not known. However, we can guess what happened. Palmer impressed upon the president the seriousness of the impending strike, pointing out its unquestionable effect on the nation's economy and its radical overtones. He then urged the president to take a strong stand and suggest that the government enjoin the miners from striking. Whether President Wilson accepted this latter proposal willingly or reluctantly is a matter for conjecture. Josephus Daniels, secretary of the navy, later maintained that had Wilson been a well man he most certainly would never have consented to Palmer's suggestions.

It hardly mattered to West Virginia miners that the government was going to enjoin them from striking. It was just talk.
No one
was going to enjoin them from striking, and when the specter of the Bolshies inevitably entered the discussion, it is likely that most of the miners rolled their eyes in confusion. Some had never heard of Bolsheviks. Some had never heard of Russia's 1917 uprising. A few had probably never even heard of Russia. There were no newspapers in the underground world, and few miners had the energy to read them at home, if there
was
one at home, when they were lifted out of the mine after dark. They might have known even less about anarchy and those who advocated it.

They were, nonetheless, smart enough to know who their antagonists really were: it was those who employed them and cared not a whit for their hardships—who, in fact, deliberately caused many of them. They referred to their employers, sometimes, in the disdainful singular. The people who ran the mines were “the man.” Said one West Virginia miner, summing up his reasons for striking, “We work in
his
mine. We live in
his
house. Our children go to
his
school. On Sunday we're preached at by
his
preacher. When we die, we're buried in
his
cemetery.”

As the miners became ever more dissatisfied with their lives under the earth, the man, early in 1920, had become ever more penurious, trying to break the United Mine Workers, the union that the coal men had recently joined, by cutting the salaries of all who belonged to it, promising to restore the money if the miners severed their ties with the UMW. They would also have to sever ties with the American Federation of Labor, or AFL, with which the UMW had recently aligned itself.

It was a tempting offer. But it was the man's offer; it could not be accepted, not even considered rationally. The miners would stick together in their refusal. They were fighting for something larger than a mere pay raise; it was dignity they wanted as well, dignity and respect and a voice in all decisions related to their precarious employment. The man, after all, had no idea what it was like deep in the shaft, walking around in what could so easily turn into a flaming, toxic tomb, his cries echoing to no purpose. The man probably grew timid when he walked down the stairs to the basement of his home.

On May 19, 1920, several members of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, the latter of whom were two brothers, arrived in the town of Matewan, in Mingo County, West Virginia. Miners there were striking. Management had ordered violence in response. The Baldwin-Felts goons stepped off the train and went straight to work, no instructions necessary. They evicted families from company-owned housing. They had been doing this kind of thing for years, and it came to them as naturally as going to church on Sunday. In a number of West Virginia coal towns, they had “forced striking miners from their homes, dumped their meager belongings along the railroad, and [driven] the families at gunpoint from the hollows.”

To Baldwin-Felts detectives, the sudden homelessness of a mining family was another successful day for themselves.

They were successful in Matewan. Most of the miners' shacks had been emptied of possessions and those possessions scattered not atop the railroad tracks this time but along the town's unpaved main street. Finishing their tasks, the Baldwin-Felts men collected their money at the mine's headquarters, then stopped in the town's lone restaurant for a self-congratulatory dinner. They were awaiting the last train of the day back to civilization. They would never be on it.

Sid Hatfield, sheriff of Matewan and one of the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feuders, had been born just a few years after “the Hatfields had tied three McCoys to a pawpaw bush and shot them dead, and he grew up with that meanness in him.” But his meanness was on the side of the miners. Sid—everybody called him by his first name—was one of the people, and the people,
his
people, were coal miners. As historian Lon Savage writes, Sid

had been only a boy during the Spanish-American War, when the nation lost some three hundred men in battle, but he became aware in the ensuing years that West Virginia had lost more men than that in a single year of coal mining accidents. After one of his family's friends was crushed to death, the widow and children were evicted without compensation from their company home to make room for a replacement miner. … [Sid] watched all this happen and was as much a part of it as the river and the coal.

He grew up to be a “rather handsome young man, slender, no more than 150 pounds in weight and five feet six in height.” But Sid was tougher than he looked. He had to be. The same was true of C. C. Testerman, the equally slight mayor of Matewan and another friend of the miners. Both were wiry, not much body weight but all of it muscle, able to take on opponents of far greater dimensions. Especially when Sid and C.C. held guns in their hands. Tonight, both did.

Accompanied by a small posse, they stood in the shadows of twilight outside the restaurant as the Baldwin-Felts men ate their evening meal that
day in Matewan. Stood resolutely. Inside, the detectives finished eating, paid their bill, and started walking toward the front door. The chugging of the last train of the day became faintly audible in the distance.

By then, Sid and C.C. had seen and heard even more than they had expected about the activities of the past few hours. “The report circulated,” according to Savage, “that a family with several children had been forced at gunpoint from their home, their furniture set out in the rain, the children left to stand in the drizzle. The stories grew worse: the detectives had thrown out a pregnant woman, a sick child, a tiny baby in its crib, all with nowhere to go. The miners' fury rose.”

It didn't matter to Sid and C.C. whether these particular stories were true or not. If they weren't true today, they would be true tomorrow or the day after, as they had been true yesterday—either in Matewan or a community nearby; the Baldwin-Felts methods were well known, oft-repeated. Someone had to take a stand against them, and who better than a Hatfield? When better than now? C.C. agreed and, like Sid, was ready to put his life on the line for the cause.

The train was visible in the distance, its whistle breaking the prickly silence. The detectives, obviously content with their supper, departed from the restaurant and turned down the street toward the depot. Had the miners not been on strike, they would still have been working, would not have seen what Sid was about to do on their behalf. He called out a warning to the Baldwin-Felts boys, waited for a response. The detectives stopped, but none of them said anything. Sid shifted his position slightly for a clear shot and drew his gun. The detectives drew their guns too, but the sheriff had the split-second advantage. He pulled his trigger twice, at two specific targets. His aim was unerring. The two targets, both named Felts, vanished in that instant from the world of the living; Baldwin-Felts was suddenly Baldwin and a bunch of other guys whose names nobody knew.

The gunfire was returned, and the sound of bullets being exchanged caused more people to head for the action, most of them miners who had nothing else to do with their time and had been standing around the fringes of the action as Sid and his men gathered outside the eatery. By the time the shooting ended that night, seven detectives were dead and another had been wounded and taken to a nearby hospital at less than
breakneck speed. Two miners were killed, and Mayor Testerman, who had also caught a bullet, maybe more than one, lay in the main street, rolling back and forth in the dirt, clutching at life with all his energy. It was not enough. He became the third casualty from Matewan. Four other residents of the town, men who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were injured by stray shots.

But there was more to come. The Matewan Massacre is not as famous as many other labor–management clashes, but it was longer, deadlier, and in many ways more dispiriting.

Some days later, relates Geoffrey Perrett, in
America in the Twenties
, the coal diggers would march south from Matewan, “cutting telephone and telegraph wires as they went. The governor mobilized the state police to stop them. The coal operators joined in by organizing a four-airplane air force that bombed and strafed” the miners, killing untold numbers. It was the first strike in American history fought, at least in part, from above.

The miners were horrified by the planes. They believed their own country had gone to war against them. Which, in a sense, it had. The miners sought and found refuge, but hiding was not what they really wanted. They were not that kind of men. It was retribution they sought, and with the help of friends and neighbors the miners were able to arm themselves with all manner of weapons, including submachine guns and homemade grenades. They fired at the planes, heaved the grenades into mobs of state police pursuing them on the ground. It took the lawmen, virtually West Virginia's entire force, to restore order and persuade some of the miners to return to work the next day.

But only for a time. Although the first shots had been fired in May, Matewan was still a battlefield in July, when the miners struck again. This time, though, they went after the owners in a different way. Although a number of the original strikers had returned to the caverns of their employment, resigned to a continuation of the worst, those who had not returned had found a new vocation. Working in the secrecy of their cellars, they put together crude but effective bombs and, in the middle of the night, hurled them into the railroad cars that waited for shipments of coal—which was once again coming out of the ground; but now, with so many of the cars having been blown to pieces, it had nowhere to go.