The Battle of Blair Mountain

THE ECHOES OF the shots fired at the Matewan depot on May 19, 1920, had hardly died down before the air was filled with cries of outrage from the leaders of the United Mine Workers and their allies. Their indignation was undiminished by the fact that the miners had given better than they had gotten on the streets of the town. Seven of the ten men who were slain had been Baldwin-Felts agents. And when the smoke cleared, the detectives had fled, leaving the field to Sid Hatfield and his union allies.

The first reports from bloody Matewan were fragmentary and unclear. But in UMW headquarters in Indianapolis, John L. Lewis did not wait for the details before he thundered his fury at both West Virginia Governor John J. Cornwell and the operators of the mines. “Press dispatches today tell of another shocking outrage in the long lists of such incidents that have been perpetrated in your state by private detectives in the employ of the coal corporations,” Lewis wired Cornwell on the day after the shoot-out, making sure to send copies of his telegram to the nation’s major papers. “Undoubtedly the American public must be astounded to know that such conditions can exist in any state in this union.”

The recently formed American Civil Liberties Union joined in the assault. Established in 1917 as the National Civil Liberties Bureau, the organization’s initial mission was the defense of conscientious objectors and critics of the war, whom the Wilson Administration prosecuted relentlessly. When peace returned, the group’s lawyers were kept busy on behalf of the targets of various Red scares instigated by Federal and state governments, part of the pervasive paranoia over the Bolshevik regime that had just seized control of the Russian Czar’s Empire. The ACLU’s leaders saw the violence in West Virginia, not just as a labor dispute, but more fundamentally, as another challenge to the Bill of Rights. Condemning Cornwell’s labor policies, the ACLU declared that the carnage in Matewan was an inevitable result of them. Cornwell’s priority, now, the ACLU said, must be to reestablish free speech and free assembly in Mingo and Logan Counties.

The very next day no less a personage than the president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, added his voice to the chorus of protest. Gompers appealed to Republican Senator William Kenyon of Iowa, chairman of the Senate committee on education and labor, urging him to conduct an investigation of the violence in Matewan, as that same committee had probed into the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek violence in 1913. Denouncing “the invasion of West Virginia by an armed band of men in the pay of absentee owners of West Virginia mining property,” Gompers charged that in West Virginia, “the blackjack and the pistol, the high powered rifle and the machine gun have been substituted for statute law, judges and juries.” The bloodshed in Matewan, Gompers said, was simply a repetition of like outrages from West Virginia’s past. “The sense of justice of the American people must be outraged by such usurpations of power.”

Reluctant to wait while Kenyon considered Gompers’s plea, local union leaders turned elsewhere in Washington, and sought the help of the nation’s chief executive, Woodrow Wilson. In a telegram to the White House Keeney and Mooney, the top officials of the UMW’s District 17, protested the hiring of detectives by the mine operators, condemned Governor Cornwell and called upon Wilson “to take some immediate steps which will assure the miners of this state that the President is willing to investigate these terrible and disgraceful conditions.”

It was not hard to understand why the union men would turn to the president for help in this critical hour. The man in the White House was the same leader whose New Freedom had once provided liberals with a battle cry and hope. “Here muster not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity,” the schoolmaster president had declared as he began his first term in March of 1913. “Men’s hearts wait upon us, men’s lives hang in the balance, men’s hopes call upon us to see what we will do.”

But since that day much had happened to torment and transform this once inspirational figure. In May of 1920, when the UMW pleaded for his help in West Virginia, Thomas Woodrow Wilson was only sixty-four years old, even in those years an age not all that far removed from the prime of life. But for this sixty-four-year-old man, the energy and convictions that had driven his career were now lost in the past. His body was so eroded by the stroke he had suffered the previous fall while touring the country on behalf of the controversial Treaty of Versailles that he could barely grasp a sheet of paper in his right hand or utter more than a few sentences. And his spirit was so embittered by frustration and defeat that he could not muster the compassion to pardon the aging Socialist Eugene Debs, whom he had jailed for sedition during the war. Of Wilson, Norman Thomas, who inherited Debs’s mantle as Socialist leader, said bitterly, that he “had proved recreant to every principle of liberalism which he once professed.”

A broad panoply of forces were at work, all of them it seemed undermining the prospects of not only the miners in West Virginia but all of those in the country who still shared a commitment to the principles to which Wilson had once seemed dedicated. The impact of this changed condition was underlined by the contrast with the political landscape less than a decade before, when Wilson became the first Democrat in nearly thirty years to gain the nation’s highest office.

Woodrow Wilson had begun his climb in national politics at an important juncture in the history of American labor—just as the trade union movement was forging an alliance with the Democratic Party. In the late 19th century the Republicans, led by William McKinley, had been successful in winning the votes of workers by promising a full dinner pail and by delivering prosperity. And McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, helped to maintain labor’s allegiance to the Republicans by championing legislative reforms that would protect unions and workers against the power of the corporate barons who had emerged in the industrial age. It soon became apparent, though, that the talk of reform was mostly just that. Roosevelt was unable to persuade his party leaders in Congress to give labor any meaningful relief. Labor grew even more estranged from the GOP when Roosevelt departed the White House to be replaced in the presidency and at the helm of his party by William Howard Taft, who did not even pay lip service to the idea of aiding labor. Taft’s stance helped push labor and the Democrats into each other’s arms. As the Democratic presidential nominee in 1912, Woodrow Wilson took his cue from his party’s pro-labor platform, redolent with calls for curbs on the excesses of the giant corporations, and moved to bolster his ties with the trade unions. In response, AFL’s leaders and operatives around the country bent every effort to turn out the workingman’s vote for Wilson. John L. Lewis, for example, who had just been appointed an AFL organizer, campaigned for Wilson in New Mexico and Arizona. With the help of labor, and the Bull Moose candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt, which divided Republican voters, Wilson captured the White House for the Democrats.

Mindful of labor’s contribution to his victory, the new president selected as his secretary of labor, former Pennsylvania congressman and former UMW official William W. Wilson. The new secretary set a pattern for a number of his cabinet colleagues of consulting often with the AFL leadership, particularly on judicial appointees. As the 1916 election approached, President Wilson threw his weight behind measures to aid such varied victims of untrammeled economic power as merchant seamen, farmers, women and children. Most dramatically, the president averted a train strike by pushing through Congress legislation granting the rail unions their demand for an eight-hour day, which had the effect of raising wages by about 25 percent.

Labor’s reward was a significant role in the massive task of organizing the economy for war. Even before the United States plunged into the conflict that had been raging in Europe since 1914, Wilson gave Gompers a seat alongside top corporate officials on the Council on National Defense, charged with responsibility for readying the nation’s economy to meet wartime demands.

The war brought other benefits for unions. With munitions orders sparking the economy and labor in short supply, workers pushed back against their bosses. They changed jobs, joined unions and threatened to go out on strike. Unions also gained from the rulings of the National War Labor Board, created by President Wilson to implement labor policies for all war-connected industry. The new agency promoted the eight-hour day in some industries, raised wages, granted women equal pay for equal work and in other ways large and small fostered the spread of unionism. Between 1917 and 1920, union membership jumped by more than 70 percent from three million to more than five million, for the first time approaching 20 percent of the workforce.

For the coal miners and their union, the war took on special meaning because of the critical need for their output to feed the nation’s war machine. “Scarcity of coal is the most serious danger which confronts us,” Woodrow Wilson declared. Backing up his words, he ordered the draft boards of West Virginia to exempt all miners declaring that they were “the essential labor for the support of the government and the liberties of free men everywhere.” The United Mine Workers Journal featured a statement from General Pershing asserting that the “work and support of the coal miners thrills us and helps to make our hearts more strong for the battle. I have always been certain that organized labor would stand steadfastly behind us until victory for democracy is achieved.”

The government efforts to promote support for the war raised the political consciousness of the miners. The propaganda that called men to the colors and sold Liberty Bonds also spoke of overturning autocracy, demanded sacrifice and commitment and justified violence as a legitimate means to achieve righteous goals. Americanism became a surrogate for socialism, embodying the principles of equality and liberty that socialism itself championed.

Over 50,000 miners ignored their draft exemptions and enlisted and 3,000 of these came home in coffins. But conditions were even more dangerous at home. Indeed District 17 President Frank Keeney wrote Wilson that the West Virginia miners had a higher death rate than the AEF. In 1918 mine explosions and accidents claimed the lives of 404 West Virginia miners. When thirteen coal diggers died in a mine explosion, the Mine Workers Journal declared that “these local boys died in the interests of democracy, they were exerting their manpower in the production of coal with which to help win the war.”

With the mines now under the control of the Federal Fuel Administration, in return for a promise not to strike, the miners got a wage increase. It was a modest hike, particularly in comparison with the huge profits the operators were reaping. But more important was the dramatic growth of the union, whose organizing drives were fostered by the Fuel Administration’s determination to regulate and stabilize the mines. By the end of the war the membership of District 17 had jumped from 7,000 in 1917 to more than 50,000, while nationwide the UMW’s ranks expanded to take in nearly 500,000 of the country’s 760,000 miners.

But if the labor movement in general did well during the war, other liberal causes suffered setbacks whose impact would carry over into the postwar era, leading to collateral damage to trade unions. In the early months of 1917 as he struggled with the decision of whether to lead his country into the conflict in Europe, Wilson worried that war would undo many of the reforms he had promoted in his first term. If the United States entered the war, Wilson told Josephus Daniels, his navy secretary, “you and I will live to see the day that the big interests are in the saddle.” And he admitted to journalist Frank Cobb that he was reluctant to awaken “the spirit of ruthless brutality” that would infect “the very fiber of our national life.”

Wilson himself did much to make his gloomy premonition come true. One of the early ominous signs was government’s campaign against Big Bill Haywood’s union, the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical fringe of the American labor movement. For conservatives and business leaders, reluctant to attack the more respectable Gompers and the AFL directly, the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies as they were called, with their dedication to strikes and industrial sabotage, and their long-term goal of toppling capitalism made an ideal target.

Wilson ordered Federal troops who were already on duty in the West protecting industrial sites against German sabotage to ensure that union activism of the Wobblies did not disrupt the war effort. As things turned out the troops served as strikebreakers and provided a shield for local authorities and vigilantes to crack down on the Wobblies. Far from objecting the AFL encouraged this practice, in the belief that obstructing the “subversive” IWW would clear a path for patriotic AFL unions to move in. Instead, military rule drove out not only the Wobblies but also the AFL. Army officers in charge saw to it that in the interest of labor stability and continued production, the workers joined company unions. Meanwhile, in the fall of 1917 Federal agents raided IWW headquarters around the nation, and a Federal grand jury indicted nearly 200 IWW leaders on charges of sedition and espionage.

The success of the war on the Wobblies coincided with assaults on labor’s allies all across the board, which gained legitimacy from a series of repressive laws Wilson prodded Congress into enacting. The most odious of these new statutes was the Espionage Act, prohibiting not only spying and sabotage but also public criticism that could be considered as harmful to the military. Its most celebrated victim was Eugene V. Debs, the perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate and longtime leader of the railroad workers. Debs was convicted after he ridiculed Wilson’s claims that he was waging the war to “make the world safe for democracy.” “This is too much even for a joke,” Debs had remarked. That was enough for a Federal judge to sentence him to ten years in prison, an occasion that prompted Debs to deliver what would become his most memorable public utterance. “While there is a lower class I am in it,” Debs told the court. “While there is a criminal element I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison I am not free.” But Debs’s idealistic rhetoric did not stop the wave of repression, which spread to state and local government.

In March of 1918 Russia’s revolutionary rulers, who had overthrown the Czar, made a separate peace with Imperial Germany and deserted the Allied cause. The new Bolshevik rulers of the Kremlin called upon workers everywhere to rise up and put an end to the war of the capitalist oppressors. Nothing of the sort happened. But the threat, real or imagined, gave new impetus to the obsession with subversion, which persisted even after the slaughter in Europe ground to a halt on November 11, 1918. Even some supposed liberals, like Labor Secretary William Wilson, took the occasion of a Washington conference of governors and mayors on postwar planning in March 1919 to condemn the recent general strike in Seattle, and other walkouts in Butte, Montana, Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey. These were not really “industrial economic disputes in their origin,” Wilson claimed, but rather part of “a deliberate attempt to create a social and political revolution that would establish a Soviet form of government in the United States and put into effect the economic theories of the Bolsheviki of Russia.”

The widespread belief in the connection between labor and violent revolution that Secretary Wilson’s remarks mirrored had been fostered by the nation’s wartime experience. Americans had emerged from the war militant in their patriotism and in their allegiance to what was often called “the American way.” Though no one knew exactly what this credo meant, businessmen assumed that it stood for their right to bar union organizers from their premises. War stories of spies and international intrigue had fed the public’s imagination and stretched its credulity. In their anxiety citizens did not it find hard to accept the notion that the struggle of American workers to improve their lot through collective bargaining was the leading edge of an armed revolution engineered by the rulers of Soviet Russia.

To be sure, in 1919, Russia’s Bolshevik regime that Secretary Wilson spoke of fearfully was being racked by civil war. While in America’s supposedly Red-ridden homeland, the Atlantic Monthly estimated the total members of the Socialist, Communist and Communist Labor parties at a not so grand total of 130,000. In other words the total membership of the parties of the Left amounted to barely more than two-tenths of one percent of the adult population. But such statistics were overshadowed in the spring and summer of 1919 by a series of genuinely alarming incidents of violence and near misses.

Alerted by the explosion of a bomb sent through the mail to the home of a U.S. senator, a conscientious postal clerk turned up more than thirty similar neatly wrapped infernal devices, which had been set aside because they lacked sufficient postage. Their addressees made up a pantheon of American business and government, including John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Attorney General Palmer.

A few weeks after escaping that threat, whose progenitor was never discovered, Palmer was going to bed for the night when he heard a bang, as if something had hit his front door. Then came a blast. Rushing outside he found some human limbs, all that remained of his uninvited caller who had been blown to pieces by his own contraption. Nearby, investigators found a telltale clue, a copy of the radical publication Plain Words.

While the spate of bombings and attempted bombings lent credence to the specter of Red Revolution, it remained for the most part only a potential menace. A more immediate and tangible problem for the public, and particularly for the labor movement, was inflation, which had gained impetus from wartime shortages and continued to rage out of control following the Armistice. The notion that inflation might have at least as much to do with the soaring prices manufacturers were charging for their goods as with the wages they paid their hired help did not seem to occur to President Wilson. That summer he warned workers against going out on strikes, which he claimed “are certain to make matters worse, not better—worse for them and for everybody else.” But discontented wage earners paid little heed to Wilson’s warning, thus darkening Wilson’s view of the labor movement even more. Indeed, as the strikes mounted, it was hard to distinguish the rhetoric and views of the Democratic President from those of his Republican opponents.

In September of 1919 most of Boston’s policemen walked off their beats, demanding higher wages and affiliation of their union with the AFL. Vandals and looters went on the rampage and Boston papers called the striking men in blue “agents of Lenin” and described the city’s plight as a “Bolshevist nightmare.” Responding to a plea for help from the city’s mayor, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge dispatched the state militia to patrol Boston’s streets. When asked about rehiring the strikers, who had been fired for leaving their jobs, Governor Coolidge delivered what would become a classic response: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” That statement made Coolidge a national hero, gaining him the prominence that led to his selection as vice president and ultimately his ascension to the nation’s highest office. But in substance and tone the words of the new champion of conservatism scarcely differed from those uttered by President Wilson, the erstwhile paladin of liberalism. A fortnight before his crippling stroke, Wilson branded the strike “a crime against civilization.”

But there were higher stakes than the salaries of a few thousand policemen in the postwar industrial conflict that now challenged Wilson. Two of the country’s most important industries—coal and steel—pitted powerful employers against their workers. These two businesses, together with the railroads, made up the backbone of the American economy. Coal and steel workers had watched with envy and admiration when only three years earlier Wilson had helped the rail workers win a historic victory, the eight-hour day. The steel workers too looked to Wilson for support as their nascent union sought to flex its muscles, convinced as their leader John Fitzpatrick put it “that the government would intervene and see to it that the steel barons be brought to time.” But with the dismantling of the wartime labor agencies and his own increasing self-absorption and resentment, Wilson lacked the means or the inclination to play the role of friendly arbiter that labor sought. Instead, when more than half of the nation’s steelworkers struck the steel mills in September of 1919, Wilson sent Federal troops and marshals to help break the strike.

The mine workers were in a better tactical position than the steel unions. First of all, labor relations in the industry were still governed by agreements reached during the war under the aegis of the Federal Fuel Administration. Then, too, the mine workers had an influential friend in Wilson’s labor secretary, William Wilson, former official of their union. Finally, and not least, they had a formidable new leader in John L. Lewis, who in 1919 at age thirty-nine had become acting president. A hulking figure of a man, Lewis made an indelible impression because of his heavy jowls and bushy eyebrows, which would endear him to political cartoonists for decades. He employed his deep voice, to bully or charm with equal ease. He was a master both of caustic invective and soaring rhetoric, replete with biblical and Shakespearean references carefully calculated for their effect. He pleaded labor’s cause, Lewis once said, “not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host.”

But where the union saw ingratitude, their government saw only a menace to economic recovery. And this was a threat the Wilson Administration would not tolerate, as it had made clear even before the strike. Wilson had been felled by his stroke a month earlier, but a statement was issued in his name responding to the strike call issued by union president Lewis, condemning the union’s action and warning that “the law will be enforced” and “the means will be found to protect the interests of the nation.”

In the event, the Wilson Administration did not even wait for violence to break out to intervene. Playing a key role in the government’s strategy, and destined to loom large in the history of that period was Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer. Raised as a Quaker, Palmer was bright enough to have graduated from Swarthmore with highest honors at nineteen, and two years later to gain admission to the bar. Entering politics as a faithful servant of Pennsylvania’s Democratic organization, he won election to Congress and in 1912 as the leader of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Democratic Convention, he helped to swing to candidate Wilson the delegates from the Keystone State he needed for the nomination.

That service was enough for Wilson to appoint him to the Federal bench and ultimately to make him attorney general. In the fall of 1919, with the president weakened by illness and distracted by events abroad, the nation shaken by domestic turmoil and no apparent heir to Wilson as 1920 Democratic standard bearer, Palmer saw an opportunity and seized it with both hands. Even before the coal miners walked out, the newly minted attorney general thrust himself to the center stage of the nation’s affairs by persuading the stricken president to permit him to seek an injunction against the strike.

It is not clear that Wilson needed much persuasion. Josephus Daniels, Wilson’s secretary of the navy, confidant and admirer, maintained later that had he been in good health, Wilson would have “nipped the injunction in the bud.” It was true that the president was ailing. But the decision to enjoin the mine workers was of a piece with Wilson’s rhetoric on the Boston police strike and his crackdown on the steel strike, both of which had preceded his breakdown.

At any rate Palmer got his way, getting a green light from the president and approval from the courts. Citing provisions of the Lever Act, which Congress had passed during the war to give government extra authority to deal with national emergencies, Palmer won an injunction against the strike on the eve of the scheduled walkout. Labor was furious. Its leaders had refrained from opposing the Lever Act only because they had been assured that it would not be used to prevent strikes. Gompers, who up until then had tried to talk Lewis out of the strike, declared the injunction a broken pledge and gave his full support to the strike.

For his part, Lewis charged that the president and his cabinet were the allies of “sinister financial interests.” The injunction amounted to, the union chief added, “the most sweeping abrogation of the rights of citizens that has ever been issued by the Federal Court.” Lewis’s public outrage was echoed privately in the inner councils of the administration by Labor Secretary William Wilson, who threatened to quit, even going so far as to write out a letter of resignation to the president. The labor secretary’s indignation was fueled not only by the violation of the promise to labor on the Lever Act but also by the fact that he himself was working furiously to reach an agreement at the bargaining table when Palmer acted, without any advance notice to his cabinet colleague. The old union man warned Palmer that apart from its unfairness, the injunction was impractical because it would not end the strike.

He was right about that. When the November 1 strike deadline came, even though the UMW leaders technically complied with the restraining order, the miners in the pits did not need the economic realities spelled out to them. Unbidden by their leaders, nearly 400,000 walked off the job, shutting down the industry. This defiance of the Federal courts served to confirm the public’s fears that America the Beautiful was about to be engulfed by a Red tide. “Revolution Is Stake Radicals Play For in Strike of Miners,” one newspaper proclaimed. “Red Bolshevism Directs This Blow Against the Nation,” another headline blared. And the cartoonist for the Post Intelligencer in Seattle, one of the hotbeds of anxiety, depicted a monstrous foot labeled “Coal Strike” about to trample the Capitol dome in Washington.

With that sort of wind at his back, Attorney General Palmer was emboldened to push even harder against the coal strike. Back to court he went, gaining a new injunction, which went beyond barring the UMW high command from leading the strike by commanding them to take steps to cancel it. Under Gompers’s leadership the AFL executive council decried the injunction, pledged its full support to the miners and urged the public to give its backing to the miners.

But John L. Lewis gauged his union’s predicament differently. Reckoning that public sentiment was running against him, he canceled the strike, called upon the miners to return to work and declared: “We are Americans, we cannot fight our government.” A generation later Lewis would bring outrage upon himself and make his union notorious by doing just that. But for the present, the public and the press hailed Lewis, only recently condemned as a tool of the Bolshevik conspiracy, as a labor statesman. Businessmen and politicians everywhere rejoiced in the end of the strike.

Except that the strike was not over. Tens of thousands of miners would not return to the pits. “This strike can’t be stopped,” declared Alexander Howatt, president of the Kansas miners, and a critic of Lewis’s policies. “We’ll call their bluff.” The mutiny of the rank and file might have persuaded objective minds of the genuineness of the miners’ grievances. But the majority of the press simply interpreted the continuation of the strike as further evidence of a Bolshevik plot. Lewis and other UMW officials were cited for violating the injunction and bound over to face Federal criminal investigation.

But none of this served to dig any coal. Winter was coming on, and as temperatures dropped so did the coal reserves. Schools and factories closed, electric signs dimmed and trains were cut back. Labor Secretary Wilson, talked out of resigning by his cabinet colleagues, argued that something needed to be done besides getting injunctions. It was his persuasion that led the administration to offer the unions a 14 percent increase with the promise that an arbitration commission would investigate their other demands.

Lewis knew that the miners wanted more. But he also knew the weaknesses of the union’s position. Aside from the negative attitude of the public, the UMW had a more tangible problem—the non-union mines in southern West Virginia had continued to produce throughout the strike. Their output was steadily increasing as the West Virginia operators sought to take advantage of the opportunity their resistance to unionism had given them. Or as Harry Olmstead, chief labor negotiator for the Williamson field operators, later boasted: “The Williamson and neighboring non-union fields of West Virginia and Kentucky gave to the country practically all the supply of coal that was had and averted general disaster among the railroads and industries of the country.”

The end of the coal strike did little to allay public hostility toward liberals and radicals of all sorts, particularly those who were unfortunate enough not to claim U.S. citizenship. This was an environment perfectly suited to the inclinations and ambitions of Attorney General Palmer. In that turbulent summer of 1919, shortly after his own house was bombed, Palmer had gotten a special $500,000 appropriation from Congress to bolster efforts to ferret out subversives. For this purpose, Palmer used the funds to establish a new agency, the General Intelligence Division, and installed at its head an eager young agent named J. Edgar Hoover, who soon compiled a list of 60,000 purportedly dangerous radicals. The nation’s new top Red hunter also sent to every newspaper and periodical of note in the country letters over Palmer’s signature warning of “the real menace . . . of the Red Movement.”

To root out this danger, in January of 1920 Palmer’s agents swooped down on alleged nests of subversion around the country, arresting more than 4,000, and deporting hundreds. Often arrests were made without the formality of warrants. Prisoners were routinely held incommunicado and denied the right to legal counsel. But the few who questioned these procedures were drowned out by the patriotic majority. “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringements of liberty,” scolded the Washington Post. And the Washington Star chimed in by underlining the danger the country faced: “This is no mere scare, no phantom of heated imagination—it is cold hard plain fact.”

If further validation of the raids were needed, Palmer himself supplied it. He claimed that the evidence from the raids served to prove that the domestic radical movement, presumably including labor unions, was dominated by radical aliens. Describing the prisoners caught in his net he declared: “Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity and crime; from their lopsided faces, sloping brows and misshapen features may be recognized as the unmistakable criminal type.”

Though Attorney General Palmer spearheaded the great Red Scare of 1919–1920, the person ultimately responsible was of course the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. Josephus Daniels and other admirers of the president later blamed the president’s toleration of Palmer’s excesses on Wilson’s health. That argument had merit, up to a point. Since September of 1919 Woodrow Wilson had played only a limited role in the government he headed. The cabinet kept meeting, but without the president, at the call of its ranking member, Secretary of State Robert Lansing. But when Wilson learned of these informal sessions he viewed them as bordering on mutiny and summarily fired Lansing, replacing him with Bainbridge Colby, a New York lawyer bereft of foreign policy experience.

But just as important as his physical debilitation in shaping Wilson’s attitude toward Palmer’s excesses was the fact that what mental powers the president possessed were focused on his losing battle to save the League of Nations. When he did find time to consider the furor at home his reasoning seems to have been a mishmash. On one hand he still liked to think of himself as committed to the defense of free speech and other civil liberties. On the other hand, he grew to share in the fear of Bolshevism, which his attorney general sought to dramatize. Indeed in Wilson’s case his antagonism toward Reds took on a personal aspect because he had come to regard the Bolsheviks as a prime force in opposing his own blueprint for international peace, including the League.

Yet Wilson, like many politicians before and after him, liked to have things both ways. In his own mind he wanted to see himself as a guardian of the nation’s rights and liberties. In the same message to Capitol Hill in which he asked for a new sedition law, Wilson warned: “The seed of revolution is repression,” and urged care and restraint in administering all restrictions on liberty, for whatever that was worth. Thus in April 1920, at the first cabinet meeting he had attended in more than six months, Wilson turned to his attorney general and said, “Palmer, do not let this country see red.” “It was a needed admonition,” observed Josephus Daniels, “for Palmer was seeing red behind every bush and every demand for an increase in wages.” Needed it may have been, but Wilson’s caveat certainly must have surprised Palmer, coming as it did from the same man who had given him every encouragement in his anti-Bolshevist binge.

This was the president to whom in the following month, after the slaughter in Matewan, the union miners of West Virginia appealed for help. Keeney and Mooney made their plea to Joseph Tumulty, Wilson’s most trusted adviser on political matters, asking him to make an appointment with the president for John Spivak, a liberal journalist recruited by the ACLU to aid the union cause in West Virginia. Spivak, the District 17 leaders said, “represents all the organized miners of West Virginia.”

Spivak had been dispatched to Washington once before to seek White House help in the fall of 1919 following the abortive union protest at Marmet and had met briefly with Tumulty. “From out of me poured details of the miners’ difficulties, of organizers beaten and sometimes killed, of the Governor’s refusal to enforce civil rights and of the miners’ determination to exercise these rights, even if they had to use force,” Spivak later recalled. In his zeal and naïveté Spivak hoped that Tumulty would promise immediate action. Instead all he got for his pains was a vague promise to look into the matter. “He seemed anxious to get rid of me,” Spivak observed. Nothing came of that meeting.

Just as nothing came of the telegram that Keeney and Mooney sent in May of 1920, except for a letter from Attorney General Palmer. Claiming to be speaking for the president, Palmer wrote Mooney that Wilson lacked authority to intervene. Because Edith Bolling Wilson, the president’s second wife, managed to shield her husband from most things in the world outside his sickroom, there is no evidence to suggest the president ever saw or even knew of the telegram from the embattled leaders of District 17. But given Wilson’s postwar attitude toward the cause of organized labor, there is no reason to believe that he would have looked with favor on the miners’ plea for help. At any rate, all that is known is that the president made no response and took no action.

The mine workers did get a response from another Washington politician, Iowa Senator Kenyon, to whom Gompers had appealed, contending that the national sense of justice had been outraged by the abuses of the West Virginia mine owners. There was a time in the not so distant past when Gompers’s assessment might have been accurate, when political leaders and public opinion would have registered a protest and when Kenyon would have been moved to act. But that time was over and done with. A week after Gompers’s appeal, he got Kenyon’s response, but it was not the answer he was looking for. The violence in West Virginia was not an appropriate issue for Senate consideration, Kenyon wrote Gompers. Congress should first wait and see what action the state courts would take.