The Battle of Blair Mountain

WHILE PUBLICLY decrying the conditions that brought on the May 19 shoot-out in Matewan, union leaders privately regarded the outcome of the violence as a precious opportunity. For years their organizing efforts in southern West Virginia had been stymied not just by the heavy-handed tactics of the Baldwin-Felts operatives but also by the intimidating specter cast by the detective agency. But now the bodies littering the street at Matewan Station served to undercut the aura of invincibility that had cloaked the detectives and repressed efforts at unionization.

It was no accident that in the immediate wake of what was becoming known as the Matewan Massacre, miners flocked to join the union fold. “Once these outlaws were out of the way there was a great rush for membership in the union,” declared the United Mine Workers Journal. Mother Jones, who had been roving through southern West Virginia on behalf of the UMW, came to Williamson to add her personal brand of fuel to the fire. “I want to say to the robbers of Logan that Mother Jones is going in, we are going to clean up West Virginia,” she declared. “I am not going to take any guns. I am going in there with the American flag, that is my banner and no rotten robber or gunman can meddle with me.”

The national union threw its support behind the organizing drive with what counted even more than rhetorical inspiration—money. In response to a substantial grant from headquarters, Frank Keeney wrote to International Vice President William Green, who years later would head the AFL: “We have Mingo County nearly completed and are breaking into McDowell. I do not propose to be blocked, bluffed or brow beaten in this campaign until every miner is in the organization.”

Late in June when the miners convened en masse in Williamson to rally behind the union, they instructed Keeney to make another effort to persuade the operators to bargain with the union. But lest anyone mistake their militance, they voted to call out their members on strike if coal operators continued to ignore the union’s efforts to negotiate. Sure enough, starting July 1, 6,000 men struck twenty mines in Mingo and Pike counties with a daily output of 25,000 tons.

But as Keeney and his comrades would soon learn, whatever advantage they might have gained from the bloodshed in Matewan would prove to be temporary. While the union counted the battle of Matewan as a victory, Tom Felts had plenty of agents to take the place of the casualties of that encounter. And the coal companies would have no trouble finding other allies in their struggle against the union. Indeed by massive use of their economic power, the operators were able to enlist the resources of the state and Federal government against the union men, turning their contest with organized labor into a lopsided struggle.

Hoping to aid the UMW cause, the American Civil Liberties Union tried to drum up public support and provide legal assistance. But however well-intentioned, these genteel tactics proved illsuited for the cut-throat nature of the struggle in West Virginia. The ACLU seemed “under the impression that there is some semblance of legal procedure here,” Jonathan Spivak, the organization’s man on the scene, groused in a letter to the ACLU president, Roger Baldwin. “There is not. You can’t hold a meeting here, get pinched, and then fight it out in the courts. If you try to hold a meeting in the southern counties you’ll never live to see the courts,” Spivak said, and then added this warning: “This state is a powder keg ready to blow up any minute.”

Like the miners, the operators saw this contest as a life-and-death struggle. And when the union made efforts to negotiate, the operators rejected them out of hand. Typical was the response of H. M. Ernst, assistant general manager of the Pond Creek Coal Co., to a telegram from Keeney, asking to bargain on behalf of the Pond Creek’s miners, who had signed up for the union almost to a man. “We know of no organization among our men nor any differences regarding wages, working conditions and so forth,” Ernst replied stiffly. “The feeling among our men and the company is unusually harmonious at the present time, but there is a very bitter feeling against your organization. In view of these facts we have nothing to discuss with you and must respectfully and emphatically decline your invitation.”

Keeney, as he did right after the May 19 shootings, once again sought help from Washington, this time from the Department of Labor, asking the agency to mediate the dispute. In response, two agents from the department met with an official of the Coal Operators Association, whom they presented with a statement warning that “serious trouble,” causing property damage and loss of life, threatened unless the coal dispute was settled. The best approach, the statement advised, was through collective bargaining, either with a union or some other method that assured the miners’ representation.

The operators promptly rejected those terms and sent the Labor Department agents on their way. Instead of negotiating, the owners brought in strikebreakers by the trainload and began reopening the struck mines. “Are you in need of any miners?” one enterprising labor agency wrote the struck mines. “If so we can offer you for immediate shipment any number of experienced miners, with or without families of any nationality desired.” Once they received an order, the labor agencies often did not bother to inform the workers they recruited that they would be going into the cauldron of a bitter struggle. Indeed, in some cases they told them they were be going to work for unionized mines.

The unions did not sit idly by and accept the newcomers. They put their own men on the trains entering Mingo County and saw to it that each train of scabs was greeted by a reception committee of strikers and organizers. “Upon alighting the men would be surrounded by dozens and perhaps hundreds of the strikers who would seek first to induce them to refuse to go further and accept transportation back,” complained Harry Olmstead, chairman of the Williamson Coal Operators Association. “Should this matter of persuasion fail it was followed by a system of abuse, scathing denunciation, vilification.”

Even worse, Olmstead contended that the strikers seemed to have the law on their side. Sheriff Blankenship, whose support for the union had already been demonstrated, sent his deputies to the train stations along with the striking miners to confront the strikebreakers imported by the mine owners and to underline the risks they ran. Stressing to the unhappy visitors the bitterness of the conflict they faced, the union representatives often offered to pay their carfare back to their homes. Indeed, during the first six months of the dispute, District 17 officials spent $14,000 buying return tickets for would-be strikebreakers. Some were in such a hurry to depart that they left their belongings behind them, and Keeney later collected twenty-two suitcases filled with the clothing of erstwhile scabs.

When, despite the efforts of the union, the operators managed to reopen nearly all the mines, under the protecting guns of the Baldwin-Felts guards, the union did not give up. Strikers continually harassed workers in the reopened mines, dynamited the tipples where the coal cars were unloaded and strafed the entrances with rifle fire from the hills. A favorite tactic of the union forces was to place tree trunks across the tracks used by the mine cars. When the drivers of the cars stopped and got out to clear the tracks, the miners fired at them from ambush.

The governor of Kentucky ordered units of the state’s National Guard to Pike County, bordering Mingo, to patrol the mine fields on the west side of the Tug River. But West Virginia, unlike Kentucky, had never reestablished its national guard, which had been federalized during the war. Governor Cornwell was forced to rely on sheriff’s deputies to keep order, with mixed results. In anti-union McDowell County, south and east of Mingo, the sheriff’s office did what it could to aid the operators by protecting the trains bringing in strikebreakers, leading to repeated clashes with miners. On Independence Day of 1920, three McDowell County deputies were shot at by miners, firing on them from ambush with high-powered rifles, or so the sheriff’s office claimed. But the miners said they only opened fire after they themselves were shot at while going to a union meeting. Two miners and two deputies were wounded in the skirmish. Two days later, in a firefight between a group of deputies and a half dozen miners with high-powered rifles, two men were shot and wounded on each side, with miners and the deputies each claiming they were ambushed by the other.

Antagonism intensified and led to more bloodshed. The home of McDowell deputy and mine guard Berman Hatfield, known for his brutal abuse of miners, was burned to the ground in early July. A few days later, Hatfield’s bullet-ridden body was found near the railroad tracks in the town of Panther, near the Mingo County line, apparently shot from ambush. Soon after, miners erected a mock effigy of Hatfield’s grave site on a sandbar in the Tug River near Matewan, a throwback to 17th-century English custom, signifying the depth of their hatred of the murdered deputy.

But in Mingo County itself the sheriff’s office was a different story. The operators wanted Sheriff Blankenship’s deputies to guide the strikebreakers through the threatening crowds of strikers and union supporters. But Blankenship, to the surprise of no one who knew him, refused. Since the sheriff had only had two deputies, the Red Jacket coal company sent him a list of its own mine guards, asking him to deputize them. Red Jacket, the largest coal operation in Mingo County, sprawling across 11,000 acres adjoining the Tug River and employing more than 1,000 men, and a leader in the use of yellow-dog contracts, clearly had much to gain from such an arrangement and had abundant resources to carry out its part of the bargain. But Blankenship refused to go along. He claimed the company’s privatization plan would violate state law, a nicety sheriffs elsewhere in southern West Virginia ignored.

But it did them little good. Cornwell had no authority to issue orders to Blankenship or any other duly elected sheriff. The best he could do for the mine operators was to take a more subtle approach. In a letter to Blankenship, he asked the sheriff what steps could be taken to curb the disorders in Mingo County.

The answer from Blankenship was loud and clear: Everything was under control, “very quiet” in fact. “In view of the fact that practically all of the mines in this field are organized we can not conceive of any reason why there should be further disturbances,” he told Cornwell. Yes, Blankenship had heard the same rumors that had evidently reached the governor’s office—about mobs parading along the roads and such. But each and every time these reports had been investigated, it turned out to be a case of “so and so saw it and was telling me.” Said Blankenship: “We have never been able to ascertain a single person who recognized any member of the supposed mob.” Meanwhile the governor should rest assured that “every precaution” was being taken and anyone who actually violated the law would be dealt with severely. Just in case, Blankenship was securing extra deputies.

Given Blankenship’s attitude, the only resort remaining to Cornwell and his coal company allies was West Virginia’s new state police force. Warning that West Virginia was in danger of being overrun by Bolsheviks and anarchists, Cornwell had rammed through legislation creating the state police in 1919. Never one to underestimate a threat, Cornwell also pointed to the 8,000 inhabitants of the state who were citizens of nations with which, in the absence of a peace treaty, the United States was still technically at war. To blunt anticipated opposition from organized labor, the governor sent a letter to all the state’s unions warning them that they could ill afford to be seen as offering “indiscriminate opposition” to a measure designed to protect the peace of the state and the safety of its citizens.

Besides, Cornwell claimed, creation of a state police force would encourage the legislature to act against two common practices abhorrent to organized labor—the private police forces created by the mine operators and the payment of deputy sheriff’s salaries by the operators, notably in Don Chafin’s Logan County.

As it turned out, though, the 121-man force that came into existence in the fall of 1919 fell well short of meeting the high expectations of Cornwell and the coal companies, at least at first. This was in large part because of the independence of the first commandant, Jackson Arnold, a World War I combat veteran and a grandnephew of the Confederate idol General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. The limitations of the statute establishing the force prevented troopers from intruding on the authority of Sheriff Blankenship, or any other local sheriff, unless specifically ordered to do so by the governor. And given Arnold’s insistence on running his own shop, Cornwell was reluctant to intrude on his authority.

As a result, mine operators complained bitterly to Cornwell that the harassment of their strikebreakers continued, while the state police stood by. “Is there no way by which the constabulary [state police] can stop this verbal vilification to which our men are subjected whenever their steps happen to cross the paths of the agitators?” an exasperated Red Jacket official wrote Cornwell in June of 1920.

Meanwhile if the state police were turning out to be a disappointment to the mine operators, for the union they were proving to be a pleasant surprise. “Very fair,” was the way Fred Mooney, District 17’s secretary-treasurer, appraised the state police’s initial responses to the strike. “They did not intimidate anybody.” The only trouble came, Mooney reported, when some of the troopers “got hold of some of that mountain dew. Then one would get out of the way sometimes.”

The union’s positive view of the state police was reinforced when troopers arrested two mine guards who lived in Kentucky for possession of unlicensed revolvers and blackjacks. Their employer complained to Cornwell, claiming that his men had immunity from arrest in West Virginia. Cornwell took the issue to Jackson Arnold, who responded by pulling his men out of Mingo County. “So long as I happen to be Superintendent I propose to conduct it as I deem proper, regardless of attempts to dictate by letters of innuendo or otherwise,” he wrote Cornwell late in June.

That of course did not suit the mine operators at all. They prevailed on Cornwell to get Superintendent Arnold to send about ten of his men back to Mingo and station them at one of the mines, “so that in case of any trouble they will be on the ground, and we will not have to wait three or four hours to get them from Williamson,” one of the mine operators wrote the governor in mid-July.

Lest he seem insensitive to the niceties of the situation he added delicately: “Please do not infer that I am dictating to you.” The truth was that Cornwell, like his predecessors in office, was so accustomed to taking orders from the mine owners that he may not have even noticed this latest example of high-handedness.

At any rate the mine operators at last found something positive in the role of the state police. But they were not satisfied: They wanted more. In a telegram to Cornwell praising the reassigned contingent of state police for achieving “peace and quiet,” the relentless Harry Olmstead of the operators association added: “We anticipate this will be the result at most mines when sufficient protection is apparent. With enough men properly placed we believe this field would be at work on a normal basis in two weeks.”

But Olmstead reckoned not with Jackson Arnold, who was as resolute as his celebrated ancestor. Whatever he might have thought about the coal operators before he took command of the state police, their habit of going over his head to the governor whenever it suited their purposes could scarcely have improved his opinion. Besides, this latest idea from Olmstead, which would have converted the state police force into a corps of mine guards, was simply bad police tactics. “I do not believe more men should be sent to the county,” he told Cornwell when Olmstead’s proposal was referred to him. He and his own ranking officers had concluded at a strategy conference that the best way to deal with Mingo’s problems was to station twenty-five to thirty men at strategic locations so they could fan out and patrol the entire county. This strategy, he pointedly noted, has been “fully explained to those whose investments in the county seemed to entitle them to consideration.” Instead of helping make his plan work, though, the mine operators had used the state police on hand as “stationary guards” and now wanted more men to use the same way. Implementing such a policy, Arnold told the governor late in August of 1920, would require 500 men, four times the existing strength of the department.

Still taking advantage of the wartime short cuts for getting Federal intervention, which allowed him to avoid appealing to the president, Cornwell on August 28, 1920, sought help directly from Major General George A. Read, commander of the Army’s V Corps area, or central department. “Disorders and threatened disorders are too numerous for the state police to deal with,” the governor told Read. Based on more than a score of letters from local citizens claiming their lives had been threatened and “private information” about plans for the “commission of other outrages,” he deemed “prompt action imperative” if lives and property were to be protected.

The call for Federal troops implied that conditions in West Virginia were out of control, which customarily in that state had led to a declaration of martial law. This was the precedent established by Governors Glasscock and Hatfield during the Cabin Creek–Paint Creek strike. Indeed the mine operators immediately demanded that the governor follow the example of his predecessors and make just such a declaration. But Cornwell, remembering that both those proclamations had been controversial, drawing a barrage of criticism both from within the state and also from the U.S. Senate investigating committee, held off.

So also as it turned out was one of the leading jurists in the county, Mingo County Circuit Judge James Damron, who unexpectedly emerged as an influential and aggressive ally of the miners. As the circuit judge, Damron had early on involved himself in the storm set off by the Matewan shoot-out. Right after the battle he went to Matewan to personally assume command of the investigation. He sought first to prevent the flames of violence from spreading, ordering gun dealers to keep a record of their sales and cutting off new licenses to gun dealers. Most importantly he impaneled a special grand jury to investigate the violence and issued instructions that were in marked contrast with the outlook of the mine operators.

Infuriated, and shaken by the events of May 19, and egged on by Thomas Felts, who was grieving for his two brothers, the operators wanted nothing less than swift retribution against Sid Hatfield and his cohorts. Such an outcome would not only satisfy Tom Felts’s urge for vengeance, it would drain the impetus from the mine union’s organizing drive in Mingo. But as Damron spoke to the grand jurors, it became clear that he was taking a broader view of the May 19 shoot-out. The investigation should not confine itself to those few bloody minutes when ten men died, Damron concluded, but should also consider the full range of events leading up to the shooting—the union efforts to organize the miners and the eviction of the miners from their homes. There was reason to believe that these evictions were illegal on their face, Damron told the jurors, adding that there was evidence that bribes had been offered to officials of Mingo and Matewan if they would wink at the evictions.

Then the grand jury began hearing evidence. This was no easy task. While there was no lack of witnesses to the tragedy, the testimony most of them offered was obviously colored by whether they sympathized with the union and Hatfield or with the operators and the Baldwin-Felts detectives. Where did the truth lie? The grand jurors had such difficulty deciding that they chose to follow a highly unusual course. In July, when they had finished sifting through all the conflicting evidence, they handed down indictments against Sid Hatfield and twenty-two miners for conspiring to murder the detectives. At the same time they indicted four of the detectives who had survived the gun battle for the murder of Cabell Testerman and the two miners. County prosecutors decided to try Hatfield and the miners first, on the charge of murdering Albert Felts. The four detectives were ultimately tried in Greenbrier County, where coal mines and coal miners were few, and acquitted by a sympathetic jury.

It was the future of those proceedings that most concerned Judge Damron when he learned that Cornwell had called in Federal troops because he assumed that martial law would soon follow. If that should happen, Damron had to worry that the courts would be suspended and to wonder, in that event, what would be the status of the indictments the grand jury he appointed had labored to produce. Damron did not brood in silence about these issues; in a telegram to Governor Cornwell he expressed his “surprise at the thought of martial law in Mingo County,” and passed on his concerns to Cornwell.

If such communication had come from any other jurist Cornwell might have been surprised, but given Judge Damron’s background such behavior was only to be expected. Most of his professional life, in law and politics, Damron had seemed to be waging an unrelenting one-man guerrilla war against the political hierarchy of the state, including the leaders of his own Republican Party. In 1908 Damron had joined with a group calling themselves the “old liners,” who charged the “regulars” who controlled the GOP with draining the public treasury with their expense vouchers. Damron and his cohorts published their own newspaper, accusing the “regulars,” led by Henry Hatfield, the Republican governor elected in 1912, of ballot box stuffing and “hiring ruffians to bulldoze the decent” to gain political power.

Despite his apostasy Damron gained election to the circuit court bench in Mingo and after the 1916 election returned to the pursuit of the good government themes that had engaged him early in his career. Over the protests of outgoing Governor Hatfield’s allies, he gained a writ from the state supreme court allowing him to cleanse the voter registration lists of “illegal voters, dead men, mules and tombstones.”

Damron survived not only these political skirmishes but a murderous assault against his person. On February 1, 1917, a few weeks before the United States entered the Great War, he was shot and wounded, though not seriously, while walking home from his office in Williamson. Suspicion fell against a local citizen who supposedly bore a grudge against Damron because the judge had imposed a three-year sentence on his girlfriend’s uncle who had been convicted in a shooting incident.

But Democratic Governor Cornwell thought that given Damron’s checkered political background, there might be more to the incident. He hired a team of private detectives whose only solid conclusion after an eight-month investigation was that the initial suspect was probably innocent. The Pinkerton agents identified so many other local persons with a possible motive for trying to assassinate Damron, from political feuding to personal revenge sought by any one of a number of husbands whom Damron had cuckolded, that they gave up any hope of actually solving the case.

But all this was long forgotten by the late summer of 1920 when Damron, in the midst of campaigning for re-election to the bench and with U.S. troops deployed in Mingo, wired Cornwell about the possibility of martial law. That telegram brought a prompt denial from Cornwell, who quoted from a telegram he had sent to Wade Bronson, the country prosecutor, stating that there would be no proclamation of martial law in Mingo County “if public officials and private citizens cooperate in the enforcement of the law, the protection of life and property and the punishment of crimes that have been or may be committed.”

Not content with Cornwell’s response, Damron launched his own personal inquiry into alleged incidents of violence, which he suspected had been inflated or even invented by the mine operators to provide the governor with justification for martial law. Looking into a report that “200 gunmen” had battled troops at Chattaroy, Damron learned that the only shooting was done by mine guards who had shot out the electric lights in front of the company’s store. Another reputed clash between miners and Federal troops boiled down to nothing more sinister than a soldier firing his weapon at what turned out to be a pig running around a box car. Yet before the dust had settled, Colonel Samuel Burkhardt, the commander of the Army contingent, had rushed to the scene in a special train. “In the meantime,” Damron complained, “news was being sent out from Williamson by some one to the effect that battles were being had between Federal troops and union miners and that martial law was inevitable.”

In their zeal to persuade the governor to proclaim martial law the operators did not rest with publicizing incidents of violence, real and imaginary. They also met with Colonel Burkhardt, who was easier to impress than Damron. Beyond what the operators told him, Burkhardt had alarming reports from his own intelligence officers, who had little sympathy for the union, particularly when its tactics threatened property rights. One report noted that the miners used “every character of intimidation with frequent instances of assault and destruction of property,” to keep the mines closed. Taking a dark view of the organizing drive, the report claimed that the miners had “a well defined scheme for the employment of armed forces and the use of high explosives in the furtherance of their campaign of unionization.”

With this information already in hand Burkhardt was quick to respond to the mine owners’ complaints. “These gentlemen declare that conditions are, if anything worse now than ever before,” Burkhardt obligingly wrote to Cornwell, echoing the operators’ pleas for a declaration of martial law, pointing out that this would enable the mine owners to rely on the Army rather than the undependable sheriff’s deputies or state police to crack down on strikers.

For his part, Damron was determined to resist this cavalier approach to the Constitution. Mindful of the coal operators’ campaign to pressure Cornwell, Damron fought back in remarks to the grand jury he had convened to investigate the Matewan shoot-out. Rebutting Cornwell’s assertion that the alleged failure of county officials to cooperate with state police justified calling in the Army, Damron argued that if a county officer failed to discharge his duty, he should be removed from office, rather than “resorting to the extreme measures that have been resorted to in this county.” To demonstrate his own impartiality, Damron ordered Sheriff Blankenship to dismiss deputies who were suspected of union sympathies and replace them with neutral officers. He canceled every pistol license in the county and vowed to keep the peace by calling out a posse of deputy sheriffs to deal with any violence.

Partly because of Damron’s statements, Army Secretary Newton Baker asked Cornwell to agree to the withdrawal of Federal troops. But Cornwell was reluctant to comply without the endorsement of the operators, and they were steadfastly opposed to any such thing. Calling Damron’s proposal to substitute deputies for soldiers “utterly impractical,” Red Jacket coal’s William N. Cummins wrote to Cornwell on October 6 that any deputy given that duty would have to live with the consequences afterward. “It must be remembered that with the lawless, radical union agitators which the condition here has landed upon us, there is no such animal as a neutral,” Cummins added. “There are but two attitudes, for and against.”

It was easy to see why the operators wanted the Army to stay. Under the “direct access” policy, the Army had been dispatched to deal with twenty-nine so-called domestic disorders, nearly all stemming from labor disputes. Though the Army as a matter of form directed its troops to be impartial between management and labor, as the official Army history of the Federal role in domestic disorders concluded, “the presence of troops in areas of labor unrest usually served to intimidate workers and break strikes.” This was certainly the case in Mingo County. As Red Jacket’s Cummins acknowledged, even with the governor refusing to declare martial law, the presence of Federal troops had “vastly accelerated” the mine owners’ efforts to get their struck properties back into production.

For supporters of the mine workers, and the labor movement in general, this was nothing to cheer about. “The saddest day I had was speaking at a number of points from Bluefield to Huntington, West Virginia,” Navy Secretary and Wilson confidant Josephus Daniels confided to his diary after a campaign trip on behalf of fellow Democrats late in the fall of 1920. With snow on the ground, Daniels wrote, the miners and their wives and children had been evicted from company houses and were suffering. “Worst of all, men in the Army uniform were being used by the mine-owners under the pretense of ‘preserving order.’ When I saw shivering children living in shabby tents it aroused my indignation to the boiling point.” When he returned to Washington Daniels recounted his experience to his colleague Newton Baker, who according to Daniels, “was as indignant as I.” At any rate, on November 4, the soldiers began returning to their Ohio barracks and by November 20, their departure was complete. But they did not stay away long. Violence flared again in their absence. In the week following the withdrawal of the troops, miners and strikebreakers clashed at least four times in Mingo County, at Borderland, Kermit and twice at Chatttaroy, all small mining towns.

Cornwell once again appealed to General Read for troops. “The state government is totally unable to cope with the situation,” he claimed. Read made plain his weariness with dispatching troops to put out fires in West Virginia that only blazed again once the soldiers left. But with Secretary Baker’s approval he ultimately gave Cornwell what he wanted. On November 28 Read deployed a battalion of the 19th infantry regiment commanded by Colonel Herman Hall to West Virginia, whereupon Cornwell, to appease the operators, proclaimed a limited state of martial law. This decree placed the sheriff’s department and the state police under military command but kept the civil courts open to try all offenders, thus avoiding the use of a military tribunal, which had provoked such indignation during the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike. It was a finely drawn distinction, which the New York Times described as “military control,” rather than martial law.

Whatever the legal state of affairs was called, it clearly worked against the interests of the strikers. The soldiers set up headquarters in the county courthouse in Williamson and their mules and trucks filled the streets of the town. Their commander, Colonel Hall, banned all public meetings and demonstrations, and also banned the carrying of firearms. Within a week some 500 rifles and pistols had been collected.

Meanwhile the union received another blow—this time from courts. Responding to a petition from Red Jacket coal company, a Federal judge issued an injunction against the union, banning it “from in any way or manner interfering with the said contracts of employment” between Red Jacket and its workers, referring to the yellow-dog contracts pledging not to join the union that miners had to sign when they were hired. Red Jacket superintendent Cummins lost no time in exploiting the injunction. He mailed a copy to Matewan’s new mayor, E. K. Beckner, along with a note referring to “the activity of certain vicious and disorderly characters,” which he claimed had made it unsafe for Red Jacket workers to pass through the town. Any interference with these men, Cummins wrote, would amount to a violation of the injunction. Sure enough when three union members were charged with assaulting two Red Jacket workers, instead of facing a trial by jurors who might have been sympathetic to their cause, they were called before a Federal Court judge and given sixty days in jail for violating the injunction.

By early December, five months after the start of the strike, the operators claimed they had raised production to about 80 percent of normal. They boasted that they were helped not only by labor they had imported but also by some ex-strikers who had returned to their jobs after signing yellow-dog contracts. Hundreds of other union men had given up on the struggle and moved away. But about 2,500 of the original 6,000 strikers stayed on in Mingo County, most of them living in tent cities the union had helped put up.

To pay for groceries the union gave each striker $5 a week for himself, $2 more for his wife and $1 for each child. The union also tried to arrange for free medical care and for credit at clothing stores. It was little enough to get by on. A New York Times correspondent who visited the largest of the tent colonies, at Lick Creek, near Matewan, found many of the children who were playing in the debris-strewn streets seemed anemic and underfed. Their meals were cooked on open fireplaces, thrown together from boulders and mortar.

With few other weapons at its command, the union was counting on the plight of the hundreds of tent colony families to win public sympathy, through coverage in a number of the nation’s important newspapers and magazines. Neil Burkinshaw, of The Nation, in an article titled “Labor’s Valley Forge,” described the “appalling” conditions in the tent colonies. “Huddled under canvas that flapped and strained at the guy ropes, in the high winds I found hundreds of families gathered about pitifully small fires. In most cases the tent dwellers were living on the bare frozen earth, the most fortunate having simply a strip of oil cloth or carpet as floor. Several children have died of pneumonia and it was pitiful to see any number of new-born babies there—and worst, many women pregnant.”

In his peroration, Burkinshaw struck just the right note from the union’s point of view. “The miners of Mingo County are fighting one of the gamest fights in the history of industrial war, fighting for a principle—the emancipation of themselves and their children from the worst economic serfdom in America.”

This sort of journalistic rhetoric naturally infuriated the mine owners, so much so that the Williamson Coal Operators Assn. issued a statement charging the union with compelling its members and their families to endure the hardships of the tents in order to “excite the sympathy of the public.” “The UMW agitators furnish transportation for men who come into the fields for employment back to other fields and obtain work for them,” the operators charged, “while requiring their members’ wives and children to shiver and suffer in the tents.”

Actually of course no one was “required” to stay in the tent colonies. The miners who lived there after being evicted from their company homes had little other choice, unless they were willing to go back to work on the mine owners’ terms. It was true that UMW leaders hoped to use the hardships endured by the tent city dwellers to dramatize the union’s struggles in southern West Virginia. They had little else to give them hope.

But the governor was in no mood to help the UMW find a way out of its difficulties. He was still smarting from the public criticism heaped upon him by the union and its supporters. “The governor of West Virginia has failed miserably to give all citizens equal protection of the law,” charged William Green, international secretary treasurer of the UMW. “Property rights have been made superior not human rights.” The New York World was even more condemnatory in an editorial right after Cornwell had made his second request for troops in three months. “Under our system political bankruptcy cannot reach more degrading levels,” the paper asserted. “With its whole body of officials incapable, with the mass of inhabitants destitute of resource, and with no military or constabulary force strong enough to meet rival mobs and subdue them,” the World demanded: “What claim has West Virginia to consideration as a self-governing state?”

To answer such criticism, Cornwell took advantage of an invitation to address the Southern Society, a group of Dixie civic leaders and businessmen at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria on December 8, 1920. Introduced as the “law and order governor,” Cornwell quickly conceded that the Mingo County strike had brought serious violence to his state. As the New York Times noted in its account of the talk, labor violence had taken forty or fifty lives in the county since spring. But Cornwell pointed out that there had been violence elsewhere in the country, right there in New York City, for example, and cited the 1919 bomb blast on Wall Street the previous September that had killed twenty-nine persons and injured more than 200 others. It would be unfair to judge New York by that tragic event, Cornwell said. And just as unfair to judge his own state by the violence in Mingo Country.

Venturing into foreign policy, Cornwell pointed to what he regarded as the much greater horror taking place in the Bolshevik state that had replaced the old Russian Empire, a country with which some Americans now wanted to establish diplomatic relations. “I believe the hand as stained with blood as if it were the hand of savages should never be grasped in friendship,” Cornwell said. Diplomatic recognition by the United States of the Kremlin regime “would accelerate immeasurably an undesirable campaign here against our institutions.”

That was music to the ears of his affluent audience. They clapped and cheered as Cornwell continued to pound away at the radicals. “Radical organizations,” he warned, “are growing all the time and it is our duty to combat them everywhere—in business organizations, in civic organizations, in the churches and schools.” The governor noted with approval Samuel Gompers’s efforts to rid the AFL of radicals but stressed this was not enough. “The job of Americanizing America shouldn’t be left to Gompers,” Cornwell cried. “It’s everybody’s job.”

The truth was that even if Cornwell had been willing to try to pull the UMW’s chestnuts out of the fire by seeking a compromise with the mine owners, the latter were in no mood to parley. “We are opposed to the UMW,” a spokesman for the operators explained, “because it has proved an entirely irresponsible organization which does not abide by its contract obligations and is directed by men who seem bent on making trouble and never hesitate at violence and disorder as a means to the attainment of their ends.”

The mine owners could easily afford to castigate the union. Things were going their way. They were winning the strike, and the governor of the state was on their side. But the mine owners were not the sort of men inclined to leave anything to chance. Judge Damron had been a thorn in their side all through the turbulent weeks following the shoot-out. If he continued to play that role, he could cause them serious trouble, both as a spokesman for critics of their tactics and as a jurist.

But for this problem as with many others they had a solution on hand—money. On October 31, 1920, in the midst of his struggle with Cornwell over martial law, and as trial neared on the case against Hatfield and his co-defendants, Damron announced that he had quit the bench. He offered no explanation at first, but one was not long in coming when the operators announced that the legal team they intended to deploy to aid the prosecution in the Hatfield murder trial had gained a distinguished recruit, someone who would not suffer for lack of familiarity with the case. He was none other than former County Judge James Damron. As the main battlefield in the struggle between the union and the operators shifted to the courtroom where Sid Hatfield would be tried, Judge Damron would now help prosecute the defendants whose indictments he had overseen.