7
Mr. Hatfield Goes to Washington
IT WAS A TYPICALLY torrid midsummer day in Washington, the kind of weather that made foreign offices around the world classify the city a hardship post for their diplomats. The capital suffered along with the rest of the East. In New York a bricklayer working on a Broadway office building keeled over and died and the director of a motion picture being shot in the Hotel Ambassador in midtown Manhattan collapsed and fell down a flight of stairs. Washingtonians, including the members of the U.S. Senate, being more accustomed to the heat, went about their lives as usual, though at a sluggish pace.
So it was on Capitol Hill. At first glance the Capitol building itself, with its darkened hallways underneath its cast-iron dome, appeared cool, at least by contrast with the sweltering streets outside. But this proved to be a temporary illusion, as the members and staff of the Senate Labor Committee realized as soon as they entered the committee’s high-ceilinged hearing room. Despite the slatted blinds shielding the windows against the blazing sun, and the electric fans that stirred the turgid air, the heat and humidity had transformed the chamber into a soggy oven. Yet, for the leaders of the United Mine Workers of West Virginia, there was no place else they would rather be on July 14, 1921, as the hearings ordered by the Senate into the labor struggle in the West Virginia coalfields commenced.
From the start of their organizing drive in southern West Virginia, the union men knew the odds were stacked against them because of the economic and political power of the operators. But they were impelled forward by the hope that if their struggle could generate enough national attention, public opinion and the influence of the Federal government would turn the tide in their direction. Certainly in midsummer of 1921 the union needed whatever help it could get. For the operators seemed on the verge of breaking the strike, if they had not already done so. As the hearing commenced, the operators boasted that the output of the Williamson field mines had all but returned to normal, and were operating at 96 percent of their regular capacity of five million tons a year.
Though the UMW leaders stoutly denied such claims, their actions tended to belie their words. In a letter to Governor Morgan only a few days before the start of the Senate hearing, union leaders had made a compromise offer of sorts. The proposal, as the union described it, amounted to scrapping its demand for a union shop, under which the operators could only employ union members, and agreeing to accept an open shop, an arrangement in which union and non-union men would work side by side. But the operators felt themselves to be in such a strong position that they did not even consider the union tender or dignify it with a direct response. Instead Harry Olmstead, the representative of the Williamson operators, had responded only with a press release in which he declared that the operators would not deal with the union in any “shape, manner or form.”
If the union had any basis for its hopes of countering this conservative tide in the forthcoming proceedings, it was in the presence, as chairman of the committee, of the junior Senator from Iowa, William Squire Kenyon. Though less flamboyant and strident than California’s Hiram Johnson, whose resolution had set the hearings in motion, Kenyon was himself a respected member of the small but influential band of Senate Republican progressives. The son of a Princeton-trained Congregational minister, Kenyon was born in Ohio but raised in Iowa, the home state of John L. Lewis, and an early stronghold of the UMW. Though the Reverend Kenyon hoped his son would follow him into the clergy, young Kenyon was intent on practicing law, a profession well suited for the cool, analytical intellect he demonstrated early on. Admitted to the bar in 1891 at age twenty-two, Kenyon began practicing in Fort Dodge, about 150 miles north of Lucas County, where Lewis cut his teeth as a union leader. By the time he was thirty-eight, in 1907, he had caught the eye of the Illinois Central Railroad, which recruited him to be its general counsel.
He might have finished out his days as a prosperous corporate lawyer, had not William Howard Taft’s Justice Department, bent on cracking down on big trusts, lured Kenyon away to serve as point man. Kenyon led a crusade that brought nearly double the antitrust prosecutions in four years than Taft’s predecessor Theodore Roosevelt had launched in eight, targets that included the likes of Standard Oil, American Tobacco and U.S. Steel.
By now Kenyon’s star was shining brightly in the Iowa political firmament. In 1911, when death created a U.S. Senate vacancy, the Iowa legislature selected Kenyon, who gained re-election by the legislature in 1912 and, after the ratification of the 17th amendment in 1913, by the general electorate in 1918.
In the Senate, Kenyon lived up to his reformist reputation; he backed tariff reductions and Federal taxes on personal incomes and corporate profits. He also sought aid for the debt-ridden farmers of the Midwest and helped to organize what over the years would become known as the Farm Bloc.
But the union could not depend on the Senator to fight its battles. Even in the Senate, Kenyon maintained a lawyerly bearing and friends knew that in his heart he yearned for a judicial position. Indeed soon after the hearings concluded, Harding would appoint him to the Federal Court of Appeals. In the meantime Kenyon seemed to impose his judicial temperament as a restraint on his progressive convictions, a tendency that would diminish his value to the mine workers union as they carried their struggle for survival to Capitol Hill.
It was clear from the start of the hearings that there would be no restraint on the mine owners’ side. During the 1913 investigation, the operators had been on the defensive in the face of charges of treating their workers unjustly. They came away from those hearings, and from subsequent skirmishes with the UMW, convinced that the union and its backers were, as one coal operator put it, “the greatest publicists on earth.” But the mine owners had learned a lesson over the years. Now they were on the attack.
They made their first target the controversial change in the Mine Workers constitution in 1912, which asserted that the miners were entitled not merely to “an equitable share of the fruits of their labor” but rather to “the full social value of their product.” That revision, L. Tailor Vinson, the chief spokesman for the operators charged, transformed the UMW from an ordinary labor union into “an organized band of robbers. They boldly claim, boldly announce that what they propose is to keep on making demands for increases until they finally take over all the mines in North America, including Canada,” Vinson declared. “Every single solitary disturbance, every murder, every assassination that has been committed in the coal industry in West Virginia is traceable directly to this announced policy of this organization to unionize first and then to own the property themselves.”
The miners also were handicapped by the detached attitude of the senators, who seemed to view the life-and-death struggle in West Virginia as just another item among the sundry and varied matters that filled their legislative lives. When the union’s spokesmen tried to counter Vinson’s attack by arguing that the excesses of the coal companies had violated their constitutional rights, that claim seemed to take the committee by surprise. “What constitutional rights—I suppose that is what this committee should investigate—what constitutional rights under the Federal constitution do you feel you have been denied?” Chairman Kenyon asked, his offhand manner seeming to minimize the importance of the issue.
But Fred Mooney was ready for him. “We are denied a republican form of government; we are denied public assemblage; we are denied the right to belong to a labor union—that is also the law of the state,” District 17’s secretary treasurer told the committee.
Yet constitutional rights seemed too abstract an issue to engage the attention of the senators. They were more caught up by the charges of violence made against the union. Asked about the alleged shooting of a state trooper by the miners, Mooney put the matter in a different perspective: “The state policeman that was killed went to a moonshine still and got some of that whisky and refused to pay for it,” he explained. “And the fellow he had skinned out of the whisky shot him in the back after he started to leave.”
Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, serving his first Senate term after six years in the House, paid more attention to what he regarded as a slur against his home state than the injustices inflicted upon the miners. When Vinson charged that the union had imported hundreds of “gun men,” mainly from Tennessee, McKellar spoke up for the first time in the proceedings. “How do you know they are from Tennessee?” he demanded.
“That is the information that has come to us from the military authorities,” Vinson told him. The fifty-three-year-old McKellar, a case-hardened Memphis lawyer with a populist streak, had concluded that in Tennessee he could gain more votes by baiting the coal companies than denouncing the union. “My information is that Tennessee is about as law abiding a state as we have in the union and we are not having any trouble like they are having in West Virginia,” he told Vinson. “I am going to insist strenuously that we know where these men from Tennessee come from.”
Mooney was of course delighted to find any senator challenging the coal companies, whatever the grounds. “A statement like that is almost unworthy of an answer,” Mooney told McKellar about the charge that the union had imported gunmen from his state. If there were any gunmen brought into the state, Mooney said, it was the operators who had done the importing. The only men brought in by the union were organizers, Mooney added, and most of these were now employed distributing relief checks to the strikers and their families.
By this time Vinson was in full retreat. He hastened to correct his earlier statement. “Our list does not show that anybody came from your state, Senator,” the abashed lawyer said.
Vinson created another opportunity for self-embarrassment by claiming that miners could earn as much as $400 to $700 a month. That got the attention of Republican Samuel Shortridge of California.
“You mean individual miners?” He asked.
“Yes, sir,” Vinson replied.
“You mean working with a pick and shovel?”
“I think I will resign and become a miner,” Shortridge chortled.
This was too much for Mooney. The highest average income for skilled miners in West Virginia, during the peak of the World War boom was only $1,066 a year, he pointed out. The top scale for miners was $4.52 a day, and the average number of days a year was only 217.
There is quite a difference between $1,000 a year and $700 a month, Kenyon observed drily.
But such tactical triumphs were few and far between for the union as the operators pressed their assault, arguing that the operators would not and indeed could not deal with the union because the union’s position was inherently unreasonable. Even when it appeared to offer a compromise, its fundamental position remained unyielding in its determination to control the mines. S. B. Avis, whom Mooney viewed as the “most venomous and malignant” of the coal company lawyers, artfully set a trap for Mooney to help make that argument. Suppose the mine operators accepted the union’s latest compromise proposal but had no room to take back the union men on strike. Would the union continue the strike?
“Yes,” Mooney replied.
That was of course just what Avis wanted him to say. “That means then that if they have got all the men they need they must discharge some of these men and replace them with your men, does it not?” Avis asked, driving the point home.
There would be plenty of room for the strikers, Mooney insisted.
“But if there is not room for them, then you are going to continue this strike, are you not?”
“You have not any right to dwell on suppositions,” Mooney answered lamely. But Avis had made his case with Mooney’s help.
The union hoped to repair some of the damage suffered in the opening day of the testimony when District 17’s president Frank Keeney took the stand on Friday July 15. Powerfully built, with large facial features and an open countenance, Keeney commonly wore a broad grin. But the friendly demeanor cloaked an iron will and a quick mind, and a far more supple intelligence than that of most of his colleagues. He could be equally convincing in a blustery harangue to the rank and file or in a sophisticated argument across the bargaining table from the mine owners. But on this day in the Senate hearing room, Keeney soon ran into difficulty as Avis resumed the mine owners’ efforts to depict the union as the enemy of law and order. “Is it not a fact that it is the policy of your organization to defend any member of your organization from any crime with which he is charged during labor troubles?” Avis asked.
Keeney fought back. “I say that we have the same right to protect our members as the coal operators have to protect the Baldwin-Felts guards,” he replied. “You do not suppose that we will permit our members to be annihilated because someone presumes them guilty of some crime?”
Stymied, Avis tried another approach. He asked Keeney to explain why the number of casualties in the Mingo County violence had been far greater among the mine guards and other forces supporting the operators than among the miners.
Keeney paused for effect and then answered: “I can explain that in this way,” he said. “When a real mountaineer of Mingo County shoots twice and don’t hit a man you know he is not shooting at you. And the men they imported in there to do the shooting could not equal them; that is all.” Keeney’s braggadocio echoed his remarks to Washington reporters the previous winter when he rebutted charges that the miners had been shooting at state troopers by saying that the miners were such crack shots that “if they ever shot at a trooper more than twice he wouldn’t be alive.”
If Keeney was pleased with his response to Avis, so was Avis. “In other words,” Avis said, reiterating Keeney’s point, “the men you had were better shots than the men on the other side.” Whatever satisfaction Keeney might have gotten from his riposte, Avis was only too content to underline the impression left by Keeney of a union official bragging that the men on his side were expert killers.
But Avis’s grilling of Mooney and Keeney was just a rehearsal for the main act in the drama, the appearance on July 16, the third day of the hearings, of the union’s star witness, the hero of Matewan and champion of the West Virginia mine workers, Sid Hatfield. While the press and spectators who jammed the hearing room craned their necks for a better look at the constable’s sharp features, “Smilin’ Sid,” as his admirers now liked to call him, gave his version of the shoot-out, in a voice so low that Kenyon twice had to urge him to speak up. In his flat mountain twang Hatfield recounted the arrival of the detectives, their eviction of the miners and then their first encounter with Testerman and Hatfield at the scene of the evictions. The detectives came back to Matewan, to catch their train back to Bluefield, Hatfield explained, leading to their second confrontation with Hatfield and Testerman, which ultimately exploded in violence and bloodshed.
“I went up and told Mr. Felts that I would have to arrest him,” Hatfield recalled. “He said he would turn the compliment on me, that he had a warrant for me.” It was after Testerman demanded to see the warrant, and pronounced it bogus, Hatfield said, that Felts shot the mayor. “Then the shooting started in general.”
That was about as far as he was prepared to go. When the senators began to probe for details, Hatfield’s answers seemed to become hazy. “How many men did you have with you?” Senator Kenyon asked.
“Well I did not have any men with me at the time they had me arrested,” Hatfield said. “It was train time and a whole lot of people would meet the train.”
“Did not the people come in to help you arrest them?” Kenyon wanted to know.
“No sir,” Hatfield replied without wavering.
“Were you all alone?” Kenyon pressed.
“I didn’t ask for any help,” Hatfield replied, ignoring the fact of the dozen or so special deputies who had been sworn in to meet the challenge of Albert Felts and his men.
Now it was Avis’s turn, and he could hardly wait.
“How many shots did Albert Felts fire?” he demanded.
“Well, I didn’t have time to count them,” Hatfield replied. “If you had been there I don’t think you could have counted them.”
But Avis had a contradiction he wanted to expose. During Hatfield’s trial, defense witnesses had claimed that Felts had fired twice. Hatfield himself did not testify at his trial. But in his prior testimony to the grand jury he had sworn that Felts had fired only one shot. Before Avis could pursue this discrepancy, Harold Houston, the UMW attorney, hurried to object. The trial prosecutor, Houston said, had turned over a transcript of the grand jury testimony to the counsel for the coal operators, but none to the miners. His client still faced charges of killing the six other Baldwin-Felts detectives who had died along with Albert Felts in the Matewan shoot-out. Under the circumstances he was not going to allow Avis to lead Hatfield down a road toward a possible perjury charge.
Chairman Kenyon let Hatfield off the hook. “The appearance of Mr. Hatfield is voluntary and we are not forcing him to give any testimony and we do not want to do anything one way or another that might affect his case,” the senator declared. “I will not ask him to answer that question.”
Now Avis went after Hatfield hammer and tongs, determined to confront him with every instance of misconduct in his checkered background, real or alleged. The lawyer had no shortage of ammunition. But Hatfield remained impassive in front of the barrage, admitting nothing, denying almost everything.
First there was the matter of the widow Testerman.
“Mr. Hatfield, did you not within less than two weeks after Mayor Testerman was killed marry his widow?”
“I did.”
“And are you not now running his place of business.”
“I am.”
“Don’t you know Mr. Hatfield that a number of witnesses who testified before the grand jury, one of whom also testified against you in the last trial, have been assassinated?”
“I do not know that,” Hatfield replied flatly.
Avis brought up the murder of Harry Staton, the former justice of the peace who had testified against Hatfield during the murder trial.
“I have been informed that one of the operators killed him,” Hatfield said.
“One of your codefendants is under indictment for doing that, is he not?,” Avis asked, referring to Calvin McCoy.
“Not that I heard of,” Hatfield replied.
Finally Avis found a crime that Hatfield would acknowledge being connected with.
“Are you not under indictment for killing Anse Hatfield?” Avis asked.
“Yes sir.”
It was easy enough for Hatfield to deal with questions about the charges he faced that he already knew about. But suddenly Avis asked him about a charge he had not heard of before—a McDowell County indictment for conspiring to blow up a tipple in August of 1920.
Caught off guard, the witness replied, honestly enough, “This is the first I heard of it.”
To Harold Houston, it sounded like a phony charge, and he leaned over to his client to joke about it.
Avis caught him and snapped: “Don’t smile, Mr. Houston, because that is true.”
“That is made up like the rest,” Hatfield told him.
But he was wrong about that. The McDowell County indictment, as Hatfield would soon find out, would turn out to be all too real, and its consequences would prove to be tragic both for Hatfield and for the union cause.
But for the time being, Hatfield had his hands full dealing with Avis’s questions. “I will ask you Mr. Hatfield, if you did not pose for the newspapers as a gunman, with pistols in your hand,” the lawyer next queried.
“No sir, I did not pose to be a gunman.”
But Avis had in his hand a widely circulated photo that showed Hatfield, a gun in each hand, standing on a Matewan street grinning broadly, which he eagerly distributed to members of the committee. At this point, Tennessee’s McKellar, who had become more sympathetic to the union cause as the hearing progressed, intervened and asked Hatfield to explain the photo.
“The paper man came to my store and he come in and made himself acquainted,” the witness said. “He said that he wanted a picture of my gun and I took the guns and stepped out on the street and he made my picture.”
“So it was simply a matter of him coming into your place and he wanted to make your picture for the newspaper after the killing?” McKellar prompted.
“Yes sir.”
Continuing his efforts on Hatfield’s behalf, the senator asked the witness if he had ever been involved “in other difficulties or shootings of any sort.” Hatfield recalled his shooting of the mine foreman, five years earlier, but said he had given himself up and had been cleared on grounds of self-defense.
“And that is the only previous difficulty you had for which you have been tried?” McKellar asked. “It is all I had anywhere,” Hatfield responded more or less truthfully. He had been in plenty of other trouble, but had never been put on trial till the murder charges resulting from the Matewan shootings.
Now it was lawyer Houston’s term to help defend Hatfield’s reputation. “Mr. Hatfield, have you ever used intoxicating liquors in any form?”
“Not for years,” said the police chief.
At this point, the operators’ lawyer, Vinson, lost patience with the rehabilitation effort.
“Why is this material?” he asked. “I would like to inquire if Mr. Hatfield’s character is at issue in this case.”
No, it was not, Senator Kenyon replied.
But the chairman was wrong about that. Hatfield had become the national symbol of the union’s struggle. And by being forced to acknowledge his disreputable past during his testimony, the last to be offered on behalf of the union, “Smilin’ Sid” had done his enemies and the foes of the UMW a considerable service.
Hoping to exploit the advantage they had already gained when they presented their side as the hearings began their second week, the mine owners inflicted almost as much damage on their case as the UMW had done to itself. Their first witness, Harry Olmstead, the spokesman for the Williamson Operators, to make clear the nature of the forces against whom he was contending, submitted a list of more than 125 incidents of violence, “assaults, burnings, killings and explosions,” all perpetrated by the union, Olmstead claimed in furtherance of its quest for power.
As to union claims of violence, Olmstead dismissed them as part of the organizing strategy of the union. “Lurid tales” are published, Olmstead testified, to the effect that the “brutal mine guards” have been guilty of assaulting men, women and children. “Wholly false,” said Olmstead of such charges, “and not supported by any proof whatever.”
Kenyon, who had developed a skepticism for the testimony of both sides, was not satisfied. If the companies did not employ Baldwin-Felts men as mine guards, he inquired, did they employ them in any capacity at all?
As a matter of fact, yes, Olmstead conceded. “We employed these Baldwin-Felts men in secret service,” but for no other purpose. “We have had 12 to 15 of these men throughout the field, whose daily reports were relied on to head off the violent machinations of the union.” And these men had been used for no other purpose, he told the committee. But then he was quickly obliged to remind himself of an exception, the contingent that had been dispatched by Tom Felt to Matewan on May 19 to evict the union miners, setting off the year-long struggle in the mountains.
But Kenyon was not through with him yet. Did the fifty-six coal companies in the Williamson field employ and pay any sheriff’s deputies?
“There have been,” he said, and then hastened to qualify his answer. “In the latter part of September and first of October, after those days that the riot was very close on,” Olmstead said, “I mean after the threatened riot at Williamson and on the public streets, a conference was held in the governor’s office in Charleston.”
Kenyon had a considerable store of patience, but Olmstead had managed to exhaust it. “Please just answer my question,” he told Olmstead.
“That is the only way I can answer it,” Olmstead persisted.
“You do not have to go into all that detail to answer that question do you?” Kenyon said firmly.
Finally Olmstead gave in. As a result of an agreement with the governor and Mingo County, the mine owners for about a month did indeed pay the salary of eight to ten sheriff’s deputies, he conceded, amounting to about $1,800. The payments were made, Olmstead claimed, “with the understanding that the money would be returned when they had it available to pay back.”
The senators were clearly upset. “Do you believe that it is a good principle, namely, that police officers should be paid by any particular interest?” Republican Senator Thomas Sterling of South Dakota asked Olmstead.
“No it would be very much better if the county would pay it itself,” Olmstead said, “and we would be very glad if they did, Senator.”
At this point, counselor Houston, who had been listening to this colloquy with far more satisfaction than he could have felt during the earlier sessions, added another point about the payments. Not only were they inappropriate, he contended, they were illegal under the laws of West Virginia.
For his part, Olmstead professed to be unaware of such a law and quickly withdrew from the witness table.
Despite such awkward moments, the coal companies seemed increasingly confident of their ability to dominate the proceedings and blacken the name of the United Mine Workers. This self-assurance made them insensitive to how some of their anti-union activities might appear to the senators, when exposed in the cold light of the hearings. But this lesson was driven home to them by the testimony of Charles Lively, the labor spy.
By calling Lively on Wednesday, July 20, the sixth day of hearings, the operators hoped to impress the senators with the inside information that the union men had supposedly confided in him. Instead, the senators seemed far more disturbed with Lively’s devious tactics, during his ten years as a paid informer for the Baldwin-Felts agency while posing as loyal union activist than in what he had learned. After listening to Lively’s description of his hoodwinking of his supposed comrades, even winning election as a union officer and also as delegate to the 1913 UMW state convention in West Virginia, Senator Kenyon broke in with a pointed question: “Were your expenses paid by the miners when you went to the convention or did the Baldwin-Felts agency pay your expenses?”
“Well the miners paid my expenses there to that Charleston convention; yes,” Lively replied. “I felt that it was necessary that I leave them pay them in order to keep off suspicion.”
“Did the Baldwin-Felts people pay your expenses, too?” Kenyon wanted to know.
“No,” Lively said; he was, after all, not without scruples, he stressed. “Because that was one thing I always made a practice of—never to charge anything I was not out of.”
Here McKellar picked up the thread of the questioning, probing further into the detective’s ethical standards. “You felt in the way you were working, you were doing entirely what was right and proper?”
“Yes sir.”
“You saw nothing wrong in that?” McKellar persisted.
“I saw nothing wrong about it, nothing illegitimate or illegal,” Lively insisted.
Kenyon was still curious about how Lively handled his expenses in his dual role. On some days, he would have expenses incurred on behalf of both the UMW and Baldwin-Felts, would he not?
“Yes sir,” Lively affirmed.
“What did you do then, how did you keep your books?” Kenyon asked .
“When I made any expense of that kind I would kind of divide it up.”
“You wanted to be very careful that both sides did not pay your expenses?” Kenyon asked.
“Yes, sir,” Lively said.
“I see you have a delicate sense of right and wrong,” Kenyon drily observed.
The sarcasm seemed to have been lost on Lively, who now had to contend again with McKellar. “If you had disclosed your connection with the detective agency, do you suppose the miners would have let you in there at all?” he challenged Lively.
“I think they would have turned me over to the undertaker,” Lively replied.
McKellar was now like a boxer who had maneuvered his opponent against the ropes. “At the same time, while you were accepting money from the miners as their representative and employer, you were really, as you have just said, in truth and in fact, the paid agent of the company that you knew was opposed to the miners?” he asked. “That is true is it not?”
“Well I was in the pay of the detective agency,” Lively said, pay that amounted to $75 a month and expenses. This was in addition to money he earned working in the mines. Lively had also been paid by the Western Federation of Miners, for whom he had worked briefly as an organizer.
“And did you accept their money while you were in fact operating against them?” McKellar asked.
“I accepted their money, and I done exactly what the man over me told me to do. He told me what to do, and I had to carry out his instructions.”
“And did you think that was right?” McKellar continued. “Now while you are testifying do you think that was the right action on your part?”
“Yes,” Lively replied.
At this point, Avis rushed to the support of his witness and the undercover tactics. “He has that right,” the lawyer said. “That is the method practiced by the Department of Justice.” When McKellar expressed disbelief, Avis added: “I think that it is practiced in every department at Washington.”
“I do not believe it,” McKellar insisted.
“But the destruction of Molly McGuires in Pennsylvania was done exactly as this was done.”
McKellar was adamant. “I will say that it violated every idea of right that I ever had. I never would have believed that a thing like this would happen, and I am not surprised that you are having trouble down there in Mingo County.”
“Senator,” Avis started to explain, “with all these murders and depredations being committed . . . ”
But McKellar cut him off. “Well, let us go on with the examination of the witness. I am frank to say that I cannot approve of that conduct.”
The memory of McKellar’s condemnation persisted after Lively’s two hours of testimony, and even after the hearings recessed two days later, until mid-September. Still, while the revelations of Lively’s duplicity and the other excesses committed in the effort to break the strike tarnished the public’s view of the coal companies, these disclosures had been offset at least in part by the airing of the union’s own dirty linen. Particularly troublesome for the union was the focus on its involvement with violence, as dramatized by the appearance of Sid Hatfield.
The net result of the hearings was at best a standoff, causing most Americans and their leaders who had paid attention to throw up their hands and turn away from the struggle in Mingo County. For the mine owners, who were having their own way and crushing the strike, this was entirely satisfactory. But for the union, which had been fighting a losing battle in Mingo County and hoped for public outrage to reverse the tide, the hearings amounted to a tragic failure. Now in the wake of their frustration on Capitol Hill, the union and its supporters would face new disasters at home.