The American Middle Class Was Born In A Western Virginia Gunfight
The Legacy of Matewan Is Common Men Standing Up to yankee Overlords
From Western Virginia to Texas, scenes like this played out all across the South as people struggled to throw off the last remnants of carpet-bagger corruption - DD
A dozen armed men wearing dark suits stepped off the noon train in Matewan, West Virginia, on Wednesday, May 19, 1920. Residents knew this was trouble. Out-of-work coal miners, in town to pick up union relief checks, watched warily. Teachers at the local grade school dismissed students early to get them home and off the streets.
The armed men, employees of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, ate lunch at a local hotel, then grabbed their rifles, packed themselves into three automobiles and chugged up the road to a place called Warm Hollow. There they began evicting coal miners’ families — carrying out furniture and other belongings and piling them onto the unpaved street. Rain added to the day’s gloom. For the crowd looking on, the lesson was clear: This is what happens when you join a union.
The Stone Mountain Coal Co. owned the houses and the property and used its money to influence elected officials and lawmen. If you were a coal miner and didn’t like the company’s rules or wages, or the prices at the company store, or the bleak and filthy conditions in which your children were raised, if you were alarmed at the number of coal miners killed at work … well, too bad. You were expected to be grateful and keep your trap shut.
When miners did speak up, coal companies called the Baldwin-Felts men. The enforcers.
Matewan’s 27-year-old police Chief Sid Hatfield and Mayor Cabell Testerman confronted agent Albert Felts in…