Hellraisers Journal – Sunday May 30, 1920
Logan County, West Virginia – Coal Operators Own Public Officials, Part I
From The Nation of May 29, 1920:
Private Ownership Of Public Officials
By ARTHUR GLEASON
[Part I of II.]
Harrisburg Telegraph October 16, 1919
WEST VIRGINIA has started in again on the organized killing which every few years breaks loose in the mining districts. On May 19, eleven men were shot to death in the town of Matewan, Mingo County. Seven of them were detectives, three were miners and one was an official. This skirmish is the first in the 1920 war between the coal operators of the State and the United Mine Workers of America. Mingo is one of the counties in the southwest of the State which have been held against organized labor by detectives, armed guards, and deputy sheriffs.
With the beginning of May, the miners formed local unions, and brought in 2,000 members. As fast as the miners join the union, the coal companies are evicting them from the company-owned houses. I saw the typewritten notice of the Stone Mountain Coal Company on the window of the company-owned grocery store. It stated that the houses of the miners were owned by the company, and that the miners must leave the premises at once if they join the union. Ezra Frye, the local organizer, acting for the United Mine Workers, had leased land, and was erecting tents for the evicted families. He had ordered 300 tents on the first allotment. Matewan lies on the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. It is run politically by the Hatfield clan, who for generations have had a feud with the McCoy clan. The economic struggle is making a new alignment across the old feudist divisions. No stranger is safe just now in these unorganized counties. We had a spy who trailed us from Charleston to Matewan. In the town, we were kept under constant guard.
The Matewan killing is only the faint prelude to the war that will be waged in attempting to unionize Mingo, McDowell, and Logan Counties. The stronghold of the operators’ power is not Mingo, but Logan County, and within a few weeks the center of disturbance will shift to Logan.
[Said Mother Jones, age 90:]
I shall not die till Logan County is organized. George Washington said “Join the union” and Logan joins the union before I am 91.
There are 91,000 persons in West Virginia employed in and around mines. Of these, 54,000 are organized in the United Mine Workers of America. For the possession of the unorganized 37,000, the coal operators and the union are engaged in the present bloody struggle. Of these 37,000, 4,000 are in Mingo and 9,000 in Logan.
The fight in Mingo is mild compared with that about to explode in Logan, which is under control of the coal companies. The best description recently Written of Logan is that of Governor John Cornwell, on November 7, 1919:
Logan County is a political unit, self-governed, electing its own officers, who are not responsible to me for their official acts and over whom I have no direct control. Congress can only make public the facts. It has no power to remove a sheriff or convict one who commits an assault. You know that can be done in Logan County only. I shall make public all the evidence.
In fulfillment of that promise, the Governor most courteously turned over to me the full stenographic evidence of the unpublished investigation into Logan County he has been conducting through three officials. Its title is “Special Investigation by the State of West Virginia.”
The coal operators maintain on their pay-rolls public officials who preserve order, guard the company funds, and keep union men out of the county. It is this exercise of public power under private pay which is one of the fundamental causes and is the most lively occasion of the bad blood between owners and workers. The operators pay directly to the sheriff $32,700 a year for this immunity from unionization. In addition, most of them pay the individual armed guard a salary. These agents of the company are deputy sheriffs, appointed by the County Court. The insider who operates this system is Don Chafin, county clerk, and running for sheriff. He belongs to the Hatfield clan, is an educated man, in early middle life, with a family. He is lord of Logan, controlling the deputy sheriffs.
C. W. Jones, treasurer of the Guyan Operators’ Association (the Logan fields lie along the Guyan Valley), says:
The operators pay the sheriff of the county $2,725 a month, and the deputies look after their payrolls. If there is a fuss or anything like that, it is reported to the operator and the sheriff.
J. M. Vest, president and general manager of the Rum Creek Collieries Company, states:
At the present time we contribute a cent a ton to the funds of the Logan Coal Operators’ Association for all purposes. Our income is approximately $100,000 a year. And out of that money perhaps $30,000 (exactly, $32,700) is contributed to the sheriff for police protection. And we have contributed largely to the Salvation Army Fund. In Logan County we have twenty-five deputy sheriffs and three constables. We have a population of a little over 60,000, scattered over an area of 400 square miles.
Pat Murphy, one of the deputy sheriffs, summed up the situation in his own style:
You don’t have no idea how this worked. There is one-half a cent off of every ton of coal on Guyan River turned into the Association in Logan, where Don Chafin is boss. He owns and controls this association of deputies. It is turned into him, and he pays his deputies when pay day comes.
Actually, it is one-third of a cent on every ton which the consuming public of America pays to Don Chafin.
Logan County’s potential coal is at least twenty million tons a year, but car shortage keeps it down to ten million tons. During the 1919 miners’ strike, Logan and McDowell Counties worked at full production and broke the back of the strike. This is one of the reasons why the United Mine Workers are specializing on the district now. If Logan falls, West Virginia is organized.
Don Chafin has drawn heavily on the Chafin family for assistance, and finds it loyally rendered by Con, John and Wayne Chafin. John Chafin, deputy sheriff, says:
The Amherst Coal Company and the Prockter Coal Company pay me $175 a month. I am on their payroll. If a man is fired, I give him a notice.
Another alert deputy sheriff is Randolph M. Dial, Who receives $120 a month from the sheriff and $50 a month from the Logan Mining Company. This private-and-public sheriff system is so thorough that when fifty-one union organizers came in on the Guyan Valley express on October 15 [1919], they went out on the same train on the same day. “Don’t let your feet touch dirt in Logan County,” said the deputies.
“I chartered an engine and two cabooses and forty-eight men,” says President Vest (of the Rum Creek Company) in telling how he ran these organizers out of Logan. This train trailed the train of the union men, and once came up even with it on a parallel track.
Sadly, I could not find Leary’s series online, but it appears that Leary won a Pulitzer for same:
Complete Bibliographical Manual of Books about the Pulitzer Prizes 1935–2003
-Heinz-D. Fischer, Erika J. Fischer
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, Mar 10, 2015
(search: “Civil War in the Coal Fields” “John J. Leary jr”) https://books.google.com/books?id=7S1fCAAAQBAJ
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