Hellraisers Journal: From the New York Liberator: “The Wars of West Virginia” by Robert Minor, Part II of IV

Quote Mother Jones, Doomed, Wmsn WV, June 20, 1920, Speeches Steel, p213 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday August 3, 1920
Robert Minor Reports on Efforts to Organize Mingo County

From the New York Liberator of August 1920:

II of IV

When the United States entered the World War and the getting-out of coal became important, the United Mine Workers of District 17, comprising the southern half of West Virginia, grew in membership from five thousand to forty-two thousand. Young and energetic leaders developed out of the coal pits, advances were made in pay, and the workday was reduced from nine to eight hours.

In 1919, Unionism knocked hard on Old Man Baldwin’s door, and even slipped her foot over his sill. Unionism entered Logan County. Logan County is the “fortified town” of Don Chafin. Old Man Baldwin ruled Mercer, McDowell, Wyoming and Mingo Counties from his headquarters at Bluefield, but the County of Logan is held by his ally, Don Chafin, officially known as County Clerk.

And Don Chafin’s fame is wide.

“Ol’ Don Chafin,” say the mountaineers, “he’s a member of the Hatfield family, and all the Hatfields is quick on the draw. One time Don Chafin thinks a salesman that come into Logan is some kind of Union fellow, and Don goes up to the fellow and says, ‘Get out of this town on the next train or I’ll blow your head off.’ And the fellow had business in Logan, so he goes to the Mayor and says how a man named Chafin had threatened him to blow his head off; and the Mayor says, ‘If Don Chafin said he was going to blow your head off I would take his word for it,’ and the salesman he left town.”

“Ol’ Don is only about thirty-five years old and he’s got twelve notches on his gun. He never got charged with murder, only once when he killed a seventeen year old boy, and he got freed from that. Don wasn’t shooting at the boy. He proved there was witnesses heard him say on a train that he was going to kill Bob Slater, the U. S. Marshal, and afterwards he was shooting at Bob Slater and didn’t mean to kill the boy. So it was proven an accident and he was turned free.

“But the time when the fifty-one organizers come into Logan, it was not Don Chafin, it was Con Chafin-that’s the brother of Don-that got the three hundred men under arms to hold up the train. Don that time was in a hospital with a bullet in him that a Union man had put in.”

When Unionism crept into Logan County, Don Chafin acted.

Stories of beatings, evictions and shootings of miners found their way north to the strongly unionized county of Kanawha.

Thousands of miners spontaneously arose with rifles and started on the great “Armed March” to release Logan County from tyranny. “To establish the Constitution,” was their slogan. For three days the thousands marched over the mountains through Kanawha and Boone Counties, welcomed and fed by the mountaineers on the route. They marched over the border of Logan and then were intercepted by President C. F. Keeney of the Union and by the Governor, who promised an investigation. They were persuaded to turn back.

That was last September. Late in October, when Bill Thompson, a coal digger, escaped from Logan County afoot over the mountains and told another story of terror, and seven Kanawha County miners with rifles made a raid into Logan and brought Thompson’s wife and children back, the Union officials barely prevented another general march of thousands.

Investigation reports lie inches deep on everybody’s desk, and the Governor campaigns in other States against Bolshevism-West Virginia having never heard of the subject-and the killing of men proceeds.

In Old Man Baldwin’s counties, every coal digger is forced to sign the “Yaller Dog.” The “Yaller Dog” is a document by which the coal digger agrees that the Union is a wicked thing, “that he will not while in the employ of the company, belong to, affiliate in any way with, and agrees to sever any connection he may have heretofore held with any such union or organization and will not knowingly work in or about any mine were a member of such organization is employed, and if the employee at any time declines to work under this contract”…”he will not then or thereafter, in any manner molest, annoy or interfere with, the business, customers or employees of this company.”

So that the company agents can capture any organizers that may be sheltered in a miner’s house, or eject the miner’s family if he joins a Union, the coal digger must also sign the company “House Contract,” which document provides:

“The said Lessee shall not permit any improper or suspicious persons to come upon the said premises, and the said Lessor shall at all times have the right to enter upon the said premises for the purpose of ejecting all such persons.”…That the company agents shall “without resort to legal proceedings of any kind whatsoever, enter upon said premises and into said house and take possession,” and “MAY USE SUCH FORCE as may be necessary to evict said party of the second part….”

Now, you city people, I’ll tell you something you’ll find hard to believe, about West Virginia mountaineers. Except for a taste in modern models of fire-arms, their philosophy contains nothing of later date than the Constitution of the United States. But in the living reality of that Constitution they I have a faith better suited to the days of Jefferson. You’d be paralyzed with surprise to hear the mountaineers speak of “upholding the Constitution” with rifle and life. They simply don’t know any better. If they are one hundred per cent. American, they are also forty-five calibre to back it up.

In the mountain towns you find men of a type that is rare: the old-time Jefferson Democrat, or the Lincoln Republican-what’s the difference?-and sometimes such men become public officials through the votes of mountain coal diggers. This occurred in Mingo County, in the election of Sheriff Blankenship and the Mayor of Williamson, the County seat, and the Mayor and Chief of Police of the town of Matewan.

Mayor Testaman [Cabell Testerman] of Matewan was a banker, yet he took part for the rights of men-even coal-digging men. “I don’t know how come it,” a coal miner told me, “but there he lays dead for the coal diggers’ rights.”

Such public officials are not partisans of Labor. They are simply impartial. When I walked into the City Hall of Williamson and saw on the door next to the mayor’s office a huge sign reading, “Headquarters of the United Mine Workers,” I discerned that the Mayor does not see Class divisions in Society. His City Hall space is loaned to the emergency-help of evicted miners in just the spirit in which a “Belgian Relief Committee,” might be permitted to hang its sign there, and you know that you would not be surprised to see a Belgian Relief Committee sheltered in a city hall.

And I found a circular that advertised that Mother Jones would speak in the Court House on the next Sunday afternoon to the mine workers of Tug River.

These officials in Mingo County so far have insisted that all men shall have the right of peaceful public meeting; and that no landlord, be it coal company or not, shall evict a tenant from his home without a process of law; and that even private detectives shall be restrained by the laws against murder.

Such, for the time, was all that the coal miners needed. Mingo County was opened to civilization. Nearly all the coal diggers joined the Union, and a few weeks ago they sent Preacher Coombs and Ezra Fry to Charleston to get organizers. Organizing began in open meetings at Matewan, where Testaman was Mayor, and Sid Hatfield is Chief of Police.

As fast as the diggers joined the Union, Baldwin-Felts men came with rifles to eject them from their homes under authority of the “Yaller Dog” documents and “House Contracts which assume to take the place of law. Mayor Testaman and Chief Hatfield took the part of the law, and therefrom resulted the battle of Matewan on the 19th of May, which C. H. Workman of the Miners’ Union wishes to state was not a fight between miners and mine-guards, but between the mine-guards on the one hand and the officials and citizens of the town on the other.

[Photograph added: Mother Jones in Matewan with C. H. Workman, Sid Hatfield, and Ezra Frye.]