Thunder In the Mountains

The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21

Lon Savage

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 1985
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822971429
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: History

The West Virginia mine war of 1920-21, a major civil insurrection of unusual brutality on both sides, even by the standards of the coal fields, involved thousands of union and nonunion miners, state and private police, militia, and federal troops. Before it was over, three West Virginia counties were in open rebellion, much of the state was under military rule, and bombers of the U.S. Army Air Corps had been dispatched against striking miners.The origins of this civil war were in the Draconian rule of the coal companies over the fiercely proud miners of Appalachia. It began in the small railroad town of Matewan when Mayor C. C. Testerman and Police Chief Sid Hatfield sided with striking miners against agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who attempted to evict the miners from company-owned housing. During a street battle, Mayor Testerman, seven Baldwin-Felts agents, and two miners were shot to death.Hatfield became a folk hero to Appalachia. But he, like Testerman, was to be a martyr. The next summer, Baldwin-Felts agents assassinated him and his best friend, Ed Chambers, as their wives watched, on the steps of the courthouse in Welch, accelerating the miners' rebellion into open warfare.Much neglected in historical accounts, Thunder in the Mountains is the only available book-length account of the crisis in American industrial relations and governance that occured during the West Virginia mine war of 1920-21.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• 1. “On to Mingo”
• 2. Everyone called him “Sid”
• 3. The Battle of Matewan
• 4. “We have organized all the camps”
• 5. “The most complete deadlock of any industrial struggle”
• 6. “It's good to have friends”
• 7. “Our citizens are being shot down like rats”
• 8. “. . .to clean up Mingo County”
• 9. “You saw nothing wrong in that?”
• 10. “Don't shoot him any more!”
• 11. “There can be no peace”
• 12. “We'll hang Don Chafin to a sour apple tree!”
• 13. “No armed mob will cross Logan County”
• 14. “It's your real Uncle Sam”
• 15. “By God, we're goin’ through”
• 16. “We wouldn't revolt against the national guv'ment”
• 17. “The thugs are coming”
• 18. “There was a different feeling”
• 19. “I, Warren G. Harding . . . do hereby command”
• 20. “Bring your raincoats and machine guns”
• 21. “Bullets were hissing back and forth”
• 22. “Things slacked off after we ate”
• 23. “These strange new craft”
• 24. “The miners have withdrawn their lines”
• 25. “It was Uncle Sam did it”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index