Matewan Before the Massacre: Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Mining Community (review)

By sunset on May 19, 1920, ten men lay dead in the coal mining town of Matewan, West Virginia, the result of a gun battle between striking coal miners and Baldwin Felts detectives hired by the Stone Mountain Coal Corporation. The Matewan Massacre, as it was later called, became one of the most famous events in West Virginia and Appalachian history. It was also a galvanizing point for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The event has often been invoked as a symbol of labor struggle or as the consequence of outside agitation. But in Matewan Before the Massacre: Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Coal Mining Community, public historian Rebecca J. Bailey revisits the conflict from a local perspective to ask why the massacre happened in Matewan specifically. Bailey’s local historical analysis uses oral histories of Matewan residents, among other primary source materials, to examine politics and economics in Matewan and Mingo County during the decades leading to the deadly confrontation.

While the massacre has long been seen as the violent beginning of West Virginia’s bloodiest mine war, the causes of the event itself have gone unexamined. When its story did get told, it was often by outsiders. Bailey argues that both journalists and scholars alike contributed to a simplified narrative of the massacre, painting the union and the company as the primary agents of the struggle. In this tale, the union played the heroic organization, emboldening the miners to rise up against the oppressive corporate coal behemoth that owned the town and forced its underpaid employees to shop at the company store. This version of the story essentialized the miners (and by extension, southern West Virginians) as primitive folk who settled disputes with violence. It has been a simple pat explanation, but as Bailey demonstrates, the town’s citizens tell a far more complicated story. From their insights, Bailey claims the massacre “erupted not only from the pent-up frustrations of miners, it also vented on-going local political clashes that tapped into religious and class differences” (13).

In order to return the story and memory of the Matewan Massacre to Matewan’s citizens, Bailey examines nearly ninety oral histories (many of which she conducted) from the 1989 Matewan Oral History Project and other documents previously unavailable to scholars, as well as local newspaper clippings, coal industry documents, and correspondence with witnesses. While a significant portion of her sources is composed of interviews from the Matewan Oral History Project, Bailey rarely quotes them directly. Instead, she uses citizens’ insights as a lens to question the factors behind the conflict, juxtaposing their interpretations against the monolithic images of southern West Virginia created by those far from the coalfields. The questions that began Bailey’s scholarly study cut to the heart of the Matewan myth: If the massacre was the result of a desperate coal elite fearing the unionization of southern West Virginia, why then did the massacre happen in Matewan, which was an independent town whose elected officials sided with the union? Furthermore, if Matewan was under the company’s iron rule, how did those officials—Mayor Cabell Testerman, a former miner, and Sheriff G. T. Blankenship, who pledged to protect Matewan residents from company wrongdoing—get elected in the first place?

Bailey argues that the massacre could only have happened in Matewan specifically because of the town’s volatile political climate and its independent nature. She begins at the turn of the twentieth century when Mingo County was carved out of the southern portion of Logan County. She traces the political infighting among the county’s industrial elite, in addition to the tenuous economic circumstance of the companies operating in the Williamson Thacker coalfield where Matewan lies. Crunched between larger, more efficient operations and rising transportation costs, companies in Mingo County depended on their...