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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and Chuck's two and Jerry's here too, and we're here in solidarity together the trio of us ready to put up our dukes. In this episode of stuff you should know the trie ipis sure, I said, trio right, yeah, okay, you were just messing around, your horsing around.
I was running with it.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Quick shout out to the city of Mexico City, by the way. I meant to mention it the other day when we recorded, but I know there's someplace you've been, and Jerry's been. I finally, Emily and I made our first trip, and as you know, I can verify Mexico City is amazing.
It's a pretty cool town. For sure.
Boy.
I feel really at home there, you do, I do. I feel very at ease. I was just like, this is I don't know, I don't know if it's a past life thing or what. That's what I was going to be, but I was like, this is like a New York in a tropical forest. I loved every bit of it.
Asked Life, you were Diego Rivera, but not the famous one, just another Diego.
Rivera, another big, old fat guy.
We did go to Frida's house, which was a lifelong dream for both of us, but really for Emily so that was amazing, and that's great, just all kinds of great stuff. So that and that's it. I can't wait to go back.
Way to shout out a city right out of the gate.
That's right. And this was my idea. And I don't know.
It may have been at the Bonnie Prince Billy shows that I went to in Arizona. We may have been talking about the fact that Will Oldham as a teenager was in the John Sales movie Mate Wan. And I think that's where it came to me because I saw that movie back then and have not seen it since then. But I was like, hey, that sounds a good, good topic to chew one man.
He was all over the place John Sales. Yeah, he wrote and directed Mate Wan. He wrote and directed Brother from Another Planet. Like he whatever interested him, he just did.
Yeah.
He was also a writer for hire, like he wrote as great at Indie Genius as John Sales is. He wrote the Piranha movie. Oh yeah, I think I knew that, and a couple of other like writer for Higher Things. But yeah, I always been a big John Sales guy. And mate one is awesome. I kind of want to check it out after I know more about it now.
Yeah. He wrote a lot of episodes of Spencer for Hire two.
And BJ and the Verar yep.
So, uh yeah, that's I'm glad you said mate one because I had never heard that word out loud before, and I looked it up and I heard one. Yes, I heard a residence say mate wan, and I immediately came up with a great mnemonic device for it.
You ready, oh boy, if.
You want to remember how to pronounce mate wan, it's a small small town in southern West Virginia.
Uh huh.
You just say, hey, who's that guy from West Virginia over there? You say, who him? That's my mate? Twan works like a charm. I am here to tell you Twan. Yeah, you could say wan, but I think Twan has a greater ring to it to really drive home how to remember.
It, mate Twan?
Okay, sure, although you would say mate one.
Is that Josh Clark's fin maybe one? That's it. I love it.
I want to see how quickly I could derail things this early in the episode.
Well, I mean I talked about Mexico City forgetting us sakes.
So we are talking about Maye Wan and I didn't know much about it. Again, I saw the word before I knew it was kind of a thing, But specifically the Battle of maye Wan is what we're kind of talking about, although that's just one kind of island in the archipelago of incidents that took place in southern Appalachia, southern West Virginia, and coal mining country just across the river from Kentucky and right near its border with Virginia as well. And all the events were about to talk
about took place in the early twentieth century. And I knew nothing about any of this until we started researching this episode. So kudos to you because this is a pretty interesting chapter in not just American history or even West Virginia history, but labor Union history as well.
Yeah, for sure. And this was Olivia jam and she did a great job. One thing I'm sure you knew before we started this is that West Virginia and coal have always been linked. And as Cole went, the history of America has gone because of that robust by two minus coal industry that has been around there since geez,
probably like the mid nineteenth century. You know, it allowed America to grow not only you know, with their factories and railroads and things, but just people and heating homes and businesses and that kind of thing.
Yeah, because you can get some hot hot heat from coal, hot hot heat, and you don't get quite as much from wood from what I understand, So just right there, you have more energy at your fingertips. Plus also I didn't realize this, but I saw it somewhere that it also kept cities from having to cut down all of the forests around them and rely on that wood. Right, It just makes it. It was just a better way
to grow as an industrializing country. And so because America was you know, booming thanks to coal, I think people just kind of assumed, like, the coal miners are probably doing great. They must be richer than astronauts for mining this stuff that's become so valuable. Coal companies were, Yes, And the problem is all of these events came from would have been totally avoided probably had the coal companies shared in the wealth less sentially. Yeah, but that's the
continuing story of you know, the world right Sadly. Yes, I don't know how long that's going to go on for. I don't think it's it has to be the way, but yes, that is so far the story of capitalism.
Yeah, but you know, it was it was a pretty brutal existence as a miner back then. I mean, it's still a very very tough job. There are still dangers to be had, even though they've you know, cleaned it up quite a bit, but it's nothing like it was back then. It was dozens of miners died every year.
There were all kinds of accidents all the time, big big events where hundreds of people die, and a single disaster or just you know, the daily work of dying on the job or dying you know because you just do that job and you breathe in that air, that.
Kind of thing.
And to add insult to injury, and a lot of these owns, the coal companies sort of ran everything, you know. Sometimes they owned the houses that the people that worked there lived in. Sometimes they owned all the businesses in town. Sometimes they ran the law offices there legal offices, but you know, the cherff's department and police and stuff like that. So it was a sort of a monopolistic control in a lot of these towns.
Yeah, and even when they whether or not they had the local sheriff for constable in their pocket, they also found out that they could really supplement their hold their grip over their workers by hiring private police forces, as we'll see. Yeah, and they.
Were really always a great idea, the private police force, that's exactly.
Yeah, for sure, and they were really deliberate about keeping
their workers from unionizing. A good example of that that Olivia turned up there was a mine owner named Justice Collins, and he I don't want to say caught, because I'm sure he really didn't care whether you heard this or not, but he was basically saying, you want to keep a quote judicious mixture of men as workers from groups like European immigrants, the Appalachian folk that have lived here for generations, and then black Southerners, I guess, deasperating from the Jim
Crow South in search of better lives who are showing up in the area. You want some of each, because these people don't naturally necessarily get along, and you can make it, you can ensure it even further that they're not going to get along by paying some better than others for the same exact work. That really keeps people
from getting along very well. And so if you've got groups of workers who aren't really interacting because they don't really mix well together, they're probably not going to be able to successfully form a labor union.
Yeah, but as we will see in many cases, the union, in fact, it worked the opposite way, and they brought together people of different ethnicities in a way that was not common at all at the time as a whole.
You know, no, it's true. And I saw there's a great Smithsonian article about all this, and the historian they talked to was saying, I don't want to paint the picture like I think. He said everyone was just holding
hands around the campfire. But they came together in ways that were just unseen outside of this area, outside of the mining industry, outside of the mining unions, and they did probably get along better than people and other unions, black and white workers and other unions, just because they integrated. There's a really great scene that happened at one of
the mine cafeterias during one of these strikes. Black and white workers held the cafeteria workers at gunpoint until they were seated together eating in an integrated cafeteria room, like they integrated themselves at gunpoint, essentially.
Amazing.
Yeah, it was pretty cool.
So the union did get going, although you know, as we'll see as this story goes not quite yet in mate Wan in what county was that again, Mingo County?
Yeah, I have a great mnemonic device for that, do you really, oh man.
So the union did get going in other parts of the country sort of late in the nineteenth century. The United Mine Workers of America was founded in eighteen ninety, and it was a real as far as unions go at the time. It was a real all encompassing union in that there were other unions around that sort of you know, if you're like a smithy or you had some really skilled specific craft, you might be represented, but they may not represent you know, black workers, Chinese immigrants,
stuff like that. But the Miners Union kind of from the beginning was like, you know what, we're stronger with more people. We're going to represent all the miners who wanted to jump on board. And they realized that, you know, strikes were early on a real and you know still today a real big way that you can make change. But they were bloody affairs back then.
Oh yeah. Like people would get shot and killed on both sides. The government forces would show up and sometimes shoot people like it was a really really violent era in labor history for sure. Murder it was murder, yeah for sure, killing people Yeah for wanting to organize for better working conditions and better pay. Yeah, like you could get you murdered back then. And so the United mind Workers of America they kept at it. I think they're founded in eighteen ninety. Did you say that?
Yeah? Can we call them mamwa?
Sure? Sure you know how to remember that.
Sure.
So within seven years they held a strike, a major strike in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and it resulted in an eight hour workday for union miners. The thing is is that didn't necessarily spread across across the country, especially in southern West Virginia, which was almost entirely non unionized as far as coal miners went, and they, I think, from what I understand, is like the biggest pocket of
non union miners in the entire country. So UMWA said, we need to start trying to make some inroads in there because there's a lot of people who could use our help. And one of the I think the first big confrontations that came to be known as the West Virginia Mine Wars took place in nineteen twelve, and UMWAH didn't actually bless it I guess is the way to
say it. So it was considered a wildcat strike. But as soon as the strike began and it grew very quickly, umwah said we're behind you guys, one hundred percent whatever you need.
Yeah, for sure.
This was the the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek coal mines in Kanawa County, and they struck. And these people will really factor in here in a second to the mate Wan affair. But the Baldwin Feltz Detective Agency, which will tell you all about here in a sec They were hired to come in, these sort of hired quote unquote guards also known as thugs if you were one of the unionists. They came in and had literal machine guns and shot up the homes of miners when their
family was were there. These miners, I mean they called them wars for a reason. These miners were heavily armed. They fought back, and the governor at the time, the Venerable William ME Glascock, came in, declared martial law and sent in the state militia to break this strike up, and a couple of hundred and it wasn't just you know, throwing all the union leaders in jail.
They were I think some of the.
Some of the Baldwin Feltz people went to jail, but it was mainly strikers and union leaders that were sort of under the thumb of Glasscock at the time. So Mother Jones, which by the way, I think Mother Jones should be a total topic that the person, not the magazine.
Sure or both.
We'll talk well, we'll talk about the magazine a little bit.
You have to, right, because like you could do an episode on People of the World that you'd have to talk about the magazine.
Yeah, for sure, or anytime we talk about us, we should probably active a nod to that magazine team.
Mother Jones was arrested though, along with a lot of the leaders and strikers. They had military tribunals and this sort of closed that the first chapter of the West Virginia Wars because World War Two came along and distracted everybody for a while. But things would kind of kick back into action in nineteen twenty.
Yeah, and the Paint Creek Cabin Creek Striker War followed a pattern that would would become pretty regular. The miners would stop working, go on strike. The company would send in goons to come evict them from their company homes without any kind of warrant or anything like that. The families of the people evicted from those company homes would set up a tent city. The goons that the mine operators employed would go attack the tent city that would
be a site too far for the miners. They would rise up armed and a real bloody clash would begin, and then the state or federal government would send in essentially troops to quell this uprising, and then the organizers would be unfairly arrested, often again without warrants, and tried and held, and then eventually things would kind of subside for a little while. That was the pattern that was, if not established there, it certainly was followed by all of the wars after that one.
Yeah. Absolutely, we take a break, Yeah, I think we should. All right, we'll be right back.
So we promised to talk a little bit more about this company that figures into the maeite Wan affair or the mate Wan I mean, there's a lot of different names the war, the Battle at mate wand stuff like that. The Baldwin Feltz Detective Agency, So this was eighteen ninety two. They were founded by a guy named William G. Baldwin in Roanoke, Virginia, and a year later he hired a guy named Thomas Feltz to run the place with him.
So it was the Baldwin Felts Agency, and they were modeled very much after the Pinkerton Agency in that they they were hired as sort of at first before they were even though they had a feeling they were going
to get into union busting like Binkerton did. At first, they were one of those private police forces you were talking about, and they were charged depending on where they were and what town they were in, with everything from kicking hoboes off trains or killing hoboes that were on trains, to sort of supplementing local police forces when they were small towns, to eradicating what they call black crime in the South, like really sort of casting an on black
people in the South and going after them. And they were, you know, they were thugs. They were the guys that they hired were Their backgrounds were pretty rough and tumble, and they would use any means necessary to do what they wanted to do. They kind of had free reign to do what they wanted.
Yeah. Part of the reason why is because again a lot of these towns were quite literally run by the mining company. So if the mining company brought in an outside police force, the actual police force would work with them. At the very least, the courts would turn a blind eye or they just couldn't get arrested. And there were a lot of murders, like in broad daylight that happened during this time, that these private police force detectives I guess carried out and just were not even arrested for.
So it was really lopsided. If you were a minor. Not only did this company like basically own you, but if you got out the line, there was a chance that you or your family were going to be beaten in or killed. So as the as the Umwa also known as Umwah really started to try to make inroads into southern West Virginia to organize this largest pocket of non union miners, the coal mine operators pushed back by hiring more and more private police forces, especially the Baldwin
Felts Detective Agency. They became not the only one, but probably the most prominent in southern West Virginia as far as the the amount of work they got and then the dirtiness that they got their hands into.
Yeah, and they, I mean they were called the Pinkerton in the South. They were very effective at least at first because I think between over like an eight year period at the turn of the century at the end of the last century, they prevented these unions from organizing in West Virginia, and you know, I think there were some strikes that happened and they kept West Virginia out of it. So they were successful for a while at least.
Like you said, they would beat up organizers. If you're pro union, you know, you might get kicked out of your house. You might have your house burned down. They place moles, they play spies among the miners and also just in town. As we'll soon see, they had one guy open up a restaurant a spy in mate Wine,
and we'll meet him later as well. But it was I think it was the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strikes that we talked about a few minutes ago, where all of these guards came in hundreds of these dudes killed up a bunch of people. The same thing happened in Colorado in nineteen fourteen and what was called the Ludlow massacre, where eleven literal children were killed because sometimes these miners were kids, like you know, I don't know how young they got, but they were children.
These kids that were killed weren't even miners, they were miners children. So they were really like not they were really out of bounds. And the fact that eleven of them were killed because the Baldwin Felts detectives came and burned the tent city down that they were living in, that was it that really caught the nation's attention as well, and it gave a really terrible name to the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, which they managed to trade on very heavily in southern West Virginia.
Yeah, in tent city because they were kicked out of the homes that were owned by the mining companies exactly.
So not only did that whole process take place in southern West Virginia, it also happened in Colorado too. That's just what happened. You got kicked out of your home, you go set up a tent city, and then imagine setting up a tent city that's nowhere near the miner's land or the mine company's land, and yet the mine company still comes and burns your tent city down because
you're still trying to organize. It's just some of the most important, almost unimaginable acts that just were carried out constantly between I guess probably basically the eighteen nineties until the nineteen thirties when Franklin Roosevelt came into power. Like, that's just what happened. That's what people did. That was the risky ran if you didn't just keep your mouth shutting your head down and take whatever abuse they heaped on you in the mine as owners.
Yeah, I mean, this is only one hundred years ago, which one hundred years is a long time, but it's not that long.
No, it's not. Which actually I mean, like there's still plenty of reasons to organized and unionize, and there's still plenty of grievances that need to be addressed, but just the actual process that happens, it's just we've come quite far, at the very least in removing generally violence from that kind of process.
Yeah, for sure. So things are heating up in West Virginia. End of nineteen nineteen, there's a big Umwah launched a nationwide coal strike where they got a big fat raise. They got a twenty seven percent raise if you were a mine worker. But again, West Virginia was still almost completely non union at this point, so they didn't get the benefits from that, but I get the feeling that
it really sort of rallied them to organize. At the same time, UMWAH was really mounting an effort in West Virginia, so they launched a campaign there in nineteen twenty in the southern part of the state and McDowell, Logan and Mingo County, where Mate one is to really get them together and say, hey, look, we got big fat raises for people all over the country. Here, you really need to unionize. And Mate wan was right there in the
middle of Mingo County. I'm sure someone's going to say, actually, it's to the outside of Mingo County.
I think it actually is.
Okay, it's just a euphemism, like you know, smack dab in the middle.
Yeah, I get you. I'm just saying I was being the lone or the masked emailer.
Yeah, the well actually person exactly, that's me. Uh no, it's not you at all, thank you, So mayite one. You know, we described these towns that were literally kind of run by the mining companies maye Wan was not one of them. The mining company did have their fingers in some operations, but there were like real legit local businesses owned by locals. There was a real independent sheriff there. I'm sorry, police chief. His name was Smile and said hat Field. Of those hat Fields. I think his his
grandfather the best. It always gets so confusing with me in genealogy.
As you know, that was his grandfather devil Ance.
No, his grandfather was half brother of the grandfather, half brother of devil Ance.
Oh was that right? I saw he was the direct grandson of devil Ance. But okay, he's still he's still ken in folk as far as the.
He was one of those Hatfields.
And we did an episode on the Hatfield McCoys if you want to check that out.
That was a good one. It was like Appalachian Romeo and Juliet story.
Yeah, it totally was. But that is to say Sid Hatfield was not in the pocket. He was a pro union guy and not in the pocket of the coal companies, which was kind of unusual.
He was such a pro union guy he was. He stood trial once for blowing up a coal tipple, which is the structure that a freight train car drives under and gets filled with coal, and it's entirely possible he did that. That's how sympathetic he was to the coal miner's cause.
Yeah, so he was.
He was the not the sheriff in town. There was a sheriff, and I get this the impression that the sheriff was a law and order kind of guy. Like his His allegiance was to law and order. So you know, no matter what side you're on, if you needed his protection or you know, the laws being broken, he took that seriously. He seemed a little more even keel and I can't remember his name. Sid Hatfield was one hundred
percent in the miners camp. And the fact that this town existed and it wasn't in the pocket of the mine operators is I think the reason why these things happened because there was there was a power structure that could start to take on these Baldwin Felts detectives who were coming to town and causing trouble.
Yeah. Absolutely, I think you're totally right.
Thanks to the law.
The company Inmate one, the mining company was called the Stone Mountain Coal Company.
Also where I was born.
You were born at the Mate one.
I was born in Stone Mountain, Georgia, different places.
I didn't know that. I knew you, like you worked there, but I didn't know you were born in Stone Mountain. Wyn't we well.
I mean I was born. The hospital was the Cab General back then. Now it's the Cab Medical Center, which is Decatur. But I had a Stone Mountain address, even though it was not near, you know, kind of downtown Stowe Mountain, in Stowe Mountain Park.
I understand that's fine. That still comes a Stone Mountain. I'm not questioning your bona fides.
No, no, no, it was.
It was just a little weird though, because if you if you're from around here and you say you grew up in Stone Mountain, people probably think like, oh, you grew up and went to Stow Mountain High School and live right near the park. But it was the dresses were just different back then.
I get you.
You sound a little defensive.
No, no, no of it all proud Stone Mountain guy.
I remember when I was a kid, Steve Martin referenced Stone Mountain and I think the man with two brains. You were like, it was a very big deal because Stone Mountain didn't get a lot of shouts and those. I remember there was one line where you said something about Stone Mountain, Georgia during like a rant, and it was just like what Steve Martin, why is his hair gray? I guess the good thing about that is Steve Martin looks about the same he does much forty years ago.
All right, So workers did they even though they weren't under the thumb necessarily as a town of the Stowe Mountain Coal Company. A lot of the workers did live in company housing, and sometimes they were paid in dividends instead of you know money, like real American money. And they did use they employed the Baldwin Feltz Company to kind of, you know, come in and keep things quelled.
Yeah. That they had a spy too, Who was I mean? In an episode full of really terrible people, this guy might be the most terrible of all. His name was C. Everett Lively see E. Lively, and he was involved in that Ludlow massacre in Colorado. He had killed at least one person for sure, and he moved to southern West Virginia and set up shop as a spy. Ostensibly he was a miner who or he had mining experience, but had gotten into the restaurant business and opened a cafe.
And he opened the cafe and basically put out the welcome mat for the local miners union to come have their meetings at so he could keep tabs on what they were saying. And you know, he wanted to say, like, wow, they really fell for that. Yes, this guy, he befriended Sid Hatfield. He made the right kind of friends to make himself seem legitimate. So it was, you know, not hard for him to get to get some of these organizers leaders and otherwise to cough up like details because
they trusted the guy. And they even very smartly the organizers for the like Mingo County area, they did not have an elected leader, and if they did, they kept it secret, so you didn't know who was actually running the show, which.
No union, no local union had right.
Oh interesting, even behind the scenes, a lot of people didn't know who was actually calling the shots, which actually, from what I understand, led to a kind of a just a byproduct democratization of the whole process as well, which I think brought people in even further because they had a real stake in what happened and had a real say in what happened.
Was they're a leader, Like, do we know who it was? Now?
Yeah, his name was I think Frank Keeney. He was his one of his descendants as a local historian, who knows all about this stuff, but he was He was definitely the guy in charge of the Mingo County Area UMWAH chapter. He was the one who was organizing it, and he was doing it at a time when no one else would do it. And actually they sent mother Jones to come in. Who would She would have been about eighty at the time. She'd been a labor organizer for at least fifty years since and she helped big
time for sure. But it was Frank Keeney who was the guy who was in charge.
I thought you were going to say they kept Keene's identity a secret, and they were like, could you know, he's just sweeping up around the restaurant, and they're like, old Keeney lost his tongue about thirty years ago and he can't even talk anymore.
Yeah, no one opened his mouth to check. They just took it out that he really had.
That's right, And he literally kept his mouth shut.
So remember ce Charles Everett Lively. Yeah, he's a terrible person.
Yeah, he's the spy. So we mentioned that Tin City. That happened in other places, this did happen in mate Wan.
A lot of the families were kicked out of their homes, relocated to live together on land in tents, and in the spring of nineteen twenty, Mingo County the mate Wan workers finally said we're going to go on strike, mainly to protest the fact that these thugs, these Baldwin Feltz thugs as they were called, came in to bust up their organizing efforts, which culminated in I guess what we'll call round one of three rounds of events on May nineteenth,
nineteen twenty, when about a dozen of these guards from Baldwin Felts came in to mate Wan. They went to a victim from tent City. A lot of people say that they were just kicked out of their homes, but the National Park Services on record saying that, you know, like you said earlier, they actually went to a place that they didn't even have jurisdiction and said you got to get out of your tent city as well, even
though we have no power here. And those did we already mentioned Lee Felts, right, or did we.
No, we've only mentioned his brother.
Okay, so a couple of the guards or Albert and Lee Felts, and they're brothers of the co owner of the company, Tom Feltz, So he has literal family members sort of on the ground as one of these local thugs. And Albert his brother, and another one of the guards named Cebe Cunningham, and this was a guy that was in that Colorado massacre. Another one of the guys in the Colorado massacre. In addition to see E.
Lively. I hope this isn't getting too confusing with all the names.
Just map it out everybody.
They had a shootout in town, like just a sort of a good old fashioned you know, meet in the middle of town and had had guns drawn.
So there's a lot of variations on exactly what happened,
and we'll give you two of them. One, according to the West Virginia Department of Culture, said that after they evicted people from the tent city or the company homes, those Baldwin Felts detectives actually went into town and had dinner, and they were on their way to the train station and they were going to catch the five o'clock train out of town when they were approached by smiling City Hatfield, and Hatfield said, hey, you didn't have any right whatsoever?
Do e vict those people? I have a warrant for your arrest? And Albert Felt said, you know what, I've got a warrant for your arrest. He might have even said, uh uh first right. It just so happened that the mayor of Maate, one Cabell Cornelius Testament CC Testament again with the double C initials. Yeah, he was on the scene. He was a good friend of Sid Hatfield's, and he said, let me see that. He said, this is a fake,
This isn't actually a warrant for Sid Hatfield's arrest. And by the way, you can't arrest the chief of police here, so get out here. And while this was happening, a bunch of miners who were armed had taken notice of this confrontation that was taking place in the middle of the street between a bunch of Baldwin Felts detectives, their mayor and their police of chief of police, and so they kind of armed themselves to see what happened. Somebody fired a shot in all heck pro procluse.
Yeah, and that's from the mouth of JM Clark legendary podcast.
You ever gone by JM?
I tried to, you know, once or twice. It felt I felt wrong.
I like that JM Clark, do you.
I don't like those two letters together. They're not great.
Oh, I think it's good. You don't. The guy's a ring.
No, it's like it's like missing a vowel, like Jim JAM something like that. JM. It's not They're not cc CB, JB. All those are pretty good. JM is not good, and I'm sorry all the jm's out there.
I think JM Clark sounds like a high end pantmaker, like a clothier or a habitasher.
I make only tattersol vests.
CW.
I would think that doesn't sound great, but my dad called me CW, so it sort of has a ring in my mind.
No, it does.
I don't think they flow really c W does c W? All right?
Yes?
JAM does not well at any rate. I'm gonna come over and have you fit me for some for a pant.
Well, that's fine. I'm gonna start calling you C dubs from now on, S dubs.
So they're surrounded by the miners. This is as far as the different accounts go, this sort of became a gredo shot first deal and that someone fired a gun, shootout happens. Seven of the detectives were killed, including Albert Feltz, the brother of the founder of the agency.
Yeah, that's and Lee, I think too.
Oh do they both die? Yeah? Okay?
And Mayor Testamon was killed and two miners. And again, depending on who you talk to, there's a historian that LVIA found named Rebecca Bailey that told the Smithsonian that
Hatfield probably shot first or the miners. Other people say that contemporaneous accounts at the time, at least from the Willi News, is like the day after they said that detectives took sid Smile and said into custody, and that when Mayor Testerman came up and said, no, no, no, you've got to release him, that that's when things broke out, and that Testerman and Felts were shot first. Yeah, and then the Baldwin Feltz thugs kind of got out of there.
Some of them tried to get across the river to Kentucky, some made it, some got shot there. Some supposedly were shot while they were running away, not across the river, and then some of those that did make it came back later, like under the cover of night to catch a train and secret. So who knows how it actually went down. We do know who died.
Though, Yeah, and there's still bullet holes in some of the brick buildings on mate Street where the shootout happened.
Yeah.
I think they preserved him by putting brass plugs in them. Oh yeah, yeah, So however it happened, there was definitely a shootout and a bunch of people died, and we're left in the street until you know everybody. I mean, you've got like the dead mayor, the chief of police is involved. There's just so many dead people laying around that it took a little while to get everything cleaned up and orderly again. Apparently trains of people had started arriving and we're like okay, and we get back on
the train. And that night actually they redirected trains through Matewan. They ordered the trains not to stop in Matewand as usual until the next day. So it was a really really big deal and rumors started flying very quickly, and probably the biggest one was that it was actually Sid Hatfield who shot Mayor Testament and that the reason he shot him was because Sid Hatfield had eyes for Testament's wife, Jesse. Yeah, and they traced this rumor to Baldwin Feltz detectives.
Yeah.
Right, And so apparently at Hatfield's trial for this, by the way, he was a quit by a very sympathetic jury, as was all of the miners involved. A lot of people stepped up and said, no, this is totally wrong. These guys were really close friends. Of course, he's not going to shoot him in retrospect, from my view, to execute your romantic rival in the broad daylight in the middle of the street anticipating a gunfight would be pretty
brazen and just hoping for the best. So I think, just you know, the fact that there was no one who even said, yeah, he actually did this, I saw him do it. I think he probably didn't. But but there is a little bit of there's a strange PostScript to this story that does make you wonder a little bit.
Yeah, Sid Hatfield married the mayor's wife, Jesse, less than.
A month after this all went down.
Yes, and it does good.
It does make you wonder.
And to make it even more interesting, Jesse was a direct descendant of Randolph McCoy No way, really, yeah, for real, I mean this a place like right across the river from where the Hatfields and the boys lived in Kentucky.
Wow, smiling said he just he did. He didn't give a crud, did he.
He didn't give a root and toot and crud.
He didn't.
I believe even after the wedding they were getting their marriage license and they were in Huntington staying at a hotel. So this is pre wedding staying in the same room. So you could get arrested for that kind of thing. Back then it was called cohabitation, and the police arrested him, and of course it was Tom Feltz who had tipped them off. But apparently the judge said, no, don't worry about it. You guys are getting married today, and who wants to mess that up?
Right?
Then Tom felt said me right.
The judge's famous quote was mazel tov, right, you want to take a break.
Yeah, let's take our other break and we'll we'll finish up what happens right after this.
So, like I said, Hatfield was acquitted. His deputy Ed Chambers was there too. He was acquitted. Seventeen miners all acquitted because they were tried in Mingo County, which was again not run by the coal companies.
So.
That really didn't sit well with Baldwin Felts with the coal operators.
Around one to the miners basically.
For sure, that's a really great way to put it. And like I said, uh, Sid Hatfield. And it turns out also Ed Chambers were tried for blowing up a coal tipple like I mentioned, and they were actually dealing with this case, and this one had had been set in McDowell County and they had petitioned Chambers in Hatfield too for a change of venue because they're like, we're gonna get the death sentence for this thing here, and
it was actually granted. For it to be granted, they needed to show up to court in McDowell County one more time before it was transferred over to I think Mingo County. And on that day they went to court with both of their wives, came out, and they were gunned down in broad daylight by no less than ce Lively, the anti union spy who was supposedly Sid Hatfield's close friend.
Yeah, and get this round one goes to the miners because they were in a like you said, the local jurors were more friendly to them. Round two goes to the other side because the assassins said it was self defense and they weren't convicted because it was a McDowell county and it was more friendly toward the coal company exactly.
So these juries are just biased on both sides.
Basically, as far as Jesse goes, she's now been widowed twice, and she remarried in January of twenty two.
But not to a hat Field or a Pinkerton of the South.
No, but he was a state constable, so she liked the I guess the elected official.
Men in uniform. Sure she should have made a baker then.
For sure, I'm going to do something different this time.
So this all, you know, that's round two, which was pretty quick. This kind of instigated Round three, which was the big one, which were the march on Logan County and the Battle of Blair Mountain. Because of these murders, the Unionist and the miner sent some demands to the governor Ephraim Morgan at this point and said, hey, this Baldwin Felts group of thugs are violent and they're doing things that are illegal and this can't stand.
But Morgan.
Of course everyone was in the pocket of somebody, yeah, was an anti union Republican and said didn't even acknowledge it, didn't even make a comment on the assassination, and took no action on this list of demands at all.
So two things about Governor Morgan. One, while he was governor, a US Senate Committee on Labor issued an opinion that West Virginia was nothing more than an industrial autocracy and that the governor was basically there strictly for the benefit of the coal operators. And then number two, when he was elected, the reason he won is because he ran against three other progressives who were pro labor, and they
split that vote. He was the only anti labor guy, and if you put their votes together, he would have been beaten badly. But they split the vote, and that led this anti labor guy to become governor. And it reveals something really important that the people, the general voter out there in West Virginia was pro labor, was in favor of miners, was in favor of unions, was not in favor of anti union conservatives. And just put put that in your pocket for later, because it's a really important point.
That's right front pocket even I think.
Is the front pocket of your ted or sal vest.
That's right right beside your pocket watch. Sure, all right.
So, because of the non action by the governor on August of nineteen twenty one, ten thousand that's right, ten thousand miners came to town, to Marmott, which is eight miles south of Charleston, armed a lot, most of them armed. Imagine everyone who had a gun had their gun definitely, and they were trying to you know, avenge obviously the deaths of Hatfield and Chambers, and they wanted to confront
this sheriff there in Logan County. His name was Don Schaffin, and they also wanted and he was a minor guy, so it was sort of all in the same bucket. And they wanted to free some miners that were jailed in Mingo County. So Governor Morgan finally steps in and Chaffin, that sheriff I was just talking about, from Logan County.
He got a bunch of deputies together, got a bunch of anti union civilians together, got their guns, and got up on the ridge line at Blair Mountain because the marchers, you know, heading into town had to go through there.
And this was a This was a war.
I mean, it was several days of gunfire, gapland guns, machine guns, rifles. They had airplanes dropping shrapnel bombs and dropping gas bombs, like gases that would make you nauseous and stuff like that.
There was a guy on a horse with a tri dent.
I'm not gonna ask if that's for you, okay.
But it was several days of like a legit real war such that the President of the United States, Warren Harding, had to come in and send it. Well, it didn't come in like literally, but sent in federal troops in his stead right, and the Union surrendered. They were obviously outgunned by that point, but a lot of them were veterans, like army veterans, and so when they called in the army, they were like, I'm not going to go to war against my army that I served.
In, right. And so even though the miners didn't make it to hang Don Chaffin, and they didn't make it to free the miners in Mingo County, they still considered this a win. Apparently, on the way back from town or from the fight, one of the miners leaned out of a passing street car and said it was Uncle Sam did it. And they were saying, like, we surrendered only two federal troops who were sympathetic with we. We didn't surrender to Baldwin Felts detectives, we didn't surrender to Chaffin,
we didn't surrender the mine operators. It was strictly because federal troops came that we we said, okay, because we're not gonna we have no beef with the federal government, so we're not going to fight them. So it was actually generally it was pre much a win for the miners for sure, and it definitely helped catalyze the organizing that went on. I saw that right after sid Haffield was gonned down. I think they reached like ninety percent of miners had signed on for the union in the area,
and this just helped catalyze it even further. The thing is is that the coal mine operators didn't give up at all. They continued their tactics trying to break strikes and break up the unions, and they actually proved to
be very successful. There was a drop in union membership from the United Mineworkers Association from five hundred thousand and nineteen twenty shortly after the events we've just described to one hundred thousand in nineteen twenty nine, not because people lost interest in unionizing or having better working conditions, but because the mine operators ratcheted up the heat, both politically and violently to make that happen.
Yeah.
Absolutely, But while they while the unions sort of lost the battle in that nine year period, they won the overall war eventually because what it also did was just sort of draw more attention to this kind of stuff, and it was you know, national news and all of these sort of militant anti union ideas were I think as far as the American public goes were like, you know, this is no good. And FDR comes in and says like, hey guys, we need a new deal, and they're like, okay,
what should we call it? And he went how about the new deal? And all of a sudden, you know, unions had a I mean, I guess you could say that had an easier time. They definitely weren't being intimidated. I mean, their unions are still intimidated, but not in the ways they were in the you know, turn of the century through the nineteen twenties.
Yeah, remember when I said Governor Morgan was elected but not by any sort of popular vote, and that the will of the people actually was pro union. Thanks to the United Mind Workers Association and some of the other unions, that voice was elevated into national politics and it actually ended up taking over the show, getting FDR elected, and then working directly with FDR to get the new deal passed, to get the labor union strength and to get better
benefits and working conditions for union members. And not just union members, the unions had a knock on effect for other workers who weren't even unionized because it it forced the mine operators to improve conditions across the board, so it benefited workers who hadn't even joined the union. And the wages had to get competitive all of a sudden too, so that benefited everyone as well. It's really difficult to overstate the effect that the United Mind Workers' Union had,
like it was an enormously on the future of America. Yeah, not just in southern West Virginia, but yes, in America. They went on to form the CIO as an AFL CIO, which organized industrial workers like the people who put together stuff using the raw material that people like the miners dug out of the ground and that had a huge effect as well. So it was a really really big deal, these mine wars that took place in southern West Virginia and the effect that they had across the rest of the country.
Yeah. Absolutely. They also went on to found the NFL and the NBA and the C. W.
Bryant.
That's right in the J. M.
Clark as far as Baldwin felt, that company, that agency. They operated for about fifteen years after that, not nearly as sort of young in Busting.
Public eye sort of spectacle, a little quieter.
But when Baldwin and Felts both died within a year and a half of each other in nineteen thirty six, they folded for good. Rich dudes made a ton of money, obviously, And I suggest seeing mate one that the John Sales movie from nineteen eighty seven is really good. It's a fictionalized version. There are a few characters, believe test the Mayor is in it, and ce Lively is in it, and a couple of others, but like the main players, like Chris Cooper's is the lead, it's a fictionalized character.
But this is a really good movie. John Sales is a great filmmaker.
Yeah, and it wrote and directed right in a nice little PostScript to all of this is found with ce Lively. Apparently, his usefulness ran its course after he was revealed to not be an actual friend to the miners, and he was no longer employed by Baldwin Feltz and by nineteen twenty seven he had gone back to mining and was destitute. That kind of thing makes you feel good.
Yeah, what about his restaurant?
It was shut down for health code violations. Somebody found p in the suit. Oh my god, it was terrible.
I'm that old bag.
No, someone put their foot in the Brunswick Stew.
Oh my gosh, you remember that.
Well, I just listened to that. It's coming out as a select I think sometimes that's okay.
Yeah, our foot in Brunswicks Dow episode.
Well, since Chuck referenced to our foot in Brunswicks Tew episode, I think everybody we can all agree that it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this Josh correction. Sorry.
That seems to be like a good fifty percent of our listener mail these days.
Well, I don't talk as much. I'm smart. I keep my trap shut.
Okay, Hey, guys wanted to write in a clear up Josh's conception of Catalina Island. It was my home away from home for almost twenty years. My husband and I lived on our forty four foot sloop and of moored in that harbor many times, probably even the same morning where the splendor had more in nineteen eighty one. And of course this is referencing our Natalie Wood episode which time, Yeah, the show's so nice, they released it thrice. Josh depicted the location as a place where rich people go in
their yachts to party yacht to yacht. In reality, it's more like camping at an RV park. Boats as small as twenty feet sail over to twin harbors on Catalina and the occupants all dine at Doug Harbor's Reef, which is the only restaurant there.
The city of Avalon is the South.
Of France type place, but the isthmus of Catalina is a boater's campground.
A couple of things.
I'll chime in about one and our experience. There's never been a power voter that thought twice about disturbing their anchorage neighbors with floodlights and generators and loud music.
And two.
As for the people who heard cries of help, I wonder if they were actually downwind or upwind of the splendor. Because sound travels very well across water, perhaps the dinghy was actually very far away when they heard these cries. Just curious part of the stuff you should know family.
Kathy with a K, oh, I wonder if that's Kathy with the K who gave us lassos in Arizona.
Oh, is that Kathy with a K? You know? I got my lasso hanging up at the camp still.
And that tracks people who have lassos also might have spent a portion of their life living on the sailboat.
Uh huh.
So okay, if that's you, Kathy with the K, how are you? Good to hear from you? And if you're not the same Kathy with the K, good to hear from you as well. Thanks for that. I love being corrected. Even though you could make a case that partying from RV to RV at RV park is a very celebrity thing to do these days, that's fine, We'll go with
your interpretation of it, all right. Well, if you want to get in touch with this, like Kathy with the K, did you can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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