
          Matewan
          By DAVID, JOHN P.John P. David
          Vol. 10, No. 3, 1986, pp. 20-22
          
          Matewan (Written and directed by John
Sayles. Filmed by Haskell Wexler. Music by Mason Daring. With James
Earl Jones, Chris Cooper, Mary McDonnell, Will Oldham.)
          Many people know that working people in the United_States were not
Federally protected in their right to organize and bargain
collectively in the private sector through representatives of their
own choosing until passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act
(Blue Eagle Act) of 1933.
          When the Blue Eagle Act was declared unconstitutional in 1935, it
was replaced in part by the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act)
of 1935, which the labor movement labeled as its "Magna Carta."
          The history of working people and the labor movement prior to 1933
is poorly documented. It comes to us in vignettes about courageous
individuals such as Harriet Tubman, Mother Jones, Eugene Debs, Big
Bill Haywood, William Silvis, Samuel Gompers, Sojourner Truth, and
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and major news events such as Haymarket
Square, Ludlow, the Molly McGuires, Patterson Silk, and textile
strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
          Perhaps no state witnessed a bigger collision between capital and
labor than did West_Virginia prior to 1933. West_Virginia, born out of
the struggle of the Civil_War, went into the Union with ties to wage
labor and northern industrial 

labor unionism, while Virginia went into
the Confederacy with ties to slave labor that later became the
so-called "right-to-work" South. The Civil_War
division, however, did not resolve the question of which economic
interests would "develop" the state's coal
resources, and two primary forces emerged.
          One came from the industrial north and the other from Richmond and
Roanoke, Va. This activity was accompanied by various efforts to
unionize the coalfields, first by the Knights of Labor, and later by
the United Mine Workers, West_Virginia Miners Union, National Miners
Union, and others. The need to organize in West_Virginia was clear to
the leadership of UMWA. The UMWA could not maintain contracts in
Pennsylvania and Illinois and build an ongoing union structure while
coal-rich West_Virginia was basically non-union. The same problem also
occurred locally within West_Virginia; as various miner unions began
to establish toeholds in the Fairmont, Kanahwa, and New River fields,
it was apparent that contracts could not be maintained as long as
southern West_Virginia and the Pocahontas Fields developed by the
Norfolk and Western were non-union.
          Thus, southern West_Virginia became the battleground for some of
the fiercest and bloodiest labor-management fighting in the world. In
the past few years, a number of efforts have documented worker
struggles, including films (MOLLY McGUIREs; JOE HILL; HARLAN COUNTY
USA), books (Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina and BLOODLETTING IN
APPALACHIA by Howard Lee, and TV/video ("And Even Heaven Wept" by West
Virginia Public Television and the Humanities Foundation of West
Virginia). The latest effort is John Sayles's film, MATEWAN, which is
about a massacre in Mingo County.
          Sayles does an incredible job in portraying one of the best-known
struggles that occurred in the early 1920s during the Mine War
period. What may be difficult for the viewer to comprehend is that the
Matewan Massacre actually occurred. It was only one of many inhuman,
unbelievable, bloody events that occurred during the Mine Wars as
miners and their families struggled for dignity and economic
survival. The context for the struggle needs to be understood. The
post-World War I period was a difficult time for workers and fledgling
labor organizations. President Coolidge canceled child labor laws,
union contracts were laughed at and thrown on the scrap heap, groups
of workers were pitted against one another in order to wring
concessions and prevent unionization, and the "yellow dog" contract, a
company document that workers had to sign that stated one would not
join a union or talk to an organizer, was upheld as legal by the
U.S. Supreme_Court in 1919.
          One coal company in the Matewan vicinity of Mingo County, the Red
Jacket Coal Company, began utilizing the "yellow
dog" contract extensively in 1920, in response to efforts
by the UMWA to stop wage cuts in the non-union southern
coalfields. Thus, the conditions of the Matewan Massacre were
established.
          Interestingly, MATEWAN was not made in Matewan but in Thurman,
Fayette County. Thurman was actually along the competing C&O
Railroad and was the center of the New River coal fields, which,
ironically, had a strong union presence since the 1880s. In fact,
black miners, who were stereotyped as strikebreakers imported from the
South in MATEWAN, were the leading force for early unions in the
Thurman area, perhaps because the area had more of a connection with
the Kanawha fields and the industrial north than the McDowell and
Mingo County areas. Perceptive viewers may notice in the film various
markings that pertain to the C&O and Thurman, but for the most
part Sayles did an excellent job in re-creating the town of Matewan
within the constraints of an extremely low budget. He had the help of
excellent cinematography by Haskell Wexler and the beautiful scenery
of the New River Gorge, which is now under development by the National
Park Service.
          The viewer of MATEWAN is quickly drawn into the struggle against
the coal company and its private army, the Baldwin-Felts Detective
Agency headquartered in Bluefield, W.Va. The hatred against the
company and the "hired thugs" is accurately
portrayed and is typical of the experiences of coal miners in many
places in southern West_Virginia such as Paint Creek (the Bull Moose
Special), Cabin Creek (Tent Towns), and Logan County (March over Blair
Mountain). Elsewhere, miners in eastern Kentucky struggled against the
Pinkerton Detective Agency, and miners in Colorado struggled in Ludlow
against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and the
Pinkertons.
          MATEWAN is important because working people in this country have
been denied a full account of their struggles. Their struggles are an
untold story about people who overcame unbelievable obstacles as they
built this country's industrial base. While numerous books have been
written about the Mellons, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Carnegies, and
others, there is little question that working people resent the
impression that these Robber Barons built America. Local audiences
loved the film because they viewed it as "their
side" of the story, as well as a chance to view a flashback
of a period only talked about cautiously by their parents and
grandparents. Local residents who were extras in the film jumped at
the chance to play roles from their family scrapbooks. Furthermore,
the film clearly shows the people involved as the honest and
hardworking people that they really were as opposed to traditional
Hollywood stereotyping.
          The weakest character in the film is Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper),
the union organizer. He was consistently portrayed as a pacifist and
an outsider, which was actually unlikely. His suggested relationship
with the Industrial Workers of the World was also curious, since the
UMWA Constitution states that members of the IWW, along with the
National Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers,
and the Ku Klux Klan, "shall be expelled from the UMWA." Of
course, all of this must be weighed against the knowledge that Mother
Jones, who helped found the IWW in 1905 and was a major union
organizer in West_Virginia, is still revered by older UMWA members,
and Ralph Chaplin, who wrote labor's best known song, "Solidarity
Forever," was an IWW organizer at Cabin Creek, W.Va.
          MATEWAN is a film with a message and one must be cautioned not to
view it as a historical aberration. The fight for a union and economic
dignity was not won in the final 

scene and is still being fought
today. One can view a modern-day version of the same struggle in the
same Mingo County in the Appalachian documentary on the A. T. Massey/
UMWA conflict titled, MINE WAR ON BLACKBERRY CREEK.
          
            John David is professor and chairman of
the social sciences department at West_Virginia Institute of
Technology, Montgomery, West_Virginia.
            EDITOR'S NOTE:
MATEWAN has for the most part concluded its theatrical
run but is available on videotape at most rental outlets and is
scheduled for cable distribution around the end of 1988.
          
        
