The People of Matewan

Better World The People of Matewan

This book contains testimony from the 1921 Congressional Hearings into the troubles in the West Virginia coal fields. I have excerpted the very personal stories of miners and the violence they faced when trying to form a union. There is the testimony of Sid Hatfield, who was murdered by C. E. Lively and a group of Baldwin-Felts detectives barely two weeks after his testimony here. C. E. Lively also testifies and offers a long defense of his undercover work, which involved gaining the confidences of striking miners and then informing on them to the coal operators and detectives. In a second hearing in October of 1921, Jessie Hatfield and Mrs. Ed Chambers testify about the day their husbands were assassinated on the court house steps in Welch, West Virginia. These first person accounts are as close as we can get to those turbulent days, when the miners of West Virginia and Kentucky took a brave stand for the union.