Word: matewan
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These faces know hard times. They look sculpted from granite. They are sere with too much work, too little food and the knowledge that in 1920 in Matewan, W. Va., life is a bed of coal. Man and boy go into the mines and die; mother and wife wait for the sound of their men coming home, or for the fatal word that they won't. Life has pressed all hope out of these faces -- to smile would be a crime against remorseless nature -- though there is no free time for despair. The miners have been taught to accept their...
...that it recalls the Hatfield-McCoy feud in the same region, around the West Virginia-Kentucky line. Now the conflict, involving some 1,500 members of the United Mine Workers, is evoking even uglier images. "It's almost like a civil war," said ex-Mayor Robert McCoy of Matewan, W. Va. Hayes West, a nonunion truck driver, was killed and another driver wounded when snipers opened fire on a convoy on Coeburn Mountain in Kentucky; three other drivers have been wounded in similar ambushes...
...Around Matewan, W. Va. (pop. 803), probably one-tenth of the inhabitants are Hatfield kin. Clarence ("Dutch") Hatfield, 69, Ellison's grandson, lives up the hollow from Matewan. A short walk away his great-grandfather Ephraim, the family progenitor, is buried in what used to be a potato patch, and a little way beyond is Dutch's birthplace. Says...
...grisly ambush occurred, and the ridge where Jim Vance (a Hatfield inlaw) made a hellbent stand against far too many McCoys. And they think they know who was to blame, though their opinions tend to run along family lines. Robert McCoy, 36, the well-fed and worldly mayor of Matewan, points a finger at the meddlesome Hatfields who invaded the election grounds: "Politics-that was what the whole thing was about. One family meddling in the other's interests." Another McCoy, twice the mayor's age, takes his own backhanded swipe: "Those poor Hatfields, as I understand...
...bound to arm themselves and adopt violent methods in their strike. Where the workers go armed, the employer is bound to call in additional force; and the vicious circle widens indefinitely, each side alleging self-protection as the cause for its acts. The recent series of affrays in Matewan, West Virginia, have already cost a dozen lives, detectives, strikers, and peaceful citizens being numbered among the slain. Such futile affairs as this need never occur, if only employer and employee alike could learn to refrain from provoking their opponents...