Reading R.G. Yoho's "The Nine Lives of Charles E. Lively"

The Nine Lives of Charles E. Lively--The Deadliest Man in the West Virginia-Colorado Col Mine Wars
R.G. Yoho
Burlington, North Carolina: Fox Run Publishing, 2020

167 pp., $19.95 paperback
https://www.foxrunpub.com/

Books about labor history and their authors have their ups and downs. Over the past fifty years in the United States we have seen the field of labor history move from institutional histories of unions and strikes and the biographies or autobiographies of union leaders to making arguments in favor of theories about immigration and how classes formed in the United States. There followed from that very-much-needed scholarship on women, certain crafts and trades, people of color, specific immigrant groups and regions, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of radical workers and their organizations. Labor historians and others then delved into researching and writing about the daily lives of "ordinary" people and people and movements who had been important in their day and who have since been written out of history or forgotten about. Along the way we had quite a few working-class people writing labor history as they knew it. None of these areas of study ever disappeared or were ever pushed aside exactly, but as research went on people began asking different questions about our history and searching for answers.

Labor history's fortunes are tied to the fortunes of the labor movement. When union organizing is on an upswing, more work on class struggles gets written and published. When unions are doing less well, there is less published. Much labor history has been written as a part of  a wider attempt to map a history of the United States that includes everyone. That has meant deconstructing or disassembling aspects of our culture, and that is a continuing project. Getting working-class people on tape or film who were closely involved in their communities has been essential to this. The historians have taken us apart, but they have not yet put us back together with a full understanding of who we are. Much labor history has also been about answering specific questions. Why doesn't the United States have a larger labor movement, mass labor and socialist parties, a more cooperativist society as other countries do? Why are race and gender our largely unspoken and unapproached divided lines, and what does this mean in the daily lives of working-class people? How do working-class identities intersect and where and why do they diverge from one another? What do "race," "class," and "gender" mean in the United States anyway?

Labor historians necessarily write from the histories of their countries and their peoples. You can catch up with what is new and interesting in labor history by going to the Labor and Working Class History Association to start with. There are labor history events on Zoom about every week from one source or another. There are journals, films, music, museums, and lots of books being published that are way too expensive for most working-class people to afford. If you're interested in radical analysis of labor history that you can afford, go to International Publishers and Haymarket Books to start. If you have some cash burning a hole in your pocket, head over to the University of Illinois Press to start.

There are many people who write and present about labor history who are not attached to colleges and universities and who self-publish. There are also many professors who teach at smaller colleges who have devoted themselves to doing local labor histories. Over the past few years there has been quite a bit of interest in the West Virginia Mine Wars, and there are people who live in West Virginia who are uniquely qualified to tell the stories of the Mine Wars. The Mine Wars ran from around 1912 into the early 1920s. This was essentially open warfare between mine workers and their supporters, on the one side, and the coal companies, law enforcement and gun thugs, and politicians who sided with the companies on the other side. It is remarkable to understand that working-class people engaged in prolonged armed struggle in Central Appalachia. It is more remarkable to understand that similar battles were fought in Colorado, parts of the South, Illinois, and many other places all within the last one-hundred and-forty years. These were open battles over workers' rights, safety on the job, higher pay and wage floors, the right to union representation, democratic government, and, in many cases, the right of workers to control or have a say in how coal was going to be mined. Please visit the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum and look at the books and learning sessions they offer to begin learning more. 

R.G. Yoho has written a book about Charles E. Lively, a complex and troubled man who worked for the notorious Baldwin-Felts detective agency. Baldwin-Felts is most often remembered as a union-busting and strike-breaking outfit that had on its payroll men who spied on union organizers and used violence and extra-legal means to achieve their ends and most often got away with what they had done. Really, nothing good can be said about Baldwin-Felts and objectivity is impossible when discussing the agency. Lively was a mine worker who took the side of the anti-union gun thugs. He spied on union miners, infiltrated the union ranks, and committed terrible acts of violence in Colorado and West Virginia, and probably in other states as well. In doing this he was part of a large and nefarious cohort. He and a few others were responsible for the murders of Sid Hatfield, the pro-union sheriff of Matewan, West Virginia, and Ed Chambers, Hatfield's friend and deputy, in Welch, West Virginia on August 1, 1921. Lively never paid for his major crimes, unless we consider his downward-spiral over the years as justice.

These assassinations were carried out in order to revenge the outcome of the Battle of Matewan on May 19, 1920 during which seven Baldwin-Felts detectives were killed. Two miners and Matewan's pro-union mayor were also killed that day, and the number of people wounded has never been determined. The violence in Matewan was one part of class and community conflict in the region as the coal industry sought to take over the state. The killings of Hatfield and Chambers sparked outrage across southern West Virginia and helped lead to a mass armed march by mine workers on Logan County, West Virginia and the Battle of Blair Mountain. Workers had reached their limit and wanted justice and their communities supported them.

Yoho's book is not a reliable labor history. He gets the initials of the United Mine Workers of America wrong and he misses an opportunity to describe the violence that Baldwin-Felts operatives engaged in in Colorado and how one of those operatives was assassinated in Trinidad, Colorado. He gets a story of a lynching in Colorado wrong. The socialists who were so important to mine worker organizing in Colorado and West Virginia get little attention. Yoho uses many newspaper articles as sources that appeared in newspapers far away from West Virginia and Colorado. Mother Jones, often called "The Miner's Angel" for her work in union organizing is mentioned without examination, although she committed serious errors in Colorado and West Virginia. People of color and immigrants who are essential to the story don't get mentioned. Yoho does not take up the fights that mine workers organized to take control of their work and all of the ways the coal operators fought back and insisted on holding the cards.

But Yoho does something else that is remarkable when he follows Lively into what must have been madness and dissolution. Labor historians rarely do this. Yoho is good at questioning motivations and creating a narrative of Lively's fall. He seems to dismiss Lively's anti-communism and reactionary politics as his motivations for betraying others and trying to break the miners' union. He goes deeper and gets as close to Lively's inner self as an author can do from a distance and in a short book. This becomes a good case study of someone who lives at the margins with an outsized temper and a level of alienation that swamps him. We see Lively falling apart over the years and then taking his life as he was hitting rock bottom. This occurred in 1962, or forty-two years after Lively had been one of the team who killed Hatfield and Chambers. It is difficult indeed to find anything redeeming in the life of Charles Lively as R.G. Yoho tells the story, and that helps make this a compelling tale.

This is a book that cries for better editing, less repetition, and less insistence on holding the moral highroad, though I share most of Yoho's sympathies.

If you have not seen John Sayles' film "Matewan" you owe it to yourself to see it. Here is a scene from the film that carries on the legend of Sid Hatfield:

Charles Lively appears in the film here. He is the man who makes "the bad end of the bullet" speech.