Matewan tells the story of a bitter 1920strike in the coal mines of southern West Virginia. The struggle culminates in the Matewan Massacre, a violen (and historically accurate) confrontation in which the town's mayor, seven armed guards hired by the coal operators, and two miners lose their lives. However, this film does more than chronicle a particularly dramatic episode in American labor history. In the hands of director John Sayles [an Irish-American who also directed The Secret of Roan Inish], Matewan offers a meditation on broad philosophical questions rarely confronted directly in American films: the possibility of interracial cooperation, the merits of violence and nonviolence in combating injustice, and the threat posed by concentrated economic power to American notions of political democracy and social justice.

Although Matewan is peopled with actual historical figures -- notably Sid Hatfield, the town's pro-union chief of police and the central protagonist in the massacre -- Sayles uses two fictional characters to propel the plot. One is Danny Radnor -- a boy preacher, miner, and union supporter -- in whose voice as narrator, looking back from fifty years later, the story of Matewan is told. The second is the film's main character, Joe Kenehan, a WWI veteran, former member of the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW], organizer for the United Mine Workers of America, and committed pacifist. Joe urges nonviolence upon miners skilled in the use of dynamite and subjected on a daily basis to intimidation by the armed guards who patrol the town's streets and assault and murder strikers. He also preaches racial tolerance. When the company brings in black and Italian strikebreakers to keep the mines operating, Joe persuades the strikers to invite them into the union. The first quarter of the film centers on this confrontation, culminating in the "scabs" joining the strike. When the miners are evicted from company-owned housing and erect a tent city outside the town, Joe goes with them, continuing to counsel nonviolence even as company guards assault the strikers from nearby woods. There follows the film's only false step, an implausible subplot in which a company agent has Joe falsely accused of raping a miner's wife. Once Joe has been cleared, the film hastens to its violent conclusion, in which Joe is accidentally killed. The film ends with Danny recalling that, in the massacre's aftermath, he dedicated himself to preaching the gospel of "one big union."

History: Blacks formed a major part of the work force in southern West Virginia. In some mines, they were a majority of the laborers. Although some blacks were brought into the area as strike breakers, many became active supporters of the union. Despite segregation of schools and housing in company-dominated towns, black and white miners shared an experience of powerlessness and exploitation. This engendered a sense of interracial solidarity reflected in the determinedeffort of the United Mine workers of America to bring black miners into its ranks. When the union came to southern West Virginia, it actively enlisted the support of black miners, and blacks held offices throughout the union's local organization structure. At a time when the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor erected insuperable barriers to black participation, the UMWA, as an industrial union, made it a point of pride to include all mine workers -- black and white, immigrant and native.

Politics: From the 1890s to the 1930s, West Virginia's US senators were generally officials of coal companies, as were most of its governors. The state legislature, dominated by representatives of agricultural counties, was less reliably favorable to the coal interests. It was not uncommon, however, for lawmakers to accept bribes from coal companies (five were arrested in 1913 for accepting payments from a coal operator running for the US Senate). Perhaps even more important, the coal companies dominated county goverment, choosing sympathetic sheriffs and other officials. The companies were the main source of county funds, which gave them a powerful voice in local affairs. Not infrequently, deputy sheriffs were paid directly by the coal companies. Even legislation intended to assist miners could be turned to the companies' advantage. 

The Workmen's Compensation Law of 1913, for example, relieved the coal operators of responsibility for job injuries, for which local juries had previously awarded compensation to miners. Laws restricting child labor were weak and systematically ignored. They failed to provide educational requirements for working children and did not specify dangerous occupations from which they should be barred. Mine safety laws were notoriously uneforced; West Virginia had the hightest death rate of any mining state, and hte proportion of miners who died in accidents far exceeded that of any European country. "One cannot imagine the power of the mining companies," a US senator from Wisconsin wrote in 1913 after visiting West Virginia. The companies, he added, "own both the Republican and Democratic parties in the state."

Mother Jones: Born in Ireland, Mary Jones (1830-1930) was brought to Canada as a young girl and moved to the United States shortly before the Civil War. Her husband and four children died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1867. She then worked in Chicago as a seamstress and later emerged as one of the most prominent union organizers in the nation's coal fiels and a speaker on behalf of social causes ranging from the abolition of child labor to the Mexican Revolution. As a paid organizer for the United Mine Workers of America, Mother Jones worked among miners from Pennsylvania to Colorado. She was active in West Virginia in a 1901 organizing drive, during the 1912 st4rike, and again after the Matewan Massacre. Jones's actions challenged conventional definitions of a woman's place, but she had little interst in women's suffrage and effectively played upon traditional gender roles (including wearing Vitorian dresses) in constructing her own image as a "mother" to male miners, whom she referred to as her "boys."

Later: The events that followed the Matewan Massacre were even more dramatic than those recounted in the film. Indicted for his part in the bloodshed, Matewan chief of police Sid Hatfield was murdered by company operatives on the courthouse steps -- a demonstration, in the miners' eyes, of the owners' utter contempt for legal processes. There followed the Great Colafield War, in which the operators flooded the region with strike breakers and armed guards, while strikers blew up mines and other property and fought pitched battles with company forces and state troopers. In 1921, the violence culminated in the armed march on Logan -- the greatest domestic armed conflict in American labor history, according to historian David A. Corbin -- in which some ten thousand armed miners clashed with company forces. With the miners apparently gaining the upper hand, President Warren G. Harding placed the entire state under martial law, brought in federal troops, and broke the strike. Not until the 1930s would unionization come to the coal fields of southern West Virginia.