Thunder In the Mountains - (Regional) by Lon Savage (Paperback)

About the Book

The Classic, Lively Narrative of a Seminal Labor Dispute in Appalachian History

Book Synopsis

The West Virginia mine war of 1920-21, a major civil insurrection of unusual brutality on both sides, even by the standards of the coal fields, involved thousands of union and nonunion miners, state and private police, militia, and federal troops. Before it was over, three West Virginia counties were in open rebellion, much of the state was under military rule, and bombers of the US Army Air Corps had been dispatched against striking miners.
The civil war began in the small railroad town of Matewan when Mayor C. C. Testerman and Police Chief Sid Hatfield sided with striking miners against agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who attempted to evict the miners from company-owned housing. Thunder in the Mountains was the first book-length account of this crisis in American industrial relations and governance, much neglected in historical accounts.

From the Back Cover

The West Virginia mine wars--and particularly their climactic episode, the miner's march on Logan in August and September 1921--make for a rousing good story, and no one has told it as well or as fully as Lon Savage does in Thunder in the Mountains. Drawing on his years of experience as a professional journalist, Savage has written a masterful narrative, full of apt description and colorful characterizations, yet based solidly on the historical record.

Review Quotes

A colorful account of the open warfare in West Virginia's dark and bloody coal fields in 1920 and 1921. . . . This is a solidly researched account of the story.-- "Library Journal"

The lively narrative, written by a former professional journalist and first published in 1985, is preceded by an explanatory introduction by John Williams.-- "International Review of Social History"

About the Author

Lon Savage (1928-2004) was a native of West Virginia. He worked in journalism for a decade before taking a job as assistant to the president of Virginia Tech, where he worked for twenty-three years.