With all of the news about what has transpired in Connecticut and Ares gun store in California I thought it rather apropos that this months (March 2014) NRA's American Rifleman had an article about the Battle of Blair Mountain. The battle took place in 1921 in the a southern county of West Virginia - Logan County. Are we reliving history? If we are please read the story to understand what tactics will/will not work.
Wiki reports:
The Battle of Blair Mountain was the result of economic exploitation of workers during a period of social transformation in the southern West Virginia coalfields.[5][6] Beginning in 1870–1880, coal operators had established the company town system.[7][8] Coal operators paid private detectives as well as public law enforcement agents to ensure that union organizers were kept out of the region.[7] In order to accomplish this objective, agents of the coal operators used intimidation, harassment, espionage and even murder.[7] Throughout the early 20th century, West Virginia coal miners attempted to overthrow this system and engaged in a series of strikes, including the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of 1912, which coal operators attempted to stop through violent means. Mining families lived under the terror of Baldwin-Felts detective agents who were professional strikebreakers under the hire of coal operators. During that dispute, agents drove a heavily armored train through a tent colony at night, opening fire on women, men, and children with a machine gun.[9] They would repeat this type of tactic during the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado the next year, with even more disastrous results.[10]
By 1920, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) organized most of West Virginia. The southern coalfields, however, remained non-unionized bastions of coal operator power. In early 1920, UMW president John L. Lewis targeted Mingo County for organizing. Certain aspects of Mingo made it more attractive to union leaders than neighboring Logan County, which was under the control of the vehemently anti-union Sheriff Don Chafin and his deputized army.[11] Mingo's political structure was more independent, and some politicians were pro-union. Cabell Testerman, the mayor of the independent town of Matewan was one supporter of the union cause. He appointed 27-year-old Sid Hatfield as town police chief.[11] As a teenager, Hatfield had worked in the coalmines and he was sympathetic to the miners' condition. He also was a member of the famous Hatfield family of the Hatfield and McCoy feud. These men provided union organizers an opportunity to gain a foothold, and unionizing accelerated rapidly in the county...
