The man who made this statement was killed in one of the recent fights in the valley. I saw his name in the list of the dead.
One of the things that give the coal operators such complete control of the men who work for them is the ownership of great tracts of land. Everywhere you are confronted with a notice that you are on private property.
Because the West Virginia mining villages are nearly all on private property, the operators owning the highways as well as the houses of the miners, they can control their going and coming and determine who may or may not visit them and talk with them. It is idle to say that the men can come and go as they please, as the operators claim. Each individual among them has the right to go from his home to the mine and back again and to travel on the county road, which is merely an excuse for a highway. But he has not the _right_ to go from his own home to that of a fellow workman nor has his wife and children. When they do so, it is by the sufferance of the mine owner, unless they go by the county road and then half the houses cannot be reached. It is idle to say that this power is not exercised by the operators. It is. I have seen it exercised, and this very fact contains a serious menace to the country. I talked it over one day with Governor Glasscock in the early days of the trouble.
"How can it be remedied?" he asked. "The whole situation bristles with problems like this. In this case you are up against a man's constitutional right to control his property as he sees fit and to keep trespassers off it."
Such a situation offers a serious problem in government. Take Cabin Creek alone, with its branches to Kayford and Decota. There are more than twenty square miles of territory in which live ordinarily about 12,000 persons. In all that territory there is scarcely a place in which a man may go without being under surveillance, and except at the little "free" or incorporated town of Eskdale, hardly a house into which a friend may be invited for a drink of water except by the grace of the coal companies.
The miners say that such a condition is un-American. They want it solved and they do not care how it is to be solved. While this matter is not put in the list of their demands, it is one of their serious grievances. Here are the things they are demanding: