Charles Everett Lively

Charles Everett Lively (March 6, 1887 – May 28, 1962) was an American private detective who worked as a labor spy for the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency. He played an active role in the Coal Wars in Appalachia and Colorado during the early 20th century.

Lively spied on the United Mine Workers of America in West Virginia and five other states, sometimes while working as a coal miner. After fatally shooting a striking miner during the Colorado Coalfield War, Lively spent several years working for Baldwin–Felts in the Great Plains before his assignment in Matewan, West Virginia.

Lively was so successful posing as a UMWA activist that he became a union delegate and was once photographed with Mother Jones. His cover was abandoned in the wake of the Battle of Matewan in May 1920, in which seven Baldwin–Felts detectives were killed. The following year, Lively and another Baldwin–Felts operative killed Sid Hatfield, Matewan's pro-union police chief, and his associate Edward Chambers, evidently at the behest of the detective agency. Lively successfully claimed self-defense in the double homicide. His participation in three killings, with scant consequences, cemented his reputation as one of the most violent opponents of efforts to unionize the coal fields. He has been called "the deadliest man in the West Virginia-Colorado coal mine wars".

Early career

West Virginia Lively was born on March 6, 1887, in Spring Hill, West Virginia, one of 11 children born to James Joseph Lively and Amelia Parsons. His father was a farmer who struggled to make a living, and his mother was illiterate. The 1900 census shows his name as "Everett Lively", and it is unclear if his birth name was "Charles". It is possible that name was added as an alias after he began work undercover in the coal fields. He then began calling himself "Charles Everett Lively" by 1940.

Lively began working as a coal miner at the age of 13, doing "most anything about a mine—loading coal, running a machine". As a youth he was "friendly and persuasive", and became close to Fred Mooney, a future leader of District 17 of the United Mine Workers of America.

Lively joined the United Mine Workers of America in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1902, and remained in the union even after his work began with the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency. He testified before Congress that he joined the detective agency in late 1912 or early 1913 in Fayette County, West Virginia.

In 1914, during the Colorado Coalfield War, Lively fatally shot a striking miner, a Swedish immigrant named Swan Oleen, in a saloon in La Veta. Lively claimed that the shooting was in self-defense. According to his biographer R.G. Yoho, it is likely that Lively killed Oleen deliberately, perhaps because of Oleen's union activities, and that he did so in order to infiltrate the Huerfano County jail. While in jail, as Everett Lively, he gathered information on union activities for the detective agency. At the behest of Albert Felts, co-owner of the agency, Lively's stay in the jail was extended to 16 months for information-gathering purposes. Lively's activities in the jail were likely conducted with the knowledge of the county sheriff, who was anti-union. Lively was in Charleston, West Virginia, at UMWA headquarters at the time of the battle,

Killing of Sid Hatfield and Edward Chambers Sid Hatfield, police chief of Matewan, West Virginia, was shot by Lively on August 1, 1921. While he was in Washington testifying before the Senate, at the same hearing at which Lively testified, Hatfield and his deputy, Edward Chambers, were indicted in McDowell County for "shooting up" a mining encampment in Mohawk, West Virginia. Lively supplied the information that was the basis of the prosecution. They stood trial in Welch, West Virginia on conspiracy charges. The county was anti-union, and Hatfield felt he was being brought there to be killed.

On August 1, 1921, the two men, both unarmed, were fatally shot on the steps of the courthouse by at least three Baldwin-Felts agents, Lively among them. The first to fire was Lively, shooting two guns at Hatfield, killing him. According to later testimony by Chambers' widow, Lively administered the coup de grâce to Chambers, shooting the wounded man in the head. One of the Baldwin-Felts men fired shots into the granite face of the courthouse and placed the guns in the dead hands of Hatfield and Chambers in order to lay the groundwork for a self-defense claim.

The Baldwin-Felts men claimed self-defense. In December 1921, Lively and two other Baldwin-Felts employees, George Pence and William Salters, were acquitted of murder charges in the Chambers killing. The jury deliberated for 51 minutes before reaching a verdict. In April 1922, the three men were acquitted in the Hatfield slaying.

In his biography of Lively, author R. G. Yoho writes that there is "no conclusive proof" that the leadership of Baldwin-Felts conspired to kill Hatfield and Chambers, but that "circumstances and evidence strain credulity to think otherwise." Yoho points out that Thomas Felts was traumatized by the murder of his two brothers and the acquittal of Hatfield and the other defendants, that Lively had no reason to be at the courthouse, and that Lively's son Charles Albert Lively has written that his father stated that when the Felts brothers were killed Hatfield "signed his own death warrant". Yoho writes that there is "overwhelming proof" that Baldwin-Felts conspired with Lively to ensure that no one was convicted for the killings.

After Matewan Lively disappeared from public view after the murder trials, and in 1923 was working as McDowell County Deputy Sheriff and Prohibition officer, a position he acquired in January 1921. There, he was engaged in a number of violent incidents. He was fined $100 and sentenced to 60 days in jail after being found guilty of using unlawful force when he pistol-whipped a man during an arrest. In 1924, Lively was arrested again for assaulting a grand jury witness against him.

In 1925, Lively was arrested in Stirrat, West Virginia on a federal whiskey possession charge. He was ordered held when he could not post a $10,000 bond. Federal agents had raided his room at a Y.M.C.A., where he was staying under a pseudonym, and found one pint of liquor.

Later that year, while employed as a guard at a Fairmont-Chicago Coal Company mine in Chesapake, West Virginia, Lively and another man were indicted on charges that they assaulted the 13-year-old daughter of a non-union coal miner. Lively was acquitted. When the indictment was publicized, the UMWA protested Lively's employment as a guard, saying that he should not be employed in that position in any coal mine. His death was ruled a suicide by a gunshot wound to the head. Lively had been blind for over a year, and his wife, who had serious health problems, was hospitalized shortly before his suicide.

In popular culture Lively was portrayed by Bob Gunton in the 1987 John Sayles film Matewan, which depicts the Battle of Matewan and mentions the subsequent assassination of Hatfield.

He was the subject of a biography in 2020 by historian R. G. Yoho, The Nine Lives of Charles E. Lively: The Deadliest Man in the West Virginia-Colorado Coal Mine Wars.