Ignorance promotes fear. The Stone Mountain Coal Company exploits the ignorance of its employees to maintain power in Matewan. Keeping Matewan’s residents fearful of their future, fearful of change and fearful for their lives, the Stone Mountain Coal Company retains absolute control over the town of Matewan. Controlling all four social and cultural processes at work in Matewan, the company is able to extract the fear, work, and “loyalty” they desire out of their workers. They are maintaining a feudal environment over their employees, binding them through debt peonage to serve only the Stone Mountain Coal Company, denying them the freedom to search for other employers. The Stone Mountain Coal Company would in fact appear to be searching for a type of slavery over its workers when it contracts them against a union, denying them control over their own lifetimes and identities. Before knowledge enters the town of Matewan with the arrival of Joe Keenan, its residents have no control over their own destinies. Definitely not a form of capitalism, where there is a free labor market, the economic exploitation in Matewan completely denies employees of all of the products of their labor, and grants the exclusive rights of appropriation to the Stone Mountain Coal Company, Matewan’s feudal lord. This is feudalism, bordering on slavery.

Culturally, the Stone Mountain Coal Company is able to maintain control over the residents of Matewan by promoting ignorance and fear of the unknown—“strike breakers,” races, and unions. Pitting Matewan’s resident workers against the incoming strikebreakers allows the Company freedom to raise competition levels for jobs that all the workers need to live, while lowering the amount of money the company has to pay to whoever keeps the jobs. It also generates hatred between the groups of workers that blinds them of their similarities and robs them of camaraderie. The resident workers’ fear and hatred of blacks and Italians and vice versa distracts them from their hatred of the company, and prevents them from bonding together as workers against the Company. The Company uses racism to their advantage by promoting it, and further prevents unionization of the workers by showing the union as something new, foreign, and untrustworthy. Unions are forbidden in the workers’ contracts, so the workers must meet secretly to discuss the possibility of one. Because they lack security in their jobs, the workers fear for their lives and creature “comforts.” The company promotes this fear by monopolizing housing, forcing workers to live in substandard housing and making sure that the workers know that if they should lose this housing, they have nowhere else to go, no place else to live. The company completely controls their physical lives, an indication of slavery. Keeping the workers in ignorance of their futures forces them to live in constant fear, allowing the company to easily gain and maintain control.

Politically, the Company controls its workers using fear to enforce its policies. Employing two “feudal knights,” or detectives, from the Baldwin/Phelps Detective Agency, the Stone Mountain Coal Company enforces rules by cruelly instilling fear in their workers. Using scare tactics, such as throwing people out of their homes, taking their possessions, and threatening their women, Hickey and Griggs rule over the companies’ employees unsympathetically. Hiding behind the companies’ ultimate power, the weak and slimy Griggs and Hickey use that power to their own advantage when they are trying to get a room at Mrs. Elkins’ boarding house, saying, “we own this house…the company will hear about this.” The company also uses their political and monetary clout to attempt to extract spies from the townspeople. Normally in feudal town situations, most political authorities defend the company, taking the money offered them and becoming part of the intimidation plot against the workers. In Matewan, however, the mayor and the sheriff defend the workers, refusing temptation and power. The company does, however, succeed in corrupting the restaurant owner, secretly using him to talk his fellow workers out of the union, and to devise a plot to scare away or murder Joe Keenan. The restaurant owners’ lust for power and money causes him to go to Bridie May, lie to her about what Keenan had said about her, and trick her into lying for the company in an attempt to have the other workers get rid of Keenan. This is a political scheme to dispose of the only source of information in Matewan, the only voice of reason in the insanity the Stone Mountain Coal Company has purposefully created, and the greatest danger to the company. Lowering hope and morale, these political persuasions give the Stone Mountain Coal Company mental control over its employees.

Environmentally, the company controls the workers by forcing them to work in substandard conditions. Mining as much coal as they can as quickly as they can, the workers are exposed to unsafe conditions, leading to illness and death. Because there is little to no management in the mines, the workers must decide for themselves how to retrieve coal from the mines. They use dynamite to free the coal, leading to unstable conditions in the mine, and sometimes employ haphazard measures to get the coal out. The poor conditions in the mine—coal particles in the air that destroy worker’s lungs, carelessly used dynamite, and poorly constructed support structures, lead to illness, and sometimes death. Constantly sick and seeing those they love constantly sick weakens the workers’ bodies and spirits, leaving them less able to make solid decisions and do good things for themselves. This undermines their fight against the company.

The company maintains economic control over its workers in many different ways. It monopolizes the circulation of materials inside the town of Matewan, so that the workers have no choice but to pay the excessive prices at the company store. The company further assures its monopoly by forcing its workers into debt peonage, making them pay the company for all their supplies, clothing, and food. This puts the workers deep into debt before they get their first paycheck, making it all but impossible to pay their way out, ever. But in case the workers ever are able to save enough money to climb out of debt, the company pays its workers solely in company scrip, based on the tons of coal they extract, not on wage, so that any money they manage to save is useless outside the company. This ensures their bondage to the company. By controlling the production and distribution of materials, goods, and services, the Stone Mountain Coal Company maintains a feudal town in Matewan.

Mentally abusing the workers of Matewan using cultural and political processes, the Stone Mountain Coal Company attempts to lower the workers’ resistance. It then hammers them with environmental and economic strain, forcing them into a feudal economy where they have little to no control over their lives and futures. Only with the arrival of intelligence, of knowledge, only with the arrival of Joe Keenan does the company falter in its’ attempts to oppress its employees. Knowledge is a catalyst for change. The union allows the workers to finally bind together as one unit of employees, allows them to stand their ground as human beings, and to make their voices heard as workers. It is the first hint of a future devoid of bondage, when the workers will have freedom to demand decent wages, to demand certain rights, and to search for other employment if they choose to do so. Joe Keenan’s murder shows that it isn’t going to be easy, that the changes aren’t going to come quickly or all at once, but that the foundation for knowledge has been laid in Matewan. Matewan demonstrates the transition from a feudal society to a capitalist society, and depicts the fight that initiated change.