INTERSECTIONS

n August 1921 James M. Cain, a talented young reporter at the , went to Spencer Davidson, the newspaper’s acting news editor, and pleaded with him to let him go to southern West Virginia, where nearly 10,000 coal miners were planning to march 50 miles through two rural counties to free, by force if necessary, fellow union members who had been jailed without formal charges for attempting to unionize the mines. Davidson, worried about the cost’s financial editor (at age 29), and when union organizer William H. “Bill” Blizzard was put on trial that year in West Virginia for treason against the state, the newspaper’s regular editor, Stanley Reynolds, sent Cain to cover it.