Davis claimed his continued negotiations were the reason for the union’s win, restoring the standard ton.  And they were a major part of it.  The wildcat strike in Boomer was a pretty strong lever too.  Without that incident and assurances of preventing wildcat rebellions in the future, operators would probably not have budged during a financial downturn.  Despite public statements of agreement like the one above, operators continued to use the long ton south of the Kanawha where rebellions had yet to be successful and where the union was completely shut out.

In Here Come the Boomer Talys, Fred Barkley addresses the idea that patience may have had the same outcome in the end:

…it could be argued that had the Boomer area Italians shown a little patience and gone back to work with the rest of the district, they would have gotten what they wanted without creating so much trouble. In fact, Adam Littlepage, Kanawha County’s pro-labor state senator, apparently acting on be­half of Ben Davis, had told them that when he addressed a public meeting in Smithers just after the Italians initiated their strike

Setting aside the fact that few, if any, of the Boomer Italians were UMWA members and, therefore, under no compunction to obey President Davis’s return to work order, the problem with the above argument is that [due to the need to support family overseas and pay off transportation debts] the stakes in the Long Ton dispute were higher for these immigrants than they were for native-born miners. 

As the story moves forward through Cabin Creek, Paint Creek, Matewan and other struggles it becomes clear that throughout the next decade an increasing number of miners, and District 17 as a whole, adopted the Boomer Talys’ strategy of direct confrontation rather than slow negotiation as the only path open to them for eliminating the guard system and claiming their rights to freedom of travel, speech, association and to be paid in legal tender for their labor.

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No matter the era, newspapers often reflect the biases of their publishers which couldn’t be more apparent than when comparing the Fairmont West Virginian with the Labor Argus (above and below)

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