officials. The West Virginia disturbances were significant as they closed a chapter involving extraordinary extra-legal procedures in the domestic employment of federal troops and in effect restored the provisions of the pre-war statutes and the Posse Comitatus Act. In other respects, however, the deployments in West Virginia resembled other wartime interventions in labor disputes as federal regulars were sent in to suppress what were deemed by local, state and federal officials as radical and foreign-inspired labor uprisings and challenges to legally constituted civil authority. The army, therefore, closely cooperated with state and local officials and mine owners and operators. In this respect, the West Virginia interventions more closely followed the labor disputes of the 1890s than those of the Progressive Era when federal neutrality was more strongly emphasized.Within the army itself, duty in West Virginia, following a four-year period of extensive civil disturbance intervention, gave impetus to army leaders to make significant preparations to systematically deal with expected future radical disorders of even greater magnitude.

While army and federalized National Guard units were on nearly constant call between 1917 and 1918 to suppress strikes and labor disorders in vital war industries, one sector that witnessed surprisingly few such difficulties during World War I was the coal industry. The wartime calm in the coalfields, obtained through federal mediation efforts between management and labor, was an exception to the normally turbulent labor situation that had plagued the coal industry during the previous forty years. The industry, however, had many unsolved labor problems from the pre-war years, which by