authorities to gain federal military assistance and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1874 prevented the misuse of federal military power by local and state civil authorities before and after regulars had been deployed. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker suspended these legal procedures in 1917 for the duration of World War I when National Guard forces, traditionally the first recourse for state officials needing military forces to maintain order, were federalized for wartime service in France. With the absence of state military forces, the United States Army was called upon to fill the void under a policy developed by Secretary Baker known as direct access. A wartime expedient, the direct access policy allowed local and state civil officials to summon directly federal troops for quelling disorders without resortingto the complicated pre-war procedure involving the state legislatures, president, and the War Department. Without pre-war legal procedures, numerous state and local officials, at the behest of local businessmen and patriotic groups, took undue advantage of the easy access to federal troops to crush labor unions or suppress radical groups and dissenters. The years 1917-21 saw an unprecedented number of federal military interventions in domestic disturbances and labor disputes.2

The first army interventions in the West Virginia coal mine wars were carried out under these wartime policies. In the final federal intervention in West Virginia in 1921, however, the federal government moved to restore the procedures that existed before the war, having come to fear potential abuses of federal military power by overzealous, inept, or corrupt state or local