Charles Lively (labor spy) facts for kids
Charles Everett Lively (March 6, 1887 – May 28, 1962) was an American private detective who worked as a labor spy for the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency. He played an active role in the Coal Wars in Appalachia and Colorado during the early 20th century.
Lively spied on the United Mine Workers of America in West Virginia and five other states, sometimes while working as a coal miner. He also spent several years working for Baldwin–Felts in the Great Plains before his assignment in Matewan, West Virginia.
Lively was so successful posing as a UMWA activist that he became a union delegate and was once photographed with Mother Jones. His cover was abandoned in the wake of the Battle of Matewan in May 1920, in which seven Baldwin–Felts detectives were killed.
Lively worked as a deputy sheriff in West Virginia in the early 1930s, and in the 1940s he and his second wife, Ollie Mae, operated the Forde Hotel in Roanoke, Virginia. He and Ollie Mae purchased and managed an apartment building in Roanoke in 1955.
He died in 1962 in Huntington, West Virginia, at the age of 75.
In popular culture
Lively was portrayed by Bob Gunton in the 1987 John Sayles film Matewan, which depicts the Battle of Matewan.
He was the subject of a biography in 2020 by historian R. G. Yoho, The Nine Lives of Charles E. Lively: The Deadliest Man in the West Virginia-Colorado Coal Mine Wars.
