The Battle of Blair Mountain saw 10,000 West Virginia coal miners march in protest of perilous work conditions, squalid housing and low wages, among other grievances. They set out from the small hamlet of Marmet, with the goal of advancing upon Mingo County, a few days’ travels away to meet the coal companies on their own turf and demand redress. They would not reach their goal; the marchers instead faced opposition from deputized townspeople and businesspeople who opposed their union organizing, and more importantly, from local and federal law enforcement that brutally shut down the burgeoning movement. The opposing sides clashed near Blair Mountain, a 2,000-foot peak in southwestern Logan County, giving the battle its name.
Miners then often lived in company towns, paying rent for company-owned shacks and buying groceries from the company-owned store with “scrip.” Scrip wasn’t accepted as U.S. currency, yet that’s how the miners were paid. For years, miners had organized through unions including the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), leading protests and strikes. Nine years prior to Blair Mountain, miners striking for greater union recognition clashed with armed Baldwin-Felts agents, hired mercenaries employed by coal companies to put down rebellions and unionizing efforts. The agents drove families from their homes at gunpoint and dumped their belongings. An armored train raced through a tent colony of the evicted miners and sprayed their tents with machine gun fire, killing at least one. In 1914, those same agents burned women and children alive in a mining camp cellar at Ludlow, Colorado.
A similar thing happened in my neck of the woods in 1925. Sounds familiar: unionized miners go on strike, company cuts off all credit to the company stores that they controlled, things become heated, company police shoot into crowds of miners killing one and wounding others, tensions increase, the military is brought in, and the dispute finally ends after a provincial election and recognition of the legitimacy of the union. Flash forward to today and the mines are all but shut down and many are museums, but the incident is still recognized every year as a local holiday.
Songs have been written, stories told.
Those same miners now mostly voted for trump because he promised clean coal…
Things have changed
The term “redneck” in the early 20th century was occasionally used in reference to American coal miner union members who wore red bandanas for solidarity. The sense of “a union man” dates at least to the 1910s and was especially popular during the 1920s and 1930s in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. ^Patrick Huber, “Red Necks and Red Bandanas: Appalachian Coal Miners and the Coloring of Union Identity, 1912–1936”, Western Folklore, Winter 2006.^
I’m citing this because the term redneck has been mostly reclaimed by conservative Americans, but it’s important that the term was used by union members who fought the cops when they were sent to break up a strike. The origin of the word was used in a far more left-leaning sense than it is today.
Iirc Howard Zinn referred to this as the “second US Civil War” in A People’s History of the United States
It was the biggest domestic military engagement since the US Civil War, at least.
I guess that depends on how you read KKK activity after Hayes ended Reconstruction.
But you could also attribute it to the same beast. Jim Crow was as much about crushing black labor power as it was state sponsored white nationalist terrorism.
I’d read it as on-duty vs off-duty labor repression.
What kind of traitorous soldiers fight against their own people?
That’s a pretty roundabout way to describe regular old cops.
It’s almost like there was a plan behind the right’s propaganda machine that has spent decades convincing ordinary people that if other ordinary people ask for things like rights or fairness or safety then that means they are an evil enemy.
It’s almost like there was a plan
There’s definitely an ideology. And there are certainly a number of plots and schemes executed at a high level.
But so much of the modern condition of American policing is just state sponsored stocastic terrorism. It’s less a coherent plan as an unchecked filibuster. Thousands of idiots and assholes told “do as thou wilt” so long as they do it to the underclass.
The kind who are there to get paid.
Othering is a pretty powerful tool built right into the human condition.
I would be curious how true that would be in a post-scarcity egalitarian society. How much does our impulse to create out-groups depend on resource insecurity?
Obviously in capitalism having an out-group makes it easier to exploit everyone by creating division. Since exploitation is the key to profits, capitalists are incentivized to create out-groups. But if you take away these conditions, is it really human nature to create an enemy out of whole groups of people?
I think anthropologists and sociologists would likely be the best to answer that, but our animal cousins do the same thing fwiw
Animals hardly live in post scarcity though, nor are they equipped to understand what that is.
Ok, but much like humans they have had very little need to develop the behaviors and capacity for it.
It’s a fun theoretical but I’d tend to think that we don’t have a special hidden away innate capacity for it given everything about humanity and nature
Its a circumstance that is an extension of rational dualism, it isn’t inherent to humanity. Its the way we were all taught to think, that leads to “othering”. There are other means of analysing our world, which bring people together rather than splitting and alienating each other.
What you call inherent to humanity, I call inherent to bourgeois capitalism. Humanity has other options. In a thread about worker liberation, bourgeois essentialism should not go uncriticized.
The arrival of the military deescalated the conflict. The miners were rightly hostile toward gun thugs, capitalists, and cops, but had a favorable view of the military. The miners did not view the soldiers as their enemy, and as far as I know, peacefully surrendered.
I’m sure there were exceptions, but that was my understanding from the great history, Thunder on the Mountain: West Virginia Mine Wars of 20, 21
Probably harder to find examples where they wouldn’t.
Armies have historicly been used just as much to keep the local population in line as to wage war.
I’m sure they had their own families to feed. Desperation is a powerful tool
If someone tells you to put a gun to a guys head for trying to feed his family, on pain of not being able to feed your own family, that’s a good sign to turn the gun on the guy giving the orders.
Because he might as well have a gun pointed at them.
Ya I agree, but I think the reality is that most people just get swept up in everything and fixate on their immediate problems.
Behind the Bastards covered this. The mining company established a ‘rape room’ system, where wives and daughters of injured miners paid off medical debts with their bodies.
Part One: The Second American Civil War You Never Learned About
Well. That goes on the list of things I really didn’t need to know. What the fuck, humanity.
What did you think the National Guard was for?
They didn’t get their start shooting college students!
First they came for the unionists, and I did not speak up…
Fun fact, if you mix dirty engine oil and sand in a water balloon, you could completely blind any vehicles that might be nearby.
Motor oil and sand just does not come off when it’s all over motor vehicle windows.
Completely impossible to see through.
Just gonna leave that there
Where do I get dirty engine oil? I ride a bicycle
U ride a bike on the street no? I’m sure u ride by plenty of cars, don’t need to own it to remove its drain bolt 🤭
Only a hundred years ago. We can’t even go 100 years without evil infesting our government.
The US government has always been evil. What are you talking about? Maybe learn about how evil a foreign policy the US has.
Not to mention the continent-spanning genocide that the US is founded upon
I dunno… Carter seemed like he was maybe cool, but I wasn’t alive yet back then
Can’t even go 4 years
I used to be evil. I still am, but I used to be too
You know what sucks about this story the most for me?
I grew up with these people’s descendants. You know what they’re doing right now?
The entire area voted more than 80% for Trump.
It bums me out so much, but then, I get it. We have NOTHING. The only means of making a living around here for regular folks is mining coal. The democrats want to end the use of fossil fuels. Of course they do, but it has turned everyone into republicans around here. Nobody is offering alternatives that truly benefit anyone but the people who are already wealthy.
The people who already had money are turning all of the land into ATV trails, and every halfwit with a camera comes to town and gawks at the poor folks for YouTube money.
My god, it all pisses me off.
You forgot to mention that most of them also have black lung.
Don’t tell them or they’ll start lynching their own internal organs.
I mean 90 billion dollars was set aside to teach them how to green energy but they voted to mine coal instead, I feel nothing for ignorant people, this is what they voted for
This is pretty similar to primary form of settler colonialism in the US too. Come in destroy the primary way of living and then offer charity with strings attached to help civilize or remove the natives.
Thank you for this comment.
The asshole you replied to can’t seem to grasp what you’re saying, but I do and I appreciate it.
And notice he quickly replied to you but ignored what I said.
Oh well.
Coal companies are now native Americans and the people working coal are native Americans? The poor endangered coal miner, why doesn’t anyone help them.
You’ll civilize them yet ol chap. Filthy savages mining coal like theyre family and community expected them too. Why don’t they just drop all of that nasty business and take up more savory professions already? Ask them why? Ha those fools can’t have any meaningful reasons, surely you and I know what is best for them. /S
I mean honestly though, I’m pro clean energy. I’m pro shutting down the coal industry. But have you actually heard anyone from there talk about what they want or what theyre concerns are?
I feel for ignorant people, so I’ll let your comment slide.
The point is “nobody thinks about or cares for or helps them” is absolutely bullshit. Any attempts at help meet deaf, defeatist, petulant ears.
You spend decades starving after you had it good, being smacked in the face by people who tell you that you’re just too stupid to understand, all while knowing that drugs were tested on your people, 2/3 of your friends and family are dead from it.
At that point, you’re dealing with a defeated people who have been fed promise after promise. Schools haven’t properly educated them since the 60s. Propaganda by pretend preachers is the only hope these people had.
The only thing I had growing up was school books from the 60s and 70s, church, and a faint memory of a time when everything was clean and good.
If I hadn’t been lucky enough to have a wealthy relative with a computer and access to the internet, I’d be right there with them. Opposing whatever crap people were trying to help me with and clinging to the one thing that I know for sure works around here. I know with 100% certainty that I wouldn’t have been able to learn anything without that little bit of luck, and at exactly the right time. Most of those people weren’t so lucky. By the time the internet became something they could afford, it was too late. Now it’s a propaganda machine that uses algorithms to further brainwash people and push them deeper into their idiocy. They don’t get the information about the clean energy initiatives. They get the information that comes from the last handful of rich assholes who own the coal companies and their cronies.
Jim Justice filled paychecks with propaganda and laid off several men in 2012 in anticipation of a Democratic victory. If you could have seen the anger I seen. That jackass owes my brother money to this day, but it was easy to convince them it was someone else’s fault when everything that had happened leading up to it was another head stomp deeper into the mud.
Change isn’t going to come overnight. These people were left to die while the world went on without them and then kicked while they were down with a so called “drug epidemic”.
They don’t trust anyone. They have a damn good reason for that.
I try to keep my emotions in check, but I get so angry when I think about this shit.
When I look back at my happy childhood memories, playing Nintendo with friends, I immediately get hit with heartbreak because the only people in a room full of kids who are alive today are me and my brother. The tiny amount of privilege we had is the only reason we weren’t buried with all of our friends.
My blood boils. I know that my people are stupid, but we’ve been intentionally kept that way for a long time. If it wasn’t intentional, it sure as shit seems that way.
Not who you were replying to. I have sort of similar roots, angst, and anger. My grandparents grew up sharecroppers, entire extended family are fundamentalists.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being ignorant. It’s just a matter of education. Willfull ignorance, on the other hand, is the greatest sin.
The part I still can’t wrap my head around is falling for a New York, city slicker, orange ass, conman. My people used to dislike cops, hate the government, guns were just a fun tool for farm and hunting, and were suspicious of military jingoism and flag waving.
I wasn’t able to get a single friend or family member to see how they were being manipulated, how they were changing. I changed some, especially when I lost the religion, but I feel like I’m closer to our roots than they are. It’s profoundly alienating. I hate my own people a lot of the time. I’m so angry at them for fucking falling for such transparent bullshit. Fuck the evil bastards that lied them into it.
They voted for him as a kind of “fuck you” to the system that’s been fucking them over for so long. So many people voted for him because he seemed to be from outside of that system. I personally know people that would have voted for Bernie instead, because he was also a kind of outsider from our “normal” politicians.
Y’all are still living under an evil infested government.
That’s literally what i just said.
not really. you very very strongly implied that there was a period it stopped being infested with evil
You’re right. I have no idea what i said. Thanks for letting me know.
Sharing this because public schools generally teach only about peaceful protest movements, so many aren’t aware that the rights we enjoy as workers today were literally fought, killed, and died for, and often the US military was on the wrong side of the fight.
Also the story of Blair Mountain teaches us just how insidious US corporations will be if we let them.
If you were deprived of history at a US school and you want to learn about more things like this, I highly recommended A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn
But remember kids, if we get rid of one more regulation, the people owning those corporations will make us all rich!
Spoiler
They won’t.
US military has always been on the wrong side of every fight.
Edit: except ww2
What a lot of people fail to realize is that mining and other blue collar industries were traditionally very left-leaning because capitalists would take away all their rights, pay them in scrip, etc. The companies only cared about the Almighty dollar (and still do), but were way less regulated than they are now. Those regulations are the result of unions, worker uprising etc.
It’s supremely. Ironic to see workers in these industries now do an about face, because Joe Rogan told them to. An over simplification, sure, but the point remains.
They did not do an about-face because Joe Rogan told them to. The left was systematically dismantled through the red scare, including the purging and cooption of unions into the liberal state establishment. Robbed of class struggle and solidarity, unionized industries could actually be weaponized against workers’ movements and then later, weakened by cooption and fraternizibg with management, dismantled through offshoring with no coercive resistance.
The people today are the dispossessed and are as miseducated on this as yourself. Having no correct information by which to understand their position, they will replace it with things like, sure, Joe Rogan, but really they mostly fill their heads with self-blaming liberalism and acceptance with the usual reactionary thinking that the ruling class amplifies to secure its positions. Something you are surely not immune to, either.
I was making a shitty joke, though it seems to have a grain of truth more recently.
I don’t know enough about the red scare to really comment on it. McCarthyism didn’t really happen in my country as much as it did in the US.
Coopting and infiltration of labour movements were partly responsible, but more so outsourcing/global competition (as you mention) and changes in dominant economic sectors played a big role too. On top of that retirement of former union members - those that saw what the benefits of unions were first hand - also cut down union interest gave corporations more power.
I don’t know enough about the red scare to really comment on it. McCarthyism didn’t really happen in my country as much as it did in the US.
Are you sure? There were killings around the liberal world as well as proscriptions.
Coopting and infiltration of labour movements were partly responsible, but more so outsourcing/global competition (as you mention) and changes in dominant economic sectors played a big role too.
The fact that outsourcing could even happen is already an indication of weak unions. In this case, weak unions coopted into the liberal legal order.
On top of that retirement of former union members - those that saw what the benefits of unions were first hand - also cut down union interest gave corporations more power.
Meaning the unions progressively lost their militancy, the left having been purges for liberals and against class consciousness and solidarity.
They did not do an about-face because Joe Rogan told them to.
Oh let him have his Russia/China/Joe Rogan boogeymen. He probably looks for Joe Rogan under his bed before going to sleep.
Damn right I do! Last time he broke into my house and started doing DMT under my bed with Bruce Lee
Joe Rogan murdered my mother and raped my father!
He broke into my pantry and ate all my Pop Tarts, then had Joey Diaz put some Death Stars in my breakfast, then they took turns fucking me in the ass.
Then I had no choice but to become American and vote for Trump, because podcasts.
Honestly, I think you’re defending the right and capitalists by derailing the conversation with your tankie bullshit.
Munch munch goes the brainworm… yiminy yeebus, is there anything that’s your society’s fault?
The irony…
Thank Yeebus you’re on the good side!
I feel like it started before Joe Rogan though. I’d say this started at least in the 70s, when more manufacturing moved overseas and we began buying more foreign made products. Mainly stuff from China and Japan, maybe also Mexico. So if you are losing your job, those are the bad guys. But who is advocating for equal rights? It’s the left, so they must also be the bad guys. So you go to the “other team” regardless of understanding policy, and then it’s just team politics, my team must win, pwn the libtards, etc etc.
Oh boy, Joe Rogan is just the newest flavor of awful. Bill O’Rielly started the whole current entertainment news by being a comedian who suddenly started being a right wing mouthpiece and any time he got called out on his shit it was “For entertainment purposes only” and he was on about the anti-left wing movements about coastal elites and unions taking workers wages.
But then the right wing even to then was building to massive corporations that donated to them, groups like the biggest anti-union propaganda machine in the world, WalMart. Notice that during the Reagan era they had “Trickle Down Economics” to fool people into thinking if the wealthy were just wealthier, then they too could be wealthier.
And the wars between groups have been speared on by the US since post civil war. Can’t have former slaves having jobs, that’d take from the whites. Can’t have people from overseas taking railroad jobs, that takes jobs from Americans. The big slaveowners of the American South were not the majority, so why did so many people fight for that confederacy? Because they were convinced by those wealthy that if slavery went away, there would go the economy… especially as so many people’s jobs were in existence to the slavery machine.
Joe Rogan wasn’t some new bogeyman who figured out how to overthrow the world. The rich has been finding ways to make poor people fight each other instead of them as a tale as old as time.
O’Reilly was never a comedian
It was Reagan, not Rogan, that caused so many I’d these issues.
I feel like it started before Joe Rogan though.
Nope. Everything was grand then, suddenly, Joe Rogan. Or China. Or maybe Iran.
Stripping education from the children of the working class has done damage lasting for generations
Where I’m from the miner syndicates were repeatedly used by the communists to quell protests in the early nineties. Left leaning or not, they were another tool of opression in the authoritarians’ arsenal, much like the military/NG in the OP.
Never forget. That’s what happens when billionaires fear no repercussion. No war but class war.
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Billionaires are not an ethnic group, they’re just assholes.
And sadly, they can always come back. Just like kings.
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Uhm . . .? What are you missing?
Ignore them, I’ve seen them make equally stupid statements before and I legit can’t tell if they’re a bot, just that stupid, or a troll. Frankly speaking you’ll save yourself some time if you just assume they have nothing but none between their ears.
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Cool, and I should care why?
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You are right, let’s kill Joe with his shop around the corner first and then work our way up, you fucking dumbass
Great job alienating 99% of your allies because they are too impure for you. Lemme know how that works out for ya.
I’d much rather fight a billionaire than the local baker or the owner of the local pizza shop.
All buisness is exploitative, but our modern world has definently changed the scale and in many ways reshapes the face of the enemy.
Put simply I don’t hate an individual that owns a local buisness. They could probably be reasoned with if we got a proper revolution. These are people just trying to survive against the system. Like us all. They don’t possess the capital to influence our elections.
I think capitalism has become so unrestrained we have to truly consider who the enemy is again.
Incorrect, first airplane attack on US soil was the firebombing of Black Wall Street during the Tulsa Race Massacre, 4 months prior
The first two airplane attacks were on blacks, and then the working class.
These bugs just keep getting cooler
thank you for alt tags, but if you pasted the text directly in the post, it would be easier to read on all apps
Great stuff, US, keep it up!
See also: Ludlow Massacre, Matewan
And they don’t teach it in schools because then we’d know our power
Theres a good movie “Matewan” for the lazy
Based.
Based… on a logical and reasonable expectation of basic human rights actually being human rights
This one, boys.
