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.
What did you think the National Guard was for?
Only a hundred years ago. We can’t even go 100 years without evil infesting our government.
Y’all are still living under an evil infested government.
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
I feel for ignorant people, so I’ll let your comment slide.
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
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
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?
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
Never forget. That’s what happens when billionaires fear no repercussion. No war but class war.
Nah fuck class war. What we need is a billionaire genocide.
No war but class war
Singles out billionaires
pick one
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.
I’m all of those three, with the sole purpose to post things you disagree with.
Cool, and I should care why?
Because class war is about workers vs owning class, and the hyperfocus on billionaires specifically is a distraction from this dynamic, with the implication within the narrative being that other groups of business owners (small business or millionaires) are good or “lesser evil” which reinforces the system that class war is supposed to abolish.
Notice how often news media owned by large corporations and billionaires use the anti-billionaire rhetoric - it’s cause it is helpful to them.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.wboy.com/only-on-wboy-com/rednecks-and-their-ties-to-the-battle-of-blair-mountain/
According to haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu, “the term redneck has strong agricultural ties. Originally used in the latter half of the 19th century, redneck was a slur used by upper class whites to describe lower class white farmers (Huber 1995). These lower class workers would often have sunburnt, red necks from tending their fields all day; hence the name.”
However, the term would soon turn away from its prejudiced roots and instead come to represent unification. At first, the term was used on pro-union southern coal miners “due to their communist ties,” grinnell.edu said. However, the labor unions took the term and transformed it into a symbol of unity, donning red bandanas to identify themselves.
In 1921, this “Red Neck Army,” a force 10,000 strong, marched from Charleston, W.Va. to Logan and Mingo counties, “the last two non-union counties in West Virginia,” according to appalachianhistory.net. The ultimate result of this march would be the Battle of Blair Mountain, where the striking miners would face off against state, company and federal forces.
Now… beyond the wierdness of a local news outlet … citing a website instead of a person as a source…
Uh basically, yeah, the Battle of Blair Mountain is also very much associated with the term ‘redneck’, yeah, whole bunch of these guys wore red bandanas or kerchiefs around their necks.
In the subsequent century, we’ve as a society mostly completely forgotten about this, redneck just means dumb bubba hick out in the boonies…
… not armed combatants literally shooting and fighting and dying for better working conditions and pay.
Isn’t the memory hole fun?
“March” is not the right word, though they did march. “Fight” and “battle” and “armed resistance” are more what happened.
Thousands of combatants, armed militias, airplanes literally dropping chemical weapons, and large machine guns at a time when machine guns were very new.
This is how you get change. Not through peaceful protest alone. A many-sided approach is needed, including peaceful protest, and yes one of those sides is certainly armed violent resistance.
This is why we need strong unions. Government work protections will always be rolled back because the government serves the powerful. They only capitulate to the rest of us when they feel threatened. Unions are our biggest strength.
Based.
Based… on a logical and reasonable expectation of basic human rights actually being human rights
This one, boys.
Oooh, I get to share one of my all time favorite artists!
Matewan (1987) is a good movie covering aspects of this story. Great cast and an engaging story. The cinematography won an Oscar.
Who wrote The Iron Heel?
What number am I thinking of?
My grandmother and her family are from Charleston. Wonder if we had people in that fight.
We have it so good these days
Part of the reason it’s to easy for history to repeat.
