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.
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.
That was a forgiveable mistake the first time around. Howver, the insanity and utter bullshit I saw during COVID was not so forgiveable. And then, electing him a second time? I don’t think there’s any way back.
It’s such transparent propaganda, it will probably always astound me that people were so easily fooled. Pepple I thought were intelligent, wise, and that I respected. The Qanon stuff, the COVID conspiracy stuff, antivax, climate change. They have ended up in a false reality that most will never escape, and it was so obviously a lie. I’m still in a mild state of shock from time to time, I still grieve it.
Intellectually I know how it happened, but my gut cannot make sense of how they fell for it.
The irony in this is that all the social policies that democrats voted into law to help these people were sabotaged by the republicans they voted for. Both in the federal government and their state government. And yet they still vote for those same republicans every time. Part of that, I suspect, is due to the pulpit politics of their church leaders keeping them in line for the GOP by hammering those bullshit “woke is evil and they’re coming for your children” talking points every sunday morning.
Just remember that from where they’re standing, even the “social policies” haven’t helped them that much. I wonder what the voter turnout is like in WVa.
You vastly overestimate the impact of democratic social policies in those areas.
That impossible to do since republicans wiped those policies out before most of them could take effect.