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.
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.
Never forget. That’s what happens when billionaires fear no repercussion. No war but class war.
Removed by mod
Billionaires are not an ethnic group, they’re just assholes.
And sadly, they can always come back. Just like kings.
Removed by mod
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.
Removed by mod
Cool, and I should care why?
Removed by mod
Great job alienating 99% of your allies because they are too impure for you. Lemme know how that works out for ya.
You are right, let’s kill Joe with his shop around the corner first and then work our way up, you fucking dumbass
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!
deleted by creator
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.
What kind of traitorous soldiers fight against their own people?
Probably harder to find examples where they wouldn’t.
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
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.
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
“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.
deleted by creator
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?
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
Matewan (1987) is a good movie covering aspects of this story. Great cast and an engaging story. The cinematography won an Oscar.
Great stuff, US, keep it up!
Oooh, I get to share one of my all time favorite artists!
My grandmother and her family are from Charleston. Wonder if we had people in that fight.
