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.
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Billionaires are not an ethnic group, they’re just assholes.
And sadly, they can always come back. Just like kings.
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.
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
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
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“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.
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.
My grandmother and her family are from Charleston. Wonder if we had people in that fight.
Great stuff, US, keep it up!
