Part One: The Second American Civil War You Never Learned About

Robert is joined by Spencer Crittenden to discuss The Battle of Blair Mountain.

FOOTNOTES:

1. The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising
2. ‘Rape Rooms’: How West Virginia Women Paid Off Coal Company Debts
3. New Evidence for the Gutman-Hill Debate
4. What was the Esau scrip?
5. “Store Pay Is Our Ruin”: The Tyranny of the Company Store
6. Mountaineer Mine Wars
7. The Coal Mining Massacre America Forgot
8. The Devil Is Here in These Hills
9. Underground Coal Mine Disasters 1900 - 2010

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello America, and welcome to the Internet. I'm Robert Evans
and this is a podcast. It's called Behind the Bastards
and it's about bad people. That's the introduction that I
have for you today and I hope you all enjoyed it.
My guest today Spencer Grtindon. Spencer, how are you doing today? Oh?
I'm great. Should I match that energy because I don't

(00:22):
think that's possible. No, no, but you nailed it. That
was perfect. That was that was the energy I brought
you in to provide perfect. Spencer. Uh, you are um,
I mean, among other things, you're kind of the reason
uh that that that D and D A big part
of the reason that D and D went from something
that I shamefully hid from bullies when I was in

(00:45):
high school. Uh, to something that is I don't know,
I'll call it cool. I'm gonna say it's cool now
to play Dungeons and Dragons and it's it's all on you, buddy.
So thank you for that. This is my my opportunity
to say that. Oh yeah, thank you for saying that.
I mean I keep telling people that, but no one
believes me. So that's validation I need. Now, you and

(01:07):
I have casted a couple of pods together in the
in the past, have we not? Yeah, you went on
Harmon Town. It was twice twice, Yeah, twice, And it
was fun. I mean, I don't know a lot of
times we have people on that don't know much, Like
it's not like they're not experts in their field or whatever,

(01:29):
but they're just not on to talk about stuff that
they have a real perspective on, or information or things
that aren't pulled out of their ass. So it was
really refreshing for that reason. Yeah, I mean I pull
a lot of stuff out of my ass, but rarely
on camera or a stage. So, how has your how's
your quarantine? Ben Spencer? How are you? How are you

(01:50):
holding up in the in the plague? Um? So it's
it's it's kind of funny because I'm getting a bit
too much of my roommate. We're kind of getting in
each other's way, and um, I was like, man, it
would be nice to be living alone. And then the
other day we were doing errands together and she's like, man,
it's so great that we're not living alone. And I
was like, oh, okay, that's that's your your version of this.

(02:11):
Then huh um, but I'm I'm getting a little stir crazy.
I would like more space. In the past, I would
just go for car rides to kind of just get
myself some space. And I can't really do that. I mean, technically,
maybe it just seems like a risk. I don't know.
I don't think it's really I don't know how California
is handling it law wise. I think it's driving alone

(02:32):
in your car is a pretty safe thing. Um, I
would say, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm you know, It's one
of those things I think everybody. I think everybody who's
quarantined with like roommates or romantic partners, is like, oh
my god, I wish I was alone right now. This
would be so much easier if I was alone. And
I think everyone who's quarantined alone is like, oh my god,
I wish I had a roommate or I wish my

(02:53):
boyfriend a girlfriend was here. It's terrible being alone. And
I think the answer is that it just sucks to
be quarantined. Um. Yeah, that's that's the less that I'm
taking out of this, is that it's not great to
be locked in in your house. Well, no matter who
it's with. I feel like I love being locked in
my house, so it would just be interesting. I wish

(03:15):
I had like a good control group to really make
this experiment pop. Now, Spencer, let me ask you. The
President has recently stated that people should liberate a series
of of Midwestern states. Have you have you jumped onto
the call to start the boogaloo? Are you? Are you
grabbing your go bag and your a R fifteen to
to to liberate the sparrow in your neighborhood. Yeah, I'm

(03:37):
gonna have to come back up at force. It all
sounds present liberation, you know, like who can get Who
could stand opposed to that? That is a great question,
and it actually ties in a little bit to our
episode today because obviously everyone in America is thinking about, um,
a civil war, like like a new one, right um,

(04:00):
And you know we're also there's a lot of thoughts
back to the old Civil War. You know. It's some
of those protests in Michigan and whatnot. People are waving
Confederate flags, which doesn't really make a lot of sense
in Michigan, but that's just remember the Confederate state of Michigan. Yes,
the great Jefferson Davis, famed detroitter. Yeah, so we're all

(04:23):
thinking about civil wars. And you know, when people in
America think about the civil wars, we have to think about,
you know, the big civil war, which is civil wars
go worldwide in the top three or seven something somewhere
around there definitely a great civil war. Um or they're
thinking about like the possibility of a new civil war,
and people will often call that the Second American Civil War.

(04:43):
But what if, Spencer, what if I were to tell
you that this country actually already had a second civil war,
one with machine guns and aerial bombardment and trenches and
blood and guts. What if I were to tell you
that already happened. Well, I would have to laugh you
out of the room. Well that would be hard because
we are quarantined in separate states, So I would have

(05:04):
to laugh. Yeah, laugh me off of the internet. Well,
don't start laughing yet, Spencer, because it turns out there
was a second American Civil War and it happened in
West Virginia. Now, most US history textbooks have a painful
allergy to talking about it because it all hinges on

(05:25):
the labor movement, and for whatever reason, the people who
write our textbooks don't like to talk about the reason
that weekends exist. Uh, but today, in this two part episode,
we're going to talk about the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Have you ever heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain? No? Literally, no,
I'm not a big history awesome even that sounds wild. Yeah,

(05:46):
it's a fucking cool story. Um, it's like, it's like, uh,
it's a cyberpunk story in a steampunk setting. That's that's
how I would if I was if I was trying
to like, if I was trying to sell the Netflix
TV show version of this, That's how I would package it.
In a fucking elevator pitch. Um, it's pretty cool. I mean,

(06:06):
a lot of people die horribly and a lot of
people get right. But it's like, just I don't know
what point I was making. It's interesting. That is very cyberpunk. Yeah,
So it all starts with coal Spencer. In the late
eighteen hundreds, coal became increasingly critical to the economic productivity
and the infrastructure of the United States, and the richest

(06:27):
veins of coal were underground, So this necessitated large groups
of men writing down to those veins through vast holes
in the earth and hacking out big chunks of coal.
The structural supports that like kept them alive and kept
the world from collapsing on them were often also made
of coal. Um. It was extraordinarily dangerous. There was like
trapped gas, sulfur gas and ship everywhere, or methane gas everywhere,

(06:50):
and like explosions happened all the time. Mine collapses were
very common. Um, It's one of the most dangerous jobs
people ever had, to the extent that like, like, like,
more Americans died from coal collapses over the decades than
died fighting in Vietnam. Um, I wanted a lot of Minecraft,
and that does not track with my experience. Minecraft. Um

(07:13):
has benefited a lot from the decades of mind safety reforms.
So thank you, Thank you Minecraft, Thank you Notch famed
Q and honor and fascist for yeah. So UM for
an example of some soul fucking the terrible cold disasters,
because I know everybody comes to the show for that
sort of thing. Um, there was the Ecoles mind disaster

(07:36):
in West Virginia in April of nineteen fourteen. This was
a methane explosion that occurred while two hundred and forty
six miners were underground and a hundred and eighty of
them died instantly. Uh. In nineteen o nine, there was
a mine explosion in Cherry, Illinois, which destroyed the entire
town and killed two hundred and fifty nine men and boys.
Because an awful lot of boys worked in mind their

(07:57):
little hands could reach the coal better. Um, so that's cool.
It's terrifying. Yeah, it sucks. Between eighteen ninety and nineteen seventeen,
at least twenty six thousand American miners were killed on
the job, mostly in explosion. Twelve thousand miners were maimed
every year, often permanently disabled. So not a great job.

(08:18):
I would say, yeah, less, I think less people are
named podcasting every year. So if he is, are less
than twelve thousand people nimed while podcasting every year? I
cannot confirm it, Tony. I'm trying to get those numbers
up with the machetes, but we still I don't. I mean,
I may be maimed a thousand people in a year,
you know, if I'm really, if I'm really getting the

(08:40):
let out. So it sucked to be a coal miner.
It was not a great job, right. Uh. Men took
the gig because they needed money, and mining often paid
well um or at least the pay that the boss
is advertised was generally good. Capitalism being what it was,
the people who owned the minds had a variety of
fun tactics that they used to funk over the human
beings who may their business profitable. One of these tactics

(09:02):
was called cribbing. See, miners were paid based on the
tonnage of coal that they mind. Every car that left
the mines was supposed to hold a specific payload of
one ton or two thousand pounds. However, the mine operator
got to actually purchase and set up the cars, and
they would regularly rig them to hold more cold than
they were supposed to hold. The wooden contraptions that they

(09:23):
added to the sides of the cart to enable this
were called cribs, and hence the name cribbing. It was
not uncommon for miners to be paid for digging out
two thousand pounds when they had actually dug out twenty pounds.
So that's stealing five pounds of coal from a minor.
That's a lot of of bullshit. So like they put
like a wooden basket around it, so they add more coal,
and then they essentially said that was one load of

(09:45):
coal when it was more like two or one and
a half. Yeah, it was more like one in a quarter,
but like, yeah, yeah, they would. They would get extra
coal for free. Basically, yeah, so that's cool. Mine operators
would also, Yeah, it's not great. It's not great. Mine
operators would all so often docked the pay of their
miners when they found slate and rock mixed in with
the coal. The man who did the weighing was the

(10:06):
judge of this, and since he was paid directly by
the mine owner, it was not uncommon for him to
just cheat the miners and lie about how much non
coal wound up in the coal. Um, so that's cool too.
And then of course your skin is crawling. Yeah, that's horrible.
It's just oh man, it gets so much worse. I mean,

(10:27):
just as a spoiler, we're about to talk about something
called burecraticized rape. So strap in man on a great episode.
But first let's talk about company stores. Um, have you
even heard that song that goes you work sixteen tons
and what do you get another day? Older and deeper
in it? St Peter, don't you call me because I
can't go own my soul to the company store that song. Yeah, definitely. Yeah,

(10:54):
Well it's it's a song about coal mining back in
these days, and the company's store, um is a thing
that like a lot of mining towns or mines would have,
and they didn't start out as necessarily exploitative. So like
a lot of mines in the late eighteen hundreds in
early nineteen hundreds were in the middle of nowhere, and
there would be like no town near the mine, and
the miners would have to live nearby because it was
just the only way for the work to happen. So

(11:15):
the company would have to set up a store where
they could buy food and necessities. So like not inherently exploitative,
but having the only place where miners can shop be
owned by their employer also is super prone to exploitation, right,
Like you can see how an asshole who would do
something like Cribbin could also take advantage of that bullshit. Um. So,

(11:38):
there's been a lot of research done in company stores
and a surprising amount of them actually don't seem to
have been abusive, and prices were in line with prices
at independent businesses, uh, But a lot of them were
horrifically abusive and would like jack up prices to wagh
above what they would cost, and some companies would actually
make it would ban or fire miners from going into
other towns to shop at stores that weren't owned by

(11:59):
the company. Yeah, and West Virginia was a place where
this was particularly common because West Virginia then and now
was out in the middle of fucking nowhere. Um like
it's it is just nowhere stand um, So you could
really get away with a lot of fucking over miners
out there. Um. And another way they would suck over

(12:19):
miners was debt peonage. So pay for miners at this
period happened like once a month, and you also had
to have been working for a full month to get
any pay um. And obviously I don't know if you're
aware of this, but if people don't get food and
water for a month, they die. Uh yeah, I've heard
such things. Yeah. Yeah, So companies would have to offer
script to workers who hadn't gotten paid yet, and this

(12:42):
was like basically an advance on their salary um. And
if you know, workers didn't make quite as much as
they thought they were going to make and they'd already
spent the company's script, they could wind up in a
situation where they were indebted to the company for long
periods of time and basically just kept having to take
script to keep their family fed and never quite got
out of debts. So it's like you, some really bad

(13:02):
situations happened in this ship, um, and company stores came
along with a lot of other things, because in a
lot of cases you had company town. So like the
company would be responsible for like the school, and be
responsible for the store, would be the responsible for housing
all of their workers. That doesn't necessarily sound bad. Um.
Although company houses were often squalid hovels, they also sometimes

(13:23):
were houses of decent quality. But the fact that you
were living in a house owned by your company meant
that you had no real security. If you got fired
for any reason, the company would kick you out of
your home the same day because you didn't have any
kind of lease or legal protections, so they had the
ability to kick you out of your home and make
you homeless in the middle of the fucking mountains at

(13:43):
the drop of a hat. Um. So that's in a
great situation. I don't know, does does your industry work
that way? Spencer? Mine does not? Yeah? No, uh, well,
I don't know. It's the parallels to like your what
do you call it? Medical insurance coverage is very it
is it is to me, but it's similarly, Yes, yes,

(14:05):
there are definitely modern day parallels, but we should also
acknowledge it was way worse back then, even though it
still sucks now. But like, yeah, it's that's actually a
very good point you make that, Like it's kind of
like health insurance where you can be fucked immediately if
your company kicks you off mountains in the metaphorical mountains
and the mountains of not being able to get your insulin,

(14:27):
which I guess is I don't know, let's say mount Hood.
Mount Hood is the mountain of insulin. I've always said, um, okay,
So yeah, there's a song called Company Town by Carl
Sandberg that I think confys how many miners felt about
their situation. I'm just going to read out the lyrics. Um,
you live in a company house, you go to a
company school, you work for this company. According to company rules,

(14:49):
you all drink company water, and all use company lights.
The company preacher teaches us what the company thinks is right.
So there's like that video game, right that just can
amount about like you're in space, but it's kind of
like this, Uh what the fund is that game? Um
Animal cross No, no, no, no no, although that has

(15:10):
its own there's a lot, a lot of lessons about
capitalism and animal crossing. Are you talking about the one
where you have to like junk a space hulk and
that's your job for like in the outer worlds, the
outer worlds? Yeah, and it's got like town you're in
like a planet that's owned by the company, and they've
got a preacher I think, and like yeah, that's what
they're this is like this is all based on actual

(15:31):
labor history, like that some of the ship in that
game they just have laser pistols, which they did not
back then. As a heads up, Yeah, which is lame.
They should have had laser pistols. This would be a
funner story different, Yeah, maybe not. Um So. Company stores
also gave the company a way to increase profits. When
the value of cold dropped, they could just soak their

(15:53):
employees by raising the price of goods, and company houses
gave them a strong lever to raise up if employees
ever complained about working conditions. If you don't like that
the boss is one ton, cart is actually one and
a half tons. Well, now, you're homeless, so like, yeah,
if this sounds a little bit like slavery to you,
it actually did to a number of black miners who
were former slaves themselves. So as a result of a

(16:15):
lot of the stuff we're gonna talk about in this episode,
there were a number of Senate inquiries, and in one
of the Senate inquiries, the Senate wound up talking to
a black miner named Mr. Eccles, and he asked about
like what he thought was the problem with the mining industry.
So here's what he said in the Senate quote. I
will tell you the miners asked the contractors or operators
to give them an opportunity to weigh the coal, and

(16:36):
they announced that they will not weigh it. They promised
to pay us by the ton, but they don't do it.
They promised, according to whatever the coal is, to pay
us by the ton, and we want them to put
it on the scales. All they do is say that
so and so much, and we have to take it.
There are some things that we cannot stand for. I
was raised a slave. My master and mistress called me
and I answered, and I know the time when I
was a slave, and I felt just like I feel now.

(16:57):
So it is not, um devaluing the suffering of slavery
to compare what these miners went through with slavery, because
some of them were former slaves and they specifically said,
this is actually not all that different. It wasn't there
like in it farming or something which seems very similar
share share cropping. Yeah, there's a lot of similarities with
share cropping, but that is that is a story for

(17:19):
another day. Um. And this is you know miners where
there were a lot of black miners and white miners,
and there were times when they worked together, in times
when they would like wind up, like white miners would
throw black miners under the bus to get a better deal.
Like both of those things happened. Um. We're not going
to get into the kind of racial history of of
the coal labor strikes and stuff as much as maybe

(17:41):
we ought to, because there's just a lot these are
all all labor history is very complicated and nuanced. So
I'm doing my best to tell a discreete story, and
I apologize for some things that will not be covered
in as much detail as they should. Um. So yeah,
coal miners sucked. Coal mining sucked. Coal miners were the
same as everybody else. Podcast takes a hard stance against

(18:04):
Suck you coal miners. We just pivot right to just
tearing a hole through coal miners, and the companies were
right because these people were motherfucker's Yet. Um, yeah, this
has been building to me just attacking coal miners for
six episodes. No, okay, So yeah, all the problems I've
talked about existed for coal miners everywhere in the United States,

(18:26):
from New Mexico to Michigan. But one particular piece of fury,
and maybe the most abusive thing that ever happened to
American coal miners, was unique to West Virginia, which also
had a lot of the richest coal veins in the country.
So back in the Old Testament and the Book of Genesis,
there's this guy named Esau, right, and Esau was a

(18:47):
starving hunter who stumbled into his brother's tent begging for food,
and his his younger brother, Jacob, agreed defeat Esau, but
only in exchange for Esau giving up his birthright as
the firstborn son in the family. A bunch of other
stuff happens in biblical story, but it's not important. I
just needed to tell you who Esau is so we
can get to the rest of this. So, mine operators
had a problem, Spencer, and that problem was that sometimes

(19:09):
their miners would get sick or would be injured and
would not be able to work for a period of time.
And since there was no social safety and at all,
this meant that they and their family would probably starve
to death. Now, the company didn't necessarily want these people
just to kick them out, because a lot of times
they'd get better. And you know, coal miners who were
good at their job are valuable um. So they found
a way to deal with this that was still profitable

(19:30):
to them. And the way that they dealt with this
was to take usually to take the next oldest male
member of the family and make them take their father's place.
But some children were too small to effectively work a
coal mine, and in these cases the company provided the
wife of a stricken miner with what was known as
esau script. Now this was a special type of script
currency only usable for food and other necessities. And I'm

(19:52):
going to quote now from an article I found on
CounterPunch based on the book Truth Be Told. Perspectives on
the Great West Virginia Mine War by Labor his storyan
Wes Harris quote. ESA was issued only two women, and
it was a form of script that would enable a
woman to purchase food for her children during the time
that her husband could not work. The ESAU was only
good for thirty days, and if her husband went back

(20:12):
to work within those thirty days, then the company would
forgive the debt, and if he did not go back
to work at the end of thirty days, then the
script became a loan that was due in payable and
full on day thirty. At the time, most coal miners
wives did not hold jobs, but they still had to
pay back the loan, which was a collateralized loan, and
the women themselves were the collateral. Their physical selves would

(20:33):
be used to pay the debt. Yeah, you've picking up
on what this means. Yeah, a little yeah, yeah. Yeah.
It was coal mining rape dollars. That's what we're talking
about here, coal miner rape bucks. Yeah. Um. So the women,
I mean, you could quibble, I guess over whether or
not to call it rape. The women who did this

(20:54):
for their families tended to consent in the sense that
they agreed to give up access to their bodies in
exchange for ESAU script to stop their family from starving
to death. But yeah, exactly, like it's it's not really
consent if your children will die if you don't do
it right. Yeah. Yeah, they the coal mining the company

(21:14):
had hostages. Yes, I feel comfortable calling it broadly rape. Um. Yeah,
The article continues. Many of these incidents allegedly occurred at
the Whipple Colliery Company's store, located in Oak Hill, West Virginia,
where woman would walk up to a room on the
third floor to try on shoes and in the process
be raped by coal company guards. The Whipple Company Store
was one of three company stores built by Cold Barren

(21:36):
Justice Collins in Fayette County, West Virginia. Joy Lynn, who
now co owns the Whipple Company Store and has turned
it into a museum, told client that she has had
as many as ten women visit the museum, who referred
to the third floor space as the rape room because
that is how the mine guards forced the women to
pay for their shoes. They would have to keep their
mouths shut tight about what had happened to them upstairs,
Lynn said, because the mining companies would threaten to kick

(21:57):
them out of their company owned houses. Yeah, so that's cool,
it's not are you a it's not it's not good.
But I don't know this is this is terrible though.
My mind's going to that. But like what's the exchange rate? Like,
I mean, did is that something they quantified? But it's
like they got shoes? Yeah, I don't know what. That
doesn't seem I mean, nothing is worth anything, but like,

(22:18):
don't get me wrong, but it's just like I don't know. Yeah,
I think it was more like while you're in I mean,
so there actually was an amount of an exchange rate
that was set up. And we don't have as much
detail on the system as we want because it was
very much kept under wraps and these women did not
like to talk about it, and the company certainly didn't
like to talk about it. Um. The term that one

(22:39):
labor historian used for it is bureaucraticized rape um. And
there would be situations where because of their debt, women
would be essentially rented to a coal mining company and
sometimes like young girls, like a wife would if she
was too old for the company to one or whatever,
would give up her daughter. And there were cases of
like twelve year old girls um who were ted out

(23:00):
to the coal mom company for like periods of four
to six months and sometimes more than once. Like, you
incur some debt, you give up your daughter for four
to six months. Uh, she pays off the debt than
you incur more debt and you give her back up.
Uh Like, stuff like that would be would be set
a lot of the time. So usually it was like
a set limit of time that you would have to
spend prostituting yourself for your daughter to coal company guards

(23:22):
in exchange for you know, necessities, right, yeah, so that's good.
Uh yeah, so, um, coal mercenaries, like the guards who
manned the coal mines were generally mercenaries. A lot of
them are former soldiers or cops or detectives and stuff
who got hired by the coal companies to brutally enforce
order in the mining camps. Uh. They took to calling

(23:44):
these women comfort girls or comfort wives, which is actually,
interestingly enough, a term virtually identical to the one Japanese
troops used for the sex slaves they took during the
occupation of Mancheria, which is neat little bit of historical
resonance there. That's always fun. Yeah yeah, yeah. So this
was not something that people discussed a lot at the time,

(24:06):
and this has led to a lot of controversy around
the system among historians, which we'll talk about at the
very end of the second part of this episode. But
historian West Harris gives one reason why the vast majority
of women caught up in the system never said anything
about it. Quote my senses, they weren't ashamed. It wasn't
something they were embarrassed about. It was very much in
the same vein as the men going into the coal
mine and taking risks they had no business taking. It's like,

(24:29):
you do what you have to do to feed your family.
They didn't talk about it, but they certainly weren't ashamed
of it. Why would you be ashamed of feeding your kids? So, yeah,
there's some complicated ship. But Spencer, you know what won't
moleste children as script currency? Um. I can think of

(24:51):
a lot of things. Only one the products and oh boy,
this this is a bad ad plug. Um no, yeah,
but by these purchase items please who we are back

(25:15):
and we are just still recovering from that really really
rough ad transition. Hit my head on that segue. Yeah, yeah,
it's bad. It's as bad as the segue that the
guy who owned the segway company plunged off of that
cliff in Scotland on that's a bad segue. Ye oh boy,

(25:37):
good Lord in heaven. Um. So yeah. In short, what
I've been talking about all episodes so far is just
kind of making the point that the coal miners in American,
particularly in West Virginia, had it rough. They had a
lot of bullshit to deal with, They were not treated well,
and they had reason to be very angry. Um and
people all throughout history have rebelled violently against their leaders

(25:59):
for a lot less than coal miners put up with. Um. Yeah. Now, unfortunately,
coal miners tended to be poor as shit. They had
no real political influence, and at least not on the
national level, and so the only way they could combat
all these abuses was to come together and form a
labor union. In eighteen eighty five, coal miners formed the
National Federation of Miners, which eventually evolved into the United

(26:22):
Mine Workers or u w M or u MW. Sorry
I just mistrote it there. Uh. In his book The
Battle of Blair Mountain, historian Robert Shogun writes this about
the U m W quote. The UMW grew rapidly, but
it faced a major problem in one state, West Virginia,
where the union movement lagged far behind. This reality had

(26:42):
been driven home to the union in eight nine seven
when it staged a nationwide walkout in protest against wage
cuts brought on by the depression that devastated the economy
for most of the decade. Over a hundred thousand miners
responded and the strike paralyzed the northern fields. Now, like
most such fights, this strike was essentially a waiting comp addition,
if the mining company ran out of money before the

(27:02):
miners starved, the miners won and got what they wanted,
and West Virginia there were enough non union mines to
allow big business to hold out, So the new Union
called in for backup, bringing in the big guns of
the American Federation of Labor in to try to help
them rally non union miners to the cause. As the
struggle picked up steam, famous left wing organizers flocked to
West Virginia, men like Eugene V. Deb's, founder of the

(27:25):
American Railways Union, and Mother Jones, who'd grown prominent from
organizing miners in Pennsylvania. Do you see what's happening here?
Like they're the mind. Miners are trying to strike, but
enough mines in West Virginia or non unionized that, like
the mind companies are able to to to to pull
out enough coal that they don't go bankrupt, so they
hold on. So like, the only way for the mining

(27:46):
for the unions to like win in the long term
is to unionize miners in West Virginia, so they start
bringing people into West Virginia to help them organized miners there.
So workers outside West Virginia, supported by groups like the
a f L, supported their brothers in the mines, and
so the mine owners found themselves forced to get creative
to counter all of this, And by creative I mean violet.

(28:07):
Company police began cracking down on organizers at non union
mines and forcing them out of the state. Since these
miners all lived in company housing, it was a simple
manner of firing and evicting anybody who talked about joining
a union. Workers around the country started to hold mass
protests and support of the workers in West Virginia. But
solidarity only goes so far. One organizer sent by the

(28:29):
a f L to work with black miners in McDowell
County wrote that trying to plan under the thumb of
company police was quote taking one's life into his hands. Quote,
while we never had any injunctions issued against us, like
by a court, we had men in winchesters against us,
which were in most cases just as effective. So he's
pointing out it was actually illegal to try to stop
these guys from organizing, but like like you couldn't like

(28:52):
legally stop them, right like courts couldn't stop them from
trying to organize. They had a right to do that,
but you could just send out men to shoot them.
Um and since there was no law on a lot
of these places, that worked just as well. And company
police regularly conducted drive by shootings. They would abduct and
beat organizers and often even murder them. John Mitchell, who
became the president of the United mind Workers, eventually was

(29:13):
attacked by company guards at a meeting. They opened fire
and he only survived by jumping into a mountain stream
and swimming away. So this is like like we're not
talking about just like you know, Amazon just got very
rightly slammed because they fired a guy who was trying
to create a like organize a union of warehouse workers,
which is like fucked up and should be illegal. We'll

(29:34):
see if they actually face any consequences to it. Um,
and we shouldn't we I'm not gonna say that, like
Amazon shouldn't be slammed viciously for what they've done. But
it was like the stakes were a lot higher back
in the the these days or those days, right, like
they were like machine gunning people. Yeah, it's intense, it's

(29:55):
pretty cool, pretty pretty cool, Spencer. Yeah, well, it's like
there's not I mean, they're not shooting people these days,
but there's not a lot of consequences for sucking over
people who try to unionize these days. Right in the
court of laws doesn't really go very well, no, because
like you know, they have all of the money in
the entire world, so they can, you know, even if

(30:18):
what they're doing is illegal, they can elongate the court
case that will eventually, you know, I think it's probable
that Amazon will eventually pay fines for what they're doing,
but they'll have made so much more money by breaking
the law by the time. Like that, I'm sure they
have been counters who are like, these laws we can
afford to break because the fines will probably be this
amount and will make this amount by breaking the law,
you know, Yeah, I mean a fine is just a

(30:40):
price for breaking the law. It's like you actually can
break the law if you pay the law brick tax. Yeah, exactly,
which is why instead of finds the company that, in
my opinion, instead of finding Amazon when they are caught
doing something like this, Jeff Bezos should be forced to
stand in crotchless pants, uh, in front of a group

(31:02):
of we'll pick by lottery, let's say a hundred and
fifty employees from the specific factory UM where the violation occurred,
and they each get to kick him in the nuts,
and it's televised that zombie song that you were taunting
me with by the Cranberries. I love that song, A
great song about the Irish Civil War. UM. I don't
see why we're bringing that into here, but I do

(31:23):
think that Jeff Bezos would think twice before cracking down
on unions if he had to be kicked in the
nuts for several hours by a hundred and fifty different people,
and over and over and over again, twice every time
you heard that pretty good cover of the song by
state radio. But this is beside the point. So in

(31:44):
many rural counties, the local sheriff's department was completely owned
by one or more mining companies, and normal police were
very regularly owned as strike breakers. It's almost as if
police are I don't know, you might call them like
if if we could divide people who were from people
who have capital into classes, and police are in the
same class as miners, but they're like kind of betraying

(32:07):
them in exchange for money, like a traitor to their class.
I don't know, I don't know. I'm sure no one's
had this thought other than me. Um. So, Yeah, the
most infamous example of this happened in eight the Latimer
massacre in Pennsylvania. A hundred and fifty armed Luzerne County
deputies confronted three to four hundred immigrant coal miners on

(32:27):
their way to a pro union protest. They've fired into
the crowd of peaceful demonstrators, hitting many in the back
and killing nineteen people. Um, but ship like this happened
all the time, you would regularly have police just start
shooting into a crowd. Um, because that's actually a really
good way. I don't know if you've ever tried to
break up a crowd, but firing wildly into it tends
to people don't like that. Yeah, oddly enough, you can't

(32:50):
stay there. No, No, most people don't, yeah, exactly. Most
people hate bullets for reasons that I think are mysterious,
but there's documentation of them. So despite numerous atrocities, the
miners of the UMW held out. They viewed what was
happening as a struggle for their very survival. And I'm

(33:11):
gonna quote from a union official named Frank Keney, who
was a participant in a lot of this stuff. I'm
a native West Virginia. There are others like me working
in the minds here. We don't propose to get out
of the way when a lot of capitalists from New
York and London come down here and tell us to
get off the earth. They played that game on the
American Indian. They gave him the end of the log
to sit on and then pushed him off. That we
don't propose to be pushed off. They say that we

(33:33):
shall not organize West Virginia. They are mistaken. If Frank
Keney can't do it, someone will take his place who can.
But West Virginia will be organized, and it will be
organized completely. So a lot of brave people in the
Union movement at this period um but also they're like
it's almost like a situation. I think what Keney would
say is like, it's not even bravery, there's just nothing.

(33:55):
It's it's the choice between organizing or extermination. They will
kill us all by by chiseling away at our lives
if we don't do this. And it seems like they
probably had real world like kind of analogs that they
can see in very recent history. Is like, oh, that's
happening to us. Yeah, they were probably a bit woker
than the average American. Like you see, Kenny, they're kind

(34:17):
of acknowledging that, like what was done to the Native
Americans was horrific and like seeing that like, oh and
now kind of the descendants of the people who killed
all of them, um, are are executing the same sort
of thing here. Like that's his attitude, which is at
least acknowledging that what happened to the native peoples of
this continent was bad. Um. So that's interesting. Like you

(34:37):
can see some like early sort of intersectionality solidarity, like
that kind of thought starting to get woven through the
labor movement, um say yeah, and eventually through blood, toil
and tiers. The miners of West Virginia forced their employers
to the table. The result of their victory was the
Central Competitive Field Agreement, a sort of magna carta between
miners and mine operators in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

(35:00):
It did not fix prices for coal, but it's set
a scale for wages and established some minimal conditions from miners.
The biggest win was that miners got an eight hour
work day, which is better than a however long until
you collapse deat of a heart attack work day. Now,
the success of the eight nine seven strike drew huge
amounts of people to the United Mine Workers Banner. By

(35:22):
nineteen o one, it had more than a quarter of
a million members. In a few short years, this very
new union had become the largest union in the country.
But all was still not well, and in the wake
of the strike, mine operators did their best to claw
back as much as they could from their employees. One
major tactic for doing this was to have the check wayman,
the guys who weighed the coal for the company, rigged

(35:42):
the company scales to show lower weights than we're actually
being pulled through. UM, so these keep finding ways to
funk with with with miners On the weights, um, And
so the miners would be like, no, we need to
have union men. They're watching the weighing of the coal,
and the company said, no, you can't do that, YadA
YadA YadA um. And as the nineteen hundreds dawned, unions
began agitating against this practice too, as described in this

(36:05):
minor ballad quote, union miners stand together, he'd no operator's tail.
Keep your hand upon the dollar and your eye upon
the scale. Good songs from miners in this period. So
things were particularly bad in West Virginia, as is usual
even to this day in West Virginia, where mine owners
were increasingly shady and huge numbers of miners lived in

(36:27):
unbelievably squalid camps. In Cabin and Paint Creek, more than
thirty five thousand non union miners and their families lived
in coal camps, and life in these places was the
very worst of coal mining. Only company stores were available,
and mine owners banned workers from traveling to nearby towns
to purchase goods. The situation grew increasingly desperate, and many
within the camps began to look to the Union as

(36:49):
their only hope for a better life. In April of
nineteen twelve, the non union miners and Paint Creek who
announced the desired to former union and submitted a list
of demands that included union recognition, the right to free
speech and peaceable assembly. This is something they were demanding
from their companies, which denied it to them, um, which
you may recognize as an inherent human right, um, but
not not for coal miners um. Uh. Yeah, and into

(37:13):
the blacklisting of union men and into mandatory company stores,
and in and into cribbing. Uh. They also demanded that
mine owners established two thousand pounds is the official weight
of a ton. And you may recognize that two thousand
pounds is in fact the weight of a ton, but um.
And they demanded the right to check the mind scales
and they have union representatives watch this process. Uh. Now.

(37:35):
The mine operators rejected these demands and the miners of
Cabin Creek went on strike for a month. The strike
went peacefully, with the UMW providing food and other necessities
from striking miners. So part of what a big union
that covered multiple states with the um would do is
you would pay dues, and those dues would not only
go to paying for union officials and like essentially lobbying,

(37:56):
but when a strike happened, it would go to make
sure that, like people, strikers who weren't working didn't starve
to death, so that you could actually strike long enough
to get what you wanted. Um. It's kind of the
whole point of a union, really, right. Yeah. Uh. Now,
when it became clear to the companies, the people who
owned the minds that these workers were striking from, that
this was not going to end quickly, the coal companies

(38:18):
decided to bring in the big guns, which were again
literal guns, and in this case they were wielded by
the men from the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, and Baldwin
Felts was essentially one of the era's equivalents to a
group like Blackwater. These guys were mercenaries, and a lot
of them were in fact former soldiers with combat experience,
and they worked in the United States and cracked down

(38:38):
on labor. Uh. Now, the agency brought in three hundred
detectives to act as strike breakers. One contemporary journalist who
interviewed a number of these men wrote, these guards were
professional strike breakers, all try it on a dozen industrial
battlefields and willing to shoot with or without provocation. They
immediately began and a campaign of assault, intimidation, and terrorism.

(39:00):
I'm going to quote next from a study by hoyt
In Wheeler, a labor historian with the University of Wyoming. Quote.
The first action of the mine guards was to evict
miners and their families from company owned houses. Personal belongings
were loaded on two trains, transported off company property and
dumped beside the railroad tracks. Miners and their families took
up residents and tent colonies established by the United Mine

(39:20):
Workers Union. At this juncture, Mary Mother Jones, and aged
but vigorous and profane labor agitator, was brought into the
fray by the union. Mother Jones was a veteran combatant
in the labor wars in which the United Mine Workers
Union became involved. She's perhaps the most colorful character of
this era of American labor history. At a speech on
the steps of the state capital in Charleston, she told
a large gathering of miners, arm yourselves, return home and

(39:43):
kill every goddamned mine guard on the creeks, blow up
the mines, and drive the damned scabs out of the valleys. Man,
this is like shadow run ship, except the future exactly
definitely happened. It's like this already happened. Well, one of
the things you realized when you read about labor history
is that a lot of them, a lot of like

(40:04):
great cyberpunk, you know, including Shadow Run. The guys who
like wrote that stuff starting in like the late nineteen
eighties early nineties knew a lot of this history. And
we're explicitly being like, we see this coming back again
because like we were paying attention to the news like
the Reagan era, the chiseling away of workers rights, like
the things that were gained by the fighting in this era,
Like they were just kind of predicting that, like, as

(40:26):
this stuff is chiseled away, these fights are going to
start up again, only people will have moved by wire
systems installed in their reflexes and fancy machine guns in
the internet. Like yeah, but yes, you're right, this is
very cyberpunk and would make like an adapted setting like
this would make a pretty fucking cool Shadow Run campaign. Yeah. Man,

(40:47):
So the Union provided these striking miners with the tools
to do just what mother Jones suggested because unions, by
the way, unions are considered kind of boring today, they
were not in these days. So they the UMW smuggled
in six machine guns, a thousand rifles, and fifty rounds
of ammunition just to start. And this seems like a

(41:09):
lot of of weaponry, but all it really did was
even the scales because the coal operators had also purchased
huge amounts of weaponry for their guards, the Baldwin Feltsman.
Both sides loaded up with weapons and began to advance
on one another. Now, the governor of West Virginia at
the time was a fellow named Richard Glasscock, and it
was within his power to stop the mine operators from
hiring mercenaries and deploying crooked, heavily armed cops to break

(41:32):
the strike. The fact that he refused to do so
was noted by Mother Jones and her public speeches. She
refused to refer to Glasscock by his name, calling him
a crystal Peter for modesty's sake. So that's so good.
That's really good, right, isn't that funny? Man? Yeah, it's

(41:52):
pretty pretty great. In August, she told him during a
speech to minors, I warned this little governor that unless
he rids Paint Creek in Cabinet Creek of these goddamn
Baldwin Felt's mine guard thugs, this is gonna there is
going to be one hell of a lot of blood
letting in these hills. Now, officially, the government of West
Virginia was not a super thrilled with any of this,
and Governor Glascock volunteered to mediate the strike, but the

(42:16):
mine operators said no. Union miners responded by posting up
on the mountain sides of the valley and sniping at
mine guards, killing a number of them. So we are like, yeah, um,
and remember like mine guards had been shooting in abducting
and beating and murdering people prior to this too, Like
this is a cycle of violence here now. So yeah,

(42:36):
the miners start sniping from the mountain sides and killing
mine guards. So the operators of the mines respond by
building fortresses to protect their guards and to protect the
scabs who are working the mines. So because the mine
companies had built fortresses, there's nothing for the miners to
do but to launch an assault at these fortresses. And
they start at a place called Mucklow on Paint Creek

(42:56):
and a massive battle results. More than a hundred thousand
shots were fired in sixteen people were killed over the
course of multiple days. What I've got a picture of
these fortresses, Like what are they building? You know, I'm
imagining mostly wooden ramparts in the like a lot of cases.
If you look at like the forts that they would
just like take huge stacks of what were fire would

(43:17):
and they would place like cannons within them, like which
by the way, like it is better than nothing if
you have if your only cover, as a woodpile would
will stop a lot of rounds, um if it's thick enough,
but also shards of wood get kicked up. This is
why sandbags are ideal if you are a modern day
striker and you want to build a decent fortification to

(43:37):
stop say the kind of rifles that police have access to,
a sandbag is going to have less wood shrapnel than
a pile of wood. Just as a heads up, Um,
this is all good information, important info for I don't know,
let's say three weeks from now. So more skirmishes followed
the Battle of Mucklaw, culminating in a massive salt by

(44:00):
six thousand armed Union miners on September one, nineteen twelve.
These are armies like these are literal armies of people
like wars have been thought like most medieval wars involved
less human beings armed and fighting than are taking like
fighting in just West Virginia. Um, it's fucking crazy. Yeah.

(44:26):
Uh so this the army assembled at the mouths of
Payton Cabin Creek, and it sent a message to the
mine operators if they continued to use strike breakers, the
miners would murder every single mine guard and destroy all
company infrastructure in the area. And of course, the bosses
refused to back down. They just hired more armed guards
and prepared to fight. The whole situation might have ended

(44:46):
in a massive blood bath if the governor hadn't declared
martial law and activated the state militia to pull both
sides apart from one another. Now, of course, this militia
was made up primarily of upper middle class gentry of
West Virginia. These were conservative men, and they had an
instinctive hatred of low income immigrant laborers. Uh. And the
strike was broken up and the militia deactivated. Many of

(45:07):
them stayed on as mine guards for the coal companies,
which provided them with enough security to reopen the minds
with more scabs and of course, the miners grabbed their
guns and started shooting again, and then the whole situation
started over. That November, martial law was declared a second time,
and the mine guards basically just threw on official government
uniforms and then cracked out on miners with the approval
of the state. Union Men who were arrested during this

(45:29):
period were tried by military tribunals under military law, and
many were sentenced to long prison terms. This was often illegal,
as the courts were happy to sentence miners for crimes
committed well before the actual period of martial law. The
crackdown was eventually successful, and by January the strike had
been broken, but it started up again in February, leading
to a third declaration of martial law. So this is

(45:52):
not going super well for anybody, really, is abs salutely
definitely a better civil war than the last one? I mean,
as in all civil well not all civil wars, as
in most civil wars, one side is objectively shitty here.
Um yeah, but yeah so um. By this point, the

(46:14):
chief mine operator, a guy named Quinn Morton, was fed
up with all of this back and forth, so his
company paid for a special armored train which they filled
with Canawas sheriff's deputies and mine guards and called the
bull Moose Special. So they drove this armored train filled
with armed men through the Paint Creek miners camp and

(46:36):
their official purpose was to serve a warrant to a
guy named John Doe for inciting a riot. I'm gonna
read Professor Howitt Wheeler's recitation of what happened next. As
the train passed through Holly Grove, a miner's tent colony,
Morton and his mine guards sprayed rifle and machine gun
fire into the colony. Morton was reported to have said,
we gave them hell and had a lot of fun.

(46:58):
Let's go back and give them another round. Owned at
least one person was killed and a number were wounded,
and we'll never get an accurate count of of what happened,
but yeah, now we've got armored vehicles charging into an
encampment and stuff like. Yeah. The miners retaliated by launching
a mass assault on a corporate encampment. A multi hour

(47:18):
gun battle left another sixteen people, most of the mine
guards dead. With the guards in flight, miners dynamited critical
infrastructure and successfully turned back a train loaded with scabs
sent by the bosses to take their jobs. In response,
Governor Glascock sent the militia in Now in March, a
new governor took office, Dr Henry Hatfield, of the famous

(47:39):
Hatfield family. You know, the Hatfields and McCoy. It's the
feuding families. Yeah, you're gonna hear a lot about halt
Fields this episode. So. Dr Henry Hatfield was more sympathetic
to the strikers, and he visited the strike area with
his medical equipment to provide aid as one of his
first official acts in office. When he arrived, he found
mother Jones locked in a local jail. She'd been convicted

(47:59):
of aiding by a military tribunal and sentenced to twenty
years in prison, and she was very clearly near death.
Her temperature was a hundred and four degrees and Dr
Hatfield immediately ascertained that she had been left without any
medical care in herself. He ordered her remove to the
capital and provided with medical attention. Dr Hatfield, the new governor,
spent two days at the front talking to miners and
providing them with medical assistance. The mine operators complained that

(48:22):
he was toadying to these men, and they sent a
delegation to complain. One of these corporate representatives told the
governor to his face that it was unwise for him
to enter the strike zone. Dr Hatfield responded by punching
this man repeatedly in his face and knocking him to
the ground. God solid governoring. They're like, yeah, the idea

(48:44):
of repeated punches to a faith before someone gets knocked down,
it's pretty funny to me. It is, it is. And
people were talking, won't punch you in the face, you
know what, won't repeatedly punch? Well, actually you want them
to this kind of person into the face, I'd buy

(49:06):
some products. We're back from another flawless ad transition. So
Governor Hatfield punches a guy out. Then he orders the
mine operators to settle with the miners in the next
few days, and he threatens that if they don't come

(49:27):
to a settlement, then Hill settle the strike for them.
The mine operators failed to do this, possibly in an
attempt to call the governor's bluff, But Dr Henry Hatfield
was not a bluffing man. He immediately rescinded the sentences
of all the men convicted under military courts. Then he
mandated that the striking union men should get the majority
of the things that they'd asked for. Um. And he

(49:48):
sounds pretty awesome, and he was definitely better than Governor Glasscock.
But we're gonna talk about some shitty things that Dr
Hatfield did as governor UM in this but he was,
you know, broadly pro union, at least compared to his predecessor.
It's that's good. So uh Yeah. Now, in his last
year of office, Governor Glasscock had appointed a commission to
investigate the causes of the strike, and they kind of

(50:10):
finished their work after the strike was ended by the
next Governor Hatfield. And not surprisingly, the men that Governor
Glasscock had picked to figure out the cause of the strike, Uh,
they did a bunch of research and shockingly found that
actually wages in Paint Creek were very fair. Uh, and
there was no good reason for the miners to have
have gone on strike. Uh. They noted that quote as

(50:31):
to the main causes of the trouble, this rises, in
our judgment, from the efforts of the United mind Workers
to organize the union and the whole chain of events
alongside said creeks. The desire to make the present strike
region the place for the insertion of a thin edge
of unionism with the ultimate aim of organizing the whole state.
So they decided that, like, yeah, this this state Commission
comes to the conclusion that it's all the union's fault

(50:52):
that things got so bad. Um. Now, thankfully the United
States Senate also gets involved and decides doing investigate the
strike and and you know, there they come to a
bit more fairer conclusions than the State of West Virginia's handpickman. Uh.
They actually called the former Governor Glasscock to testify, and
he tells them in under oath, his his his his

(51:16):
stance changes a bit, and he admits that the trouble
had commenced after the operators on Paint Creek had a
uh sign like declined to enter into a new agreement
with the striking miners. Um. Yeah, and uh. During like
his his testimony in front of the Senate, one of
the senators questioning him asks Governor Glascock, it seems to

(51:36):
be that the mind guards were the disturbing element among
which this trouble arose, and Governor Glasscock responded, that was
my impression, Senator, yes, sir, So that's interesting. Um yeah. Now,
in the end, the Senate Committee concluded the basic cause
is the private ownership of great public necessities such as coal. This,
coupled with human greed incident to such ownership, has brought

(51:59):
about the deplorable and Unamerican conditions in the West Virginia
coal fields. Now this is interesting to me for a
couple of reasons. One of them is that we have
a coal is not so much a great public necessity
these days. Um, But you might call in the middle,
particularly of a gigantic pandemic, in which case people aren't
able to shop at the wide variety of stores that

(52:19):
they normally get their necessities from, you might call a
service that ships things to people's door nationwide and provides
an avenue for small and medium and even large businesses
to get their products into the hands of Americans who
need them during these times, you might call such a
business a great public necessity. And you might say that

(52:39):
the rampaging infections and Amazon workhouses, uh, and they're they're
illegal crackdowns on union labor, you might call that an
example of human greed incident to the ownership of such
great public necessities bringing about deplorable, non American conditions. You
might you might say that I will. I'll say a
right now. Yeah. Yeah, Actually I can't remember all the words,

(53:03):
but I just imagine me saying it. Yeah. I I
think we can all get that into our head. So
the coal companies lost this battle, um, but they were
not about to give up on their greater war against
their own laborers. As Robert Shogun rights in the Battle
for Blair Mountain quote, coal Age, the Journal of the
Coal Operators, it's like a magazine for coal company man
declared that the so called strike on cabin and paint

(53:25):
creeks was in reality an armed insurrection formulated by agitators
hired by the union, and afterwards reinforced by socialists. That's
how they you can, that's how they wanted that to
be pronounced. I'm canceling my subscription to cole Age right now.
Oh now, don't, don't. Don't be a reactionary. Cole Age
has a lot of good Like how else you gotta
learn who the best strike breakers are? Something we all

(53:48):
need this. This podcast is heavily supported by coal Age.
Please keep your subscriptions active, people. So, the coal operators
now saw the miners in the union not simply as
economic adversaries, but as a diabolical force, uh, not merely
seeking unionization, but domination of the West Virginia coal industry

(54:09):
and of the United States. Mine operators in Mingo County
were particularly worried about the Cabin and Paint Creek strike.
Their non union workforce was perpetually restive, and it was
not exactly a secret that UMW representatives had started reaching
out to these men. The operators in Mingo County condemned
the union as unlawful, per se, revolutionary in character, and
a menace to the free institutions of the country. For

(54:31):
their part, the union responded to victory by expanding their ambitions.
In nineteen twelve, the United Mine Workers Union amended their constitution,
adding a clause that miners were entitled to the full
social value of their product. What does that mean? What
do you think that would mean? The full social Saying
that workers are entitled to the full social value of
their product, it sounds like they should be owning the

(54:55):
means of production. That might be a way to interpret that. Spencer, Yeah, yeah,
basically in the way you know, because we have like
minutes of the actual debates, because like there were debates
even within the union, like they weren't all of one mind,
Um and and kind of yeah. One of the ways
you'll hear this set is that, like, just and this
is kind of like the simplest way to state that

(55:16):
if you work an hour, what you get back should
be worth an hour of your life. And I think
a lot of people would argue that an hour of
their life is worth more than seven dollars or even
fifteen dollars. Another way to look at this is that, uh,
you you are in whatever whatever work you do, the
profit that that work generates, you are entitled to, not
the bosses, not the shareholders, not the corporate executives who

(55:38):
drive armored trains through mining encampments and fire machine guns
at striking laborers. Um. Yeah. So miners in the wake
of this start to talk about writing capitalists out of
the social contract essentially, and as you might imagine, these
capitalists are not super happy with this, and they begin
to gear up for the next round of combat. But

(56:00):
in the meantime, the union men celebrated, not just in
West Virginia but all around the country. One of the
more remarkable aspects of the victory in West Virginia was
the fact that black and white coal miners had largely
collaborated in order to achieve victory. Now, it would be
too much to say that the white miners considered black
miners their equals. Mining camps were still very much segregated,
And it is fair to say that almost everyone in

(56:21):
this story, even the heroes, were pretty racist by modern standards. Um,
but they were at least able to overcome that in
a large degree to kind of work together to make
situation better for everybody. And this is was part of
a start of kind of like the birth of of Yeah,
this kind of understanding, you know that we're we all
have are in this this fight together to to improve

(56:43):
standards for working people. Did this was did they like
try and and divide Like, did the bosses try and
divide people along racial lines or anything? Yes? And in
many cases and in many strikes around the country, they
were very successful in this. They weren't successful in this
particular strike, which is something that makes it no worthy
because this often worked. Often bosses would be successful and
basically getting white laborers to throw black laborers under the

(57:06):
bus to get better terms. Um. So like and that
was a way to be like what you want us
to say that everybody gets this minimum pay even black people,
Like then we're saying they're equal to you. So like
that definitely happened a number of times, but it didn't
work at this strike. That's just so like I can
just see that. But it's like, uh so what you're
saying is we got to accept that uh black people

(57:28):
deserve the same stuff as we do. That that is
one bridge too far, my good man, Like, it's just
uh yeah, and it's it's this, you know, there's different.
It's very different. And because they're like we're kind of
eliminating the racism from But in the modern day, you'll
hear people talk about like, well, okay, basic income seems
like a great idea, but what if X group, you know,

(57:49):
what if like rich people, what if like whatever group
gets it? Like that's not fair and like part of
the like obviously, like one of the problems with that
is that when you start saying stuff like we need
a basic income, we need free college, we need um
uh we need uh universal healthcare, and people start bringing
like what about this group? What about that group? Um?

(58:11):
You know, what they're really saying is I don't believe
that this is an inherent right. I think certain individual
groups might deserve it, but I don't see it as
an inherent right. And I think one of the lessons
of the labor movement is that this ship only works
when you act when you when you you really treat
it like an inherent right, and you you reject attempts
to divide people, even among groups that might make sense

(58:34):
to you at the time, because in reality, if you're
agreeing to that division at all, um, you are against
the idea that people have a right to this sort
of thing. Yeah. So all of this Spencer Um, particularly
kind of the cross racial solidarity that was that was
evident um in this strike, helped inspire one of America's

(58:54):
few non racist white guys at the time, a fella
named Ralph Chaplin. UM. And Ralph a member of the
International Workers of the World or the i w W.
The Wobbly some people call them. This is a group
that's around today and they're very far left um, you know,
anti capitalist workers union. And Ralph Chaplin, inspired by the
strike in West Virginia, wrote a song called Solidarity Forever Um,

(59:18):
and right after we get through some plugs, I'm gonna
close this out by playing that song. But first, Spencer
you want to plug your plug doubles drop. Yeah. Man, Um,
I am on Twitter at the six Sler th h
E s I x L E R. I'm on everything
else is at the six Sler. Uh. Don't follow me
on Twitter. I don't tweet good stuff. Uh, it's bad. Um.

(59:42):
I have a show called harmon Quest. Um. If you
like it, you can watch it on vr V or
YouTube or you know, I don't know. I'm sure it's
downloadable illegally. Um. And if you like it, Uh, send
Netflix an email and say, you guys gotta buy this show.
You guys got to make more of this Netflix. You
know what's up? Send Netflix and email, find their CEO's

(01:00:04):
mailing address and send them letters written in blood whatever
works to get Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm telling people that
if you can get a goblin head, mail a goblin
head to the door of Netflix. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Please
continue committing the felonies that we urge in most episodes. Um. Yeah.

(01:00:25):
You can find us on the internet at behind the
Bastards dot com. You can find us on Twitter at
at Bastard's Pot and also on Instagram at the same thing.
I have a podcast called The Women's war that might
provide a little bit of a suggestion on how to
rebuild society after the collapse. That seems increasingly likely hits um,
so check that out too, uh. And now I'm going

(01:00:45):
to close us out by playing the song that I
was just telling you about, Solidarity Forever, which was inspired
by this West Virginia strike. And this is a recording
by the great American folk musician Pete Seeger. Here we go,

(01:01:08):
Salalilarity for everver, solalidarity for that ever, salilarity for ever.
Call the Union young bates us strong. When the Union's inspiration,
through the worker's blood chill run. There can be a

(01:01:31):
power greater anywhere beneath the sun. Yet what force on
earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one. But
the Union makes us strong. Sal Alarity foreverver, salilarity for everver,

(01:01:53):
soalalidarity foreverver, for the Union makes so strong. Long. It
is we who pow the prairie, built the cities where
they trade, duck the mines, and built the workshops, endless
miles of railroad laid. Now we stand outcast and starving,
mit the wonders we have made. But the Union makes

(01:02:17):
a strong salilarity forver, salilarity for him, salilarity firever young
days as strong they have taken untold millions that they

(01:02:40):
never toil to earn. But without our brain and muscle,
not a single wheel can turn. We can break their
boughty power gain our freedom. When we learned that the
Union makes a strong sality farver salp salep makes us

(01:03:11):
long in our hands is placed a power greater than
their hearted gold, greater than the might of atoms, magnified
a thousand hold. We can bring to birth a new
world from the ashes of the old. For the Union
makes a strong salve sate strong