Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Second American Civil War You Never Learned About

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

Robert is joined by Spencer Crittenden to continue to discuss The Battle of Blair Mountain. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where bad people are talked about, and in this case, the bad people are coal mining company executives in specific and capitalists in general. And my guest for part two, as with part one, is Spencer Crittenton. Spencer, the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, more or less, essentially. And the showrunner for Harman Quest. Even though your name is not Harman, but we'll just skip right past that.

No, it's all marketing, you know? It's all marketing, yeah. Spencer, are you a big fan of the First World War? Are you a World War I stan? Yeah, I'm a big World War I stan. You love trenches, trench foot? Oh my god, and like mustard gas? Oh hell yeah, mustard gas.

Oh my god, child soldiers being massacred by the thousands. Big fan of that. Just pumping people into a meat grinder. Exactly. World War I was awesome for everybody, but it was a particularly good thing for coal miners, and for unions in general. Because the United States, right, we got involved in World War I spoilers. And we had to go to the whole country, we had to get on a war footing.

Because the US military, once upon a time, actually, it was weird, the idea that we would have a standing military that was bigger than just a couple of thousand guys. And so we had to really quickly make an army, because we just kind of didn't have one when World War I kicked off. We had a few thousand guys on horses who were used to shooting it out with Poncho Villa, but that was about it. We had to build this army up suddenly, and that takes a lot of fucking coal, right? At this point, all of your fucking industry bullshit is fueled by coal.

So we had to get a lot of coal real fucking fast. And the president also had to institute a draft, because we didn't have a whole lot of soldiers. And this constricted the labor supply. So US suddenly needs a shitload more coal, and also there's a lot less labor age men that you can hire to do it. And this means, I don't know if you understand, if you know much about economics, I do not. But I know that when you have less of something, it gets more valuable.

So suddenly coal miners, which had kind of just been treated like trash before this, as you might have guessed from the fact that they machined gun them from an armored train, they're valuable now. You can't just machine gun them. And so the federal government actually kicks in some protections from miners and starts treating them really well. The National War Labor Board, which President Wilson instituted to help manage American industry, pushed for the eight-hour workday, granted raises to laborers,

and supported equal pay for women doing what was then still considered to be men's work. Equal pay for equal work was the idea. And we are still not there. But they start talking about it now, right? It stops being, prior to World War I, you're kind of on the fringe if you're saying women should get paid for doing the same job that a man is doing. That's a loony. Kind of like how, as soon as the fucking everybody's laughing about basic income

being like a fringe position and then a plague hits and everybody's like, oh, maybe this is actually a normal thing that should exist. Yeah. Yeah, so all of that shit starts to happen because of this whole war thing. And I don't want to make it out to like Wilson was like super pro labor because the IWW, the Wobblies, the group who one of their members wrote the song that we ended the last episode with, Wilson brutally cracks down on them because a lot of them are like fucking anarchists, right?

They're a very interesting group because like the guy who wrote Solid Area Forever fucking hated the communist governments that came out of like the end of World War I and also hated capitalists, interesting group, interesting person, worth reading about. But President Wilson fucking cracked the shit down on those guys because they were seen as being like too politically radical and it's easy to punish radicals during a wartime. But the actual union men working like the UMW, like these coal miners, these were seen as being like fundamentally pretty American and they were also necessary.

So Wilson did support miners war and things got more and things got a lot better for particularly mine workers during this war. So yeah, President Wilson declared at the outset of U.S. involvement that a lack of coal was quote, the most serious danger facing the United States in this current crisis. So he declared coal miners immune to the draft and for the first time these rough and tumble rednecks who were used to being treated like disposable assets

started to realize that they were actually really valuable and kind of critical to the nation working and they had to promise not to strike during the war but in exchange for this promise they received a substantial raise. Now the result of all this was that by the time the war ended and the troops started to return home coal miners had started to get used to the idea that they were valuable and skilled workers performing a critical task.

Now, have you read Doss Capital, Spencer? No. That's fine. I'm sorry. It's super boring and a real snooze fest. So Doss Capital is a book written way back in 1867 by Karl Marx Karl Marx was the founder of the Marx Brothers, he invented comedy but he also had some theories about labor.

Yeah, and the big mustache. He had some theories about labor too. Lenin read a book on him in the Song American Pie. Anyway, Karl Marx and Doss Capital landed on something that's generally referred to as immiseration theory and immiseration theory is the idea that because cutting wages and benefits to workers is the easiest way to increase profits, right?

So like if you operate a coal mine, the cost of building mine carts the cost of donkeys to like tow mine carts the cost of electricity to light the mines. These are all fixed costs, right? These things cost what they cost but you can cut what you pay the workers. You can cut their benefits and that will increase your profits. So because doing this is the easiest way to increase profits

Marx was like workers in capitalist societies are going to be victims of a gradual chiseling away of their quality of life. So pay will get cut, you know, and you might say that things in the modern day that would be an example this would be like monitored bathroom breaks, robotic trackers to inform your boss when you're not loading Amazon packages enough. Things that in Marx's words, quote,

destroy the actual content of his labor by turning it into a torment. They transform his life into working time and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation and every extension of accumulation becomes conversely a means for the development of these methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates

the situation of the worker be his payment higher or low must grow worse. So this is this is this is a big part of Marxist theory and it suggests a Marx kind of suggested that immiseration is what help tends to produce revolutions. People get so fed up with being abused and chiseled away at that they revolt. Now this is definitely true in a number of cases

and you can point to certain specific cases where like this is what happened to workers and it caused a revolt. But I think one of the issues that kind of people who are really into Marxist theory have is that they kind of over apply it and it is a fact that that immiseration theory actually doesn't always hold true and in fact often does not hold true.

More than a century of scholarly analysis has actually shown that living standards for workers often raise in time in various capitalist countries and yet those workers still engage in revolts. And so the question is if if standards don't necessarily get chiseled away at but those workers still revolt what is causing revolts and so there's alternate theories that have been proposed to explain this.

James C Davies an American scholar theorizes that social revolutions often occur after what he calls need satisfaction which is generally measured by income has risen for a period of time and then sharply drops. So this causes a sudden and massive gap between expected and obtained satisfaction which provokes action on behalf of the aggrieved. So Marx is saying that like workers things just get worse

and worse and worse and worse until they're forced into action. And Davies is suggesting that social revolutions occur after things actually get better for a while and then suddenly get worse and people just are furious. And you can see like the strikes that we talked about in the last episode were kind of the result of minors just getting chiseled away at for so long that they got really pissed. And what we're going to talk about today is more an example

of what Davies is talking about is things getting better like during World War I things get a lot better for minors and then after World War I that changes sharply and people get really fucking pissed off and everything that we're about to talk about today happens. So things were not all sunshine and roses for labor during the war. Woodrow Wilson cracked down like I said on the IWW but the government was willing to work with Union

to express the proper amount of patriotism. That said they were still terrified of anything that smelled even a little bit like communism and this fear only increased as the Russian Revolution heated up and the Bolsheviks got down to some serious Bolshevicking. As soon as the war... I mean, it wasn't even a joke. As soon as World War I was over and more young men returned home

that opened up the labor market and so bosses began to correspondingly cut wages and benefits to their workers again to try to claw back more control, power and profit. And this led to immediate strikes, obviously. Reasonable? Yeah. The strikes started among the nation's steel workers but in over the course of like the fall of 1919, early 1920

there were like several thousand strikes in the United States from all sorts of different workers including police officers. Cops have unions and they strike too. They just also break up strikes by other unions. So again, maybe something to think about. So in September 1919, half of America's steel workers go on strikes and Woodrow Wilson uses federal troops to violently break the strike and this foreshadows how labor would be treated over the coming years.

But while the steel workers could be crushed rather simply mine workers were in a much better position to resist. For one thing, they had more institutional support within the government because of like systems that had been set up during World War I to support miners. So they were also the best organized chunk of laborers within the country. At this point, United Mine Workers was more than half a million men strong and the union then possessed the ability to shut down almost the entire coal industry and if you shut down the coal industry, you basically shut down the United States.

Now, by September of 1919, when the UMW held their annual convention workers were pissed, wages had been slashed and workers had been laid off as soon as the fighting stopped and demand fell. So what made miners feel as if they'd been bait and switched, which they sort of had been. And they, yeah, this particular chant was common among miners at the time and I think it gets across the general feeling of many. We mined the coal to transport soldiers. We kept the home fires all aglow.

We put old Kaiser out of business. What's our reward? We want to know. So they're a little bit pissed. Yeah, yeah. So the union calls a strike This was still illegal under wartime laws, which had not been lifted yet. And President Wilson promised that the law will be enforced, which was generally taken to mean that federal troops would be used to shut down any strike.

And a tedious game of political back and forth followed with the government issuing court injunctions against the strike that rendered the union unable to call for a walkoff. So the unions like we're going to strike. The government says, actually, that's fucking illegal. And the union says, OK, we're not going to call for a strike. But then 400,000 coal industry workers just walk off the job anyway. But it's not a union strike. It's just 400,000 Americans being like, fuck you then.

Like, what are you going to do? You're going to come to our houses and kill us all? Well, we got to liberate the coal mines. Yeah, reopen the economy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you go in there and liberate them. Do the job if you think it's so fucking easy. So the problem with this was that winter had started to hit by the point that all these guys come off the job

and coal shortages during the fall and winter mean that a lot of Americans start suffering, right? Because they can't heat their homes. And this pisses off a lot of normal American citizens who might otherwise have sympathized with the union because, like, they're freezing in their houses. So the union was ultimately stymied in this nationwide strike by a mix of public disapproval and the fact that there were still a lot of non-union mines in West Virginia, in Mingo County, to be specific. And these were very productive mines that put out enough coal to keep critical U.S. industry afloat. So normal Americans are suffering, but the things that are necessary to maintain, like, the nation's existence,

that shit keeps going because of these non-union mines in West Virginia. And eventually the UMW is forced to cave and the miners have to go back to work. And yeah, the bosses, by and large, won this round. And their victory made it clear to the union men that they could not successfully execute a nationwide strike without unionizing the mines of West Virginia. Yeah. So that's good. A valuable lesson.

A valuable lesson. To us all. To us all. To us all. As I've often said, Mingo County is the enemy. Still true to this day. So Mingo County was the mine operator stronghold in West Virginia, and they fought like devils to keep union organizers out and to clamp down on any individual miners who might try to change the status quo.

They were aided in this by the Logan County Sheriff's Department, which was wholly owned by corporate interests and dedicated to crushing worker organization. The cause of the union was made all the more difficult by cultural factors in Mingo County. Most of the miners there were farmers first. Men who saw coal mining as a temporary placeholder gig when prices were low or crop yields were poor. They didn't truly identify as miners. And so it was hard to organize them. Mingo County remained resistant to the cause of organized labor until early 1920.

Now, in the wake of that strike, the union goes to the table with the bosses and, you know, they basically try to iron out what differences they can so that there won't be another strike because it still hurts the mine company's profits. Sure. This arbitration commission, like, concludes by recommending a significant raise for union miners, 27% to avert future strikes. So union miners get a raise. Non-union miners, the miners in Mingo County who had allowed the bosses to end the strike, they don't get a raise because they're not part of the union.

So these guys just fucked over the union in a strike and then they immediately see, oh, this is why we have a union because it increases the amount of money that we make. Yeah. So over on the other side of the holler, their union neighbors were suddenly getting paid a shitload more. Mingo County miners started demanding raises from their bosses, pointing out that they'd loyally kept working during the strike, and this surely meant that they deserved the increased pay. And this did not convince the people who were their bosses.

Shocking. Yeah, I'm shocked. As Robert Shogun writes, quote, the response of the Howard Colliery at Chatteroy typified management's attitude, the Howard manager offered a modest increase but then boosted prices in the company's store. When some miners complained, they were pistol-whipped by mine guards. Oh, no. Yeah.

This is actually probably going to surprise a lot of people, but most folks don't like to be pistol-whipped. Yeah, it's not great. I know, I know, I take some controversial takes and that's going to be one of them, but I'm generally anti-pistol-whipping. Maybe on a hot day. I'm not going to say that. There's a time and a place for pistol-whipping, but it's a bad thing to receive, you know?

You'd rather be the giver of a pistol-whipping than the receiver. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So at Burnwell Coal & Coke, one impatient miner posted a notice at the entrance, to the miners of Burnwell Coal Company, we shall have this 27% raise. We want this 27% raise which the government had granted us. The response from the president of Burnwell was not long and coming.

He said, as one of his employees recalled, he would let his mine go until moss grows over it, until it falls in the Huckleberry Ridge, before he would ever work a Union man. 80 of the 92 Burnwell miners walked off their jobs and sent two of their number to Charleston to ask District 17 for a charter. Hundreds of other miners elsewhere in Mingo did much the same thing. In accordance with Union policy, they were extracted by the head of the Union to return home,

reclaim their jobs, and reopen the mines. Then the Union promised they would be welcomed into the Union. The discontents did as they were bitten. As the last week of April began, the organizing drive swept like wildfire through Mingo County. The Union counted 300 new members in one day and hundreds more the next. And of course, true to form, the bosses fired every single man who came in to work with the Union card. And they then sent armed goons in to force these men out of their company homes. So hundreds of workers Unionized, they wind up homeless, their families wind up homeless.

And the Union has to set up and pay for miners camps to put these guys up and keep them and their families alive while they begin to Unionize the mines of Mingo County and start to strike. So how much later was this than the last episodes? This is eight years later. This is 1920. 1920 and 1921 is when all this happens. So it's like enough time to forget, but not like for the people who lived it. They're like, oh, shit, not again. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of the people, the people organizing this strike on behalf of the Union

had also in large part taken part in the shit that happened in the last episode. And also all of the folks cracking down on them, like the people in charge of Baldwin felts and everything. All of these folks are a lot of these folks are still around. So both sides have more experience and are bringing what they experienced at the last set of strikes into this one. So, um, yeah. And one of the things that's interesting to me about this is that these workers had refused to Unionize and it kind of fucked over the Union, but then the Union basically spends a shitload of money buying them tents and food and helping to like take care of them as they begin their strike,

because that's just the way the shit works. So the whole situation infuriated larger and larger sections of the minor Mingo County minor population as they see their friends and family members kicked out and made homeless. And by May 1920, 3,000 of Mingo County's 4,000 minors had been Unionized. Now they were aided in this by the fact that much of the local government in Mingo County was pro-Union. The town of Madawan, which is like one of the big towns in the area, the town of Madawan's mayor, Cable Testament, had been elected by minors and he was loyal to them rather than the mine bosses. Cable Testament.

Yeah, it's a funny name. That's awesome. It is a funny name. Yeah, a lot of great names in this. People didn't know how silly their names were back in the day. When the county sheriffs, so not the county sheriffs, the state police in West Virginia were in the pay of the mine bosses. And like the boss of the state police was a captain named Brocus and he was totally pro-mine, like corporate mine company. But like a lot of the county sheriffs were very pro-miners.

Some of them were pro, like it kind of depended on the county. A lot like Logan County was really shitty and pro-mine company. But Mingo County, you know, things were a little bit more, you had a lot more sympathy for the minors. And the police chief of the town of Madawan was profoundly pro-miner. And his name was Sid Hatfield, like the old governor, Doc Hatfield. Sid came from a family that was infamous for fighting in Feudon and at 27 years old, Sid was one of the best gunmen in the state. Then as now, the redneck farmers of West Virginia were all quick to brag about their handiness with a gun. But even among a crowd of marksmen, Sid Hatfield stood out.

He always carried two pistols. He was known in duels for shooting them through his pocket sometimes just to kill people faster. He was kind of a badass. Yeah, he always carried two long pistols and he was said to be equally accurate using either hand. He had a habit of showing off his skill by tossing a potato into the air and splitting it open with a shot from his gun. In 1915, he'd had a semi-famous duel with a mine foreman that left the foreman dead. Hatfield had claimed self-defense and been cleared of all charges. Now, in general, local law enforcement around Mingo County was unwilling to help the mine companies evict union men from their homes.

The sheriff's department would only assist when proper notice was given, and that interfered with the desire of mine operators to throw out unionized workers on the same day they were fired. So again, the bosses called on the services of the Baldwin-Feltz Detective Agency. Many of these men were deputized by friendly West Virginia sheriffs, which gave them official license to enforce laws in the mining camps and to carry guns. The bosses used them to collect rent, to guard payroll, and to suppress union organizing. So that's good. I'm in favor, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you might compare them in Shatter Run to like Night of Ront or whatever, which is why Shatter Run has so many like four-pay police departments. That's the thing that happened. Like that's not like a, like, yeah. Like the Pinkertons. Like the Pinkertons, yeah, they're another, and they do, they do a lot of union crushing. It's just, it's mainly Baldwin-Feltz here in West Virginia. So the Baldwin-Feltz men were particularly despised for their undercover work.

The agency regularly deployed men to hide among the miners and pretend to be union sympathizers. One of these men, Charlie Lively, went so far as to organize several union local outposts in Mingo County during the spring of 1920. So Lively would like set up union groups and then he would provide names of all the people who were secretly meeting to the company, who would then like fire and evict those people. Lively and his agents would also act as agent provocateurs. So when like miners would hold protests, they would create violence at those protests in order to justify violent crackdowns by mine guards. Oh, that happens today, right? Well, like all the fucking time, dude, all the fucking time.

Yeah. Yeah. So the head of the Mingo County operation was a fellow named Albert Feltz, one of the leaders of the Baldwin-Feltz agency. He and his men had been tasked by their employer with serving a series of evictions on families who lived in Madawan. Since the local police, led by Chief Hatfield, would not help, he asked his brother, Tom Feltz, who was directing the agency, to send him a bunch of reinforcements. Madawan was the heart of unionist resistance in Mingo and Albert knew that evicting families there would be dangerous work. So he, there were about six other men, he approached Mayor Testament and asked if it would be okay for he and his men to set machine guns up

on the roofs of some local buildings in Madawan in case things got out of town. He's basically like, hey, we got to evict a bunch of people, might piss off the locals. Can I put machine guns up on your roof to murder your citizens if they get angry? Oh, man. Now, the mayor made a controversial call and said, no, you cannot set up machine gun nests on the roof of local buildings. Brave. Brave, yeah. So he's the opposite of the Jaws mayor, kind of.

I don't know, the Jaws mayor doesn't really square with this, but he's everyone's cultural touchstone for a bad mayor. So imagine him is not looking like that. So yeah, Albert offers next to bribe the mayor with $1,000 for the right to set up a killing field in the middle of town. And to his credit, the mayor says, no. Well, can I at least set up a killing field? Yeah, what can I just want to have the ability to machine gun every one of your voters? Why is this a problem? What about some sort of death bog?

Yeah, what about a death bog? What about a, I don't know, a murder forest? Yeah, a murder forest could be good. Yeah. So on May 19th, 1920, Albert Feltz's reinforcements arrived. Seven men, including his other brother, Lee Feltz. This gave him a total of 13 armed detectives. And detective at this point is a word that just means mercenary.

Like these guys aren't detecting shit, they're armed thugs. I saw the mystery of why I beat that man to death with a blackjack. Yeah, it's because it was Paul. I remember when I learned that like, oh, private detectives are just people that you hire to monitor other people. They're just kind of like paid stalkers. And I was like, oh, that's a very different picture. Yeah. You know, that's a broad generalization, but still.

And yeah. And here they're just paid, they just are men with guns who do whatever the people hiring them ask. And in this case, it's throw people out of their homes. So Albert Feltz gets 13 detectives when he gets his reinforcements. So yeah, he was worried about the danger of doing this work without machine gun nests to back him up. But he and his men hopped into three cars and drove out to the edge of town to start evicting the shit out of some miners. Now the Baldwin Feltz men were all heavily armed and the miners in the area could do nothing but stand by and watch as they tossed furniture and valuables out onto the street. This kind of work was routine for the Baldwin Feltz men and they intended to destroy the lives of a number of families and then hop on the train to get back to their homes at the end of the day.

Now, the Baldwin Feltz detectives were interrupted in their task by Sid Hatfield, the police chief and Mayor Testerman. Again, Albert tried bribery, this time offering Sid two to three hundred dollars a month for his allegiance. Hatfield turned him down and demanded to know what authority Feltz had to evict people. Feltz replied that he'd gotten a court order from the Capitol in Charleston, but he didn't have it on him. So Hatfield and Testerman are like, that's unacceptable. You don't even have the fucking court order. We have no way to know that you have a right to evict these people. And Feltz just shrugged and said basically like, I have 13 men with guns.

What are the two of you going to do about this? So the mayor and the police chief go back downtown and they attempt to like get on the telegraph or whatever and they call up warrants from the local court to try and arrest the Baldwin Feltz men for unlawfully processing evictions. But it doesn't really work out. Things aren't very fast back then. And while they do this, an armed posse of locals, mostly miners, start to congregate in downtown Madawan, which is why Albert Feltz had wanted some machine gun nests there. So by the time the Baldwin Feltz men finished their work and returned to the hotel they'd been staying at, there were an awful lot of angry men with guns in the middle of Madawan ready to do violence. So the Baldwin Feltz men get back and they're packing up to get to the train station and there's another confrontation between Mayor Testerman, Sid Hatfield and the detectives. The two groups threaten to arrest each other.

And then, as historian Robert Shogun writes, quote, Brother Lee and Cunningham drew their pistols and returned fire, but they were badly outgunned. Most of their comrades, whose guns were packed away, scrambled for cover behind trees and fences. But Combs' men were relentless. One after the other, the Baldwin Feltz agents fell. So at the end of the bloodletting, three Madawan locals, including Mayor Testerman, were dead, along with seven Baldwin Feltz detectives, including both Feltz brothers. And most of the killing on this day was done by Sid Hatfield. Now, it was rare for Cops to wind up on the site of Union Strikers, and this plus Sid's well-earned reputation as kind of a larger-than-life gunslinger made him an instant hero of Union men nationwide.

Like, they fucking love Sid Hatfield because he shoots a bunch of detectives. Yeah. Yeah. You like, I mean, those are, he got the two brothers. It's like he took out the boss almost, although I'm sure there's more bosses. There's more bosses. He took out a boss. And like every post, every like photo you see of Sid Hatfield from this period of time, he's pointing both of his guns directly at the cameraman, like smiling and posing.

They weren't great on gun safety back then. A lot of pointing guns at people to get good photos. Yeah. So the United Mine Workers Union puts together a propaganda film called Smiling Sid, which they played in camps to help inspire and organize minors. Sid Hatfield becomes the focus of regular newspaper stories, and photographs inevitably capture him pointing, again, both of his guns at the camera. There was a trial for Sid Hatfield, of course, but the Mingo County jury decided that Smiling Sid had done nothing wrong. It also happened that several witnesses hostile to Hatfield died mysteriously right before the trial. Obviously, the Baldwin Feltts detective agency and the surviving Feltts brother were not about to take this lying down.

They attempted to frame Hatfield and one of his deputies for the destruction of coal company property at a nearby county where the legal situation was friendlier. So Hatfield and his deputy had to travel to McDowell County, West Virginia, to stand trial. Now, there was no real evidence against them, but the goal was never to convict them. In August of 1921, Sid and his deputy arrived in town to go to their trial. And as they stepped up to the courthouse doors, a group of Baldwin Feltts mine guards, including that labor spy I was talking about earlier, Lively, drove up and just pumped them full of gunfire and kill both men. Now, the men who murdered Sid Hatfield were tried in turn, but McDowell County justice proved as unwilling to convict them as Mingo County justice was to convict their victims. So this happens.

Yeah, so that's cool and good. Do you know what else is cool and good? You know what won't murder the only good cop in this story? The products and services that support this podcast, none of them killed Sid Hatfield. That is a hard line we draw with our sponsors. I ask every one of them, did you murder Sid Hatfield? And they all say no, except for the one that said yes, the Koch brothers. And I apologize for that getting through.

Here's the ads. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We track down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Oh, my Christ. Oh, sweet bleeding Jesus, we are back. Oh, what a good time. So yeah, that's the Hatfield stuff. It's a bummer. And while all this is happening, so this like occurs over the course of about a year, you know, you've got the Madawan Massacre as it's known. And then you've got Sid Hatfield's assassination, you know, those two are a little less than a year apart, but this happens like 1920 to 21. And while all this drama is progressing and like there's a bunch of court cases and shit and Hatfield's, you know, becoming a public figure while all this is going down, the overall situation in Mingo County had continued to degenerate.

Striking miners had formed into a series of heavily armed camps and groups of them started regularly sallying out to carry out sniper attacks and acts of sabotage on mine company infrastructure and also to assassinate mine guards. Now, West Virginia's governor at this time was fundamentally a coward, and his first instinct was to beg President Harding to send in federal troops to help calm the violence. Harding replied that he wouldn't send in federal troops until he was convinced the governor had actually taken some sort of action. So the governor enacted West Virginia's public safety law, which enabled him to seize authority for Mingo County law enforcement from the local police, who sided with the miners and handed over to the head of the state police, a guy named Brockus, who was in the pay of the mine owners and was a real piece of shit. So that's good. Yeah, I guess that must have happened in history before, but that seems pretty drastic to be all like the police, they're not the police. Yeah. Oh, the police aren't policing the way we want them to police. They're not the police anymore. This other guy that we pay is now the police. Yeah.

It is important to note that there is there is a history in the labor movement of police siding with workers and being very useful in that. But also there's a history of the state just being like when they do that, you're not the police anymore. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So Brockus gets to create new police because the police that were there didn't hate miners enough, and he immediately uses his powers to create a law and order community made up of 250 volunteers. And these were mostly wealthier men from Mingo County, business owners and landed gentry, who would just be given rifles by the state and the legal authority to violently suppress their poor working class foes. So that's cool. Yeah. I love it. Yeah, it's awesome and good and cool. I also love it.

And what's even cooler is that today, if this happened, no one would even need to give them rifles because they already have them. Right. And a lot of the people that would be shooting at don't, which is part of a anyway, on May 19 1921, the governor declared a state of martial law in West Virginia. He put Major Thomas B Davis of the of the of the of the state, you know, National Guard or whatever the militia in charge of finally suppressing the the strikers. And Major Davis was a real piece of shit. So Davis had joined the US military to fight in the Spanish American war, which is a bad war to have joined to fight in. But he also failed to see any action in it. So even though he never got any combat, he decided he really liked military life. And when his regiment was disbanded, he joined the West Virginia National Guard to stay in uniform. Davis had commanded a unit during the paint Creek strike of 1912. And the whole experience had revealed in Robert Shogun's words, a nonchalance towards civil liberties on the part of Davis, which is not a thing you want to be nonchalant about.

Be chalant about civil liberties is my. Shallot the shit out of those. Yeah, you want to chalant the hell out of them. Yeah, don't non the anyway. Here's Robert Shogun quote. This is talking about what he had done in the 1912 strike that we talked about last episode. It also talks about some shitty things that the governor who was otherwise seemed pretty cool. Dr. Hatfield got up to so it was a useful paragraph quote. The military commission that had held sway over defendants charged with violating governor glass cocks martial law decrees selected him as its provost Marshall, him being Davis.

Despite the fact that the civil courts in the martial law district were open, the military commission sitting in the town of Pratt and Kenawa County ruled on offenses ranging from larceny, adultery and disorderly conduct to disobeying sentries and perjury. A nearby freight terminal served as a bullpen to hold prisoners among whom was Mother Jones. On occasion, the commission tried as many as 30 prisoners at a time dispensing with such formalities as indictments or juries. Davis saw to it that those convicted were hustled off not to the county jail but to the Moundsville State prison. With Davis's active assistance, the commission rode rough shot over civil courts. When the county circuit court issued an order forbidding enforcement of the commission's sentences, Major Davis, acting on orders from Governor Hatfield, who had by now succeeded glass cock, blocked the county sheriff from serving the writ on the National Guard officer who headed the commission. In May of 1913, after a pro-labor newspaper, the socialist and labor star editorially denounced the coal barons and attacked Governor Hatfield for arresting a union lawyer and suppressing the labor argus sister paper to the star, Davis led a raid on the star's offices, bearing warrants from Hatfield himself. Davis and his posse of guardsmen and sheriff's deputies forced their way into the paper's offices in Huntington, overpowered a guard and wreaked havoc, destroying type and printing equipment.

From there, Davis and his commandos invaded the editor's home, seizing correspondence and books and rummaging through his files and search for the paper's subscription list. The editor and assistant editor were imprisoned for two weeks. So that's cool. So that's this guy's backstory. That's gotta be like, is that very precedent in history? I mean, I'm sure you know, take out the press, but yeah, that just seems like such a, I mean, you know, obviously it's like you cut them off at their communication, but at the same time, it seems like such bystanders, you know? Yeah, historically, it's pretty dangerous to run a socialist newspaper in the United States of America. A lot of them got murdered, a lot of them got deported, a lot of them got cracked down on. There's a long, beautiful history of that. It's one of our proudest traditions in the United States. Yeah, it's cool and good.

So yeah, so that's the backstory of this guy, Major Davis, who winds up in charge of the state of West Virginia's efforts to suppress the strikers and end the violence, which they do by using more violence. So Davis's first task in charge was to vet the volunteers for the county's new vigilance committees, and these are like the rich guys who volunteered to shoot at poor people. And Davis ensured that no union men, farmers or black men were allowed on the commission or given firearms. Citing his authority under martial law, Major Davis banned all union gatherings and only union gatherings. He also banned the distribution of pro-union newspapers. He rescinded all gun permits for union men as well, effectively stripping them of their constitutional right to bear arms. So that's good. So Davis's first actions targeted union organizers, arresting them for trying to hold gatherings and having several of them brutally beaten by his own men.

He also put in an order for a crate of new Thompson submachine guns, which he hoped would aid the Mingo police in clearing out strikers and their families. The miners, however, did not wait for this to happen. On May 25, 1921, a group of snipers from one of the striking workers camps opened fire on camp guards. State police and national guardsmen from nearby Kentucky came in to provide backup, and two of them were killed by sniper fire. The snipers were eventually driven off, several was arrested and one was killed, and the whole encounter convinced the mine bosses that it was necessary to break up these striking camps, which had basically evolved into armed militia compounds. Now, Major Davis's first plan for how to handle this situation was to create concentration camps on U.S. soil. He wanted to send soldiers into the strike camps and force out most of the committed union men and then reorganize the camps, which would then be filled with women and children,

and put them under semi-permanent military guard. So yeah, he just was like, what do we just made some concentration camps out of this? That seems like a call. There's only the same ideas, like bad guys don't have new ideas. It's all the one idea, really, which is, yeah, use weapons that you have and they don't to lock them into prisons of one sort or another and make them do what you want, or just die if that's what you want them to do. Yeah, that is the only plan ever, like when you get right down to it, which is cool and good and does not echo in history or into the modern day in any way. So as a prelude to this, this concentration camp policy, Major Davis began sending police and soldiers on a series of raids against camps in Lick Creek. Now, there were a series of gunfights involving hundreds of men sniping at each other and like mile-long skirmish lines and Davis ordering men to fire machine guns into the camp to suppress strikers,

a bunch of different gunfights like this, multiple battles occur. So there's all these raids, which kill a number of people and happen over the course of days and weeks, and the death toll of all these raids, combined with the anger over the assassination of Sid Hatfield, which happens in early August of 1921, all of this eventually pushes the striking miners into massive retaliation. On October 24th, 3,000 of them gathered with all of the guns that they could carry. Now, since Davis's men had been raiding their strongholds, they decided to target a stronghold of the mine bosses, Logan County. And I'm going to read a quote now from a write-up by a professor named Hoyt Wheeler, a labor professor, talking about what was happening in Logan County at the time. Logan County in 1921 has been described as a leer in the face of liberty, a feudal barony defended by soldiers of fortune in the pay of mine owners. The ruler of this feudal barony was the sheriff of Logan County, Don Chaffin. It has been said of Chaffin that, in his heyday, when clothed with official power, he was a hard-drinking, swaggering, bragging, bullying gunman who ruled his kingdom of Logan with a mailed fist.

In Logan County, it was the practice for coal companies to pay the salaries of deputy sheriffs. These deputies were used systematically by Chaffin to prevent union organizers from operating in Logan County. Organizers were beaten and jailed at will. So this army of miners from their camps organizes at Linn's Creek, which is about 65 miles from the Logan County line, and they start marching. Two UMW officers who are terrified of the bloodshed that might ensue if these guys reach Logan County, they actually intercept the miners and they begged them to call off the march. They're like, basically, we can negotiate this, we can work things out with the companies, there's no need for this to turn into a massive bloodbath. And the miners agree, and this army of miners starts to back away, and while they're backing away, Sheriff Chaffin of Logan County decides to launch an attack while they're retreating, and he kills two men after a massive battle. Now, this pisses off the striking miners, and suddenly they stop retreating and backing away, and in fact, 3,000 more men join them and, like, swell the force to 6,000. And this army of 6,000 men starts advancing on Blair Mountain, a ridgeline that separates the Union Chunk of Logan County, which is pretty tiny, from the larger non-union chunk.

And by the time they actually reach Logan County, there's more than 10,000 miners in this army. Now, the soldiers in this massive Union army are dressed as the nightmares of every American capitalist. They wore red bandanas and they tied red flags to the barrels of their guns. They had an organized medical corps to deal with casualties and at least one machine gun. Their commander, their general, was a Union officer with the pretty awesome name of Bill Blizzard. Wow. Pretty fucking sick. Yeah.

I like that. Yeah, one witness who was present described the scene of the army this way. One big red-headed fellow hopped off the train, a lot of them took trains to get up to the front, and got up on the platform and waved his high-powered rifle and said, The Coal River Hellcats have arrived. Now watch us work. He called for Detail Number 74. He got up on some high ground and kept hollering for Detail 74, and there were about 20 men all armed. They had on the customary overalls and belt cartridges and a couple of big 44s stuck in their belt and high-powered rifles.

He called those men in and he called the roll and then started off up Coal River and word was being passed around through the crowd. So on the opposite side of Blair Mountain, Sheriff Chaffin had about a thousand men at his command, about a thousand police and stuff, along with another 2,000 volunteers, mostly these vigilance county men. So he's got about 3,000 fighters in total, but he also has several commercial pilots and he has three planes. So that's about to matter in a second. Now, the assault of the miners begins on August 31, 1921, and it is ugly from the jump. The miners had the advantage of numbers, but they were assaulting an entrenched enemy. They're basically trying to attack the top of this mountain.

So they're attacking an entrenched enemy with the high ground and access to a number of gatling guns and other automatic weapons. Battle was joined at a number of sections across the line and the fighting was vicious. Sheriff Chaffin eventually decided to send out his planes. Now, initially, the thing that he had like been legally authorized to do was to load them up with copies of a proclamation from President Harding, basically saying like, stop, stop all this. But instead of loading them up with proclamations, on Thursday, September 1st, he ordered them loaded with pipe bombs and tear gas bombs and just starts dropping them on crowds of miners. Now, this doesn't work very well.

The Sheriff's Air Satz Air Force was markedly ineffective. But it is part of what makes the Battle of Blair Mountains so historic. This was not just a strike or a riot. This was a full-fledged military action, a war on American soil against American citizens, which included airpower and machine guns. It's wild, but people don't learn about this shit. Yeah, it's like people talk about like the Oklahoma bombing and stuff, and this seems like the same kind of level of escalation. The chances, I don't know, I'm bad at history. You're good at history. Yeah, I mean, like the Oklahoma City bombing people know about because it was just like one asshole with no good grievance,

but like on the part of a bunch of right-wing nut fucks, murdering people. But these guys had a real grievance, and it was a grievance that kind of cuts to the heart of inequalities in the center of American society. So we never talk about the time that they got bombed and tear gassed and shot at with machine guns. We just leave that out of the history books. No, the eight-hour workday was entirely gained by polite people with signs protesting. That's why we have a weekend. Not the men who charged machine gun nests and sniped at corporate guards. I love that.

Yeah. It's cool, like this is cool history. This is what history should be. You've got to imagine that if we told the stories like this, people would be a lot more interested in our history. Yeah, the reason we have these things like the weekend and the eight-hour workday is that, and this is not just what happened in West Virginia, all over the country, there were a number of actions like this. This is kind of like the biggest and most, but like all of these things that we consider just a part of life, like the fact that you're supposed to get a weekend, all of these things were bought in blood by men who were willing to kill for these rights, by men who were willing to die for these things.

And we don't talk about that even though it's cool and interesting because it might give people ideas. Yeah, I mean, they sacrificed a lot, but I also like retweeted a petition, so, you know. That is the same thing, yeah. Yes, these men were retweeting with their rifles. Yeah, in a way, every one of the 100,000 bullets fired in that one battle was a tweet. It's all about the ratio then as now. Yeah, they ratioed the mind bosses by strafing them with 30-06, yeah. Robert, I hate to be that person, but it's time for an ad break.

You know what also supports the strafing of mine guards with high-caliber hunting rifles? The products and services that support this podcast. Yay. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records.

We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. We're back. And where we just left off, the sheriff of Logan County had ordered chemical weapons and bombs deployed by air against attacking workers. So that's pretty cool. Now, over the course of days, this battle escalates and fighting continues again for days. And federal troops are finally sent in, which, you know, it takes a while to get there and the Union men know that federal troops are coming. They also know that like they can't fight federal troops, right?

You know, the army has cannons and better bombers and a whole lot of machine guns. So they realize they only have like one last ditch chance to like win this fight before the army arrives and they launch a desperate assault across the entire Blair Mountain line. And I'm going to quote again from the Battle for Blair Mountain by Robert Shogan about this last assault, quote, In preparation for their attack, the insurgents dispatched a patrol to destroy a railroad bridge on the Guyon Dot line of the Norfolk and Western, hoping to keep reinforcements from reaching the defenders positions. But the miners went ahead with their planned assault anyway that same morning. The attack began with a faint at the center of the defense lines at Blair Mountain. The miners opened up on an outpost manned by the Bluefield boys, a volunteer contingent from that town with machine gun and rifle fire. Having gained the attention of the defenders, the miners sent their main force against the left and right flanks of the defenders.

Attack was pushed desperately, reported one local journalist from his vantage point in a machine gun nest on the defense ramparts. The enemy seemed to have no sense of fear, whatever, and advanced over the crest of the hill in the face of machine gun and rifle fire. But in reality, the defenders gave as good as they got. We couldn't fire a shot, but what they would rake our line from top to bottom, one of the miners told reporters. To this beleaguered insurgent, the defenders seemed to be able to volley back 100 rounds for every shot fired at them. And when it came to devious tactics, the defenders were at least a match for their attackers. At one point, the defenders in the first line of trenches abandoned their posts, seemingly driven off by the force of the attack. The advancing miners promptly occupied the trench, exulting in the ground they had gained.

But they had little time to celebrate. A hidden machine gun nest located barely 50 yards away raked the position and drove them back. Another machine gun nest, protected by a rock cliff and barricades of timber and stones, kept up a steady fire. Fortunately for the miners, it could only fire in one direction, but it was enough to repel several assaults. So, the attack fails in the end. The miners cannot break the line at Blair Mountain and can't take the mountain. And federal troops arrive on September 3rd, and the miners were forced to retreat to their lines and eventually to disband. In the end, 50 to 100 miners were killed, along with 10 to 30 of sheriff chafensmen.

Almost a thousand miners were arrested, but the vast majority of the army dispersed. Many miners hid their weapons in the hills and valleys around Blair Mountain, and caches of arms are actually still discovered there today. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, yeah, go arms hunting in Blair County and send me what you find. Just mail it. Mail it. The U.S. post office loves sending century old munitions and dynamite.

Just go ahead and it's fine. Well, they'll take what they can get. They'll take what they can get. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. There were trials for treason and murder in the wake of all this. Bill Blizzard was acquitted, but some of the miners were convicted for a variety of crimes. The UMW paid for everyone's legal defense, which nearly bankrupted the Union. And the immediate wake of the battle was a huge victory for the forces of capitalism.

This time, the bosses had won. But the United Mine Workers of America continued to organize, and the Senate Investigating Committee looked into the whole mess, which helped bring national attention to the plight of miners in West Virginia and elsewhere. The bosses had won on the battlefield, but they did not win in the long battle for public opinion. By 1935, the New Deal brought new protections for workers and an end to many of the abuses that had long plagued the coal industry. The UMW succeeded, finally, in organizing the vast majority of miners in West Virginia.

So that's good. Yeah. The Esau System, which we talked about in our first episode, whereby women were forced to pay for basic necessities by rape, is believed to have come to an end around 1934 as a consequence of the Union finally organizing West Virginia. While many aspects of this violent struggle have been studied and covered in detail by historians like Robert Shogun, the Esau System was allowed to fade from memory. Historian Michael Klein writes that the use of female flesh to extend credit to feed the family was never mentioned by our own regional historians.

Now, this has led many modern historians to doubt that such a system ever existed. The men who line up on this side, like West Virginia University professor Paul Rakes, will point to the aggression and powerful self-defense instincts shown by the miners at Blair Mountain. Men who were willing to charge machine gun nests to fight for their rights surely would not have taken a system of bureaucratized rape of their wives and sisters lying down. Labor historian Wes Harris has a convincing argument, though, against this line of reasoning. Quote, My best guess is they didn't talk about it because if they had talked about it,

they would have risked their husbands getting really irritated and going out and trying to get revenge. Your husband gets killed, you're a widow, you're on the street, you get kicked out of the company house. Which is a point, like a lot of miners died because they got angry and took up arms against the mine, and a lot of these women were just like, if I let them know what I'm doing to keep the family fed, they'll go get themselves killed, and then we'll be in an even worse spot. Yeah, I mean, it seems like there's no shortage of reasons why you might not create a big thing out of it that almost are, at least in modern perspective, seem very self-evident and don't even need to be discussed,

but it's like it was a big deal to be able to be all like, no, actually, there's this logic to it, it's so strange. Yeah. Now, it's further evidence for the idea that the ESAO system was real. Labor historian Wes Harris points to the extremely well-documented history of child labor in the minds of West Virginia. Now, this was illegal even at the time that we're talking about, but it was not uncommon for 10-year-olds to be sent down to work, and authorities were almost never called as a result of this.

If a child were to complain to a social worker, his family would lose their company house and be forced out onto the street. This is a little bit like how, today, more than a fifth of U.S. workers are regularly forced into uncompensated overtime. You might also compare it to the fact that in 2017, one study found that workers in 10 U.S. states had lost a combined $8 billion per year to wage theft from their employees. Now, that's just 10 states, $8 billion in wage theft per year. Now, one of the things that's interesting to me is that the total value of all property theft nationwide on an annual basis is about $16 billion. So, if you're looking at these numbers, you might come to the conclusion

that wage theft is almost certainly a larger problem than all other theft combined in the United States, but it's virtually never prosecuted. That's neat, isn't it? It's like one of the... I worked at a place that had wage theft. I don't think I was ever deprived of paid overtime or anything, but there's a lot of people who just straight up didn't get paychecks and stuff, and then we all talked about it. Well, it seems like there's nothing we can do.

We can try and fight it and lose, and then get fucked over, and then everyone gets fucked over. Yeah, we'll all get fired, and yeah, we won't be able to pay rent. We'll be out of our houses. Now, because of legal protections, we'll be out of our houses in 30 days, as opposed to the same day, but you know, things you might conclude that things aren't as much better as they should be, and some people might conclude that maybe some folks need to be putting red bandanas around the barrels of rifles today, but that's outside of my purview to advise as a podcast host. So the battle between labor and the bosses continues,

and today it largely does so without unions on the side of labor. Unions are a lot less common than they were back then, and they have a lot less power. Strikes are not a thing of the past entirely, but they don't have the teeth that they used to. Although in 2019, the threat of airline stewardess is striking, and air traffic control is just not being able to handle working without pay during the government shutdown, showed us that the mere threat of such things in the right industries can bring swift concessions to the capitalist class, because that fucking situation ended real quick once it looked like the planes weren't going to be able to fly. Now, the overall situation for labor in America is not great today.

Most of us have never known a United States in which labor was organized and capable of acting on a mass scale to achieve its goals. While the new labor rights that FDR's administration put in place helped to enshrine protections into law, and these were very important, the fact that unions basically bowed to the federal government and letting them set all this meant that successive generations of politicians have been able to steadily chisel away at labor rights, while unions slowly declined in power and influence. The struggle of labor is the struggle of folks like you and me to live a decent life. Our predecessors fought in blood for a five-day, 40-hour work week. They picked up guns and they braved machine gunfire for the right to organize themselves to speak their mind

and to live independent lives as something more than slaves of the wealthy. Now, the next chapter of this history, the chapter that podcast hosts will be talking about in another hundred years, this has not yet been written, but everyone listening here now has a chance to be one of the authors of this history. And I'd like to end this episode once we plug our plugables with another song, another union ballad by one of America's great folk musicians. Whose side are you on? And this is also by Mr. Pete Seeger. As you sit in quarantine waiting for whatever the future has in store for us, I think it's good to ask yourself the same question that Pete asks everybody in this song.

So we're going to play ourselves up with that, but Spencer, do you first want to plug your plugables? Yeah, at the Sixler on all the things. It's spelled like it sounds. If you can't spell it, that's fine. You're probably better off. And I did a podcast called Harmon Town. You could listen to the ads. I'm pretty proud of those ads. I'm not super proud of my other output on the podcast. I mean, it's fine. It's just like, you know, I was just hanging out. It was just some bullshit. But yeah, that's some stuff. Harmon Quest is a show I did.

We played D&D and then animate it. I think it's pretty accessible. If you love D&D and your friends just don't get it, you might want to show it to them. I don't know. But really, it's about Robert, you know? What is? This is really about you, not me. No, this is about all of us. And my only plugs are our website, BehindTheBastards.com, our podcast and Instagram at BastardsPod and my podcast, The Women's War, which has a lot to say about systems that might be set up

that might work a little better than some that we have today. So maybe listen to that. And right now, listen to Mr. Pete Seeger. From all of you good workers, good news to you, I'll tell of how the good old union has come in here to dwell. Which side are you on? Which side are you on? My daddy was a miner and I'm a miner's son and I'll stick with the union till every battle's won. Which side are you on? Which side are you on?

They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man or a Thugford J.H. Blair. Which side are you on? Which side are you on? No workers can you stand it or tell me how you can. Will you be a lousy scab or will you be a man? Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Don't scab for the bosses, don't listen to their lies. Those poor folks haven't got a chance unless we organize.

Which side are you on? Which side are you on? What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.