Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Largest Labor Uprising in U.S. History

Episode Date: May 24, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Jul 28, 2020 Chris and Dave from the Mandatory OT and IWW join Breht to cover the fascinating and crucially important history of the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in American history and the largest armed uprising in America since the Civil War.  In this powerful episode, we dive deep into the largest labor uprising in U.S. history—the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. This was no metaphorical struggle: 10,000 coal miners, armed and organized, rose up against brutal exploitation, corporate tyranny, and state violence in the heart of Appalachia. It's a story of working-class militancy, raw courage, and revolutionary spirit—one deliberately buried and whitewashed by history. We bring it back to light. Check out Dixieland of the Proletariat  ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Coal mining is the most dangerous work in our land a day, with plenty of dirty slave and work and very little pay. Coal miner won't you wake up and open your eyes and see what the dirty capitalist system is doing to you and me. Dear Miner, they will slave you tell you can't work no more. And what do you get for your living, but a dollar in a company's store, a tumble-down shack to live in, snow and rain pours in the top, you have to pay the company rent, you're paying never stop.

I am a coal miner's wife, I'm sure I wish you well. Less than this capitalist system in the darkest pits of hell. Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Before we get into this wonderful episode with Mandatory OT on the Battle of Blair Mountain, I want to cover a couple things up front. First things first, we have finally some high-quality, unique designed shirts for supporters and listeners of RevLeft Radio. A previous guest, I think it was our episode entitled

something like Rebel Music a couple years ago. Our guest from that episode has recently started a communist clothing line called Goods for the People and as they were sort of launching their clothing line, they reached out to me, wondered if we wanted to do some sort of collaborative design with them and I obviously jumped at that opportunity. So we do have shirts.

I will link to the shirts in the show notes so you can go check it out. At first, I wasn't sure that I didn't think we were going to get any money from it. It was just about making these high-quality shirts available to our listeners, but then they reached out and said, actually, yes, we'll give you $2 per shirt. So this is a perfect way for people who want to support the show, but for whatever reason might not want to do it through Patreon. Rather, maybe it's because they don't like Patreon or they don't like the monthly subscription model

or they just don't have enough money to do that on a monthly basis, et cetera. Not only do we get a little kickback for every shirt sold, but just wearing our shirts out in public, repping Rev Left in the Rev Left community is an awesome way to support the show. And we would deeply humbled and appreciative if anyone goes out and purchases these shirts. So again, that will be linked in the show notes of this episode.

So no more on that. Just shout out to Goods for the People and check that out if you are at all interested. And the second thing I want to say before we get into this episode is I just want to give a quick little shout out to Friends of the Show, Dixieland of the Proletariat. It's another podcast.

really centered on the working class from the South. So they have some episodes on Blair Mountain. I think their first episode ever was on Blair Mountain in the Coal Mining Wars. So definitely go check them out. If you want more information specifically on the Battle of Blair Mountain or just want another left-wing voice to add to your podcast array, check out Dixieland at the Proletariat. We will link to them in the show notes as well.

Okay, without further ado, on today's show, we have Chris and Dave from Mandatory OT, the official podcast of the West Virginia chapter of the IWW. And they're on today to talk about the Battle of Blair Mountain. This is a huge episode. I think it's almost three hours, if not over three hours long. The only other episode I think that we've had that's been this big as our infamous or famous Stalin episode,

depending on where you're coming from. So this is one of our longer episodes ever. But Dave and Chris are wonderful interlocutors. They're entertaining. They're hilarious. And we've sprinkled in some clips throughout the show to highlight certain points and drive other points home, et cetera. So it's one of our big historical episodes, jammed, packed full of information and entertainment, as usual. So we hope people really get a lot out of this and basically just really enjoy the discussion because I enjoyed having it.

Chris and Dave are a wonderful comrade. So shout out to Mandatory OT. Obviously, I'll link to all their stuff in the show notes as well. So without further ado, let's get into this wonderful episode. Chris and Day from Mandatory OT on The Battle of Blair Mountain. Enjoy. I'm part of like independent organizations here in the northern Panhandle, West Virginia based roughly out of wheeling. But I don't know, Dave. Oh, anything you want to say?

I mean, yeah, we're doing introductions. I'm Dave. I am the other part of mandatory OT. I am part of the IWW as well. That's pretty much all that I'm a part of is that now. I mostly put my focus into kind of more just independent reading and research for our show. I know you always ask for tendencies. Generally, Chris and I kind of, we used to really call ourselves malice and that's kind of gone by the side.

I know at this point, I guess I am some shade of Marxist-Leninist, but you can really just call me a Marxist at this point. Marxist, communist, scientific socialist. That's probably, that's probably a good descriptor of where we fall. We're from an anarcho-Sendicles union, or we're part of that, but we, as our union also is, is incredibly varied. non-secretarian. Yeah, we like to say syndicalist in the streets and Leninist in the sheets, if you will. Well, beautiful. Thank you both for coming on. I know I've been on

your show, so it's nice to have you on to talk about something that has incredible, regional, and I think personal and familial importance for both of you, which is the Battle of Blair Mountain and, importantly, the context surrounding and leading up to it. Since this topic is so large, I'm not going to delay it any longer. I think we're just jump into it. And the first half of the conversation will be really centered around all of the conditions and actors and events that lead up to it.

And then the second half will be an actual discussion of the Battle of Blair Mountain itself. So before we get into details, though, can you give a sort of broad overview of what the Battle of Blair Mountain was for those who may have never heard of it at all? and just sort of pinpoint what its historical importance is so people can sort of orient themselves to the topic before we dive into the details. Yeah, I guess that I'll field that one, Dave. So the Battle of Blair Mountain took place in the southwestern part of West Virginia.

It is still today, much like it was 100 years ago, massively underdeveloped, very, very poor area. And there were a lot of the mines in this kind of like central minefield of like indiana ohio pennsylvania west virginia um in the south they weren't unionized in the north they were but i guess the biggest thing to really kind of know going in is is just the kind of gravity of the situation and how it still reigns as the uh largest armed kind of insurrection in uh u.s history this side of the civil war so I think that that's kind of the best jumping off point is kind of just understanding a couple sentences.

It was really, I mean, yeah, and then at the most basic point to describe it as it was a violent episode of class struggle that came from essentially a boiling pot of many past events that will go over. Yeah, and also before really going in whole hog, this took place, like the end of it was in 1921. So for those listening that aren't well acquainted with it, it is very important. to remember that as we talk about these revolutionary figures and their movements that surround them, it's crucial to understand that Bolshevism, as we think of it today, and like Marxism, Leninism, even in kind of its baby stages, did not really exist, that it was still very much kind of a growing and changing thing. And especially in the mountains of West Virginia. Yeah. In 1916, you have like the Easter rising.

in Ireland, the James Connolly, but, and that, that was not any kind of like ML revolution in this, the kind of events before that transpire. Oh, yeah. I mean, as we'll get into, too, it definitely had its reactionary elements as well. We can't stress this enough with how many moving pieces that there were for this to happen and that it caused as well. Yeah, absolutely. It's, it happened a century ago.

It was the largest, I think, actual full-on labor conflict that exploded into an actual violent warfare, violent battle. And so that's what people should know. And we'll get into at the very end the legacy of the Battle of Blair Mountain, but regionally the importance of it really can't be understated either. So it really is a monumental moment in the sort of class struggle in the United States, particularly with all of the contradictions and nuanced. and complexities that come with it, particularly given the fact that the U.S. is a white supremacist settler colonial state. And so I think we'll navigate those nuances as we come across them. But I hope that that's sort of putting it on the table for people who might have no clue what this is. It really is a monumental historical event.

And that's why we wanted to cover it. Coal companies want to blast mine Blair Mountain. But it's not simply to mine coal. They want to erase its history. What is it about Blair Mountain that they don't want you to know about? Coal companies have long history fighting unions and violently exploiting their workers. Early in the 20th century, working conditions were so bad that black miners, who were former slaves, said working for the coal company felt no different from slavery.

Just some slaves up here, they own our black ass. And in 1921, poor white, black, and immigrant miners rallied together for better working conditions and revolted. That was very scary to the powers that be in 1921, the idea that you had blacks and whites, you know, on the same side, arming themselves. It was at Blair Mountain, where 10,000 miners faced off against the coal company forces, exchanging over a million rounds of fire over the course of four days until the U.S. government intervened on behalf of the coal companies. The Battle of Blair Mountain was, and is still to this date, the largest armed uprising in America. America since the Civil War. It's the largest example of people challenging the power structure in West Virginia, standing up for themselves and standing up for their rights.

And there are people who absolutely do not want that to be remembered. So after historians spent years to finally make Blair Mountain a registered national historic site, coal companies managed to reverse the decision using underhanded dishonest tactics. Coal company lawyers included the names of dead people in a list of objectors. One person has been dead since 1983, and yet that individual objected to the listing of Blair Mountain. In 2016, a federal judge found that the decision to remove Blair Mountain from the National Register of Historic Places was arbitrary and capricious in violation of federal law. But that hasn't stopped the coal companies from destroying the site. And they were destroying very specific areas where there were.

were archaeological sites and just for the record book where that's disturbed there would have been where the defensive forces for the drug durs and machine guns up the hill here why would you pay a mining company to go a mine 2,500 feet and they never took one lump of coal out of it not one they do not want this history being memorialized they don't want a monument to the united mine workers of america they don't want the coal companies looking bad and any way, shape, or form. And the easiest way to make sure that happens is to blow it up. So in order to understand the battle itself, we must, of course, first understand the conditions that led up to it, culturally, politically, and economically. Can you talk about those underlying

conditions for us? Yeah, so diving in, kind of the stereotypes of West Virginia, or predominantly that it's rural, hilljacks, hill folks, hillbillies, whatever you want to say. And that kind of idea is really driven because of the unique industrialization that occurred in the state, especially in the southern part of the state, because you weren't close to Pittsburgh like we are here in the northern Panhand or even Cleveland, for that matter, which were sizable industrial centers. But a lot of the families in the south, they still made a living by farming, but there was the development of mines, timbering operations, railroads, and factories. that did not result in that kind of development of big cities, like with Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Philadelphia, what have you. In 72% of the population, as of 1930, after all of this transpired by almost a decade, still lived in rural areas,

even though the economy was overwhelmingly industrial. In this segment of Appalachia consisted predominantly of non-Anglo-European immigrants, And so you had a lot of like Slavic immigrants, a lot of Italians, Poles, just... Hungarians. Yeah, Hungarians. A lot of non-native English speakers, if they spoke English at all. And the Italian kind of tradition is also, can't be understated because that socialism that comes from there is steeped in the kind of anarcho-syndicalism that you see play out throughout this conflict. and also a big component of the population were freed or runaway slaves or the children or descendants of those slaves.

It's crucial to note that there are more black workers in West Virginia than in any of the other coal fields. And what was attractive is it's easily like the closest of these kind of states outside of the central field. The big draws were Vancouver and Colorado. and if you're kind of a freed slave or a former slave those are that's a pretty pretty big trek to say the very least and the coal operators kind of held this idea of equal work for equal pay or at least advertised that idea um as we're all right there were a lot of stipulations to that yeah and and for folks like just kind of uh for lack of better we're discovering their freedom and discovering

some huge fucking air quotes there there's a really nice kind of draw to that. These unionization pushes in southern part of the state kind of began in 1897 and then push forward in 1902 but there was very limited success

this was predominantly by the wobblies and also the UMW of A. However with all of this the UMW did see very way the UMW of A is a United Mind Workers of America. Yeah, I got to spell out. We got to spell it out.

Oh, man. You take it for granted down there. Yeah. You see it. It's the initials that you see all the time. I mean, they're one of the biggest players next to the two, you know,

armies that we're going to talk about later is the UMWA. And the, I was just at my uncles for a cookout two nights ago. And he has a big UMW of a calendar. because he's a former minor. So with these unionization pushes, a lot of it really faltered, but they did secure a foothold in eastern Kanawa County. And for those of you that aren't quite familiar with this region,

Kunawa County is the county that has Charleston, which is the current state capitol and was the capital then as well. So now we kind of got this general kind of cultural layout, pushing onward a big big component is the company town and if I if I recall correctly the company town in some parts of Kentucky existed until like 1970

which is absolutely fucking insane and that's probably like the most well-known part of this whole story this whole event is the company towns and which is you know as you'll get to talk about here in a second made up essentially 80% of miners lived in company towns Yeah. For those of you that can't fathom it, if you're from, like, L.A. or New York or what have you.

If you've seen sorry to bother you, it's the kind of apartment buildings that all of the, God, the company escapes my name, but that the worker, the horse workers pretty much lived. So, and I took this quote that kind of sums it up pretty well. The typical coal mining town is not a town in the ordinary sense at all. The place where the town stands is the point at which a seam has been open. buildings have been erected, and machinery has been installed. The town is the adjunct and necessary convenience of an industry, and if the mines should disappear, it too would cease to exist. It is not even called a town in the language of the locality. It is called a camp.

No one owns his own house. He cannot acquire so much title to property. No one runs a store, operates a garage, or sells groceries, or haberdashery to his fellow townsmen. No one amuses them in the movie theater. There is no main street of small business. owned by different people and making up that mosaic of commercial life that's typical of villages everywhere. There's a little if any participation in common group activities. No body of elected

councilman ever passes on repairs for roads, no group of people ever. Gets together decides that the old school has to ramshackle for the children or that the old church needs repainting. No family physician builds up a successful practice by competing with other physicians. No lawyer settles disputes over property rights amongst their neighbors. It is accurate to say that no one does these things. The coal company does them all. It owns all the houses, rents them to the miners. It owns the store, the pool room, the movie theater, and often helps to build the school and the church. From the cradle to the grave, breath by, they draw breath by the grace of a sometimes absentee coal owner, one of whose visible representations is the deputy sheriff.

a public official in the pay of the coal owner. And that's also something that's going to really come into play a little down the road as we discuss what's going on. Because the way that a lot of these capitalists, these coal owners, kind of imposed their will, was through these deputies that they kind of had it, that they paid off. And a lot of these capitalists lived in New York. They lived in Philadelphia. Hell, they maybe even fucking lived in London.

London, which is, in this time, kind of boggles my mind that they were able to have this repression, but the deputy sheriff played such a big role in that, and they were paid very handsomely. I mean, as we'll see throughout this whole story, it really just shows you how, I mean, it's very on the face. The contradictions in this whole thing are the most apparent out of any situation that I've ever like studied or seen and because it literally is policing paid by coal companies everything is paid by the capitalists it's i mean it's just the most on the face now where we have much more the complication or not the yeah the complications or complexity of neoliberalism in between

these things in this time the sense of the of the company town there was none of that it was direct yeah i was going i was going to say it's very much uh the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and peer concentrate form with no illusions at all. You know, just the police are our enforcers and we own everything. Oh, yeah, it's just as shitty as pure orange juice concentrate, I promise. But in addition to the deputy sheriff that wields a lot of power, we have a cool little agency that is a recurring factor throughout this whole tale. They are called the Baldwin-Feltz Detective Agency,

and they worked exclusively in the minesfield. minefields is privatized police. Now, if you don't know who the Baldwin-Felps agents are, or the agency, think of the pakerine test. It's the exact same concept of that, which most people have heard of. Yeah. Yeah. They were private police force.

Truly, they kind of look like Al Capone gangsters. Like, as we were researching, I'm like, motherfucker. Like, they look like they're about to shoot their names into the wall of a fucking bank in Chicago. But the Baldwin-Feltz agency was started by. three brothers there's Tom Feltz who is the oldest and then his two younger brothers Albert Feltz and Lee Feltz and they were they really strong-armed what the sheriff couldn't do because the sheriff did a lot of like behind-the-scenes

things like wrote bogus warrants whatever but a lot of times the Baldwin Feltz agents bolstered the sheriff's numbers or would do kind of the heavy lifting for the sheriff and also got paid very well and one of the primary I guess purposes of the Baldwin-Feldt's agents was to evict workers who were unionists or sympathizers. And this was taken to court. However, the courts favored in the way of the coal operators and Baldwin-Feldt's agents and said that this falls under master's servant rights. So, of course, if you're evicted, like, we're not going to protect you because they're providing this out of the goodness of their heart. You wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them.

like it's just utter protection of property rights and like Dave said it's so fucking on the nose I could just worry just quoted my dad there and not everyone's dad can be drifting to being a Marxismanist so I'm sorry regularly company towns were intentionally segregated like I mentioned southern West Virginia was a really diverse place you had a lot of immigrants you had descendants of slaves, if not former slaves. And then you had like some quote-unquote native Appalachians, which were, they were not indigenous folks.

They were like the sons and daughters. Of the original settlers. Of the original settlers, exactly. So when we refer to Native Appalachians or if we refer to them from here on out, keep that in mind. We're not talking about indigenous folks at all. Mostly because that's when we were researching this. That's kind of the language.

Yeah. That was always apparent was when talking about the Appalachian natives, they were talking about the people like where... Colonizers. Yeah. But they kind of separated these three parts of town, like the part where black folks lived, where the immigrants lived, where the quote-unquote native Appalachians lived. But something that the coal operators really overlooked is the fact that when you're in the mine for 12 hours and covered in dust, people still talk in like languages shared. that kind of transcends that kind of boundary again you're with someone you're going to pick up their language and working with them 80 hours a week yeah not more 80 100 hour weeks yeah and so it kind of

builds this empathy and this solidarity um and puts up like an interesting kind of colorblind curtain at first because everyone's covered in cold us you can't tell what someone looks like so it kind of flicks away all this like preconceived notions that someone may have and from there like you have the like men of the house that talk to each other at work and thus like their families get close so you have traveled between these parts of town more so than probably today like you would have like with suburbs like suburban and like inner city and like rural folks um so that that's also like a really interesting thing that and it's an important factor to the the effect that blair mountain had and the and the reason it was such a strong for it Yeah. So from the company town, we also have company script, which was like a currency or credit. And sometimes it was, it was coins and paper money. Sometimes it wasn't. It was just like it was fake money in the air, like our debit cards or something. So miners worked in the company mines with company tools and company equipment. They were required to lease it. Like you probably didn't have the means to bring your own equipment. And if you did, nope right um then they rent the company housing all the cost of the items from the company store were deducted your entire life you cannot stress that enough you literally your entire life everything you did your your income your value the your every experience that you experienced

was was affected by the company or determined by the company it's like if you worked at amazon and they paid you an amazon gift card I would not be surprised if that was a new development. Oh, believe me, I'm waiting for it. We've seen it before, only 100 years ago. Or not even shit. So, and the stores themselves, it's like a fucking gas station. Or like, if you live in a food desert, the prices are hella overinflated.

And since, like, there's no alternative to purchasing the goods, you can buy the $4, $6 piece chicken nuggets, banquet chicken nuggets at Dollar General. what the hell else you got you didn't have the means to go you know 10 15 or not even I'm sorry more like 40 miles to a store where things might have been cheaper in the town over yeah um so therefore but you couldn't use the money anyways because you're using company's script yeah well you could but there was an exchange rate and it was only sometimes some companies allowed you there was an exchange rate for every dollar script it would be 75 cents that you get paid out so you're losing money still so so even when the wages were increased coal companies would increase the prices at the company store to balance what they lost it's it's kind of like the argument against ubi i'm gonna say you know you heard of the freedom dividend yeah yeah where we kill the kill every bit of the social safety net give everyone a thousand dollars a month and then nothing nothing goes wrong from there right right prices aren't increased or anything so as you can see like already there's so there's so

There are already so many parallels to be drawn. Again, like, just in this moment, the mask is still kind of on. Capitals adapted over 100 years. But the result of this general mode of life is that many mining towns are, they're unsightly, they're unhealthful, just generally poorly looked after. The houses are slapped up, like, not really repainted or they go unrepaired. surface is privy to nearly everywhere in evidence it's a prevalent cause of like soil pollution stands on high ground back in the house so that its contents are washed toward the bed of the creek

like it's it's very bad so like even if you go to take a drink from the creek you're just drinking like chemical or toxin and and it's something that we still face here today i just say we've had yeah where was it down in northern kentucky or southern west virginia there was a school this was just like a couple years ago, maybe last year had just smoke from a nearby, I can't remember what it's natural, or nearby one of the, I think it was a coal plant

and the smoke filled up to school and it was literally just smoky hallways and they were like, and they didn't send anyone home, they were like, no, just the principal came over to the loudspeaker and was like, we all breathe it, go outside and breathe it there. Yeah, we're staying in school, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Yeah, so you had like these belching Coke ovens. They spew the fumes and smoke from the open tops directly at the windows like and this isn't anything new like there's a town an hour and a half hour 40 minutes from here called parkersburg west virginia it's where a big dupont factory is amongst other very similar factories they call that place chemical valley it has one of the highest rates of cancer in the u.s truthfully if not the world so shit hasn't really changed So, company script, we're on to cribbing.

So cribbing is when the miners are denied their proper pay, they were paid based on the tons of coal mined. Each car brought from the mines who supposedly held a specific amount of coal. It was supposed to be a ton, 2,000 pounds. However, cars... There's always a however. There's always the however. However, the cars were altered to hold more coal

than the specified amount. And that's on top of the coal operator's ton already being a long ton, which was 2,200 pounds. So the cars were also altered to fit an additional 300. So you'd have a ton and a quarter being brought out of the mine and you're only getting the pay for the one ton. Even though you brought more coal out.

And this was also on top of, that they would have the uh the docking which was the judgment of the coal carts was done by a check wayman and the check wayman was um hired hired by hired by the co-operators and they were often cheated out by that by the coal you know the coal we'll give a wrong estimate or pay them less um as we'll learn later one of these stipulations for unionizing is to have an elected check Weyman that is a check Wayman that is elected

by the workers so therefore that can be more you know democratically more and less likely to get cheated if it's you know your co-worker doing it right

so between 1890 and 1912 it's worth noting to the between 1890 and 1912 West Virginia had a higher minor death rate than any other state and according to the state

archives it's noted that quote unquote in World War one, a U.S. soldier had a better statistical chance of surviving in battle than a West Virginia did in surviving the fucking coal mines. Wow.

Like, let that sink the fuck in. Like, that is just absolutely, on top of getting just completely ripped off and fucked over by their companies and you started young, as we'll find out, the heroes and not so heroes of the story all started

the ages of like 9 and 10. I mean, it was that's what you did. You know, you've seen the cliche, uh, TV plot or something where the kids trying to get away from a mining town. No, kid, you're going to work in the mines and that's bad. You know, that's kind of, that's, but that's how it was. Yeah. My daughter is 11. So literally kids younger than my own daughter in the coal mines. It blows my mind. Fuck, she'd have two years of seniority. Damn it. Yeah, she'd be a proud human W, uh, member. God damn. But we're going to come to find out that maybe that's not something to be too

proud of. So like I said earlier, there were union drives throughout like West Virginia and then eastern Kentucky, like especially the southern part of West Virginia. And the reason for these very concentrated drives that started in the 1890s was that the UMW of A realized that the rest of the central field that included Indiana, Ohio, western Pennsylvania. They realized that the mines in southern west virginia although the transportation costs were higher because there wasn't a big city to to be like the railroad hub the mines in southern west virginia and in eastern kentucky would undercut the strikes or bargaining power of the other mines in the central uh central field um so you're going to learn that not not all of these intentions were were of the purest and it was

very strictly uh from a business kind of perspective it's just the cost of doing business so to speak yeah even before this the um w had a history of um corruption um as we'll learn the people that actually one of the people were about to talk about next was elected there was three different officials that were elected to district 17 of west virginia which is where all this happens um of the umw to replace uh officials who were corrupted yeah so i guess that after the the now that we've gone over like all the mix of like cultural and geographical factors and we have a setting now yeah we we established the setting and much like jr r tolkien with fellowship in the ring we took about three and a half hours to do it so that's all right i think i think that setting is

not only important but completely fascinating and it is sort of an exercise in world building for people that aren't familiar with with the conditions that these workers were forced to exist in to have that laid out for them and just to show just how all consuming the power of the of the capitalist were and the degraded state of existence that the workers had to endure just to get by and provide for themselves and their family. So before we dive into the wars themselves, let's establish an important figure in all of this, and that's Frank Keeney. Can you talk about who he was and why he's worth discussing in this context? All right, so Frank Keeney. um it's i'm going to say it's worth noting about a million fucking times this evening so i

apologize if you want to cut it cut them out that's fine but um so uh charles francis keeney he has a really tragic story he kind of rises uh to power as is a very insurgent socialist in the um w va and as everything kind of transpires eventually uh his story ends he he passes a way as a fucking like valet at a strip club like after after all of this that's that's what happens so that's just kind of a really interesting tidbit i thought um it's really poignant but um frank keeney he was born on cabin creek um which is roughly kanawa uh in 1882 um his dad passed away while he was pretty young um his mother uh lost their family farm to coal operators um just eminent domain or they were able to buy up land at reduced rates

and nothing new again we see it see it today in small towns everywhere i mean that's literally like every leader of this of the battle and of the of the union army was once evicted from their homes i mean everyone had a history of that but that's what you know as we'll learn that's you know mostly what they led the army was was these people evicted in keeney uh left school uh like dave said it not years old to work as a trapper boy. A trapper boy is normally like nine or 10 years old, and he would man, he would man the doors to the mine. And he did this to make ends meet for his family. Again, his dad passed away and his mom lost the family farm, so it had to do what he could

do to help put food on the table. It's also worth noting that the legal age to work at this time, in 1891 was 12 years old. They couldn't even reach that. They couldn't even let and get to 12. God damn. Like it's just, it's depravity, really. But after that, after his nine years of fucking seniority

at 18 years old, Frankini took a job digging coal for 40 cents a ton. And again, that's the long ton of 2200 pounds. And we're often cheated out of it. Yeah, you're cheated out of it. Yeah, you're cheating. it out of it. If you have like other ore or like shale

or whatever in the coal. And it's in company script. We'll reinforce it along the way. But at 20 years old after he's been in the mines for actually underground for a couple years, he meets Mother Jones at a billiards room. And I'm sure

that if you're listening to Rev. Left, you know who Mother Jones is. Famed labor leader founder of the IWW. One of the founders of the IWW, I should say. And Jones is there in another attempt to stir up the southern coal fields and do a union drive. Yeah, she was unionizing up until her death. I mean, she's fucking 90 years old.

Yeah, she's 90 years old throughout most of the story. Yeah. At this time, she's only like 70. So she's like 75. But, so she knows she's in like this billiards room, this bar. One of the few kind of social spaces that these miners have, and she sees from across the room this guy who's really kind of charming and charismatic really commands the attention of everyone at the pool table,

and he's just super fucking personable. And it's Frank Keeney, and she corners him and talks to him, and then she hands him the book, she gives him some books, and then very specifically lame is Rob. And this is how he teaches himself. to read. And the story of Le Miz also kind of parallels the life that he and his community have led, like just kind of like struggling for bread on their table. And through this kind of interaction and this education, he becomes a socialist, especially after witnessing the evictions

of some minors in 1902. There was speak of legislation at the state national level that Keeney did witness, but the coal operators did what big business owners do, and that is block legislation. So Frank Keeney and the rest of the miners see kind of this fatalism

of trying to participate as working people, as proletarian folks in like this bourgeois government. So that's also a crucial, crucial kind of radicalizing moment. And I think that that holds true.

for us as well for you for anyone listening to this that that like that really kind of hits home and kind of brings a tear to your eye um so i guess from there do you want us to pop on into the paint creek cabin creek strike itself there brett yeah absolutely i think you know having established all that we should get into the conflicts themselves and these two things we're going to talk about coming up or sort of i guess they could be described and tell me if i'm wrong but tremors before the earthquake that is Blair Mountain? Is that fair? Sort of. So,

Paint Creek, Cabin Creek, there's a lot of tremors around it. It's a little more than a tremor. It's not quite the earthquake. It's not the earth-shattering occurrence. It also gives a lot of the leaders the experience needed

for what happened in the battle of Blair Mountain. I see. Yeah. It's something that maybe paint creek cabin creek can be compared to like maybe a russia in 1905 or or um maybe even like the present day like right now with the protests that have been popping off in like minneapolis or new york or houston or hell yeah we got even here in the northern fucking panhandle west virginia like so that means what eight years yeah we have eight years Stay here.

Let's go. Yeah. It's the events where, like, some of the, like, most prevalent organizers were, like, a lot of people get radicalized. A lot of people see the horror, like, just displayed, like, somehow even more bluntly than it already is at this time. And it's where, like Dave said, a lot of the organizers, a lot of the people, they would play prominent roles, really cut their teeth.

So, diving in, the paint crew. Paint Creek in Cabin Creeks are in Canawa County, again, the Charleston area. And, of course, the strike is situated between these two creeks of Paint Creek and Cabin Creek. Paint Creek in the west in Cabin Creek in the east. So by this time, most of the Canawa River Coalfield was unionized with the UMWVA. The exception of this were the 55 mines along Cabin Creek. Creek. And there were 41 other mines on Paint Creek, but they made roughly three cents less than the other Canawa coal fields. And in 1912, the Paint Creek miners entered contract

negotiations between the UMW and the coal operators. And these were kind of their demands. There's eight of them. Number one, the right to organize. Number two, recognition of their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. Number two, number three, end to blacklisting of union organizers. Number four, alternatives to the company store. Five, end of the practice of using mine guards. And mind guards are simply the Baldwin Feltz agents. Number six, prohibition of cribbing. So there's no more of this like long ton, like altered carts, like you're getting less money for having other rocks in the fucking shit you mine. Like, fuck all of that. Number seven, the installation of scales at all mine. It all

mines that accurately weigh coal in number eight unions to be allowed to hire their own check waymen to make sure the companies check women were not cheating the miners and to go a little more into that like Dave said those would be like democratically elected by the workers themselves

accountable to the people yep exactly so the none of that shit happens and about a week later it's a sad team who would ever fucking guess this um the the strike begins on april 18th 1912 um so during the paint creek cabin creek strike the socialist party of america in west virginia um initially gave very little uh recognition to the struggle and it's worth noting here that truly you can make a fucking episode about this weird 1912 infighting between the um w of a the socialist party of america and then the iww it was also like

30 socialist newspapers around this time and there was yeah there was a lot of socialist newspapers in west virginia a hundred years ago it's actually astounding that i found out i'm like oh what is you know all different varying names of socialists there are socialist you know or whatever in them but it's um yeah there was it's depressing how much socialist conversation there used to be in this area but well now now we have podcasts so yeah yeah exactly we're just carrying the rich rich tradition, socialist newspapers in West Virginia. That's right. My God, that's an arrogant statement.

Holy shit. No, it's a depressing one. Depressing, sad. Yeah, on top of that, until we founded the, or not like we specifically, but until the West Virginia chapter of the IWW was opened up, I believe, last year,

there was not on the books any sort of like radical union chapter, or I think even like just radical kind of. organization in the state of West Virginia like on the books. Right. So if we do nothing for the rest of our lives, at least they can say, oh, they were part of the first ones to vote in the

first IWW in the area. At least we have that on our resume, I guess. Man, talk about resting on your laurels. I'm going to pack it up and go home. That's it. I'm done. I'm going to take you on or something. So,

yeah, like I said, the Socialist Party really didn't give too much mind. But as kind of the strike progressed, they started setting up the strike committees and holding mass meetings to raise funds so that they could bring in weapons for the striking minors and smuggle like information in pictures out to the outside world to get like a real press of what's going on.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much where their support ends. It's the same old story. As again, you have the battle essentially between the ballot box versus violent unionism, which was the SBA, you know, versus the IWW. I mean, it's, yeah, you have the split. And like always, what the left does the best, splits. That's right. That's right.

Yeah, so, so, yeah, like Dave said, the Socialist Party of America was not too keen on the IWW's militant unionism. Again, they were, they were like giving the miners aid to, like, buy weapons, but they weren't too keen on the IWW's. W.W's use of weapons. Very, very interesting kind of crossing of wires here. But it, again, comes down to reform versus, like, a revolutionary fervor. And Eugene Debs was not about that revolutionary fervor. Yeah, this really made us, like, this is not... I know we didn't really put anything about Eugene Debs in this,

but I will say that in us, when we were researching this, So we were like, we now think less of Eugene Debs, I'll put it that way, because of his wanting to wash his hands of this, essentially. Bernie Sanders. Yeah, Debs was pretty, it was just as imitent as Bernie Sanders is. And I will go on the record and piss off a shitload of your listeners probably. I don't know. Most of them would agree with that.

I mean, I think Eugene Debs is often held up sort of stripped of any real historical context. People know the name, but don't really know much more than that. you know yeah and and to an extent i think that the david and i kind of kind of had that this was a this was pretty astounding like don't don't get me wrong we had we'd never really looked into you j dubs before is this the topic we never really covered because we were never really interested too much in um and deb's a strategy in dubs the strategy yeah and then yeah reading more of this and then he um if i remember correctly uh yeah he just pretty much didn't want anything to do with it you know the disagreements the iww and just

kind of like didn't really was not a proponent of a lot of the union struggles that were happening in West Virginia or the strategies and it just was very like oh dude no why aren't you it was you also have the matter of like also in the SPA

like white chauvinism which not to say that didn't exist in the UMW of A because believe me it absolutely fucking did and same goes with the IWW but that's also worth calling attention to, especially when the

the kind of base of this fervor, this energy, the people that are actually on the ground going through this, is pretty diverse. But the leaders are for now, the leaders are mostly white in these strikes, right?

But I know that throughout. But in the battle that changes dramatically. In the battle we, as we'll talk later, we see a real rainbow coalition. And just real quickly, we recently put out an episode on the history of the IWW, and we don't spend a lot of time but we do spend a little time talking about some of the contradictions and conflicts between the socialist party of america and the iww so if anyone wants

to learn more about that um i could link to that in the show notes or you can go find it on our episode backlog but yeah that's a whole other episode literally yeah no it's it's a bit i remember yeah i remember it popping up in my feet and that morning i listened to it it's a fucking wonderful episode thank you um so from there um the reason that like the socialist party was backing uh it was like providing the aid to the miners uh in southern west virginia and even eastern kentucky was that the um w v a was like threatened with bankruptcy because they were in conjunction with this supporting strikes in colorado and vancouver uh as well it's again totally separate episodes but i believe 1914 colorado some of the horrifying shit that the baldwin felt

agents did there, including, like, burning people alive. Yeah, it's truly Nazi shit that they would, like, put in trigger warning for anybody, I guess, is that they would, like, put the women and children of striking minors in, like, big pits in, like, wells and burn them alive. Oh, damn. This was happening 100 years ago in Colorado. Yeah. Fuck.

Yeah, that's, that's Ludlow in Ludlow, Colorado. All in, all into battle, unionizing. As a sort of side note, in the Haitian revolution, there's sort of a prelude to that sort of Nazi terror as well when they would take dissident or rebellious slaves and put them in the whole of a ship and then pump sulfur dioxide into that as an early. Holy shit. On our last episode of the Haitian Revolution, we talked about that as well. So it's just crazy to see the sort of fascistic preludes to what eventually culminated in the Holocaust, you know. Yeah. I mean, there's a reason maybe the parallel.

It was much more apparent with the U.S. than it is maybe the Haitian revolution. But there's a reason that Hitler looked up to the United States kind of policing so much, truly. So from there, during the Cabin Creek strikes, leaders had strikers go to Cabin Creek to contact the UMWA loyalist in Exdale, which is a town kind of close by, so that they could engage in a sympathy. strike. Frank Keeney met with them and drafted a set of demands asking them to quote unquote, restore the miners' right to free speech and peaceable assembly. They also asked to end force trading at company towns, remove the Baldwin-Feltz agents, allow miners to bring their own checkweiman, install their own scales. They kind of just gave the rundown. And Keeney and his father-in-law were both fired the immediate next morning after this at the Wake Forest

mining company's office for being the ringleaders of the walkout that transpired. Keeney from here on out was blacklisted and evicted from his company home. And so when Keeney went to went to the Exdale tents or he'd been living for two weeks at this point, he was told that the UMW District 17 had called off the strike against the unionized mines in Paint Creek in the Canawa Valley. They'd settled for a wage increase of 2.5 cents per long ton. And soon they learned the mine owners in Paint Creek wouldn't even agree to that increase. So you kind of have this, this, like what just happened there is kind of an expression of the demands after some walkouts.

And Keeney being blackballed along with, oh, evicted it's like the third time of his life. Yeah, evicted again. And then to kind of like quell the strike, the UMW of A district 17 itself says, okay, well, Well, yeah, you get this little pocket change, and I guess that's it. But they didn't. Yeah, and then they pulled it back. I mean, there was literally nothing was one. Yeah, so from there, Keeney pretty much, like his coworkers, his family essentially, set their men back on strike.

Keeney met with other UMWA officials to beg for assistance, but again, they were told that their resource. sources were tied up in the fight on Paint Creek. And Paint Creek had been like longstanding dues paying members, even though that they didn't quite have the benefits that the other like Canawa Coalfield like Unionist had. And Kinney stated that quote unquote, if you men are afraid to make the trip with me, I will find someone with the nerve to go with me. And I know an old woman who would up the creek with me. In all of this, he was referring to Mother Jones to make her umpteenth thousandth trip back with him. Um, so on August 6th, 1912, Jones arrives in Keeney's hometown, um, which it's not really specified. It's just a town. Um, it's just referred to, uh, is,

cabin creek, but it is the only town along Cabin Creek that isn't a company town. So Jones had Keeney draft of a bill to post along the valley. And it reads, Exert your rights as freeborn American citizens. Organize yourselves for mutual protection and to protect your wives and babies. Only cowards will submit to the wrongs we have suffered. Man, ad your prop used to be so much more like in your face back in the day.

And that's something that Jones was really known for any listeners that aren't well acquainted. She would, in her speeches, she would literally just call the people cowards and call them dogs and say, your dog, yeah, you're scum for not standing up to the mine operators or to your bosses. And the crowd loved that they would cheer back. I wish I could go into my workplace and just tell everyone in there, like, it's too afraid to unionize with me. You were all pieces of shit for not one unionize. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Fuck you. You're cool.

You want to unionize with me. So, like, it's truly remarked. I'm like, God, that would make this way easier, but the kind of one bit of aid that the UMWA sent the District 17 minors at this time was George H. Edmonds. He is a black organizer. He was there to join the strike in Cabin Creek to appeal to the predominantly kind of black segment of that workforce. Edmonds was a socialist. He preached. He preached. class solidarity. He'd written about socialism in the union's journal and spoke against Booker T. Washington for his calls on black workers to unite with their employers and lick their fucking boots. This was really like, as you put it, it's really a push to, like he said, to organize the black workers and to kind of prevent other black workers from crossing picket lines. Yeah, because that was a very genuine fear as well that some unionist had was that, uh,

there would be black scabs or even just the black minors themselves that because of whatever elements there there were of white chauvinism of racism that they they would kind of follow that booker t washington approach and we see that luckily a lot did not um that there was that kind of cross racial class based solidarity um so this starts another walk off on august 7th in 1912, a march of 3,000 miners goes to Charleston to confront Governor William Glasscock about abolishing the mine guard system. And who would have guessed that... You're expecting me to make a joke about his name, weren't you? Yeah, I was. I was. I was waiting for it. So who would have expected that William Glasscock says, okay, we'll abolish it and we're going to implement UBI

and the whole thing is over? Brett, thank you for having us on. Wrong. Glasscock did what all good American politicians do and says, this doesn't matter between the employer and the employee, not for the government. Even though we are going to stop you

at every turn that we can, anytime anything submitted the court, and we will send the state police to murder you. Even though we will kneecap you every chance we get. And so Jones kind of, Mother Jones, pleads with glasscock i won't even say pleads just kind of says to glasscock declares that unless the governor ridd's paint creek and cabin creek of these god damn baldwin felt's mind guard thugs there's going to be a hell of a lot of bloodletting in these hills and motherfuck if she was not

correct so his leadership had faltered and more militant rank and file kind of take hold this is where the miners take i really take up arms uh they smuggle the firearms and explosives uh into the area surrounding pan creek cabin creek that stash them in the forest and like hollowed out trees um it's kind of early guerrilla warfare there's a lot of guerrilla warfare in uh like like you would see in and say vietnam or what have you um like as i read this i was just thinking fuck i wish that that the miners were able to read uh jop or or like on guerrilla warfare by Mao or Kwame Nakruma

or something like something that had more to say about the matter. Yeah, because they dynamited like coal tipples and railroad tracks. It was just, I mean, they did not fuck around. Yeah, and for those that don't know, cold tipples are

essentially the kind of housing that is used to like store the coal and then put, to like, transport the coal into the train cars like the train cars would go underneath usually or would pull up beside and that's how they'd loaded up so after two weeks glasscock declares martial law and ushers in 1,200 national guardsmen he encouraged negotiations between the UMWVA and the coal operators and the UMWVA was very welcome

to the negotiation however the coal operators refused the operators then had mass evictions filled up all the uh all the camps the actual like tent canvas tent camps that were set up by the unionists in the um w a itself they would carry in scabs via train car uh these would be predominantly immigrants and they would use the same kind of strategies to bring in immigrant scabs as they did just like regular immigrant workers before like the strikes and that is they literally kidnapped them yeah pretty much they'd post up a uh paper in and in whatever country, let's say Slovakia, and it would

say like the land of milk and honey like come to America where you work hard and everything's like fucking great and then like a poor Eastern European or what have you pretty much under the Tsar would say this is fucking great. Let's do it.

And then they would travel into New York by boat and then they pretty much be kidnapped and again we have like and I truly don't mean to laugh about it because like as I say it out loud it's fucking horrifying it's just a is that it would be very holocaust like transportation of

immigrants to the southern West Virginia minefields they would just get put them on on on trains and and take them down in mass yeah you wouldn't know where you were going you would you would you would come over to you know New York Ellis or Ellis Island and all that and then while looking around you would literally just get like pulled onto a train that was sent all the way down to West Virginia. And then you're now a coal miner. Yeah. Damn. So pulled from the archives is a quote from someone's niece that was a unionist.

She said, my aunt, she stomped his face in with her heel, tore his ears off, and nearly killed him. That is how brutal the miners and the miners' wives and pretty much just pro-union people were to the scabs. like if these motherfuckers think scabby the rat is bad i would have loved to have seen them a hundred years ago for real just that alone too we cannot underplay the role that the women played in these unionizing efforts um while the men were working and sometimes off uh shooting their guns and trying to i mean as we just talked about you know it's a guerrilla warfare happening even right now in cabin creek and that made the women play um a crucial role as nurses.

I mean, throughout this, throughout any sort of event, you know, you had women who, who fed the minors and the soldiers, essentially. Yeah, they would take care of if a minor died.

They'd take care of his family. They would take care of each other's kids if one was outtending to, to something else. It was very, it wasn't dissimilar to some of, like, the programs the Black Panthers had,

like with the child care and, like, community breakfast. and another like really cool thing in addition to just like beating the shit out of scabs was that they would stand at the train depots like along the whole platform and just like link arms together and keep the Baldwin felt agents from stepping off the trains wow yeah powerful um yeah like I have goosebumps right now and like in researching and reading and and watching documentaries he's like my heart just swelled so much realizing that all this went down just a few hours away

and in just the kind of solidarity that that is possible we just really have to like get in the dirt and strive for it but from there it's it's now 1913 newly elected governor hatfield also implements martial law to eliminate the quote unquote troublemakers he would imprison the strike leaders, set up military tribunals to try them. Overall, 49 socialist minors and leaders were court-martialed, including Mother Jones, in one week in 1913. They would eventually get out mostly without any damage done. So in February 1913, probably like one of the most chilling kind of scenes from all this happens.

and that is at a camp in Holly Grove on Paint Creek, you have the Bull Moose Special, which is an armored train. It's outfitted with gatling guns. There's felt agents abort it. There's cops aboard it, just shooting. Everyone's just shooting wildly into the encampment. It's nighttime you can't really see.

This terror is the catalyst for the miners, staking out the town of Mucklo. And when they stake out the town of Mucklow, Baldwin-Feltz agents kind of enter the town, start to do their evictions. And then when I think the story goes, when you hear the sound of the Bobwhite open fire. And one of the miners did Bob White call Bob White's a bird. And the miners just rained bullets from the fucking heavens on these goddamn Felts agents. So very much. guerrilla warfare. And this was about a little month, about a month after the Bull Moose special

rips through the camp, the encampment at Holly Grove. So we stumble upon April 1913 in no small part of thanks to Mucklow. Hatfield negotiated the settlement and announced on Mayday of 1913 that the strike was finished. The mine operators had realized that they needed to settle because their mines had been closed for a year and they couldn't break the strike with strike breakers are intimidation. Hell yeah. So the concessions that the operators had agreed to included the independent check-wazeman for the tonnage,

the right to shop outside the company's store, and also the nine-hour work day. Because these guys were putting in at least 12, 14-hour days. So cutting it down to 9 is much better. You're less likely to have the fatigue. you're still going to have fatigue. It's a very fucking demand of job. You get cancer not to a little later in life.

Yeah. Yeah, you'll get cancer at 70 instead of 60 if you live that long. But you're less likely to make a mistake and just like have an entire fucking like coal seam fucking fall on you. Oh, this is one of the best Keeney quotes. Keeney in the militant rank and file of the area, which is District 17, take concessions but tell the UMWA that it's too little too late. And Keeney says, quote, unquote, we do not listen to capitalists from New York in London.

So that is the Paint Creek Cabin Creek strike kind of boiled down, tried to do the best we could with events that, again, like so many of these things we touch on could be there. And what's astounding. And what's astounding is like growing up in relative proximity to this area, this is the Battle Blare Mountains, like, not taught it at all on our podcast. public schools it's not mentioned in passing is i don't think we i don't think was mentioned us i don't remember it at all if it was but yeah it's just not something that's i mean for obvious reasons even though i mean they could teach it later as we'll get into that but it's just it's mind-boggling with how much is involved in this entire um in this decade yeah in this event yeah it's a decade of it's a decade of class struggle and one of the most and we kind of talk about this on another

episode of ours where we talk about the migration from appalachia to chicago but appalachia really was and especially this part was in its way its own like third world of the united states yeah and it was much more diverse you had a lot of immigrants you had like i said former slaves descendants of slaves and and there was a lot of illiteracy you've had truly third world conditions yeah um and and we could talk about that forever and kind of how the dynamics have changed. And well, and I think later too, as before we get to the end, we'll talk about how how these kind of are the situations and the places and the conditions that often equal strong revolutionary movements.

Exactly. Well, let's go ahead and I'm going to ask one more question before we get into the Battle of Blair Mountain proper. And I think that it's going to require us to establish, and you might have already mentioned them, but establish who Sheriff Sid Hatfield is. and then what the Madawan massacre was in its aftermath. So if you want to cover that history, and then after that,

we'll dive into the Battle of Blair Mountain proper. Yeah, absolutely. Just a real quick rundown before we really dive into Sid Hatfield, just to kind of establish the conditions with which Hatfield kind of, for lack of better word, rises to power. And he was able to do what he does in the immediate aftermath of Paint Creek, Cabin Creek after the negotiations and that like really cool kind of Frank Keeney quote these wildcat strikes still continue there's still a guerrilla

warfare and on the wings of an insurgent kind of presidential bid for the UMWA District 17 Keeney is elected the president of District 17 with a friend and also fellow minor Fred Mooney is secretary treasurer so four years you still have the still have the insurgencies going on and the U.S. enters into World War II and Keeney kind of threads an interesting needle here Wait, World War, which World War? Oh shit, World War I apologize.

My notes are fucked, I apologize, but Keeney publicly says that the miners like should work for the war effort this is in 1917 when the U.S. enters however privately behind closed doors with other unionists and organizers and minors. He says he was very against any war. He very strongly condemns the war and says it's a rich man's imperialist game that they sent the poor to be killed instead of

their own sons. So why does he do this? Why does he try to thread this needle? It's because the war production was a big opportunity to open doors for unionization. Because of the war effort, the UMWA District 17 membership increases to 30,000. And that is a five-time increase. And by 1920, it would be 50,000, which was its height. Yeah. And there's tens of thousands of dollars in the banks. And with these resources and support, it's time to really push into Mingo County, McDow

County, and Logan counties. And Mingo is the home of Maitwan, which we will discuss very shortly. McDowell has the town of Welch and Logan is where Blair Mountain itself is located. So the way that the Keeney kind of threads this needle, this gain, and also with the numbers and like monetary gains that they've made, this gains them more backing from John Lewis, who is the president of the UMW of A. Kind of a dick. Yeah, just absolute fucking scumbag. He's a horrible, horrible reactionary. He's very conservative.

He's the kind of like Western Pennsylvania Unionist that. Harry Haywood spoke of in Black Bolshevik when he talks about his time in the Western PA, Colfields, and how folks called Haywood, one of the quote-unquote good ones discussing his race. So very, very racist, intense white chauvinism. And he only really wants the southern part of the state to be unionized because it gives him more a due. paying members. B, it also gives them more leverage with the state of Indiana, Ohio, and then those Western PA coal fields. Yeah, he was very much running the union in a very capitalist sense. As a business. It is straight up a business union. Like, there's a reason

they call them that. Right. So with this kind of like union front that's going on, the coal operators created their own sort of capitalist front as well, where they would pool their resources and kind of like spread the Baldwin felt agents around. They'd kind of like spread the wealth, but for capitalists. They would kind of pay across the county lines and across like company lines to provide absolute, just marginally better housing. Like maybe the fucking roof ain't caving in anymore. They would like build a couple more bars and pool halls.

It's the office pizza party. Yeah, they'd have nicer churches and maybe get like a better teacher for a school. Yeah, it's exactly the office pizza party, except like 1918 in the U.S. But something that Keeney and the other unionists really rally behind is this idea of, yes, we have these better schools and churches, but we still don't, like, quote unquote, we still don't got our freedom.

And an example of that is like the postmaster for the town was just an official at the company's store and they'd go through all the mail before sending it. Make sure that you're not a pro-union scumbag. And in the time leading up to what transpires in Mait 1 as well, you see this armed resistance in very specifically the Dirty 11. You have Don Fewclosed Johnson Chain, Don Chain, who... We need to make a sequel called Dirty 12.

And Chain was, or Fuglose Johnson, whatever you prefer to call him. was very inspired by Edmonds when he was sent down for Paint Creek Cabin Creek. And he's a predominant black union organizer and arguably the most prominent of the Dirty 11 that would use the firearms in these very like syndicalist kind of tactics where they would dynamite coal tipples or like they bomb like railroad tracks. They'd like send engines off the rails. They would stick up company stores with guns and like even maybe you can kill the officials that were there. Like some real king shit.

Yeah. With all of this, District 17 can push to start their Mingo County campaign in May 1. They have the manpower. They have the backing from the various sources. They got money in the bank. They're ready to rock and roll. So they begin the campaign in Mait 1, which is, one of if not the only independent town in all of Mingo County. I took this quote. I did not cite the book here. Whoops. And it says, Mait Wan was 800 people, a block of businesses, a main street line by maples with whitewashed trunks, big wooden houses behind the maples, miners cabins along Mait Creek and the railroad, and a high rock cliff behind it all. There was a depot, a bank, a company store, a hotel, a hardware, two drug stores, and the do drop in.

There was also Testerman's jewelry run by coal operators. So coal operators in the area paid deputy sheriffs and private detectives to enforce laws that they liked. Company spies circulated secretly amongst the miners to learn of any union activity. And it was quote unquote the worst governed town in this state, which is truly a matter of perspective. Because as we'll see, we have, we're about to introduce to you the, now in all, of history, there has only, there's, actually there's two, I'm sorry, there's two dead cop, or, I'm sorry, I missed, two dead cops.

Two good cops, I fucked it up. Two good cops. One dead, two, Sid Hatfield. Fuck. So, you forgot Chris Dorner, but okay. Oh, oh, fuck, Chris Doerner, oh, shit. So, um, Testerman's jewelry, um,

was run by, uh, the mayor of the town's, uh, C.C. Testerman, Cable Testerman. and his wife, Jesse Testerman. So from there, we can finally talk about Sid Hatfield. Like Dave said, one of three good cops ever. And he was born on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky in quote-unquote Hatfield-McCoy feudant country of the Tug River in 1893. He was raised by Jake Hatfield, 70 miles away from Charleston,

and that's as the crow flies. And he was supposedly not actually Jake Hatfield's son, Jake's wife. Oh, by the way, of the Hatfield and McCoys. For those who know the classic feud, he was, yeah, part of that family. But, um... Or not. We don't know. No, I suppose it wasn't actually but was raised as if he was a Hatfield.

So he grew up in the mines. He saw how the ex-slaves would come into. the area and how Hungarians and Irish and Polish and Italians were imported on the boats or from the boats. He left school to be a minor and eventually went to Alburn, Kentucky across the river from Maitwan. And at 25, when there were 90 mines along the tug that employed about 6,000 people, Maitwan's mayor, C.C. Testerman appointed him the first chief of police of Maitwan. Sid was known for being good with his gun. There was a certain charisma to him. which is as we can tell

pretty important for some kind of like revolutionary leader he had a real no bullshit attitude legend is that he'd even like killed some men for being too rowdy or being like anti-uny for being too rowdy and anti-union

he was incredibly pro-union yeah so the coal operators believed it was their natural right as the property owners to choose to only hire non-union workers and as we said earlier like the courts have kind of ruled in their favor time and time again throughout this process and theoretically as deputy sheriffs and sheriffs did he was supposed to uphold those laws but he didn't yeah like a champ yeah Sid said the fuck off he wasn't

taking the money he grew up in it he knew he was in the dirt he knew what what it was like to be a minor like fucking 10 years old yeah he was a problem prominent member of the community. It was people who grew up with. It was his friends. It was a union town. You know, it was all of this stuff. And he really, I mean, throughout this whole thing, Sid was just really good at just telling capitalists to fuck off. I mean, he was, he was the king of that. Oh, yeah. So, Mayor Testerman really favored the miners. That's why that quote of, it's the worst run town in the state, might be a little attributed to Sid and Testerman being

pro union. Yeah, and Testerman favored the miners, as did Sid. And Sid wore his badge and guns, but no uniform, and enforced the law in a way that could only please the miners. When miners fought, he pulled them apart. When they got drunk, he took them home. When they become obstreperous, he calmed them down. So it's what a cop should do. And also, what would, you know, and again, I don't think you, you can't call them a cop, though, in the sense in the definition of how we define police now because here's a quote from a minor once however he saw a man known to be against the miners union carrying a weapon in violation of mate one law and he arrested the man knocked him to the ground and slapped him up in the lockup nice yeah yeah so none of that anti-union shit was flying on sid's watch and like a really big moment for Sid as kind of the sheriff in for just the unionization efforts in Mingo County. In spring of 1920, a town called Burnwell, which is three miles from May Juan, was the first to unionize and get behind the national 27% wage increase in the freedom from the company town.

Sid stood watch at the union meeting to ensure no interruptions occurred during the quote-unquote meeting along the tug as it's referred, though there was. no like real solid prospect of the union like the drive hadn't really started yet there was just the workers that wanted it themselves and the co-operators refused to even meet with the union reps or discuss the subject and if they wish to work uh the miners had to had to sign yellow dog contracts which uh was pretty much in writing saying that they wouldn't quote unquote affiliate or with or assist or give aid to any labor organization but Like 3,000 of the 4,000 minors still signed up with the UMWVA.

And with that, there was the creation of mass UMWVA camps in the region because they couldn't work. Like, there was, they wouldn't sign the old dot contract. As we're talking, what's happening in the background constantly are evictions. Like this is happening every day of, I mean, maybe not every day of every year, but it's happening consistently where any time you breathe the word. union or you say the word solidarity or you think it you're evicted from your home your shit is dumped onto the what few belongings you have are thrown on off the porch onto the muddy-ass dirt road uh in the middle of the pouring rain they scrape the coal out of your uh burner they would yeah

it would literally empty your house completely they hold you you and your wife and your kids at fucking gum point telling you to get the hell out like truly horrifying shit um So on to the Maitwan massacre itself. So the events transpire on May 19th of 1920. It's kind of the tipping point of all of this. It's on the Union Day where 2,000 extra people are in Maitwan, like coming in from these various camps because they need to receive their relief pay in any supplies that they or their families might need.

So it's a pretty boom, pretty goddamn boom metropolis for, southern west virginia standards at this point again the town only had 800 people to start with and so on behalf of the stone mountain coal company uh the baldwin feltz agents uh showed up and this particular squad is led by two uh of the younger felds brothers and that's albert and lee felts so they have breakfast at a hotel uh owned by ants hatfield and There's a class trader. A piece of shit. And he's obviously not a union guy as he lets the mine guards have a nice little breakfast at the hotel. They make their way up Mate Creek to the homes of some striking miners. And the first one of these homes is a man named Charlie Kelly. First eviction.

And it takes place as Sid and Mayor Testerman follow behind the agents. And as they walk through the town to follow the, the Baldwin-Felts detectives, they kind of amass an angry group of people. Wait, real quick, before, as right before they follow the Feltz agents into the eviction, when Sift Hedfield first hears of the Feltz agents in town, he first says that he's going to shoot the motherfuckers. And then, or some form of that, or shoot the goddamn sons of bitches. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he gets on a call, he starts calling people with either him or 10. Testerman. I can't remember exactly. And what in the the town pastor also has said they are no Testerman tried to call the town pastor to calm things down and the pastor said I'm going to

shoot two of the two of the bastards myself. Yeah. So real big union town for sure. Um, so as they're evicting Kelly, Sid confronts Al Feltz regarding a warrant and Al, hands him the piece of paper. And so Sid kind of makes his way back to the office and contacts the sheriff in Williamson about 10 miles away. The sheriff confirms that Al has no authority to make these evictions. And that's kind of what Sid wants to hear. He can take the matters into his own hands. So he prepares to trump up some arrests due to illegally carrying weapons because why do you have those weapons if you don't if you don't have a proper warrant. So he files that paperwork.

And it's expected to come on the 5 o'clock train that night. So in waiting, Sid couldn't really confront the detectives. So at 4 p.m., the detectives return after evicting actually six families. And each story is worse than the last. Like I said, you had the story with the Kellys. Then people were forcing kids out of their homes. gunpoint was reported they kicked the pregnant woman out onto the dirt streets and so sid tells them as they near the depot of the warrants that he has for their arrests and al says that he quote unquote returns the compliment and claims they have a warrant for sid's arrest one of the armed crowd runs into testerman's jewelry store in the square that the depot is located in and testerman goes to view the warrant he's summoned from from his jewelry store and he announces to the crowd that it's a bogus warrant.

So Testerman Feltz and Sid are in a bit of a stare down. Really in the kind of like a Wild West scenario. That was terrible. Dave, insert the good, bad, and ugly theme here. And in this kind of stare down, that's when the first shot is fired. This is murky. Yeah, who fired the shot is a little bit, a little bit up in the air. Which is a common theme.

Yeah. Sid claims that Al Feltz shot C.C. Testerman, and then Sid shot Feltz. Some others claim miners staking out of chambers hardware in the square shot first, and they accidentally misfired and hit Testerman. And the Feltz have always said that Tom Feltz specifically has always said that Sid shot his brother first. But we also want to reliterate that the Feltz were the only, saying Sid shot first. Yeah.

So Testerman and Feltz fall to the ground and Sid draws his pistols and suddenly the place is a fucking war zone. In the firefight is Lee Feltz is reloading his gun. Rees Chambers, who is the father of Sid's best friend, Ed Chambers, kills Lee with his rifle. He puts a couple of point blank bullets right into him. So when it's all over, Lee and Al Feltzer among, along with five other detectives, had been killed two miners had been shot in mayor testament was taking his dying breaths he kind

of gets into shelter and is tended to by his wife jesse like praise has his last rights what have you um in five others were wounded in this uh in this uh fire fight it lasted two minutes yeah lasted all of two minutes jesus from there we will go into the aftermath do you have any anything you want us to elaborate on bread or just keep on trucking Just keep trucking, yeah, I think this is absolutely fascinating, yeah, just keep going with the aftermath and they'll get into the Battle of Blair Mountain proper.

Yeah, that's pretty much what's next after we can finish talking about this, I'm talking about you'll see. Man, we might actually beat the Stalin episode for a long. Fuck! It's getting there. In the weeks after the May 1 massacre, Tom Feltz jumps up a case

of shit, of Sid shooting Mayor Testerman because of his affinity for Jesse testerman's wife and of course this wasn't the story wasn't really helped by married what two weeks after or a week yeah by Sid and Jesse's very quick marriage after the mayor's death and reports yeah yeah it's pretty like oh that's not good bro that doesn't look good it's like oh man wait a month at least I mean come on haven't you heard of guy code man come on six months six months after my death

So, there were also reports of the two of them kind of strolling along the Tug River in the weeks leading up to the ultimate death of Testaments as well. Yeah, there's speculation that they were, yes, there was an affair before Testament's death. However, since it's been a pretty good guy this far. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt. And Jesse says, it's going to be at least one bad thing about the guy. they're like they're in huntington uh west virginia to to and they're going to the courthouse get married so they stay the night the press kind of swarms them and and they're sent to jesse and jesse makes an attempt at dispelling all of this kind of conversation by talking of sid's closeness to the family

to testerman himself to jesse to their to their five six-year-old son and how testerman said that if he should die, then she should take Sid's hand in marriage. From there, they're all married, what have you. A local restaurateur in X. Minor, C.E. Lively, opens his doors as a kind of like union hang out and savehouse for the minors in Maitwan post-massacre. He becomes kind of a prominent member of the union community, C.E. Lively, and we'll get more into him later, but it's good to just kind of introduce him now. yeah so after the massacre keeney sends all 71 area coal operators letters of negotiation and they all say no using pretty much the same like copy they all send the same you know it's pretty much the same damn letter like every single one of them and this i think kind of really speaks to the collective and was a signal of the power that they had in uniting as like a kind of like capitalist sort of union itself

So as a result, on July 1st of 1920, Keeney calls a general strike for Mingo County. In 95% of the miners, walk the fuck off to break the strike, while they would still use the evictions in these violent means that the felt agents would use, the operators introduced a new strategy. They'd play to the fears of the petty bourgeois, like lawyer types, the restaurant owners, potential physicians, whatever. and this wasn't even just local it was also like a national fucking campaign and they would tie the UMWA to Bolshevism

which once you know about the UMWA and how insanely reactionary it is it's the same thing it's like it's that same goddamn mean this but unironically that was happening a hundred years ago too yeah it's like God I wish I wish the Democrats were even a quarter

as cool as the fucking yeah I wish the UWA was fucking Bolsheviks. That would have been that would have been cool. That would have been awesome. We would have been living in the West Socialist Virginia states. I don't know.

55 strong baby. So the operators kind of concoct this narrative of the quote unquote American plan that they spread like nationally and it speaks of like loyalty and patriotism and like

the dumb ass like bootstraps story and it's very effective with a lot of like petty booze across the country and even to an extent like in the state um and yeah some of the workers as well and they think that being union shows disloyalty to your work and disloyalty to your employer yeah you're loyal to an outside agitator i want to i've heard that before yeah exactly as we were like going through stuff to to include in this in this episode i found a striking kind of like stair step comic it was like a staircase and there's like feet walking down it

And the top step says, like, strikes and walkouts. The next step says disorder dash riots. And then from there it goes to Bolshevism and murders. And then... Chaos in all caps. Yeah, then chaos in all caps on the last stair. And then below that last stair is just a black abyss of nothingness with a big white question. So we like to call the cold zone.

That's something I want to be in. Yeah, exactly. That's like where Marxist history begins. We're still prehistory, y'all. So, on January 26th of 1921, 23 men are on trial for the murder of the Baldwin-Felts agents in Maitwant. And the first person is a witness to be called to the stand. Mr. C.E. lively. Yep.

And so he proudly declares under oath and on the stand, he says that he is a felds agent and very anti-union. it's worth noting that he was in fact one of the Baldwin felt's greatest spies he would sign his letters his correspondence with the agents in bluefield in Virginia with he would sign it as like number nine or something like that yeah he essentially he ran the safe house he was a safe house and was one of Sid's best friends and a lot of the miners other friends and he had completely infiltrated the union and also I didn't put it in here because I saw it um earlier um but chris covered this part but there was a part where even the judge asked um as as lively is is probably saying he's a false agent and that he spied on his friends the judge asked like and you don't see anything wrong with that and lively just goes no nope yeah and and much like our reaction there's audible gasps in the fucking courtroom because he ran the goddamn safe house like he he heard a lot of shit said to him in confidence and and sadly this isn't the last we'll hear of them either, but go ahead.

And he says that Hatfield bragged to him about killing Al Feltz. But luckily, uh, Maitwan, uh, was a union town and the defendants were found not guilty to an absolutely fucking uproarous applause. Um,

and those that were anti-union just jaws on the, on the fucking floor could not believe that all 23, there were some who, who had shown their support for a guilty verdict, like had to leave town. immediately after a not guilty verdict was read you got to bring the energy back yeah exactly um so we got another west virginia governor um to talk about uh his name's ephra morgan republican and he was there for 1921 1925 um he doubles the police force in west virginia to protect

its highest revenue source and of course being coal so in may night early may 1921 the coal mines in mingo were operating at near capacity. A few miles down the river from 8-1, miners opened fired on strike breakers during more wildcat strikes. Miners also dynamited the coal company's power plant, and they would cut down telegram and telephone lines so that there was no correspondence in or out.

And several units of state troopers are deployed and square off against the miners for three days. Again, reinforcing that element of guerrilla warfare that we see play out over the course of, this decade. On May 18th of 1921, there are 250 men meet in the May 1 courthouse and they're predominantly petty, petty booge business owners and lawyers and doctors and what have you. And they create a quote-unquote vigilance committee. So this is comprised of folks that view the miners as less than or think their power is threatening. They think they're subhuman

and they're upsetting the natural order of things. They're upsetting the capitalist system. right and their goal is literally to guard against quote-unquote outside agitators so where have we heard this story before it's seriously like the maga hat philly dads that are out on fucking street corners because they're afraid that

Osama bin Antifa is going to fucking bomb the goddamn statue of Frank Rizzo or something. Well at least but at least in this point though I will there wasn't I don't think that those kind of those kind of little small, like, vigilante groups or whatever they wanted to call themselves.

It weren't really as an effect, I think, as they do now, because it's important to note that every single union minor had a gun. Actually, no, I'm sorry, had like five guns. And that was such a presiding force over, like, kind of these places, these little community or these little groups of brown shirts would kind of flow it in and out. Yeah, so in May 19th, Morgan declares martial law in Mingo, with enforcement by state troopers and the dipshits and the vigilance committee and one state trooper says if there's an agitator around

you can stick them in jail and keep them there and that's what he liked about martial law you didn't need any fucking reason you just jail to people. Yep. No constitutional rights under martial law. Yep. The common charge that they would kind of slap on people was called bunching

and it's fucking wild to think about because bunching is talking in groups of three or more. So if Dave and I meet IRL with a guest, like just one single guest, we're bunching. We're bunching. We're going to fucking jail under Morgan's statewide martial law. God.

Just a pretext to harass and arrest anybody you want. Yeah, exactly. And if you're keeping track, this is what, the third or fourth time martial law has been? Yeah, it's a third time. Third time martial law has been declared in the state. God damn. than a decade. Yeah,

and so the troopers would, like, even jail people for having the Union Journal, the United Mine Workers' journal folded in their pocket, even if they were just, like, handed it, like someone handed it to them.

Yeah, if you, under the times that they're under martial law, if you, if you say the word union, I mean, you're immediately locked up.

If you have anything, I mean, when they say agitating, if you even say, hey, let's get to get, I mean, like you said,

bunching, that's three more people. what is a union you know and it really was just complete and utter just destruction of any sort of thought of unionizing yeah it was so rough like so bad under martial law that the black unionists had gone so far as to liken their conditions the slavery that they uh and if not them themselves that their parents had faced and you see the petty bourgeois maintain the the the their refrain that the miners did this to themselves, they made the trouble, they forfeit their rights of citizens, they made their bed go lay in it. The same chuddy shit that you still hear from

the fucking suburban, like, used car lot dad today. It's all about freedom and liberty until literally anybody else asked for it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Meanwhile, I'm going to fucking crack some bud light and wave around this American flag. Well, it's the freedom of unity of, you know, or the freedom a profit, you know, or, yeah, property. Yeah, that's, that's what they, that's what matters. Yeah, they're afraid that that's going to encroach upon them in their safe little, little bubble. As we talked before, that attitude has been pushed to be, you know, thankful for everything that's been supplied to you. Why aren't you in worse conditions for all, everything the company has given you?

Exactly. So, it takes us to June 14th of 1921 and there are reports of minor shooting at their superintendent, which is just generically a boss. 70 state troopers rated the nearby Maitwan tent colony. They ransacked each tent. They'd confiscated weapons. They tipped over the fucking stoves.

They poured kerosene into milk and would just like take knives and slice the fucking canvas of the tents. In this raid, the troopers killed an unarmed minor and they marched 45 others at gunpoint and locked them up without charges. Like, again,

it is truly it's chilling to see the fascistic elements that come out in this yeah I mean capitalism in decay is fascism right it is pressure on capitalism

you get the fascism that's what it is exactly and this is for anyone that was like all about the videos of taking knees

with cops and whatever else you don't need to dive that deep into his story. To realize that it's just counterinsurgency tactics and to realize that there's no, there is literally not a single action that they will do and not a single thought in their head that they'll have that will be beneficial for a working class person or working class as all. None. Everything is absolutely done, employ to undercut you and everything that you are owned to as a working class person. Exactly. Yeah. So at this point,

there are now over a hundred unionist jailed in Mingo County. So it takes us to August 21st of 1921 where we're getting there. We're literally six days before the battle right now. So, yeah, August 21st of 1921, Sid and Jesse Hatfield, Sid's best friend Ed, who I mentioned earlier, and his wife, Sally, take a train from Mait Wan to Welch in McDowell County. So they have to go to Welch because Sid is being, tried for, I believe, dynamiting a coal tipple.

He also took part in these kind of insurgent efforts. Yeah, he was part of the Dirty Eleven, wasn't it? Yeah, I believe so. I believe he was part of the Dirty Eleven. And so they stopped a couple towns out from Welch. So again, this is a cop actively taking part in working class warfare for the working class. Yeah. And so they stopped a couple towns out from Welch, and our old buddy, C.E. lively, boards the train. and sits close to the Hatfield, like, part of it.

Yeah, they like exchange glances. There's, I think Sid at one point tries to talk to him or see, I can't, and then it kind of gets blown up. Things are kind of awkward, you know? There's like, huh, they see, because they see each other again, I think, at the hotel. They see each other. We'll get there. Okay.

Like I said, Sid's there because he's under indictment for murders and bombing the coal tipple. And so they stop in Welch. they get off the train and they have breakfast and as they're having breakfast CE lively pops in again it's a little weird dudes like stalking them and so

they make their way to the courthouse and the sheriff's deputies escorting the four of them to the courthouse and watch also to stress also what just had occurred before this is Sid was warned Sid and Edward warned to not go to McDowell they were warned they knew this was dangerous going in

there were hits on their heads by the Baldwin felt's agents, and the sheriff of, which I don't think we have his name, the sheriff of McDowell even had like said it before that he would have protection there, as we will learn here in about two seconds. That was not the case. Yeah. Thanks for the pickup, Dave. There's, like I said, there's a lot going on, and I'm sure that some shit slipped through the cracks. So the sheriff's deputy is escorting the four of them to the courthouse in Welch. and then at the foot of the steps

he kind of lets Ed and Sid lead the way and when Ed and Sid crest the stairwell C.E. Lively is there again and then he shoots Ed in the neck and after that gunshot some other Baldwin-Felds agents join in and they shoot Sid dead right at the top of the courthouse steps

in cold fucking blood. It was even 30? I think he was under 30. Yeah. It was like 28. God damn. This gain, not just local press, but also national press. And the New York Times, you know, the bastion of just fucking peak journalism. Yeah, the communist times, I know. Yeah, the communist times.

They said, quote unquote, Sid died the way he lived, the way his people live, his primitive mountaineers, they live by the sword and die by the sword. There will be no peace in the coal fields until all of these people have died off. And they likened the West Virginia miners to set. savages and sub-humans. So if you need any fucking reason to not listen to the New York Times, like... God. I mean, it's the same.

Yeah, and then, well, 10 years after this, they would go on the praise Hitler in a piece. So, I mean, it's not... Doing the Lord's work, man. Fuck. I mean, what? Just last week, they published Tom Cotton's fascist fever dream of sending the military in against the American people. And there's an unbroken line of the New York Times being fucking shit.

Oh, yeah. God, shit's accelerated so much. I totally fucking forgot about Tom Cotton's fever dream. Holy shit. We would all like to forget about that. For real. So, Hatfield and Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers' funeral processions were over 2,000 people big. And they occurred in mate one.

And four days after the funeral mother. His funeral has had more people than the town itself. Mm-hmm. So four days after the first. funeral, Mother Jones, Frank Keeney, and Fred Mooney, call a rally at the steps of the Capitol in Charleston. There's over 5,000 minors there with a large police presence, and Governor Ephra Morgan refusing to leave his office. It's another scene that we have seen a matter of just weeks ago. And Keeney says, you have no recourse except to fight. The only way you can

get your rights is with a high-powered rifle. If we meet any resistance, the Maitwan Affair will look like a parade. Oh, and amen. So. And that's kind of right where we can. And that is the lead-up to the battle of play. Two hours later, which, to be fair, this is, this is actually most of what we're going to go over. I mean, it's, there are so many leading and turning gears that it's really, what's, we're going to kind of shoot through it because the, as we'll go, the battle will only last from Wednesday to Saturday.

So it's not, it's mostly we're going to be talking about like skirmishes and leaders and kind of the state of the, the army itself and how it operated. Yeah, you know, we think historically we isolate these events, you know, and sort of pick them out of space and time and think about them as sort of isolated incidents. But, you know, we've been talking about the Battle of Blair Mountain in some deep sense this entire time. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. So let's get into the battle itself. So all of these events.

and historical figures eventually culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in U.S. history and the largest armed uprising since the Civil War. In 1921, 10,000 miners gathered together to unionize the southern West Virginia Colfields to fight for their health and for their safety. They were met on Blair Mountain, and a battle ensued. Today, Blair Mountain is threatened by mountaintop removal coal mining. They strip away the entire forest, bulldoze away the soil, and start blasting. It wouldn't happen at Antietam.

What they would like more than anything in the world, these giant corporations, is to destroy this great monument to the union movement, American middle class, to American values, and American democracy, and that's Blair Mountain. And I've come to the conclusion. The history of Blair Mountain actually is a motivating factor behind the industry wanting to blow it up. They were asking for an eight-hour workday, you know, to work five days a week, eight hours a day, to be paid by the hour instead of the tonne, so that they could. could be so that they could have a stable income and not work, you know, 14 hours.

They weren't asking for the sun and the moon. They were just asking for human decency, basically. If you had money coming to you, you was paid in script. No. How? No. There wasn't no such thing if you had any money coming to you for you. You didn't make enough to even feed your man and his wife.

But the most important thing that how you had to have. important thing that happened during that period to restore our democracy was the emergence of the union movement. And that really, and the biggest battleground, the frontline battle ground for that battle, was on Blair Mountain. And when they realized that the state government wasn't going to help them out, and they realized that the national government wasn't going to help them out, and they were starving, you know, in tents, you know, that's when they grew desperate and that's when

they grew violent. Social movements that are non-violent that have been successful have mostly developed in the 20th century Gandhi and King. And in 1921, that hadn't happened yet. Frankini said, you know, the only way you can get your rights is with a high-powered rifle. And he told them to go home and await the call to march. They started out on foot. At one point, probably around Danville, they ended up hijacking a train.

There was an army waiting for them at Blair Mountain. This was an army made up of state police, of mine guards, and of citizens. And then what actually brought the whole thing to an end was that federal troops from Kentucky were called in. Well, as soon as the miners heard that the federal troops were coming, they thought first of all that the federal troops would be on their side, and they'd try to work on the side of justice rather than on the side of the coal operators. Indeed, they didn't. They went in and started arresting people, so the miners then fled.

They really didn't want to fight the U.S. Army. It's a bittersweet time because, on the one hand, they lost, and the union was broken for the next 12 years. But on the other hand, it's one of those mileposts that you look back on and say that was a really important moment, and in fact, even though it initially led to a setback, it finally led to going forward. Yeah, bring back a lot of memories. Go it up.

Blair Mountain means to start this union in here. That's 90% of it. That's where it starts from. I'm a charter member of the United Mine Workers of West Virginia. You've got rights when you've got a union. That's your buddy. I become the mine commitment. committeemen, the safety committeemen, and the hospital commitment.

I didn't let them die with nothing. I think the symbol that Blair Mountain represents of people standing up to the coal industry is one that they would just as soon have obliterated. See, they're going to fill this Halloween here, too. This is going to be the Hackens For the Hackens Fork Valley Field right here. So it's probably going to meet their valley field over here, cut branches. There was a dirt road. It went up the hollow there and threw the pass there, low gap. And we know there's a lot, there was a lot of fighting going on there.

That's a valley field right there for an Ackis fork mine. Right there. If you walk up that hollow, you'll be on top where all the artifacts are. We're going in with metal detectors. We're not finding anything made after 1921. That means that those artifacts are dated before 1921, which puts them right at the time of this battle. Most of the miners probably just pulled their squirrel gun or their deer gun out of the closet and a couple of boxes of ammunition and they went to war.

And I found miners' bullets coming all the way up, right? And so now we're seeing the defensive parts right here, a whole bunch of fired rounds, and then we just now found an incoming round. Now when you have a lot of spent bullets like that, the lead part, then you think, hey, there was pretty close quarters here. And so you think the miners were really putting the heat on them. Right down over the hill we found some patterning of pistol rounds which are short-range weapons.

But the things you find in the soil don't lie. They tell the truth and they've been there for 90 years and then all of a sudden they start testifying. We know that they broke through at Crooked Creek Gap. I think that they broke through at Mill Creek Gap. And what we're finding here with the archaeology is that they possibly were breaking through here. This piece of land right here is one of the most significant stories in American history. And if it's destroyed, then it's going to be gone forever. Essentially, you're taking the most incredibly biodiverse temperate forests on Earth and this amazing aquatic resource and poisoning it, annihilating it, and destroying it forever in order to get to the coal.

And, you know, at the base of the mountains where this is going on, communities are being driven to extinction. You just couldn't turn a company loose like AT Massey because they'd feel tugged river up. They put the river over here, you know. The coal companies are willing to do anything to get at that coal, including destroying a wonderful historical site that belongs right up at the top of the historical battlefields in our country. It made it onto the registry, and then all of a sudden the rug was pulled out from under her. those people who are trying to preserve the mountain. And I think it was pretty underhanded the way that happened. And so they gave us a list, we commented on it.

They used a different list. We commented on that, and they said it's too bad, it's too late, the comment period was over. Part of the objectors who signed on to objecting the nomination, two of them are deceased. They've been dead for one of them for over 20 years. And so there's just a huge amount of discrepancies. The 1,600 acres is roughly what we came up with that included most of the archaeological evidence.

And the problem with it right now is that that 1,600 acres just happen to have millions of tons of coal underneath. And, of course, the coal companies are vying for that coal. They want to actually blow the tops of the mountains up so they can get to the coal. I don't approve it. I don't approve it at all. I don't approve of it. I hope they stop it. Chole.

You go down to Mingo County, you go down to Logan County in southern West Virginia where that battle was raged in 1921 and people who are still alive, remember their ancestors who fought in that battle. We're going to save Blair Mountain by God, because that's their working man's simple. Too many people died that day, so y'all can be speaking here tonight. Too many. Blair Mountain, you know, it's a part of us. It's like a fiber, you know, in the clothing, you know.

It's just one little piece that kind of puts the whole puzzle together. If I was still in there, I never stopped till to run that plum out of the damn country. I mean, if it took a war, we will be right there in it. So let's get into it. What happened? All right. So after what transpires Charleston with first. Frank Keeney delivering kind of his speech on the steps under.

Because it's important to understand that Sid Hatfield was very much a martyr in this. When he died, he angered. I mean, everyone was pissed the hell off. That was really that between that and the jailed, the 100 jail, the 100 jailed unionists and Mingo, yeah. Yeah, there was, that was, as we'll see, that was the rallying cry, um, was on to Mingo. And like I told Chris, um, earlier in the week, I'm actually very sad. that we didn't name our podcast on to mingo that would have been very cool um but um but yeah

as we'll see this is really just people i mean everyone's pissed off they're starting people are they're grabbing their guns they're storing ammunition um they're holding up non-union stores and other places um in banks to gain assets are holding up trains um train warfare is a big part of this as we'll go into as well um they used to call uh was minor specials um where they would just make their own they would essentially make their own trains they would they would hijack the trains up and down the railroad track and then would you know disconnect them connect what they needed armed them with with guns that they'd stolen um it was just a really wild shit yeah so in the wake of keeney's rousing speech uh there's um w of a men and union sympathizers congregated

lens creek which is a small town about 10 miles outside of charleston and And their plan is to march and Mingo and free the union miners in prison there and drive out the Baldwin-Feltz mine guards. And like Dave said, Sid was like a huge fucking martyr in this. And the thought was that Sid and Ed were defenseless when they were killed, how Mingo's miners were hurted into jail like animals. Like I said, there were 45 let at gunpoint right into their cells and how their families were forced out of their homes at gunpoint. some had been to the funeral and seen the anguish of Sally and Jesse over the deaths of their husbands. But in order to converge on Mingo, the miners would first have to go through Logan County and take on the forces of the ardently anti-union sheriff, Don Chafin. Who's the name will be saying a lot from here on out?

And Chafin, for every good thing that Sid Hatfield was, for everything that he went, like, It literally was like the yin and yang, the yinin, yang cliche of, you know, the dark side of, because you have two foxes inside of, or two wolves inside of you. Yeah. And one's a good cop and one's fucking Don Schafen. So, uh, he accepted a shitload of coal operator money for years and was referred to as the czar of Logan County. Like that really outlines just how fucking brutal, uh, Chafin was. He really ruled with his deputies and with the youths. of the Baldwin-Feldt's thugs and all that.

He really did earn the name of the Tsar. And as a little aside for anyone from the sweet, sweet state of West Virginia or anyone outside of, I believe that Chaffin had some kind of relative. Like a nephew, a great-nephew? Yeah, something like that. Run for like House of Delegates or something like that. Eric Chaffin, and lo and behold, dude was also a piece of shit. so Abbot wasn't far too far fall too far from the tree so well his family also prospered from

yeah from this so part of what gave like Chafin so much control over Logan and like what gave him pretty much eyes everywhere and part of like his czar like rule over the place was that he had his deputies ride every train in and out of Logan County chafin deputies would even beat traveling salesman within a fucking inch of their lives if there was even the slightest whiff that they might even be potentially sympathetic to unions so chafin also armed in addition to his own police force he armed over 3,000 volunteers to work alongside the state troopers so at this point also john l lewis president of the um w of a piece of shit total scumbag is absolutely terrified of the revolutionary

fervor of the Southwestern West Virginia minors. He's convinced they would do irreparable damage to the UMWVA's reputation and thus his pockets and he urged Keeney to shut down the march. So after the initial speech at the Capitol, Mother Jones

of the fucking IWW militant goddamn unionists even had second thoughts. Because at this point there's also talks of them sending in the U.S. military At this point, they are talking about it, and that scares even Mother Jones, who generally fearing for the lives of the miners. And also, she also has concerns that the action could scare people away from unionization, not just in the UMW of A, but elsewhere as well.

Eventually, she pulls a paper from her pocket during a speech on August 24th that she says is a telegram from President Warren Harding. and she says that he's willing to permanently eliminate the mind guard system if the march does not happen. And as she states this, Keeney makes an effort to grab the telegram to claim it's a fake. Mother Jones, in her fashion, tells him to go to hell. So then Fred Mooney goes and checks with the White House and confirms the suspicion that Jones never received correspondence from Harding. She had made it up. Keeney issues a public statement that that telegram was bullshit. Yeah, and this happens in, like, that night, Mother Jones leaves a West Virginia.

She later writes in one of her journals that this event itself absolutely, like, ripped her heart from her chest because she loved and cared for Keeney, like a child, and loved and cared for all of the minors in Southern West Virginia. Yeah, they were her boys that she called them. Yeah, it was one of her first. favorite places to agitate and they were some of her favorite people to agitate and and it really truly broke her heart so that was that was a very kind of humanizing uh thing and i personally don't disagree with with i can see it yeah his sentiment either um we'll discuss that on down the road but uh hell the fear of life alone uh is is understandable but when your backs against the wall like these miners when you're dying

every day regardless. Yeah, you're dying anyways in this situation. Exactly. So at the start of this March, the convergence at Lens Creek, 1,300 men accumulated over 8 miles. And then over several days, that grew into 8,000

minors and sympathizers. Canawa County Sheriff, Henry Walker, says that the miners should disband and that, with it being only 10 miles from Charleston, that it's out of control, and at this point there's only a hundred state troopers and there's no national guard so their defenses are down and and very obviously walk walker is terrified shaking in his fucking boots one of as they're organizing um and they're bringing people together again we said we've now hit 8,000 people in the union army essentially um the leaders made speeches along the creek to the miners and um and it's heard that one of the leaders said if the white people got guns guns, he said, Blacks had better get them too.

And we, and that's from black, from, yes, some black union organizers. And that's what we do see is here in a second, I will go over the leaders of the army, and it was very much, it was all across the board. They were segregated in the company towns. They were not segregated in this unionizing effort. So from there, Dave, do you want to go ahead and tackle? Oh, we can introduce to tackle old Billy Blizzard. Okay, so Bill Blizzard, who is.

one of the central figures from this point going forward. He was born in 1892, also in Cabin Creek, West Virginia, to a union home. His father was a UMW member. His mother was a strong supporter of the union, Sarah Blizzard. He became a minor at the age of 10 when would immediately become a loyal member of the UMW. His mother, Sarah Blizzard, was often compared to Mother Jones, who everyone called Maugh, and Bill was often called Maugh's son. Sarah Blizzard is also what I found was quote unquote suspected of participating in guerrilla warfare.

She destroyed railroad tracks to prevent the further destruction of a tent camp that the family had relocated to after being evicted from their home due to their union ties. She would participate with like essentially do dirty 11 shit with the other minors. At age 19, along with Frank Keeney and Bill Mooney, Bill Blizzard was elected to leadership in the UMW. in District 17 to replace the corrupt officials that I mentioned before. Bill was known to be much more militant than other UMW members. He was, I didn't put the quote here, but he says that, or he was very much against any sort of peaceful agreements. He did not, Bill Blizzard was against going to the negotiating table with the co-operators.

He believed in full frontal military, militant action. Bill Blizzard fucking ripped. He really is, is like the, you know, Sid was, I mean, after Sid, Bill Blizzard really kind of takes a sort of leading this, this movement. He is suspected and credited as, as the general of the Union Army, but as I'll get into here a second as I go more in depth with how the Union Army was set up. He really was more likely that he wasn't really in command of anything. He, it's morally widely reported by, um, by primary sources, like people who were there that he more likely just kind of gave speeches. He was like

son even yeah yeah he was he gave speeches he um relayed communications and he would like go and we'll go here later he would go and talk to the like general banholz and the other military kind of just like receive information what they were doing and like be friendly with them and he would just dip out he was the liaison yeah yeah he would go and like talk to the military officials and act buddy and buddy with them and once he got his information he know he dip out and it would relay and relay that information. Bill, and Bill is only 28 at this, at this whole time. Everybody's so young. Yeah, it's, it's insane. Like, I'm going to turn 25 at the end of the week. But he's also been working for 18 years. Right. I know. They live like two lifetimes in one. Yeah. I've been working for 10 years.

I've been in the work for 10, 10 years now. And I'm still, and I'm three years younger than it, or two, I'm sorry, two years younger than him. It's insane. Yeah. So, like, with this kind of, the convergence at Lens Creek and everything that transpires with Mother Jones. The miners begin their march to Logan County. And from there, on Domingo. Yeah, on Domingo. And I believe we do not have this in our notes, but I, if I recall correctly, as they begin their march, there is word of the U.S. military, U.S. Air Force very specifically stepping in. And as Keeney says, I've washed my hands, like, after he delivers his address, he goes, oh, fuck, like, I need to inform everyone of what's going on. He kind of tells a 180.

And him and Mooney, they gather the men in Madison as they're marching on the way. Several thousand, again, we're talking about 8,000 people, were unloaded into the ballpark to hear Keeney and Mooney speak. Keeney would then stand on the hood of a car and declare that the march was suicide. And then he had orders from President Harding himself to end the March. So he ends up doing what Mother Jones, which was true. That's true. He did. He had received orders from Harding. Washington at this point was kind of dilly dallying around. They really wanted West Virginia itself to handle it.

And they wanted the UMW to handle it at this point. But the miners that they knew the union leadership would be held responsible and that the U.S. military would be involved. And as he's giving the speech, he's relaying that. And the miners had little no issue. They didn't care about fighting the governor. They didn't care about fighting cops. They did not, and they loved to fight the Baldwin-Feltz. But they really did not want to fight the U.S. military, where, again, many of them have served.

We're fresh off of World War I. And so a lot of them, if not most of them, had served or had family who were in the military, who were drafted. It's important here, and as you know, so during the history of this event, that there were still very heavy patriotic sentiments throughout the minors. This was not a decolonizational effort, which I think is possibly the quite the biggest reason it failed. And it would work against them time and time again. What was it? The quote is like, my gosh, we'd never fight the American like military. We won't go against.

I have it later when Van Henson. Yeah. And one of them goes, you know, we wasn't fighting with the government. So General Banholz now arrives that we're seeing. The general drove, and Bailey Blizzard. font goes to Racine and finds a general and ends up going with him as they drive on the Linskriek road to a minor's encampment. It's kind of awkward. No one knows what the fuck to do. The military has arrived. Here's your general banholz, which I do not have much information on him. He's kind of not too

important. Much like the governors. There's some characters here that aren't, their background is not too important. But yeah, here it is. So after, but the ice broke. They started talking. One of the miners said, my God, we wouldn't revolve against the national government. This ad sentiment that the march is over. People think the march is over. They're dispersing a little bit after Madison. Many at this point give up and go home, all but forgetting said. And then we have the Sharps battle.

Now, after much of the fervor had died down, and many of had returned home after Keeney and Mooney's ballpark speech, a collection of state policemen went to Sharples, the town Sharples, at the behest of Schaithen, in order to have payback for the quote unquote humiliation of several state policemen in the past year from the Lick County Tent Colony, which was another event where minors had fought back against the destruction of their tent encampment by the Baldwin Feltz agents, led by the same Captain Brockes who led the original Lick County Tent Colony

a braid. They arrived there at night. They met with a small group of armed minors, as usual. No one knows who shot first, but two minors were killed, one critically injured, and the nearby houses were filled with bullet holes. None of the policemen were injured, and they marched. away and they took five minors as prisoners. Doing this just

completely reignited the march. We thought it was over. We thought it was done. And this event here... By and large, it was over. Yeah. Also, we can make a drinking game out of... No one knows who shot first. We just make a drinking game of how many times the word shot or bullet. I would just be...

Just be fucking destroyed. So, Union officer, AC Porter, returned from the Sharples area to report to Governor Morgan that the march was back on. And he called it a, quote, monster powder keg awaiting only the smallest of sparks to launch one of the bloodiest industrial wars in the history of the world, in quote. Many miners, as I said earlier, they commandeered trains, vehicles. The only thing they would leave were doctor's cars, which you would have to put white tape over your headlamps to say that you were a doctor and they would leave you alone. Yeah, any sort of medics.

They followed like, you know, they followed war rules. Yeah. they didn't shoot doctors or any of that they really because again is we can't set or can't stress enough many of them has served their military actually during this which i'd like to point out that not even the fucking militarized police forces breaking up protest don't have the they're also attacking medics yeah they're just shooting shooting fucking medics with tear gas oh yeah no matter with any issues that has said with with the minors and certain reactionary sentiments they will never be as bad as i mean that's a whole other that's a whole other that's a whole other thing. So as A.C. Porter relates this to Morgan. Morgan relates to Harding. And so President Harding basically says he gives it 48 hours to disperse or he's going to send in a National Guard. He makes a proclamation. This is on Tuesday. So Sheriff Chafin makes the announcement. No, quote, no armed mob will cross Logan County.

um and quote hundreds of young men across logan and mcdow counties would join in fighting the quote unquote invading rednecks as they were called that's a nice spicy way to say outside agitated yeah i mean yeah even though there were people right down you know they were they were their fucking neighbors they were relatives as i wanted the the jailer of the union army and the jailer of shapen's army were brothers um yeah it was literally they weren't these were not invaders They were family. Schaffin's army included many non-union minors with mixed enthusiasm, mostly low, because the miners were told to, they had to conscript to the volunteer army or they'd be fired.

Many were drunk on moonshine. There was rampant drinking in Schaithen's army. It also included boys as young as 14, wanting to get in battle, seek adventure. The total of Schaffin's army or the volunteer army came to 2,800 men, and then he would eventually give command over to Colonel William E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. Binks. What stopped it was not the volunteer army that defended. It was a U.S. military. That was really the force that put a stop to the battle. Order was essentially non-existence. Like I said, oh yeah, I already said that volunteer army that defended. It was a U.S. military. That was really the force that put a stop to the battle. Order was essentially non-existence. Like I said, Oh yeah, I already said that volunteers drank.

The first fatality of the battle of Blair Mountain actually came to George Dueling, who was shot by a laborer in the volunteer army when they accidentally discharged a rifle. So we had the first death, and it's an accidental death. Hell yeah. I love it when the trash takes itself out.

So on Wednesday morning, August 31st, the long Spruce Fork Ridge, of which included Blair Mountain. It estimated 10,000 men were involved. Some estimates reported up to 20,000 in this battle as shooting would go on between the two armies along a 10-mile front. This was the beginning. It's essentially the beginning of really what's noticed is like the kickoff of the battle itself.

It held more so, a little side note, it held more soldiers than George Washington's Battle of Trenton. Christ. So this was a bigger battle than most revolutionary war battles. I mean, yeah, estimates are anywhere between 10 and 20,000. A real revolutionary war. Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, it's insane. We ain't putting fucking Sid Hatfield or Fuglose Johnson on dollar bills.

That's all I'm going to say. That's, well, there's a joke in there somewhere. Whatever. Just because it's there, doesn't mean we have to quit. I know, I know, I know. So, Schaffin's Air Force, which she has a little Air Force, it's three biplanes. They would drop, like, pamphlets of Harding's proclamation on the side of the miners to literally no effect. Major Charles F. Thompson would also read their proclamation to the

miners. However, this proved completely futile as many minors and people did not understand the legal terms used in the proclamation. No shit. He eventually, the miners got aggressive in the town. They threatened him to leave. His train was then commandeered by armed minors. He refused to leave. Tensions are heightened. Eventually, a town doctor would ask one of the older and more respected miners named Uncle Charlie to ask with those guns, trained on the major to step back.

They did. They listened to the older, the older minor, and the major left without any incident. But he posted up the proclamation in two parts of the town. And it didn't do anything, because no one was like, first, they didn't know what it meant. Second, it was strong union sentiment anyways. Yeah, they're not going to fucking pay attention,

even if literacy was 99%. But, yeah, they were trying to. Yeah, literally, again, not many can read, period. So that was completely just ineffectual. I think that that's also like a point to touch on like throughout history with like these revolutions is that with literacy comes this kind of revolutionary fervor. And that's why so many like oppressed peoples like are so illiterate. Like you see that with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Yeah. And revolutionary programs in a lot of those places are always centered first and foremost. on literacy programs, you know, to boost the literacy rates of the people. Yeah, I think, I think, again, like, focusing on the DRA, I think that literacy shot up to, like, 95% in two fucking years. And if I'm correct, like, Cuba had a very similar case. Oh, if you want people to read, give them socialism. Yeah, absolutely.

That's really how it comes down to. So continue on. We have one of the leaders of the, of one of the companies of the Union Army, which was Johnny Wilburn, who was a minister with a large family. He would constantly call the police thugs. He is quoting, saying, The time has come for me to lay down my Bible and pick up my rifle and fight for my rights. He assembled a group of followers at the Blair School.

It was time for the, quote, laboring man to fight. He would lead them to attack into the face of Schafen's army and would, quote, take no prisoners. The following consisted of 70 armed minors, both black and white. The next morning, they were awoken by gunshots from deputies of Schaffan's army. Each would then face each other thinking that they were of the same side. This happened a lot. They each, because each armies had their own passwords.

So they each gave their passwords and it struck them as they gave different passwords. Immediately after the password was said, amen, which was a pastor in Schaffin's army, gunfire exploded. Four men died. The small regime of Schaffin's army, once led by Deputy Gore, who was now dead, one in retreat. so that's just kind of another event like it was just some of these battles were just like this was like johnny woolburn going the little fuck these pigs let's go and 70 people followed them and they killed four traitors all in like the span of an afternoon yeah it's it's truly just little or the morning little pop-up skirmishes here and there it's not like a two week just bullets raining down kind of a it skirmishes it really is multiple skirmishes you have the line as i mentioned the 10 mile front that's consistently happy but inside the woods you have a lot of these little skirmishes between anywhere from 10 people

anywhere to you know some of these companies were like 800 people of miners battles were now breaking out across the mountain fighting became increasingly heavy u banks the drunk a veteran of france and romanian outbreaks reported that he had never seen such battles so he's freaking out he's been in france and romania during war one he's never seen anything like it they were believing they were losing at this point. The Schaffin's army were scared that they're like, oh shit, we're going to get annihilated. So they telegraphed Washington, D.C. asking for more

troops, for he feared Logan would be, quote, attacked by an army from 4 to 8,000 Reds, end quote. I mean, that's a sentence I want to hear again. I know. Say it again, but in slow mouth. Schaeffen would, and this happened a couple times, Schaeffen would order a

T&T bomb dropped into the mountains from one of his planes. Each time that this happened, no one died, nothing was hit. They couldn't tell where anyone was in the mountains in the forest you would just kind of you were just blindly the air force the air force was pretty much useless um the air force is called into this doesn't do anything um i have in here later um i'll i'll go over it now because i remember the details pretty well uh the air force when they were called in originally were called in 21 um planes 14 of them made it to charleston seven had crashed on the way there

um it's like just it's like an entire company of john mccain's it's yeah literally that's fucking beautiful oh they couldn't they couldn't um they couldn't handle the the weather um there was storming they couldn't handle flying around the mountains uh they couldn't they couldn't fly the terrain the terrain this is why you know hey um you know one of the things we talk about on our podcast is to protect people's war happen in

Appalachia would be kind of dope for that reason um there's a lot of terrain yeah totally so far it seems shaithen's army had held the defensive he made a press announcement proclaiming success and holding back the rebels and regaining lost territory. At this point, they had lost four men, however, many more were taken custodian, or I'm sorry, many were taken prisoner, custodian of which was Bad Lewis White, who was also one of the leaders of the companies and the jailer. Bad Lewis White was reported to actually treat the prisoners pretty well.

He would always feed them, and he would prevent other minors from trying to harm them while they were in prison. The Union Army continued to commandeer trains picking up minors as they went to add to their cause. So they're, they're, they're stealing these trains. They're adding guns to them. They're breaking them up, putting them in the way they want to. The railroad company at this time has completely, they've abandoned the railroads for the most part at this time. They've just let it, they've let the minors take them over. They abandoned their schedule. And they're picking up more minors as they go. The army just keeps growing at this point. Throughout the battle zone, school buildings were turned into headquarters and hospitals. I already said doctors and nurses were giving passes to access to battle areas. As those on the near front had to use cotton to plug their ears and aspirin to kill the headaches from the concussions of the firing. The shooting was going on night and day 24-7 during this week. How long that 10-mile front? Yeah. Yeah, it was 20, it was reported that constantly gunfire,

it was like I said, people, to the point it was damaging people's hearing. You couldn't like speak. You had to yell to hear other people speak. It was so loud. One minor is quote saying, you was in more danger from another green horn than any minor getting to you from the other side. That was a non-union minor because again, which the volunteer army... They were drunks. Yeah, they were drunks. And I've never fired a gun. So by September 1st, at this point, it's over.

The proclamation, or not it's over. The proclamation is over. The 40 hours are up. They've completely ignored Harding. And they had taken control, the Union Army had taken control of 500 square miles of southern West Virginia. They controlled the railroad tracks, the stations, and the railways. rail yards. Highways were patrolled and automobile traffic was regulated. Passes were issued to authorize citizen movements within the battle area, and of course, mines are not allowed to operate.

This was all under the supervision and direction of the Union Army. At this point, the UMW of A is out of it. They've lost all controller sway. Most of the miners have, they don't give a fuck about the UMW of A. They want to unionize and they want to get revenge for Sid and they want to free the minors. Philip Murray, the international VP of the UMWA endeavored to calm the miners down and lay down the arms, but instead, his life was threatened and he was run out.

So casualties are beginning to rise. Fatality ports were casual, incomplete, and else sustained for the most part. And we don't. We have no idea how many people have died. The estimate goes anywhere from 16 to 100. And to this day, it's more agreed upon

between 50 and 100. I don't know, but then I saw some sources that Thought Mars 16, yeah. So even today, I don't know how many people died. We don't. Because you, yeah, like Dave said, you just don't have the complete primary source. People kept reporting massive deaths when there weren't in it. So the Union Army, or not the Union Army, sorry, the Schaffin's Army kept making announcements that we did good today.

We killed tons. We're doing good, but they had it. And that kind of distilled a lot of. There's an asterisk after we killed tons, and that asterisk is of our own men. There's just trees. We shot trees. Which is really what it was. I mean, they shot, I mean, trees were the victim with the main victim in all this.

Youth who had to leave to start school were giving passes by the minors to travel the roads. Names were not used, period, for the most part. Everyone was called Buddy. Oh, fam, they had, they had some infosac right there. Yeah, that was literally Buddy. Secrecy was incredibly important in the prevention of spies. By this point, reporting was incredibly difficult, if not our, right impossible. Miners refused to talk. All telephone and telegraph wires had been cut. The press constantly pressed the idea that there was some hidden general, which as I said, many thought was Bill Blizzard. But no military organization could operate this smoothly without central direction. All food and provisions were accounted. And I'm quote, oh, by the way, I'm quoting this from Lon Savage's book, Thunder in the Mountains, which I highly recommend. It's an incredible read. You'll rip through it. It is a fun. It's a short read, but incredibly informative. That's where a lot of my notes have come from.

All food and provisions were accounted for and handed out equally without any argument or incident. The men were accounted for from captains to corporals and followed orders accordingly. However, this was believed to be indulging by the press to an extent. The army was absolutely organized to some extent, but there were some incidents here and there. But most reporting that I've seen shows that this was incredibly like, it is astounding. The leaders, some of the leaders who led essentially their own companies, both black and white were Ed Reynolds, Bill Blizzard, Walter Allen, D. Muncie, John Wilburn, Savoy Holtz, Romeo, Craig, uh, is it Crago? Romeo Craigo, yeah.

Bad Lewis White, um, Red Thompson and Charlie Popcorn Gordon, the last two who, um, who were black. Um, co-operators, reporters and others would spend the next 50 years looking for the so-called rebellion commander to no success. I know that the Blair Mountain Reenactment Society organization, they'd say they kind of said the bill blizzard was a general but again that's kind of one of the minors would go on to praise bill blizzard who had many um but despite all his rallying speeches he never commanded anyone that minor would say quote we was all just leaders um which is so dope man like that's so cool um to have that the kind of level of organization but also it be diffuse enough i mean they were couldn't exactly like chop off the head yeah i was

about to say it's more of like a hydra where if you get one like the two more grow in its place or something like it is it is truly fucking incredible and it's something that did in our own like organizing locally something that we try to maintain they would use i mean they were very they would use muscle you know they would call what we you know what some people would call mob rule or or quote-unquote terror tactics it was it was incredibly effective uh guilla warfare um the uh not only waged with incredible efficiency, but also waged in companies with a singular mission to unionize and better their lives. However, here we enter the 26th Infantry Regiment and the 19th Infantry Regiment would make their way down to West Virginia. Do they crash? No, they went by train. So they

did not. They didn't John McCain at all right. They didn't know, not like the Air Force. Oh, that was bad. And they would brag, the Air Force would go on bragging about being the only air, only time, the only brigade used for civil disturbance and like all you did was just fly around and crash i don't get fucking bragging about it's more and more and more and more and more and more like you brag about that to this day it's more and more and more and more like john mccain with every sentence i'm sure they also really despised asian people so yeah i'm sure it's trash so um so on friday is when the union miners took more ground and now fighting is now within one mile of mingo later in their day Stephen's army would bomb again, dropping them from planes over the mountains.

Again, no one's injured or killed. Gas bombs and tear gas were also used during the course of the battle by the reactionary army. Eubanks and the press both believed the bombing was causing heavy casualties with the New York Times, our best friends again, reporting the miners had, quote, carried their dead and wounded away with them. There was never any evidence of this. That was just completely wrong. Now I do have a little tidbit about the IWW's involvement. While the IW never really made much headway in West Virginia, we did find out afterwards

that found among the miners encampments after the battle, there were IW pamphlets and some like socialist and anarcho-sendicals literature, and there were wobbly scattered across who took part in the fighting. One such member, we only known by his Kominsky, was arrested within minutes of arriving in Logan. They immediately learned he was not only a union member, but IWWW member. So he was jailed immediately. and sadly he would not last 36 hours in Logan. The jailer Oliver White, the brother of Bad Lewis White, ordered his son to shoot Kominsky while he was away.

And that is what happened. He was murdered in cold blood. The son tried to say that he was hit, but all the other prisoners were like, no, he just came in and shot him. So it didn't hold up. But I'm pretty sure that his son got away with like one year in probation or something.

Nothing. Yeah, this is nothing. So now the troops have arrived at the order of General Billy Mitchell, the 88th Air Squadron from Langley, Virginia was assigned to West Virginia. And it says, yeah, here we are. The 21 planes ordered only 14 arrived. The squadron would go on to only perform reconnaissance. They carried no bombs or in emission when surveying the area

and would return to Langley later that month with only half of what they started with. They only came back with 10 planes and would boast it as a success. And when later, that's what it is. The 436 bombarding squadron said to be the only aircourse unit who ever participated in a civil disturbance. And yeah, they think that's a pride of whatever. Fucking losers. Fucking losers. I always think of that

that Will Ferro Giff where he just goes, what a loser? What is that from? What are that from? Wedding Crashers? Anyways. So Bill Blizzard has a conversation with Captain Wilson of one of the Influency Regiments. He learns that the captain will let anyone keep their gun who has

a permit, which i.e. is like maybe 1% of the miners, the union minors. Blizzard learns that this will be like it always has the deputies will be allowed to keep their guns to mow down the minors that they left defenseless. And this is the strategy of the U.S. military is they disarm the Union Army while doing nothing. I mean, nothing to disarm the volunteer army. I mean, they are on the side of the Volunteer of Schapen's Army. They try to come in as this.

The great arbiter of peace. Yeah, the government. Yeah, we're just here to solve things. But it's, it's so blatant. It's the state butting up against the interests of capital. It's like the fucking legislation, how Glasscock and Hatfield, and that's Governor Hatfield,

and Morgan have all kind of conducted themselves throughout this as well, and just working hand in hand with the fucking operators and the felt agents as well. And, yeah, and so we, so, okay, so you have in places like Sharples and other surrounding towns where the soldiers, are showing up and the miners start to mingle with the soldiers because as I said before they don't have any qualms with the soldiers you should but hindsight is 2020 um but that's that that

and that diffuses a lot of it is the the just the presence of the military is really what kind of like ends this conflict as we start to diffuse um we still this is friday the september 1st we still have fighting up against Logan some are ignoring these the uh u.s soldiers coming up on their rear And now, at this point, I've lost count of the amount of infantry regiments involved. The 40th regiment would arrive in Logan from Fort Knox. They would bring machine guns, trench mortars, 37-millimeter guns, a radio outfit, and 50 mules. Jesus Christ. They were agreed extremely well in Logan, receiving numerous applause from people as they passed.

President Harding then would sign a second proclamation establishing martial law in southern West Virginia. However, he does not promulgate it, and he said leaves it in the hands of General Banholtz to use it if necessary. Harding also canceled orders for further infantry regiments to be sent down. When Banholz was asked if he would disarm the deputies as well as the minors, he stated, quote, they are now

under the control of the federal authorities, and they will do just as they told, end quote. Banholds will not only be praised by the co-operators, but the UNW as well, as the UNW journal reported, he, quote, is ever smiling and good nature with the time to see everybody.

But there is doubt in the minds of none that he is boss. And the claims and counterclaims of either side, he has no interest. And this ladies and gentlemen and non-bearer and your pals is why the Yung W fucking sucks. Now, this is pretty much, we're pretty, I mean, everything is dying down. People are, and are mingling with the troops. The troops present has really kind of sets just here. It's taken the wind completely out of the sense. I mean, it's literally just one day.

you have one day a 10,000 soldiers going at it and a 10 mile of fun the next day it's down to I mean the last shot was hurt Saturday night Jesus Christ we have people are just stopped fighting they all pack up and go home thousands of soldiers are seen walking along the roads going home many are arrested I do want to I do have one little thing about the press um because I thought this was really important with how the press was handled by the union army media was often censored or controlled from both sides of the conflict. And Logan, local newspapers, generally just printed whatever the cooperatives wanted them to do. We cannot stress enough how just all of Logan was just one giant bourgeois weapon.

Fuckhole. Yeah. It was awful. And this was commonplace for the long time at the place at there, but the foreign press was like, why are you listening to the town? Just listen to the U.S. government like the rest of us. Across the mountain, union miners informed any reporters that they could not send out dispatches unless they were first censored by minors.

Throughout the struggle, the miners realized the importance of controlling and protecting information. When a photographer from the Philadelphia Inquirer, James J. Brady, arrived at the minors front with a recommendation from the Attorney General of the United States, he was unable to retrieve any information. Eventually, the miners just destroyed all this film and held him prisoner for a day. They did not treat the press well. They just completely, it was, the press showed up. Everything was destroyed and you were told to leave.

for the Union Army, which I think is important. I think controlling information and a revolutionary movement like that is, I mean, liberals will try to like virtue signal and say, no, freedom of press. There is no freedom of press. What do you think about that, Brett? There's just no objectivity. And so in a struggle, when it's that explicit and out in the open,

knowing that the press is going, is a corporate bourgeois press, aligned with the people you're fighting suppressing them is a necessary step of the revolution in a lot of cases and I would agree and to add and Logan it was even worse. The only woman from the press to cover the story, Mildred Morris, who I

think was New York Times trying to be in New York Post was sexually harassed by the Logan officials. She would only sit in the hotel lobbying set of her bedroom because of general fear they kept trying to come into her bedroom. She would go on to state about to struggle as quote not war civilized nations carry on against each other but war without mercy carried on by men lesting for blood

which um it's such a i included it because it's actually a really popular quote from the time but i think it's picked out because there's this benign liberalness under it of just saying you're just men lesting for blood there's no class struggle here it's both sides it they're saying that they're just they just all want vengeance and yeah all blood and to see the other others died like there's No, yeah, like you said, there's no fucking analysis whatsoever. And I'll just skim this. Any sort of press sent to Logan, anything that they tried the right was censored. They were told to not say, quote, no sobbed stuff for those rednecks.

And just anything that mentioned the miners, anything that said the volunteer army was in bad luck or in bad faith, or anything that disparaged them was taken out. So where the miners just didn't fucking talk to them, Logan or Schaffin's army really tried to to control the information by controlling what went out. So at this point, we have a surrender. By the weekend, multiple federal troops are called, multiple battles, national attention. West Virginia's rebellion minors have started to surrender in large numbers.

600 minors by the first evening. However, they only turned into 80 guns. Nice. Yeah, not, yeah. A thousand more have simply gone home. The U.S. Army would patrol the streets and essentially inputs or implement martial law. anyone who was joining up three or more people bunching or even maybe broken up or taken to jail. The last shot was her Saturday morning on Sunday, quote,

minors and their families could be seen strolling along the streets of their communities, talking with each other but not the soldiers. Despite rumors of a massive body count, constant searches proved to be fruitless since the rebellion began on Lynn's Creek. It was thought, quote, only 16 persons had been killed, 12 of them of the Union Army. However, due to since sensationalism by, the press. Shafin's army and the Union's Army's refusal. It's that

Baltimore draw. You can't pronounce certain words. We're not for fucking Baltimore. I know, but someone told us we had a Baltimore draw and it stuck with me. And some estimates still go, oh yeah, Shafen's, due to sensationalism of the press, Schaffin's armies, also sensationalism in the Union's army's blatant refusal to share any details.

The true number is never known, with some going up to the number of 100. So, I mean, after the conflicts, you really just have, this is it. I mean, everyone is, there's a trials here. I don't know if you really go into that, Brett. I know that we've been going on for hours. If you really want to just kind of get into the meat, as far as the trials, the only notable thing is that Bill Blizzard was tried for treason.

He was acquitted. When he was acquitted, um, he was, um, people carried him on their shoulders. The miners erupted in applause and carried him out, which I thought was super cool. And the only person who was convicted for treason was Walter Allen, who was, one of the leaders of the companies. Like an absolute king, when he was convicted for 10 years, he jumped bail and was never heard of again. It's worth noting, too, that Blizzard was found not guilty

in the same courthouse that John Brown was tried and hanged in 1859 as well in Charles Town. Fascinating. So, yeah, I mean, the aftermath, despite being severely weakened, the strike and Mingo continued, and hundreds remained intense along that. tug which is that southwest um yeah the river um in october 1922 the um w a had finally called off the strike costing more than two million dollars the um bankrupting district 17 led to the resignation of its leaders as we mentioned um people like uh keeney had really just bad um endings um the um w of a membership in uh west virginia by 1929 as i said earlier it was 50 000 in 1920 in 1929 in

1929, it was 600 in West Virginia. It had dropped 49,400 people. It was not until the Roosevelt administration of the miners of Southern West Virginia are finally unionized, so it takes another 10 to 15 years. For more than 50 years, Siddhafield's graves sat across the river from 8-1, only marked by a small plaque put there by the union miters. However, eventually in the 70s, as his life story gained more publicity, there was now a large gravestone with his picture engraved, and the words written on it quote defender of the rights of working people gunned down by felt detectives on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse his murder triggered the miners rebellion at the battle of Blair Mountain end quote that we went through all the notes the whole outline only took us

four hours but thank you so much for covering all of that history it's a whirlwind it's a roller coaster ride but it's an important and essential moment in working class history on this continent and just globally. And I'm very thankful that both of you put in the work to do this. Before we wrap up, though, I do want to touch on just the legacy of the Battle of Blair Mountain in the region today. And then maybe what you think, a couple lessons that we can extract today, you know, sitting as we are in our own moment of uprising, what we can learn from those who fought in the Battle of Blair Mountain. Do you want to tackle the legacy and then the takeaways?

Oh, yeah. No, no, real quick. I just want to say, too, no, thank you a ton for let us to come on, as you can tell. And listeners, because I'll tell, too, this is something we're very passionate about. So thank you for giving us the avenue to be able to talk about this, about this, like, really, you know, it's about something we love on this platform. Yeah, and this isn't the end. We still got more shit to talk about, of course. But, but I just want to do. It's really cool to give back to the platform that provided so much of the fodder for our own radicalization as well. well. So thank you very much, Brett. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So the legacy is, as I mentioned earlier, it's not really talked about in public schools, but it is, but it is like a well-known piece of West Virginia history. Yeah, you have that, but it's not as well-known as what I'd like it to be. You still have, like, down in McDowell and Mingo and what have you. In that area, you still

have, like, what was it, the Blair Mountain Memorial Society or? The reenactment Society? Reenactment Society, yeah. And they do like a yearly reenactment. Like next year is the centennial celebration for the Battle of Blair Mountain. And there's going to be some really awesome celebrations for that. We're still like trying to. Trying to actually weed, yeah, the IWW.

Yeah, we're trying to get a presence down there as well because that's going to be really, really fucking cool to kind of commemorate that piece of history. But I think like one of the. biggest pieces of its legacy is just like the prevalence of militant unionism and if not militant unionism and just like a baseline understanding of unionism in the state

and in this area because everyone has like a fucking uncle in the goddamn UMW. Every single family, unless you're like the Schaffens or something, has like union family members. I have union family members. Chris has you know, family members that praise

the union you know it's um who grew up in union towns you know west virginia used to be a like a blue union state um until clinton and took everyone over with naphta yeah clinton was what was what flipped our state um i mean not that it matters now but you catch the drifts um but it's like yeah that's and that legacy really is is the power of the the general i guess the mainstream consensus legacy is the conditions that the miners faced. That's what's really what really like, and that's the kind of all that like

liberalism will allow you to pull from it is, oh, these conditions were bad and they were awful, as we are, we talked about it, and the battle did this whole event is what proclaimed to the nation, how bad it was. And that did bring about change and working conditions in the mines because

of this. Because people were like, holy shit, they're willing to, you know, in the thousand, take up arms. Yeah, to start an insurrectionary war. And they were called communists. They were called insurrectionaries. They were called, you know, as he said, invading rednecks, Bolsheviks, as anyone will do. As we've seen in the past week, and we'll see for the rest of our lives, really.

It's something that we've been on, like, other podcasts. And we feel like a lot of folks in the kind of, like, left media sphere try to come up with, some kind of like blanket answer like band-aid answer for like how do you do this what is your process it's called tennessee fighting instead instead of like being like a dialectical materialist about it and like talking to people and like understanding history and like your material conditions and like the history like your current environment whatever um and we said listen like we have like like a solid inroad to start with the unionism

of this state. You might only have like a rivaled unionism in the Pacific Northwest because you have like the IWW had an incredible presence there. You have like the ILWU, the longshoreman. I actually

saw an IOWU sticker on a pole right outside work no shit. Yeah I was like what the hell yeah. We don't have longshoremen here but all right. Not the longshoremen. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, the, the, uh, the lecture workers union.

That's IPEW. There's so many acrony. There are. There are. but yeah, so, so like, something with the teacher strikes and

we're going to shout them out now. Thank you so much to Brendan, one of our comrades in the IWW. Um, just awesome, awesome stand up guy and he provided so much of, of like the materials for us to like really go over. So without him,

this, have happened. We're one of the following founding members of that WVIDB2. If we're just the ones arrogant enough to want to talk about it and think people want to hear us talk about it. So he said during the teacher strikes, he's like even the most conservative teachers would say, I got to go on strike.

I got to go out with everyone. I got to sit there on the steps of the Capitol. There was still class solidarity between people who called themselves conservatives. Yeah, like that wore fucking maga hats and had Trump bumper stickers. They're like, my granddaddy'd be rolling over in his grave if he knew that I didn't support the union. Powerful. So that's like a really, and that also couples this idea of family and community, regardless of how like bastardized that might be.

It is something that you can utilize in organizing in an area like this. And I think that that's actually could segue into the issues. Because as we see with the issues, and we know the issues with trade unions and just general unions, especially the United States itself and how they have just failed over and over again. And as we've talked about in the U and W of A and just the complete lackluster, I mean, they were counter-revolutionary trying to stop the battle. They was, I mean, led by John L. Lewis, who was a massive piece of shit, he was essentially the proto George Meaney. He was just, and a lot of these unions were able to be co-opted by that. So on top of that, you have the co-optization of unions that's already happening. And then you have the split of the left.

We have the IWW, the SPA, and the UMW of A, all disagreeing on all tactics. And the miners themselves are disagreeing. And it really just, and it creates these own contradictions within a revolutionary movement, because this was, this was absolutely revolutionary movement. it was not a Marxist revolutionary movement. And that is what failed it, I think. I think what failed was that. And the stronger fact that why, yes, one positive,

and one thing we know is powerful, as Chris and I have talked about on this show multiple times, is the Rainbow Coalition. And we saw immigrant, Eastern European immigrants, white people, and black folks working together in this class struggle. And that's one of the things that made it so powerful.

powerful. So if this had been a decolonizational effort, yeah, had it been led by black folks and immigrants. With these numbers and this organization, we would be, it's unreal to think, I know against speculation, but I think when we do look at the science of different movements and we need to look at what success and failed, the science of Marxism, we really need to look and say that this could have been so much powerful. And I think that is what failed. It is that it wasn't, it wasn't this decalcitrant.

colonizing decolonizing effort for as much good as Keeney and Mooney and that like leadership even Blizzard contributed to what happened

to the union it's more of not quite playing so much commandism as it is like letting the masses kind of determine what they wanted to do and then just like backing that

and if if there's some some kind of like kinks in the armor or kinks in the chain that you are there with your resources with your funding with what you have with your capacities and they also kind of help iron that out and not kind of be just another thing that's kind of pooling in an opposite direction like you would see keeney ultimately doing and that really lends itself to the current moment as well um i think that you and allison did uh an episode for red menace where you talked about with everything popping off with the protests like the left like and I felt it

too like it's like holy shit moment where it's like fuck we're like really tailing the masses because because there was like a week of unity you know you know where we talked about where like social media was being used as almost as purely informational which is fucking awesome my Twitter feed wasn't about clout chasing it wasn't clout chasing it was literally just people reporting like what was going on in Oregon and I was like it was beautiful for that one week we're already back to the bullshit but but but to see like where like the various left movements is a whole or like holy shit maybe we don't need to be handling everything with kid gloves like people are pissed and i'm sure there are revolutionaries that are that are like

leading the charge that are these community organizers but you can't assume that for everyone but what you can like what you do see is again like the colonized uh people the most oppressed people are the ones leading it that have their backs against the wall like these miners did and it's like instead of like trying to command like from on high it's like okay you you want to do this you feel you have nothing else you can do what the fuck can we do to support it and i think one one other final lesson to really extract from all this is we're working on the confines of capital still um the W of A lost $2 million was bankrupt, was destroyed by this, by this, by this movement. And while it did bode well for conditions of miners, it ultimately destroyed so much of the

movement because of, because of, you know, who owns the resources. And that's something that still needs, you know, furthering figuring out. And there are other theorists that I haven't read that I have on my reading list, my reading, all, like, my reading lists like everyone else who should be is massive. And, you know, so there's more to learn from that, too. But this was definitely a really interesting, not just interesting, a fantastic, awesome thing to cover because of the learning about how guerrilla warfare tactics can work in our area and have been successful in the past.

And for as great as the accomplishments of this uprising and so many other uprisings have been, we do get the lesson that in order to put a final end to the things that caused these uprisings, the underlying oppression, there'll have to be a, rupture from the capitalist system that underlies all of these conflicts. And insofar as any revolutionary movement fails to transcend the overall class system, it'll always never be a full victory, right? And so we should honor those who came before us, understand and learn from them and salute them, but also realize that if we really want to get to a point where we can finally say, wow, that was actually a success. It will be synonymous with the topic.

of the capitalist and the world imperialist system. And so, you know, that's a lesson we can extract as well. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, Chris and Dave, thank you so much for coming on. This was a marathon of an episode, but it's worth it. And I think people will love it and learn a lot from it. I didn't know a lot about this battle coming in outside of the fact that, you know, it happened and what the basic outline of it was. And I learned so much just listening to this conversation and I know my listeners will as well. So thank you so much for the time you put into this to make it such a detailed and fascinating and at times hilarious and at other times dark account of this event. You really brought it to life and I'm deeply grateful for that. Before I let

you go, can you let listeners know what recommendations you would offer for anyone who wants to learn more about the Battle of Blair Mountain and then where people can find you and your show online yes absolutely um we will actually give you a bibliography and if you just want to post the books yeah we'll just do that because there's we don't have a list right now it's all scattered through the notes somewhere perfect but like i can put up a list on in audio i will definitely say read thunder in the mountain by by uh lawn savage it is absolutely fucking incredible it's a really good written it's really captivating it tells it a very he he takes it's very much narrative based. It was written in the early 70s and he talks with a lot of the miners who were in the part of the battle.

He speaks with like Bill Blizzard's son and everything and it's truly captivating. It's a wonderful piece. There's also, it's mostly historically accurate, but also just for a very entertaining piece. If this like really kind of tickles your fancy, so to speak, the movie, Mate Wan from 1987, it was directed by John Sales, who does the forward, actually, for Thunder in the Mountain. So, also an incredible, incredible film. Oh, us. Who are we? Oh, yeah. Who are we?

We are mandatory OT. We are the official podcast with the West Virginia IWW. We've been podcasting for a couple of years at this point. We're just, even though we're part of the IWW, as I think we stated early the show. Um, we get called tankies a lot on the internet. Um, if so that's, if that kind of says where we go, um, but we're definitely, I mean, we have like your show yourself. You know, we take, we actually took a lot of influence from this show, Brett, um, and wanting to really expand and look at different theorists. And I mean, we had for the fucking hell, we had Howie Hawkins on last

week. Um, if that says anything. And which was, which was interesting. I have my own thoughts on that, but that's off the air. Um, so, you know, it was fun but um so yeah that's kind of what we um we do all kinds of things we have a um like worker survey that i'll have um we'll probably ask you to put in the notes for for anyone who's working in or who lives or works in west virginia so we can try and help build a worker center got to use that non-profit uh system to uh you got exploit that to kick the kick chart the revolution try to find the revolution but um yeah you can you can find the podcast at mandatory o t on Twitter. More importantly than that, like we're also on SoundCloud, but even more importantly

than that is check out the West Virginia IWW on. No, not our only fans. God damn it. Check out the West Virginia IWW on Twitter and on Facebook at slash West Virginia IWW. Check us out just online, West Virginia, IWW.org. If you have any cool stories of... Maybe you just want to talk about like metal, you know, you can hit us up. And stop that. Any cool stories? You want to talk about the mid 2000s death core. I'm game for that.

Well, perfect. I guess we'll end it on that note. Solidarity. Yeah, fuck you, Chris. Solidarity with the West Virginia IWW. Check out mandatory OT. All the links in the show notes. Thank you both for coming on. We'll be in touch and without a doubt

we'll work together again in the future. Oh, hell yeah. Absolutely. Yes, thank you again. Thank you so much, Brett. Thank you for listening. RevLeft Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio or make a one-time donation and buy me a coffee.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. Thanks, we'll be in the show notes. Thank you.