Speaker 1: Hello America, and welcome to the Internet. I'm Robert Evans
Speaker 1: and this is a podcast. It's called Behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: and it's about bad people. That's the introduction that I
Speaker 1: have for you today and I hope you all enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: My guest today Spencer Grtindon. Spencer, how are you doing today? Oh?
Speaker 1: I'm great. Should I match that energy because I don't
Speaker 1: think that's possible. No, no, but you nailed it. That
Speaker 1: was perfect. That was that was the energy I brought
Speaker 1: you in to provide perfect. Spencer. Uh, you are um,
Speaker 1: I mean, among other things, you're kind of the reason
Speaker 1: uh that that that D and D A big part
Speaker 1: of the reason that D and D went from something
Speaker 1: that I shamefully hid from bullies when I was in
Speaker 1: high school. Uh, to something that is I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'll call it cool. I'm gonna say it's cool now
Speaker 1: to play Dungeons and Dragons and it's it's all on you, buddy.
Speaker 1: So thank you for that. This is my my opportunity
Speaker 1: to say that. Oh yeah, thank you for saying that.
Speaker 1: I mean I keep telling people that, but no one
Speaker 1: believes me. So that's validation I need. Now, you and
Speaker 1: I have casted a couple of pods together in the
Speaker 1: in the past, have we not? Yeah, you went on
Speaker 1: Harmon Town. It was twice twice, Yeah, twice, And it
Speaker 1: was fun. I mean, I don't know a lot of
Speaker 1: times we have people on that don't know much, Like
Speaker 1: it's not like they're not experts in their field or whatever,
Speaker 1: but they're just not on to talk about stuff that
Speaker 1: they have a real perspective on, or information or things
Speaker 1: that aren't pulled out of their ass. So it was
Speaker 1: really refreshing for that reason. Yeah, I mean I pull
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff out of my ass, but rarely
Speaker 1: on camera or a stage. So, how has your how's
Speaker 1: your quarantine? Ben Spencer? How are you? How are you
Speaker 1: holding up in the in the plague? Um? So it's
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of funny because I'm getting a bit
Speaker 1: too much of my roommate. We're kind of getting in
Speaker 1: each other's way, and um, I was like, man, it
Speaker 1: would be nice to be living alone. And then the
Speaker 1: other day we were doing errands together and she's like, man,
Speaker 1: it's so great that we're not living alone. And I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, okay, that's that's your your version of this.
Speaker 1: Then huh um, but I'm I'm getting a little stir crazy.
Speaker 1: I would like more space. In the past, I would
Speaker 1: just go for car rides to kind of just get
Speaker 1: myself some space. And I can't really do that. I mean, technically,
Speaker 1: maybe it just seems like a risk. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's really I don't know how California
Speaker 1: is handling it law wise. I think it's driving alone
Speaker 1: in your car is a pretty safe thing. Um, I
Speaker 1: would say, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm you know, It's one
Speaker 1: of those things I think everybody. I think everybody who's
Speaker 1: quarantined with like roommates or romantic partners, is like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, I wish I was alone right now. This
Speaker 1: would be so much easier if I was alone. And
Speaker 1: I think everyone who's quarantined alone is like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I wish I had a roommate or I wish my
Speaker 1: boyfriend a girlfriend was here. It's terrible being alone. And
Speaker 1: I think the answer is that it just sucks to
Speaker 1: be quarantined. Um. Yeah, that's that's the less that I'm
Speaker 1: taking out of this, is that it's not great to
Speaker 1: be locked in in your house. Well, no matter who
Speaker 1: it's with. I feel like I love being locked in
Speaker 1: my house, so it would just be interesting. I wish
Speaker 1: I had like a good control group to really make
Speaker 1: this experiment pop. Now, Spencer, let me ask you. The
Speaker 1: President has recently stated that people should liberate a series
Speaker 1: of of Midwestern states. Have you have you jumped onto
Speaker 1: the call to start the boogaloo? Are you? Are you
Speaker 1: grabbing your go bag and your a R fifteen to
Speaker 1: to to liberate the sparrow in your neighborhood. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have to come back up at force. It all
Speaker 1: sounds present liberation, you know, like who can get Who
Speaker 1: could stand opposed to that? That is a great question,
Speaker 1: and it actually ties in a little bit to our
Speaker 1: episode today because obviously everyone in America is thinking about, um,
Speaker 1: a civil war, like like a new one, right um,
Speaker 1: And you know we're also there's a lot of thoughts
Speaker 1: back to the old Civil War. You know. It's some
Speaker 1: of those protests in Michigan and whatnot. People are waving
Speaker 1: Confederate flags, which doesn't really make a lot of sense
Speaker 1: in Michigan, but that's just remember the Confederate state of Michigan. Yes,
Speaker 1: the great Jefferson Davis, famed detroitter. Yeah, so we're all
Speaker 1: thinking about civil wars. And you know, when people in
Speaker 1: America think about the civil wars, we have to think about,
Speaker 1: you know, the big civil war, which is civil wars
Speaker 1: go worldwide in the top three or seven something somewhere
Speaker 1: around there definitely a great civil war. Um or they're
Speaker 1: thinking about like the possibility of a new civil war,
Speaker 1: and people will often call that the Second American Civil War.
Speaker 1: But what if, Spencer, what if I were to tell
Speaker 1: you that this country actually already had a second civil war,
Speaker 1: one with machine guns and aerial bombardment and trenches and
Speaker 1: blood and guts. What if I were to tell you
Speaker 1: that already happened. Well, I would have to laugh you
Speaker 1: out of the room. Well that would be hard because
Speaker 1: we are quarantined in separate states, So I would have
Speaker 1: to laugh. Yeah, laugh me off of the internet. Well,
Speaker 1: don't start laughing yet, Spencer, because it turns out there
Speaker 1: was a second American Civil War and it happened in
Speaker 1: West Virginia. Now, most US history textbooks have a painful
Speaker 1: allergy to talking about it because it all hinges on
Speaker 1: the labor movement, and for whatever reason, the people who
Speaker 1: write our textbooks don't like to talk about the reason
Speaker 1: that weekends exist. Uh, but today, in this two part episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain? No? Literally, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not a big history awesome even that sounds wild. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a fucking cool story. Um, it's like, it's like, uh,
Speaker 1: it's a cyberpunk story in a steampunk setting. That's that's
Speaker 1: how I would if I was if I was trying
Speaker 1: to like, if I was trying to sell the Netflix
Speaker 1: TV show version of this, That's how I would package it.
Speaker 1: In a fucking elevator pitch. Um, it's pretty cool. I mean,
Speaker 1: a lot of people die horribly and a lot of
Speaker 1: people get right. But it's like, just I don't know
Speaker 1: what point I was making. It's interesting. That is very cyberpunk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it all starts with coal Spencer. In the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, coal became increasingly critical to the economic productivity
Speaker 1: and the infrastructure of the United States, and the richest
Speaker 1: veins of coal were underground, So this necessitated large groups
Speaker 1: of men writing down to those veins through vast holes
Speaker 1: in the earth and hacking out big chunks of coal.
Speaker 1: The structural supports that like kept them alive and kept
Speaker 1: the world from collapsing on them were often also made
Speaker 1: of coal. Um. It was extraordinarily dangerous. There was like
Speaker 1: trapped gas, sulfur gas and ship everywhere, or methane gas everywhere,
Speaker 1: and like explosions happened all the time. Mine collapses were
Speaker 1: very common. Um, It's one of the most dangerous jobs
Speaker 1: people ever had, to the extent that like, like, like,
Speaker 1: more Americans died from coal collapses over the decades than
Speaker 1: died fighting in Vietnam. Um, I wanted a lot of Minecraft,
Speaker 1: and that does not track with my experience. Minecraft. Um
Speaker 1: has benefited a lot from the decades of mind safety reforms.
Speaker 1: So thank you, Thank you Minecraft, Thank you Notch famed
Speaker 1: Q and honor and fascist for yeah. So UM for
Speaker 1: an example of some soul fucking the terrible cold disasters,
Speaker 1: because I know everybody comes to the show for that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Um, there was the Ecoles mind disaster
Speaker 1: in West Virginia in April of nineteen fourteen. This was
Speaker 1: a methane explosion that occurred while two hundred and forty
Speaker 1: six miners were underground and a hundred and eighty of
Speaker 1: them died instantly. Uh. In nineteen o nine, there was
Speaker 1: a mine explosion in Cherry, Illinois, which destroyed the entire
Speaker 1: town and killed two hundred and fifty nine men and boys.
Speaker 1: Because an awful lot of boys worked in mind their
Speaker 1: little hands could reach the coal better. Um, so that's cool.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying. Yeah, it sucks. Between eighteen ninety and nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: at least twenty six thousand American miners were killed on
Speaker 1: the job, mostly in explosion. Twelve thousand miners were maimed
Speaker 1: every year, often permanently disabled. So not a great job.
Speaker 1: I would say, yeah, less, I think less people are
Speaker 1: named podcasting every year. So if he is, are less
Speaker 1: than twelve thousand people nimed while podcasting every year? I
Speaker 1: cannot confirm it, Tony. I'm trying to get those numbers
Speaker 1: up with the machetes, but we still I don't. I mean,
Speaker 1: I may be maimed a thousand people in a year,
Speaker 1: you know, if I'm really, if I'm really getting the
Speaker 1: let out. So it sucked to be a coal miner.
Speaker 1: It was not a great job, right. Uh. Men took
Speaker 1: the gig because they needed money, and mining often paid
Speaker 1: well um or at least the pay that the boss
Speaker 1: is advertised was generally good. Capitalism being what it was,
Speaker 1: the people who owned the minds had a variety of
Speaker 1: fun tactics that they used to funk over the human
Speaker 1: beings who may their business profitable. One of these tactics
Speaker 1: was called cribbing. See, miners were paid based on the
Speaker 1: tonnage of coal that they mind. Every car that left
Speaker 1: the mines was supposed to hold a specific payload of
Speaker 1: one ton or two thousand pounds. However, the mine operator
Speaker 1: got to actually purchase and set up the cars, and
Speaker 1: they would regularly rig them to hold more cold than
Speaker 1: they were supposed to hold. The wooden contraptions that they
Speaker 1: added to the sides of the cart to enable this
Speaker 1: were called cribs, and hence the name cribbing. It was
Speaker 1: not uncommon for miners to be paid for digging out
Speaker 1: two thousand pounds when they had actually dug out twenty pounds.
Speaker 1: So that's stealing five pounds of coal from a minor.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of of bullshit. So like they put
Speaker 1: like a wooden basket around it, so they add more coal,
Speaker 1: and then they essentially said that was one load of
Speaker 1: coal when it was more like two or one and
Speaker 1: a half. Yeah, it was more like one in a quarter,
Speaker 1: but like, yeah, yeah, they would. They would get extra
Speaker 1: coal for free. Basically, yeah, so that's cool. Mine operators
Speaker 1: would also, Yeah, it's not great. It's not great. Mine
Speaker 1: operators would all so often docked the pay of their
Speaker 1: miners when they found slate and rock mixed in with
Speaker 1: the coal. The man who did the weighing was the
Speaker 1: judge of this, and since he was paid directly by
Speaker 1: the mine owner, it was not uncommon for him to
Speaker 1: just cheat the miners and lie about how much non
Speaker 1: coal wound up in the coal. Um, so that's cool too.
Speaker 1: And then of course your skin is crawling. Yeah, that's horrible.
Speaker 1: It's just oh man, it gets so much worse. I mean,
Speaker 1: just as a spoiler, we're about to talk about something
Speaker 1: called burecraticized rape. So strap in man on a great episode.
Speaker 1: But first let's talk about company stores. Um, have you
Speaker 1: even heard that song that goes you work sixteen tons
Speaker 1: and what do you get another day? Older and deeper
Speaker 1: in it? St Peter, don't you call me because I
Speaker 1: can't go own my soul to the company store that song. Yeah, definitely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well it's it's a song about coal mining back in
Speaker 1: these days, and the company's store, um is a thing
Speaker 1: that like a lot of mining towns or mines would have,
Speaker 1: and they didn't start out as necessarily exploitative. So like
Speaker 1: a lot of mines in the late eighteen hundreds in
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds were in the middle of nowhere, and
Speaker 1: there would be like no town near the mine, and
Speaker 1: the miners would have to live nearby because it was
Speaker 1: just the only way for the work to happen. So
Speaker 1: the company would have to set up a store where
Speaker 1: they could buy food and necessities. So like not inherently exploitative,
Speaker 1: but having the only place where miners can shop be
Speaker 1: owned by their employer also is super prone to exploitation, right,
Speaker 1: Like you can see how an asshole who would do
Speaker 1: something like Cribbin could also take advantage of that bullshit. Um. So,
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of research done in company stores
Speaker 1: and a surprising amount of them actually don't seem to
Speaker 1: have been abusive, and prices were in line with prices
Speaker 1: at independent businesses, uh, But a lot of them were
Speaker 1: horrifically abusive and would like jack up prices to wagh
Speaker 1: above what they would cost, and some companies would actually
Speaker 1: make it would ban or fire miners from going into
Speaker 1: other towns to shop at stores that weren't owned by
Speaker 1: the company. Yeah, and West Virginia was a place where
Speaker 1: this was particularly common because West Virginia then and now
Speaker 1: was out in the middle of fucking nowhere. Um like
Speaker 1: it's it is just nowhere stand um, So you could
Speaker 1: really get away with a lot of fucking over miners
Speaker 1: out there. Um. And another way they would suck over
Speaker 1: miners was debt peonage. So pay for miners at this
Speaker 1: period happened like once a month, and you also had
Speaker 1: to have been working for a full month to get
Speaker 1: any pay um. And obviously I don't know if you're
Speaker 1: aware of this, but if people don't get food and
Speaker 1: water for a month, they die. Uh yeah, I've heard
Speaker 1: such things. Yeah. Yeah, So companies would have to offer
Speaker 1: script to workers who hadn't gotten paid yet, and this
Speaker 1: was like basically an advance on their salary um. And
Speaker 1: if you know, workers didn't make quite as much as
Speaker 1: they thought they were going to make and they'd already
Speaker 1: spent the company's script, they could wind up in a
Speaker 1: situation where they were indebted to the company for long
Speaker 1: periods of time and basically just kept having to take
Speaker 1: script to keep their family fed and never quite got
Speaker 1: out of debts. So it's like you, some really bad
Speaker 1: situations happened in this ship, um, and company stores came
Speaker 1: along with a lot of other things, because in a
Speaker 1: lot of cases you had company town. So like the
Speaker 1: company would be responsible for like the school, and be
Speaker 1: responsible for the store, would be the responsible for housing
Speaker 1: all of their workers. That doesn't necessarily sound bad. Um.
Speaker 1: Although company houses were often squalid hovels, they also sometimes
Speaker 1: were houses of decent quality. But the fact that you
Speaker 1: were living in a house owned by your company meant
Speaker 1: that you had no real security. If you got fired
Speaker 1: for any reason, the company would kick you out of
Speaker 1: your home the same day because you didn't have any
Speaker 1: kind of lease or legal protections, so they had the
Speaker 1: ability to kick you out of your home and make
Speaker 1: you homeless in the middle of the fucking mountains at
Speaker 1: the drop of a hat. Um. So that's in a
Speaker 1: great situation. I don't know, does does your industry work
Speaker 1: that way? Spencer? Mine does not? Yeah? No, uh, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's the parallels to like your what
Speaker 1: do you call it? Medical insurance coverage is very it
Speaker 1: is it is to me, but it's similarly, Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: there are definitely modern day parallels, but we should also
Speaker 1: acknowledge it was way worse back then, even though it
Speaker 1: still sucks now. But like, yeah, it's that's actually a
Speaker 1: very good point you make that, Like it's kind of
Speaker 1: like health insurance where you can be fucked immediately if
Speaker 1: your company kicks you off mountains in the metaphorical mountains
Speaker 1: and the mountains of not being able to get your insulin,
Speaker 1: which I guess is I don't know, let's say mount Hood.
Speaker 1: Mount Hood is the mountain of insulin. I've always said, um, okay,
Speaker 1: So yeah, there's a song called Company Town by Carl
Speaker 1: Sandberg that I think confys how many miners felt about
Speaker 1: their situation. I'm just going to read out the lyrics. Um,
Speaker 1: you live in a company house, you go to a
Speaker 1: company school, you work for this company. According to company rules,
Speaker 1: you all drink company water, and all use company lights.
Speaker 1: The company preacher teaches us what the company thinks is right.
Speaker 1: So there's like that video game, right that just can
Speaker 1: amount about like you're in space, but it's kind of
Speaker 1: like this, Uh what the fund is that game? Um
Speaker 1: Animal cross No, no, no, no no, although that has
Speaker 1: its own there's a lot, a lot of lessons about
Speaker 1: capitalism and animal crossing. Are you talking about the one
Speaker 1: where you have to like junk a space hulk and
Speaker 1: that's your job for like in the outer worlds, the
Speaker 1: outer worlds? Yeah, and it's got like town you're in
Speaker 1: like a planet that's owned by the company, and they've
Speaker 1: got a preacher I think, and like yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: they're this is like this is all based on actual
Speaker 1: labor history, like that some of the ship in that
Speaker 1: game they just have laser pistols, which they did not
Speaker 1: back then. As a heads up, Yeah, which is lame.
Speaker 1: They should have had laser pistols. This would be a
Speaker 1: funner story different, Yeah, maybe not. Um So. Company stores
Speaker 1: also gave the company a way to increase profits. When
Speaker 1: the value of cold dropped, they could just soak their
Speaker 1: employees by raising the price of goods, and company houses
Speaker 1: gave them a strong lever to raise up if employees
Speaker 1: ever complained about working conditions. If you don't like that
Speaker 1: the boss is one ton, cart is actually one and
Speaker 1: a half tons. Well, now, you're homeless, so like, yeah,
Speaker 1: if this sounds a little bit like slavery to you,
Speaker 1: it actually did to a number of black miners who
Speaker 1: were former slaves themselves. So as a result of a
Speaker 1: lot of the stuff we're gonna talk about in this episode,
Speaker 1: there were a number of Senate inquiries, and in one
Speaker 1: of the Senate inquiries, the Senate wound up talking to
Speaker 1: a black miner named Mr. Eccles, and he asked about
Speaker 1: like what he thought was the problem with the mining industry.
Speaker 1: So here's what he said in the Senate quote. I
Speaker 1: will tell you the miners asked the contractors or operators
Speaker 1: to give them an opportunity to weigh the coal, and
Speaker 1: they announced that they will not weigh it. They promised
Speaker 1: to pay us by the ton, but they don't do it.
Speaker 1: They promised, according to whatever the coal is, to pay
Speaker 1: us by the ton, and we want them to put
Speaker 1: it on the scales. All they do is say that
Speaker 1: so and so much, and we have to take it.
Speaker 1: There are some things that we cannot stand for. I
Speaker 1: was raised a slave. My master and mistress called me
Speaker 1: and I answered, and I know the time when I
Speaker 1: was a slave, and I felt just like I feel now.
Speaker 1: So it is not, um devaluing the suffering of slavery
Speaker 1: to compare what these miners went through with slavery, because
Speaker 1: some of them were former slaves and they specifically said,
Speaker 1: this is actually not all that different. It wasn't there
Speaker 1: like in it farming or something which seems very similar
Speaker 1: share share cropping. Yeah, there's a lot of similarities with
Speaker 1: share cropping, but that is that is a story for
Speaker 1: another day. Um. And this is you know miners where
Speaker 1: there were a lot of black miners and white miners,
Speaker 1: and there were times when they worked together, in times
Speaker 1: when they would like wind up, like white miners would
Speaker 1: throw black miners under the bus to get a better deal.
Speaker 1: Like both of those things happened. Um. We're not going
Speaker 1: to get into the kind of racial history of of
Speaker 1: the coal labor strikes and stuff as much as maybe
Speaker 1: we ought to, because there's just a lot these are
Speaker 1: all all labor history is very complicated and nuanced. So
Speaker 1: I'm doing my best to tell a discreete story, and
Speaker 1: I apologize for some things that will not be covered
Speaker 1: in as much detail as they should. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: coal miners sucked. Coal mining sucked. Coal miners were the
Speaker 1: same as everybody else. Podcast takes a hard stance against
Speaker 1: Suck you coal miners. We just pivot right to just
Speaker 1: tearing a hole through coal miners, and the companies were
Speaker 1: right because these people were motherfucker's Yet. Um, yeah, this
Speaker 1: has been building to me just attacking coal miners for
Speaker 1: six episodes. No, okay, So yeah, all the problems I've
Speaker 1: talked about existed for coal miners everywhere in the United States,
Speaker 1: from New Mexico to Michigan. But one particular piece of fury,
Speaker 1: and maybe the most abusive thing that ever happened to
Speaker 1: American coal miners, was unique to West Virginia, which also
Speaker 1: had a lot of the richest coal veins in the country.
Speaker 1: So back in the Old Testament and the Book of Genesis,
Speaker 1: there's this guy named Esau, right, and Esau was a
Speaker 1: starving hunter who stumbled into his brother's tent begging for food,
Speaker 1: and his his younger brother, Jacob, agreed defeat Esau, but
Speaker 1: only in exchange for Esau giving up his birthright as
Speaker 1: the firstborn son in the family. A bunch of other
Speaker 1: stuff happens in biblical story, but it's not important. I
Speaker 1: just needed to tell you who Esau is so we
Speaker 1: can get to the rest of this. So, mine operators
Speaker 1: had a problem, Spencer, and that problem was that sometimes
Speaker 1: their miners would get sick or would be injured and
Speaker 1: would not be able to work for a period of time.
Speaker 1: And since there was no social safety and at all,
Speaker 1: this meant that they and their family would probably starve
Speaker 1: to death. Now, the company didn't necessarily want these people
Speaker 1: just to kick them out, because a lot of times
Speaker 1: they'd get better. And you know, coal miners who were
Speaker 1: good at their job are valuable um. So they found
Speaker 1: a way to deal with this that was still profitable
Speaker 1: to them. And the way that they dealt with this
Speaker 1: was to take usually to take the next oldest male
Speaker 1: member of the family and make them take their father's place.
Speaker 1: But some children were too small to effectively work a
Speaker 1: coal mine, and in these cases the company provided the
Speaker 1: wife of a stricken miner with what was known as
Speaker 1: esau script. Now this was a special type of script
Speaker 1: currency only usable for food and other necessities. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote now from an article I found on
Speaker 1: CounterPunch based on the book Truth Be Told. Perspectives on
Speaker 1: the Great West Virginia Mine War by Labor his storyan
Speaker 1: Wes Harris quote. ESA was issued only two women, and
Speaker 1: it was a form of script that would enable a
Speaker 1: woman to purchase food for her children during the time
Speaker 1: that her husband could not work. The ESAU was only
Speaker 1: good for thirty days, and if her husband went back
Speaker 1: to work within those thirty days, then the company would
Speaker 1: forgive the debt, and if he did not go back
Speaker 1: to work at the end of thirty days, then the
Speaker 1: script became a loan that was due in payable and
Speaker 1: full on day thirty. At the time, most coal miners
Speaker 1: wives did not hold jobs, but they still had to
Speaker 1: pay back the loan, which was a collateralized loan, and
Speaker 1: the women themselves were the collateral. Their physical selves would
Speaker 1: be used to pay the debt. Yeah, you've picking up
Speaker 1: on what this means. Yeah, a little yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was coal mining rape dollars. That's what we're talking
Speaker 1: about here, coal miner rape bucks. Yeah. Um. So the women,
Speaker 1: I mean, you could quibble, I guess over whether or
Speaker 1: not to call it rape. The women who did this
Speaker 1: for their families tended to consent in the sense that
Speaker 1: they agreed to give up access to their bodies in
Speaker 1: exchange for ESAU script to stop their family from starving
Speaker 1: to death. But yeah, exactly, like it's it's not really
Speaker 1: consent if your children will die if you don't do
Speaker 1: it right. Yeah. Yeah, they the coal mining the company
Speaker 1: had hostages. Yes, I feel comfortable calling it broadly rape. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: The article continues. Many of these incidents allegedly occurred at
Speaker 1: the Whipple Colliery Company's store, located in Oak Hill, West Virginia,
Speaker 1: where woman would walk up to a room on the
Speaker 1: third floor to try on shoes and in the process
Speaker 1: be raped by coal company guards. The Whipple Company Store
Speaker 1: was one of three company stores built by Cold Barren
Speaker 1: Justice Collins in Fayette County, West Virginia. Joy Lynn, who
Speaker 1: now co owns the Whipple Company Store and has turned
Speaker 1: it into a museum, told client that she has had
Speaker 1: as many as ten women visit the museum, who referred
Speaker 1: to the third floor space as the rape room because
Speaker 1: that is how the mine guards forced the women to
Speaker 1: pay for their shoes. They would have to keep their
Speaker 1: mouths shut tight about what had happened to them upstairs,
Speaker 1: Lynn said, because the mining companies would threaten to kick
Speaker 1: them out of their company owned houses. Yeah, so that's cool,
Speaker 1: it's not are you a it's not it's not good.
Speaker 1: But I don't know this is this is terrible though.
Speaker 1: My mind's going to that. But like what's the exchange rate? Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, did is that something they quantified? But it's
Speaker 1: like they got shoes? Yeah, I don't know what. That
Speaker 1: doesn't seem I mean, nothing is worth anything, but like,
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong, but it's just like I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it was more like while you're in I mean,
Speaker 1: so there actually was an amount of an exchange rate
Speaker 1: that was set up. And we don't have as much
Speaker 1: detail on the system as we want because it was
Speaker 1: very much kept under wraps and these women did not
Speaker 1: like to talk about it, and the company certainly didn't
Speaker 1: like to talk about it. Um. The term that one
Speaker 1: labor historian used for it is bureaucraticized rape um. And
Speaker 1: there would be situations where because of their debt, women
Speaker 1: would be essentially rented to a coal mining company and
Speaker 1: sometimes like young girls, like a wife would if she
Speaker 1: was too old for the company to one or whatever,
Speaker 1: would give up her daughter. And there were cases of
Speaker 1: like twelve year old girls um who were ted out
Speaker 1: to the coal mom company for like periods of four
Speaker 1: to six months and sometimes more than once. Like, you
Speaker 1: incur some debt, you give up your daughter for four
Speaker 1: to six months. Uh, she pays off the debt than
Speaker 1: you incur more debt and you give her back up.
Speaker 1: Uh Like, stuff like that would be would be set
Speaker 1: a lot of the time. So usually it was like
Speaker 1: a set limit of time that you would have to
Speaker 1: spend prostituting yourself for your daughter to coal company guards
Speaker 1: in exchange for you know, necessities, right, yeah, so that's good.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, so, um, coal mercenaries, like the guards who
Speaker 1: manned the coal mines were generally mercenaries. A lot of
Speaker 1: them are former soldiers or cops or detectives and stuff
Speaker 1: who got hired by the coal companies to brutally enforce
Speaker 1: order in the mining camps. Uh. They took to calling
Speaker 1: these women comfort girls or comfort wives, which is actually,
Speaker 1: interestingly enough, a term virtually identical to the one Japanese
Speaker 1: troops used for the sex slaves they took during the
Speaker 1: occupation of Mancheria, which is neat little bit of historical
Speaker 1: resonance there. That's always fun. Yeah yeah, yeah. So this
Speaker 1: was not something that people discussed a lot at the time,
Speaker 1: and this has led to a lot of controversy around
Speaker 1: the system among historians, which we'll talk about at the
Speaker 1: very end of the second part of this episode. But
Speaker 1: historian West Harris gives one reason why the vast majority
Speaker 1: of women caught up in the system never said anything
Speaker 1: about it. Quote my senses, they weren't ashamed. It wasn't
Speaker 1: something they were embarrassed about. It was very much in
Speaker 1: the same vein as the men going into the coal
Speaker 1: mine and taking risks they had no business taking. It's like,
Speaker 1: you do what you have to do to feed your family.
Speaker 1: They didn't talk about it, but they certainly weren't ashamed
Speaker 1: of it. Why would you be ashamed of feeding your kids? So, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some complicated ship. But Spencer, you know what won't
Speaker 1: moleste children as script currency? Um. I can think of
Speaker 1: a lot of things. Only one the products and oh boy,
Speaker 1: this this is a bad ad plug. Um no, yeah,
Speaker 1: but by these purchase items please who we are back
Speaker 1: and we are just still recovering from that really really
Speaker 1: rough ad transition. Hit my head on that segue. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's bad. It's as bad as the segue that the
Speaker 1: guy who owned the segway company plunged off of that
Speaker 1: cliff in Scotland on that's a bad segue. Ye oh boy,
Speaker 1: good Lord in heaven. Um. So yeah. In short, what
Speaker 1: I've been talking about all episodes so far is just
Speaker 1: kind of making the point that the coal miners in American,
Speaker 1: particularly in West Virginia, had it rough. They had a
Speaker 1: lot of bullshit to deal with, They were not treated well,
Speaker 1: and they had reason to be very angry. Um and
Speaker 1: people all throughout history have rebelled violently against their leaders
Speaker 1: for a lot less than coal miners put up with. Um. Yeah. Now, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: coal miners tended to be poor as shit. They had
Speaker 1: no real political influence, and at least not on the
Speaker 1: national level, and so the only way they could combat
Speaker 1: all these abuses was to come together and form a
Speaker 1: labor union. In eighteen eighty five, coal miners formed the
Speaker 1: National Federation of Miners, which eventually evolved into the United
Speaker 1: Mine Workers or u w M or u MW. Sorry
Speaker 1: I just mistrote it there. Uh. In his book The
Speaker 1: Battle of Blair Mountain, historian Robert Shogun writes this about
Speaker 1: the U m W quote. The UMW grew rapidly, but
Speaker 1: it faced a major problem in one state, West Virginia,
Speaker 1: where the union movement lagged far behind. This reality had
Speaker 1: been driven home to the union in eight nine seven
Speaker 1: when it staged a nationwide walkout in protest against wage
Speaker 1: cuts brought on by the depression that devastated the economy
Speaker 1: for most of the decade. Over a hundred thousand miners
Speaker 1: responded and the strike paralyzed the northern fields. Now, like
Speaker 1: most such fights, this strike was essentially a waiting comp addition,
Speaker 1: if the mining company ran out of money before the
Speaker 1: miners starved, the miners won and got what they wanted,
Speaker 1: and West Virginia there were enough non union mines to
Speaker 1: allow big business to hold out, So the new Union
Speaker 1: called in for backup, bringing in the big guns of
Speaker 1: the American Federation of Labor in to try to help
Speaker 1: them rally non union miners to the cause. As the
Speaker 1: struggle picked up steam, famous left wing organizers flocked to
Speaker 1: West Virginia, men like Eugene V. Deb's, founder of the
Speaker 1: American Railways Union, and Mother Jones, who'd grown prominent from
Speaker 1: organizing miners in Pennsylvania. Do you see what's happening here?
Speaker 1: Like they're the mind. Miners are trying to strike, but
Speaker 1: enough mines in West Virginia or non unionized that, like
Speaker 1: the mind companies are able to to to to pull
Speaker 1: out enough coal that they don't go bankrupt, so they
Speaker 1: hold on. So like, the only way for the mining
Speaker 1: for the unions to like win in the long term
Speaker 1: is to unionize miners in West Virginia, so they start
Speaker 1: bringing people into West Virginia to help them organized miners there.
Speaker 1: So workers outside West Virginia, supported by groups like the
Speaker 1: a f L, supported their brothers in the mines, and
Speaker 1: so the mine owners found themselves forced to get creative
Speaker 1: to counter all of this, And by creative I mean violet.
Speaker 1: Company police began cracking down on organizers at non union
Speaker 1: mines and forcing them out of the state. Since these
Speaker 1: miners all lived in company housing, it was a simple
Speaker 1: manner of firing and evicting anybody who talked about joining
Speaker 1: a union. Workers around the country started to hold mass
Speaker 1: protests and support of the workers in West Virginia. But
Speaker 1: solidarity only goes so far. One organizer sent by the
Speaker 1: a f L to work with black miners in McDowell
Speaker 1: County wrote that trying to plan under the thumb of
Speaker 1: company police was quote taking one's life into his hands. Quote,
Speaker 1: while we never had any injunctions issued against us, like
Speaker 1: by a court, we had men in winchesters against us,
Speaker 1: which were in most cases just as effective. So he's
Speaker 1: pointing out it was actually illegal to try to stop
Speaker 1: these guys from organizing, but like like you couldn't like
Speaker 1: legally stop them, right like courts couldn't stop them from
Speaker 1: trying to organize. They had a right to do that,
Speaker 1: but you could just send out men to shoot them.
Speaker 1: Um and since there was no law on a lot
Speaker 1: of these places, that worked just as well. And company
Speaker 1: police regularly conducted drive by shootings. They would abduct and
Speaker 1: beat organizers and often even murder them. John Mitchell, who
Speaker 1: became the president of the United mind Workers, eventually was
Speaker 1: attacked by company guards at a meeting. They opened fire
Speaker 1: and he only survived by jumping into a mountain stream
Speaker 1: and swimming away. So this is like like we're not
Speaker 1: talking about just like you know, Amazon just got very
Speaker 1: rightly slammed because they fired a guy who was trying
Speaker 1: to create a like organize a union of warehouse workers,
Speaker 1: which is like fucked up and should be illegal. We'll
Speaker 1: see if they actually face any consequences to it. Um,
Speaker 1: and we shouldn't we I'm not gonna say that, like
Speaker 1: Amazon shouldn't be slammed viciously for what they've done. But
Speaker 1: it was like the stakes were a lot higher back
Speaker 1: in the the these days or those days, right, like
Speaker 1: they were like machine gunning people. Yeah, it's intense, it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool, pretty pretty cool, Spencer. Yeah, well, it's like
Speaker 1: there's not I mean, they're not shooting people these days,
Speaker 1: but there's not a lot of consequences for sucking over
Speaker 1: people who try to unionize these days. Right in the
Speaker 1: court of laws doesn't really go very well, no, because
Speaker 1: like you know, they have all of the money in
Speaker 1: the entire world, so they can, you know, even if
Speaker 1: what they're doing is illegal, they can elongate the court
Speaker 1: case that will eventually, you know, I think it's probable
Speaker 1: that Amazon will eventually pay fines for what they're doing,
Speaker 1: but they'll have made so much more money by breaking
Speaker 1: the law by the time. Like that, I'm sure they
Speaker 1: have been counters who are like, these laws we can
Speaker 1: afford to break because the fines will probably be this
Speaker 1: amount and will make this amount by breaking the law,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, I mean a fine is just a
Speaker 1: price for breaking the law. It's like you actually can
Speaker 1: break the law if you pay the law brick tax. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: which is why instead of finds the company that, in
Speaker 1: my opinion, instead of finding Amazon when they are caught
Speaker 1: doing something like this, Jeff Bezos should be forced to
Speaker 1: stand in crotchless pants, uh, in front of a group
Speaker 1: of we'll pick by lottery, let's say a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty employees from the specific factory UM where the violation occurred,
Speaker 1: and they each get to kick him in the nuts,
Speaker 1: and it's televised that zombie song that you were taunting
Speaker 1: me with by the Cranberries. I love that song, A
Speaker 1: great song about the Irish Civil War. UM. I don't
Speaker 1: see why we're bringing that into here, but I do
Speaker 1: think that Jeff Bezos would think twice before cracking down
Speaker 1: on unions if he had to be kicked in the
Speaker 1: nuts for several hours by a hundred and fifty different people,
Speaker 1: and over and over and over again, twice every time
Speaker 1: you heard that pretty good cover of the song by
Speaker 1: state radio. But this is beside the point. So in
Speaker 1: many rural counties, the local sheriff's department was completely owned
Speaker 1: by one or more mining companies, and normal police were
Speaker 1: very regularly owned as strike breakers. It's almost as if
Speaker 1: police are I don't know, you might call them like
Speaker 1: if if we could divide people who were from people
Speaker 1: who have capital into classes, and police are in the
Speaker 1: same class as miners, but they're like kind of betraying
Speaker 1: them in exchange for money, like a traitor to their class.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know. I'm sure no one's
Speaker 1: had this thought other than me. Um. So, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: most infamous example of this happened in eight the Latimer
Speaker 1: massacre in Pennsylvania. A hundred and fifty armed Luzerne County
Speaker 1: deputies confronted three to four hundred immigrant coal miners on
Speaker 1: their way to a pro union protest. They've fired into
Speaker 1: the crowd of peaceful demonstrators, hitting many in the back
Speaker 1: and killing nineteen people. Um, but ship like this happened
Speaker 1: all the time, you would regularly have police just start
Speaker 1: shooting into a crowd. Um, because that's actually a really
Speaker 1: good way. I don't know if you've ever tried to
Speaker 1: break up a crowd, but firing wildly into it tends
Speaker 1: to people don't like that. Yeah, oddly enough, you can't
Speaker 1: stay there. No, No, most people don't, yeah, exactly. Most
Speaker 1: people hate bullets for reasons that I think are mysterious,
Speaker 1: but there's documentation of them. So despite numerous atrocities, the
Speaker 1: miners of the UMW held out. They viewed what was
Speaker 1: happening as a struggle for their very survival. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from a union official named Frank Keney, who
Speaker 1: was a participant in a lot of this stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: a native West Virginia. There are others like me working
Speaker 1: in the minds here. We don't propose to get out
Speaker 1: of the way when a lot of capitalists from New
Speaker 1: York and London come down here and tell us to
Speaker 1: get off the earth. They played that game on the
Speaker 1: American Indian. They gave him the end of the log
Speaker 1: to sit on and then pushed him off. That we
Speaker 1: don't propose to be pushed off. They say that we
Speaker 1: shall not organize West Virginia. They are mistaken. If Frank
Speaker 1: Keney can't do it, someone will take his place who can.
Speaker 1: But West Virginia will be organized, and it will be
Speaker 1: organized completely. So a lot of brave people in the
Speaker 1: Union movement at this period um but also they're like
Speaker 1: it's almost like a situation. I think what Keney would
Speaker 1: say is like, it's not even bravery, there's just nothing.
Speaker 1: It's it's the choice between organizing or extermination. They will
Speaker 1: kill us all by by chiseling away at our lives
Speaker 1: if we don't do this. And it seems like they
Speaker 1: probably had real world like kind of analogs that they
Speaker 1: can see in very recent history. Is like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: happening to us. Yeah, they were probably a bit woker
Speaker 1: than the average American. Like you see, Kenny, they're kind
Speaker 1: of acknowledging that, like what was done to the Native
Speaker 1: Americans was horrific and like seeing that like, oh and
Speaker 1: now kind of the descendants of the people who killed
Speaker 1: all of them, um, are are executing the same sort
Speaker 1: of thing here. Like that's his attitude, which is at
Speaker 1: least acknowledging that what happened to the native peoples of
Speaker 1: this continent was bad. Um. So that's interesting. Like you
Speaker 1: can see some like early sort of intersectionality solidarity, like
Speaker 1: that kind of thought starting to get woven through the
Speaker 1: labor movement, um say yeah, and eventually through blood, toil
Speaker 1: and tiers. The miners of West Virginia forced their employers
Speaker 1: to the table. The result of their victory was the
Speaker 1: Central Competitive Field Agreement, a sort of magna carta between
Speaker 1: miners and mine operators in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: It did not fix prices for coal, but it's set
Speaker 1: a scale for wages and established some minimal conditions from miners.
Speaker 1: The biggest win was that miners got an eight hour
Speaker 1: work day, which is better than a however long until
Speaker 1: you collapse deat of a heart attack work day. Now,
Speaker 1: the success of the eight nine seven strike drew huge
Speaker 1: amounts of people to the United Mine Workers Banner. By
Speaker 1: nineteen o one, it had more than a quarter of
Speaker 1: a million members. In a few short years, this very
Speaker 1: new union had become the largest union in the country.
Speaker 1: But all was still not well, and in the wake
Speaker 1: of the strike, mine operators did their best to claw
Speaker 1: back as much as they could from their employees. One
Speaker 1: major tactic for doing this was to have the check wayman,
Speaker 1: the guys who weighed the coal for the company, rigged
Speaker 1: the company scales to show lower weights than we're actually
Speaker 1: being pulled through. UM, so these keep finding ways to
Speaker 1: funk with with with miners On the weights, um, And
Speaker 1: so the miners would be like, no, we need to
Speaker 1: have union men. They're watching the weighing of the coal,
Speaker 1: and the company said, no, you can't do that, YadA
Speaker 1: YadA YadA um. And as the nineteen hundreds dawned, unions
Speaker 1: began agitating against this practice too, as described in this
Speaker 1: minor ballad quote, union miners stand together, he'd no operator's tail.
Speaker 1: Keep your hand upon the dollar and your eye upon
Speaker 1: the scale. Good songs from miners in this period. So
Speaker 1: things were particularly bad in West Virginia, as is usual
Speaker 1: even to this day in West Virginia, where mine owners
Speaker 1: were increasingly shady and huge numbers of miners lived in
Speaker 1: unbelievably squalid camps. In Cabin and Paint Creek, more than
Speaker 1: thirty five thousand non union miners and their families lived
Speaker 1: in coal camps, and life in these places was the
Speaker 1: very worst of coal mining. Only company stores were available,
Speaker 1: and mine owners banned workers from traveling to nearby towns
Speaker 1: to purchase goods. The situation grew increasingly desperate, and many
Speaker 1: within the camps began to look to the Union as
Speaker 1: their only hope for a better life. In April of
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve, the non union miners and Paint Creek who
Speaker 1: announced the desired to former union and submitted a list
Speaker 1: of demands that included union recognition, the right to free
Speaker 1: speech and peaceable assembly. This is something they were demanding
Speaker 1: from their companies, which denied it to them, um, which
Speaker 1: you may recognize as an inherent human right, um, but
Speaker 1: not not for coal miners um. Uh. Yeah, and into
Speaker 1: the blacklisting of union men and into mandatory company stores,
Speaker 1: and in and into cribbing. Uh. They also demanded that
Speaker 1: mine owners established two thousand pounds is the official weight
Speaker 1: of a ton. And you may recognize that two thousand
Speaker 1: pounds is in fact the weight of a ton, but um.
Speaker 1: And they demanded the right to check the mind scales
Speaker 1: and they have union representatives watch this process. Uh. Now.
Speaker 1: The mine operators rejected these demands and the miners of
Speaker 1: Cabin Creek went on strike for a month. The strike
Speaker 1: went peacefully, with the UMW providing food and other necessities
Speaker 1: from striking miners. So part of what a big union
Speaker 1: that covered multiple states with the um would do is
Speaker 1: you would pay dues, and those dues would not only
Speaker 1: go to paying for union officials and like essentially lobbying,
Speaker 1: but when a strike happened, it would go to make
Speaker 1: sure that, like people, strikers who weren't working didn't starve
Speaker 1: to death, so that you could actually strike long enough
Speaker 1: to get what you wanted. Um. It's kind of the
Speaker 1: whole point of a union, really, right. Yeah. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: when it became clear to the companies, the people who
Speaker 1: owned the minds that these workers were striking from, that
Speaker 1: this was not going to end quickly, the coal companies
Speaker 1: decided to bring in the big guns, which were again
Speaker 1: literal guns, and in this case they were wielded by
Speaker 1: the men from the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, and Baldwin
Speaker 1: Felts was essentially one of the era's equivalents to a
Speaker 1: group like Blackwater. These guys were mercenaries, and a lot
Speaker 1: of them were in fact former soldiers with combat experience,
Speaker 1: and they worked in the United States and cracked down
Speaker 1: on labor. Uh. Now, the agency brought in three hundred
Speaker 1: detectives to act as strike breakers. One contemporary journalist who
Speaker 1: interviewed a number of these men wrote, these guards were
Speaker 1: professional strike breakers, all try it on a dozen industrial
Speaker 1: battlefields and willing to shoot with or without provocation. They
Speaker 1: immediately began and a campaign of assault, intimidation, and terrorism.
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote next from a study by hoyt
Speaker 1: In Wheeler, a labor historian with the University of Wyoming. Quote.
Speaker 1: The first action of the mine guards was to evict
Speaker 1: miners and their families from company owned houses. Personal belongings
Speaker 1: were loaded on two trains, transported off company property and
Speaker 1: dumped beside the railroad tracks. Miners and their families took
Speaker 1: up residents and tent colonies established by the United Mine
Speaker 1: Workers Union. At this juncture, Mary Mother Jones, and aged
Speaker 1: but vigorous and profane labor agitator, was brought into the
Speaker 1: fray by the union. Mother Jones was a veteran combatant
Speaker 1: in the labor wars in which the United Mine Workers
Speaker 1: Union became involved. She's perhaps the most colorful character of
Speaker 1: this era of American labor history. At a speech on
Speaker 1: the steps of the state capital in Charleston, she told
Speaker 1: a large gathering of miners, arm yourselves, return home and
Speaker 1: kill every goddamned mine guard on the creeks, blow up
Speaker 1: the mines, and drive the damned scabs out of the valleys. Man,
Speaker 1: this is like shadow run ship, except the future exactly
Speaker 1: definitely happened. It's like this already happened. Well, one of
Speaker 1: the things you realized when you read about labor history
Speaker 1: is that a lot of them, a lot of like
Speaker 1: great cyberpunk, you know, including Shadow Run. The guys who
Speaker 1: like wrote that stuff starting in like the late nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties early nineties knew a lot of this history. And
Speaker 1: we're explicitly being like, we see this coming back again
Speaker 1: because like we were paying attention to the news like
Speaker 1: the Reagan era, the chiseling away of workers rights, like
Speaker 1: the things that were gained by the fighting in this era,
Speaker 1: Like they were just kind of predicting that, like, as
Speaker 1: this stuff is chiseled away, these fights are going to
Speaker 1: start up again, only people will have moved by wire
Speaker 1: systems installed in their reflexes and fancy machine guns in
Speaker 1: the internet. Like yeah, but yes, you're right, this is
Speaker 1: very cyberpunk and would make like an adapted setting like
Speaker 1: this would make a pretty fucking cool Shadow Run campaign. Yeah. Man,
Speaker 1: So the Union provided these striking miners with the tools
Speaker 1: to do just what mother Jones suggested because unions, by
Speaker 1: the way, unions are considered kind of boring today, they
Speaker 1: were not in these days. So they the UMW smuggled
Speaker 1: in six machine guns, a thousand rifles, and fifty rounds
Speaker 1: of ammunition just to start. And this seems like a
Speaker 1: lot of of weaponry, but all it really did was
Speaker 1: even the scales because the coal operators had also purchased
Speaker 1: huge amounts of weaponry for their guards, the Baldwin Feltsman.
Speaker 1: Both sides loaded up with weapons and began to advance
Speaker 1: on one another. Now, the governor of West Virginia at
Speaker 1: the time was a fellow named Richard Glasscock, and it
Speaker 1: was within his power to stop the mine operators from
Speaker 1: hiring mercenaries and deploying crooked, heavily armed cops to break
Speaker 1: the strike. The fact that he refused to do so
Speaker 1: was noted by Mother Jones and her public speeches. She
Speaker 1: refused to refer to Glasscock by his name, calling him
Speaker 1: a crystal Peter for modesty's sake. So that's so good.
Speaker 1: That's really good, right, isn't that funny? Man? Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty pretty great. In August, she told him during a
Speaker 1: speech to minors, I warned this little governor that unless
Speaker 1: he rids Paint Creek in Cabinet Creek of these goddamn
Speaker 1: Baldwin Felt's mine guard thugs, this is gonna there is
Speaker 1: going to be one hell of a lot of blood
Speaker 1: letting in these hills. Now, officially, the government of West
Speaker 1: Virginia was not a super thrilled with any of this,
Speaker 1: and Governor Glascock volunteered to mediate the strike, but the
Speaker 1: mine operators said no. Union miners responded by posting up
Speaker 1: on the mountain sides of the valley and sniping at
Speaker 1: mine guards, killing a number of them. So we are like, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: and remember like mine guards had been shooting in abducting
Speaker 1: and beating and murdering people prior to this too, Like
Speaker 1: this is a cycle of violence here now. So yeah,
Speaker 1: the miners start sniping from the mountain sides and killing
Speaker 1: mine guards. So the operators of the mines respond by
Speaker 1: building fortresses to protect their guards and to protect the
Speaker 1: scabs who are working the mines. So because the mine
Speaker 1: companies had built fortresses, there's nothing for the miners to
Speaker 1: do but to launch an assault at these fortresses. And
Speaker 1: they start at a place called Mucklow on Paint Creek
Speaker 1: and a massive battle results. More than a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: shots were fired in sixteen people were killed over the
Speaker 1: course of multiple days. What I've got a picture of
Speaker 1: these fortresses, Like what are they building? You know, I'm
Speaker 1: imagining mostly wooden ramparts in the like a lot of cases.
Speaker 1: If you look at like the forts that they would
Speaker 1: just like take huge stacks of what were fire would
Speaker 1: and they would place like cannons within them, like which
Speaker 1: by the way, like it is better than nothing if
Speaker 1: you have if your only cover, as a woodpile would
Speaker 1: will stop a lot of rounds, um if it's thick enough,
Speaker 1: but also shards of wood get kicked up. This is
Speaker 1: why sandbags are ideal if you are a modern day
Speaker 1: striker and you want to build a decent fortification to
Speaker 1: stop say the kind of rifles that police have access to,
Speaker 1: a sandbag is going to have less wood shrapnel than
Speaker 1: a pile of wood. Just as a heads up, Um,
Speaker 1: this is all good information, important info for I don't know,
Speaker 1: let's say three weeks from now. So more skirmishes followed
Speaker 1: the Battle of Mucklaw, culminating in a massive salt by
Speaker 1: six thousand armed Union miners on September one, nineteen twelve.
Speaker 1: These are armies like these are literal armies of people
Speaker 1: like wars have been thought like most medieval wars involved
Speaker 1: less human beings armed and fighting than are taking like
Speaker 1: fighting in just West Virginia. Um, it's fucking crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh so this the army assembled at the mouths of
Speaker 1: Payton Cabin Creek, and it sent a message to the
Speaker 1: mine operators if they continued to use strike breakers, the
Speaker 1: miners would murder every single mine guard and destroy all
Speaker 1: company infrastructure in the area. And of course, the bosses
Speaker 1: refused to back down. They just hired more armed guards
Speaker 1: and prepared to fight. The whole situation might have ended
Speaker 1: in a massive blood bath if the governor hadn't declared
Speaker 1: martial law and activated the state militia to pull both
Speaker 1: sides apart from one another. Now, of course, this militia
Speaker 1: was made up primarily of upper middle class gentry of
Speaker 1: West Virginia. These were conservative men, and they had an
Speaker 1: instinctive hatred of low income immigrant laborers. Uh. And the
Speaker 1: strike was broken up and the militia deactivated. Many of
Speaker 1: them stayed on as mine guards for the coal companies,
Speaker 1: which provided them with enough security to reopen the minds
Speaker 1: with more scabs and of course, the miners grabbed their
Speaker 1: guns and started shooting again, and then the whole situation
Speaker 1: started over. That November, martial law was declared a second time,
Speaker 1: and the mine guards basically just threw on official government
Speaker 1: uniforms and then cracked out on miners with the approval
Speaker 1: of the state. Union Men who were arrested during this
Speaker 1: period were tried by military tribunals under military law, and
Speaker 1: many were sentenced to long prison terms. This was often illegal,
Speaker 1: as the courts were happy to sentence miners for crimes
Speaker 1: committed well before the actual period of martial law. The
Speaker 1: crackdown was eventually successful, and by January the strike had
Speaker 1: been broken, but it started up again in February, leading
Speaker 1: to a third declaration of martial law. So this is
Speaker 1: not going super well for anybody, really, is abs salutely
Speaker 1: definitely a better civil war than the last one? I mean,
Speaker 1: as in all civil well not all civil wars, as
Speaker 1: in most civil wars, one side is objectively shitty here.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, but yeah so um. By this point, the
Speaker 1: chief mine operator, a guy named Quinn Morton, was fed
Speaker 1: up with all of this back and forth, so his
Speaker 1: company paid for a special armored train which they filled
Speaker 1: with Canawas sheriff's deputies and mine guards and called the
Speaker 1: bull Moose Special. So they drove this armored train filled
Speaker 1: with armed men through the Paint Creek miners camp and
Speaker 1: their official purpose was to serve a warrant to a
Speaker 1: guy named John Doe for inciting a riot. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: read Professor Howitt Wheeler's recitation of what happened next. As
Speaker 1: the train passed through Holly Grove, a miner's tent colony,
Speaker 1: Morton and his mine guards sprayed rifle and machine gun
Speaker 1: fire into the colony. Morton was reported to have said,
Speaker 1: we gave them hell and had a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Let's go back and give them another round. Owned at
Speaker 1: least one person was killed and a number were wounded,
Speaker 1: and we'll never get an accurate count of of what happened,
Speaker 1: but yeah, now we've got armored vehicles charging into an
Speaker 1: encampment and stuff like. Yeah. The miners retaliated by launching
Speaker 1: a mass assault on a corporate encampment. A multi hour
Speaker 1: gun battle left another sixteen people, most of the mine
Speaker 1: guards dead. With the guards in flight, miners dynamited critical
Speaker 1: infrastructure and successfully turned back a train loaded with scabs
Speaker 1: sent by the bosses to take their jobs. In response,
Speaker 1: Governor Glascock sent the militia in Now in March, a
Speaker 1: new governor took office, Dr Henry Hatfield, of the famous
Speaker 1: Hatfield family. You know, the Hatfields and McCoy. It's the
Speaker 1: feuding families. Yeah, you're gonna hear a lot about halt
Speaker 1: Fields this episode. So. Dr Henry Hatfield was more sympathetic
Speaker 1: to the strikers, and he visited the strike area with
Speaker 1: his medical equipment to provide aid as one of his
Speaker 1: first official acts in office. When he arrived, he found
Speaker 1: mother Jones locked in a local jail. She'd been convicted
Speaker 1: of aiding by a military tribunal and sentenced to twenty
Speaker 1: years in prison, and she was very clearly near death.
Speaker 1: Her temperature was a hundred and four degrees and Dr
Speaker 1: Hatfield immediately ascertained that she had been left without any
Speaker 1: medical care in herself. He ordered her remove to the
Speaker 1: capital and provided with medical attention. Dr Hatfield, the new governor,
Speaker 1: spent two days at the front talking to miners and
Speaker 1: providing them with medical assistance. The mine operators complained that
Speaker 1: he was toadying to these men, and they sent a
Speaker 1: delegation to complain. One of these corporate representatives told the
Speaker 1: governor to his face that it was unwise for him
Speaker 1: to enter the strike zone. Dr Hatfield responded by punching
Speaker 1: this man repeatedly in his face and knocking him to
Speaker 1: the ground. God solid governoring. They're like, yeah, the idea
Speaker 1: of repeated punches to a faith before someone gets knocked down,
Speaker 1: it's pretty funny to me. It is, it is. And
Speaker 1: people were talking, won't punch you in the face, you
Speaker 1: know what, won't repeatedly punch? Well, actually you want them
Speaker 1: to this kind of person into the face, I'd buy
Speaker 1: some products. We're back from another flawless ad transition. So
Speaker 1: Governor Hatfield punches a guy out. Then he orders the
Speaker 1: mine operators to settle with the miners in the next
Speaker 1: few days, and he threatens that if they don't come
Speaker 1: to a settlement, then Hill settle the strike for them.
Speaker 1: The mine operators failed to do this, possibly in an
Speaker 1: attempt to call the governor's bluff, But Dr Henry Hatfield
Speaker 1: was not a bluffing man. He immediately rescinded the sentences
Speaker 1: of all the men convicted under military courts. Then he
Speaker 1: mandated that the striking union men should get the majority
Speaker 1: of the things that they'd asked for. Um. And he
Speaker 1: sounds pretty awesome, and he was definitely better than Governor Glasscock.
Speaker 1: But we're gonna talk about some shitty things that Dr
Speaker 1: Hatfield did as governor UM in this but he was,
Speaker 1: you know, broadly pro union, at least compared to his predecessor.
Speaker 1: It's that's good. So uh Yeah. Now, in his last
Speaker 1: year of office, Governor Glasscock had appointed a commission to
Speaker 1: investigate the causes of the strike, and they kind of
Speaker 1: finished their work after the strike was ended by the
Speaker 1: next Governor Hatfield. And not surprisingly, the men that Governor
Speaker 1: Glasscock had picked to figure out the cause of the strike, Uh,
Speaker 1: they did a bunch of research and shockingly found that
Speaker 1: actually wages in Paint Creek were very fair. Uh, and
Speaker 1: there was no good reason for the miners to have
Speaker 1: have gone on strike. Uh. They noted that quote as
Speaker 1: to the main causes of the trouble, this rises, in
Speaker 1: our judgment, from the efforts of the United mind Workers
Speaker 1: to organize the union and the whole chain of events
Speaker 1: alongside said creeks. The desire to make the present strike
Speaker 1: region the place for the insertion of a thin edge
Speaker 1: of unionism with the ultimate aim of organizing the whole state.
Speaker 1: So they decided that, like, yeah, this this state Commission
Speaker 1: comes to the conclusion that it's all the union's fault
Speaker 1: that things got so bad. Um. Now, thankfully the United
Speaker 1: States Senate also gets involved and decides doing investigate the
Speaker 1: strike and and you know, there they come to a
Speaker 1: bit more fairer conclusions than the State of West Virginia's handpickman. Uh.
Speaker 1: They actually called the former Governor Glasscock to testify, and
Speaker 1: he tells them in under oath, his his his his
Speaker 1: stance changes a bit, and he admits that the trouble
Speaker 1: had commenced after the operators on Paint Creek had a
Speaker 1: uh sign like declined to enter into a new agreement
Speaker 1: with the striking miners. Um. Yeah, and uh. During like
Speaker 1: his his testimony in front of the Senate, one of
Speaker 1: the senators questioning him asks Governor Glascock, it seems to
Speaker 1: be that the mind guards were the disturbing element among
Speaker 1: which this trouble arose, and Governor Glasscock responded, that was
Speaker 1: my impression, Senator, yes, sir, So that's interesting. Um yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: in the end, the Senate Committee concluded the basic cause
Speaker 1: is the private ownership of great public necessities such as coal. This,
Speaker 1: coupled with human greed incident to such ownership, has brought
Speaker 1: about the deplorable and Unamerican conditions in the West Virginia
Speaker 1: coal fields. Now this is interesting to me for a
Speaker 1: couple of reasons. One of them is that we have
Speaker 1: a coal is not so much a great public necessity
Speaker 1: these days. Um, But you might call in the middle,
Speaker 1: particularly of a gigantic pandemic, in which case people aren't
Speaker 1: able to shop at the wide variety of stores that
Speaker 1: they normally get their necessities from, you might call a
Speaker 1: service that ships things to people's door nationwide and provides
Speaker 1: an avenue for small and medium and even large businesses
Speaker 1: to get their products into the hands of Americans who
Speaker 1: need them during these times, you might call such a
Speaker 1: business a great public necessity. And you might say that
Speaker 1: the rampaging infections and Amazon workhouses, uh, and they're they're
Speaker 1: illegal crackdowns on union labor, you might call that an
Speaker 1: example of human greed incident to the ownership of such
Speaker 1: great public necessities bringing about deplorable, non American conditions. You
Speaker 1: might you might say that I will. I'll say a
Speaker 1: right now. Yeah. Yeah, Actually I can't remember all the words,
Speaker 1: but I just imagine me saying it. Yeah. I I
Speaker 1: think we can all get that into our head. So
Speaker 1: the coal companies lost this battle, um, but they were
Speaker 1: not about to give up on their greater war against
Speaker 1: their own laborers. As Robert Shogun rights in the Battle
Speaker 1: for Blair Mountain quote, coal Age, the Journal of the
Speaker 1: Coal Operators, it's like a magazine for coal company man
Speaker 1: declared that the so called strike on cabin and paint
Speaker 1: creeks was in reality an armed insurrection formulated by agitators
Speaker 1: hired by the union, and afterwards reinforced by socialists. That's
Speaker 1: how they you can, that's how they wanted that to
Speaker 1: be pronounced. I'm canceling my subscription to cole Age right now.
Speaker 1: Oh now, don't, don't. Don't be a reactionary. Cole Age
Speaker 1: has a lot of good Like how else you gotta
Speaker 1: learn who the best strike breakers are? Something we all
Speaker 1: need this. This podcast is heavily supported by coal Age.
Speaker 1: Please keep your subscriptions active, people. So, the coal operators
Speaker 1: now saw the miners in the union not simply as
Speaker 1: economic adversaries, but as a diabolical force, uh, not merely
Speaker 1: seeking unionization, but domination of the West Virginia coal industry
Speaker 1: and of the United States. Mine operators in Mingo County
Speaker 1: were particularly worried about the Cabin and Paint Creek strike.
Speaker 1: Their non union workforce was perpetually restive, and it was
Speaker 1: not exactly a secret that UMW representatives had started reaching
Speaker 1: out to these men. The operators in Mingo County condemned
Speaker 1: the union as unlawful, per se, revolutionary in character, and
Speaker 1: a menace to the free institutions of the country. For
Speaker 1: their part, the union responded to victory by expanding their ambitions.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twelve, the United Mine Workers Union amended their constitution,
Speaker 1: adding a clause that miners were entitled to the full
Speaker 1: social value of their product. What does that mean? What
Speaker 1: do you think that would mean? The full social Saying
Speaker 1: that workers are entitled to the full social value of
Speaker 1: their product, it sounds like they should be owning the
Speaker 1: means of production. That might be a way to interpret that. Spencer, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: basically in the way you know, because we have like
Speaker 1: minutes of the actual debates, because like there were debates
Speaker 1: even within the union, like they weren't all of one mind,
Speaker 1: Um and and kind of yeah. One of the ways
Speaker 1: you'll hear this set is that, like, just and this
Speaker 1: is kind of like the simplest way to state that
Speaker 1: if you work an hour, what you get back should
Speaker 1: be worth an hour of your life. And I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people would argue that an hour of
Speaker 1: their life is worth more than seven dollars or even
Speaker 1: fifteen dollars. Another way to look at this is that, uh,
Speaker 1: you you are in whatever whatever work you do, the
Speaker 1: profit that that work generates, you are entitled to, not
Speaker 1: the bosses, not the shareholders, not the corporate executives who
Speaker 1: drive armored trains through mining encampments and fire machine guns
Speaker 1: at striking laborers. Um. Yeah. So miners in the wake
Speaker 1: of this start to talk about writing capitalists out of
Speaker 1: the social contract essentially, and as you might imagine, these
Speaker 1: capitalists are not super happy with this, and they begin
Speaker 1: to gear up for the next round of combat. But
Speaker 1: in the meantime, the union men celebrated, not just in
Speaker 1: West Virginia but all around the country. One of the
Speaker 1: more remarkable aspects of the victory in West Virginia was
Speaker 1: the fact that black and white coal miners had largely
Speaker 1: collaborated in order to achieve victory. Now, it would be
Speaker 1: too much to say that the white miners considered black
Speaker 1: miners their equals. Mining camps were still very much segregated,
Speaker 1: And it is fair to say that almost everyone in
Speaker 1: this story, even the heroes, were pretty racist by modern standards. Um,
Speaker 1: but they were at least able to overcome that in
Speaker 1: a large degree to kind of work together to make
Speaker 1: situation better for everybody. And this is was part of
Speaker 1: a start of kind of like the birth of of Yeah,
Speaker 1: this kind of understanding, you know that we're we all
Speaker 1: have are in this this fight together to to improve
Speaker 1: standards for working people. Did this was did they like
Speaker 1: try and and divide Like, did the bosses try and
Speaker 1: divide people along racial lines or anything? Yes? And in
Speaker 1: many cases and in many strikes around the country, they
Speaker 1: were very successful in this. They weren't successful in this
Speaker 1: particular strike, which is something that makes it no worthy
Speaker 1: because this often worked. Often bosses would be successful and
Speaker 1: basically getting white laborers to throw black laborers under the
Speaker 1: bus to get better terms. Um. So like and that
Speaker 1: was a way to be like what you want us
Speaker 1: to say that everybody gets this minimum pay even black people,
Speaker 1: Like then we're saying they're equal to you. So like
Speaker 1: that definitely happened a number of times, but it didn't
Speaker 1: work at this strike. That's just so like I can
Speaker 1: just see that. But it's like, uh so what you're
Speaker 1: saying is we got to accept that uh black people
Speaker 1: deserve the same stuff as we do. That that is
Speaker 1: one bridge too far, my good man, Like, it's just
Speaker 1: uh yeah, and it's it's this, you know, there's different.
Speaker 1: It's very different. And because they're like we're kind of
Speaker 1: eliminating the racism from But in the modern day, you'll
Speaker 1: hear people talk about like, well, okay, basic income seems
Speaker 1: like a great idea, but what if X group, you know,
Speaker 1: what if like rich people, what if like whatever group
Speaker 1: gets it? Like that's not fair and like part of
Speaker 1: the like obviously, like one of the problems with that
Speaker 1: is that when you start saying stuff like we need
Speaker 1: a basic income, we need free college, we need um
Speaker 1: uh we need uh universal healthcare, and people start bringing
Speaker 1: like what about this group? What about that group? Um?
Speaker 1: You know, what they're really saying is I don't believe
Speaker 1: that this is an inherent right. I think certain individual
Speaker 1: groups might deserve it, but I don't see it as
Speaker 1: an inherent right. And I think one of the lessons
Speaker 1: of the labor movement is that this ship only works
Speaker 1: when you act when you when you you really treat
Speaker 1: it like an inherent right, and you you reject attempts
Speaker 1: to divide people, even among groups that might make sense
Speaker 1: to you at the time, because in reality, if you're
Speaker 1: agreeing to that division at all, um, you are against
Speaker 1: the idea that people have a right to this sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Yeah. So all of this Spencer Um, particularly
Speaker 1: kind of the cross racial solidarity that was that was
Speaker 1: evident um in this strike, helped inspire one of America's
Speaker 1: few non racist white guys at the time, a fella
Speaker 1: named Ralph Chaplin. UM. And Ralph a member of the
Speaker 1: International Workers of the World or the i w W.
Speaker 1: The Wobbly some people call them. This is a group
Speaker 1: that's around today and they're very far left um, you know,
Speaker 1: anti capitalist workers union. And Ralph Chaplin, inspired by the
Speaker 1: strike in West Virginia, wrote a song called Solidarity Forever Um,
Speaker 1: and right after we get through some plugs, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: close this out by playing that song. But first, Spencer
Speaker 1: you want to plug your plug doubles drop. Yeah. Man, Um,
Speaker 1: I am on Twitter at the six Sler th h
Speaker 1: E s I x L E R. I'm on everything
Speaker 1: else is at the six Sler. Uh. Don't follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter. I don't tweet good stuff. Uh, it's bad. Um.
Speaker 1: I have a show called harmon Quest. Um. If you
Speaker 1: like it, you can watch it on vr V or
Speaker 1: YouTube or you know, I don't know. I'm sure it's
Speaker 1: downloadable illegally. Um. And if you like it, Uh, send
Speaker 1: Netflix an email and say, you guys gotta buy this show.
Speaker 1: You guys got to make more of this Netflix. You
Speaker 1: know what's up? Send Netflix and email, find their CEO's
Speaker 1: mailing address and send them letters written in blood whatever
Speaker 1: works to get Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm telling people that
Speaker 1: if you can get a goblin head, mail a goblin
Speaker 1: head to the door of Netflix. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Please
Speaker 1: continue committing the felonies that we urge in most episodes. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You can find us on the internet at behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards dot com. You can find us on Twitter at
Speaker 1: at Bastard's Pot and also on Instagram at the same thing.
Speaker 1: I have a podcast called The Women's war that might
Speaker 1: provide a little bit of a suggestion on how to
Speaker 1: rebuild society after the collapse. That seems increasingly likely hits um,
Speaker 1: so check that out too, uh. And now I'm going
Speaker 1: to close us out by playing the song that I
Speaker 1: was just telling you about, Solidarity Forever, which was inspired
Speaker 1: by this West Virginia strike. And this is a recording
Speaker 1: by the great American folk musician Pete Seeger. Here we go,
Speaker 1: Salalilarity for everver, solalidarity for that ever, salilarity for ever.
Speaker 1: Call the Union young bates us strong. When the Union's inspiration,
Speaker 1: through the worker's blood chill run. There can be a
Speaker 1: power greater anywhere beneath the sun. Yet what force on
Speaker 1: earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one. But
Speaker 1: the Union makes us strong. Sal Alarity foreverver, salilarity for everver,
Speaker 1: soalalidarity foreverver, for the Union makes so strong. Long. It
Speaker 1: is we who pow the prairie, built the cities where
Speaker 1: they trade, duck the mines, and built the workshops, endless
Speaker 1: miles of railroad laid. Now we stand outcast and starving,
Speaker 1: mit the wonders we have made. But the Union makes
Speaker 1: a strong salilarity forver, salilarity for him, salilarity firever young
Speaker 1: days as strong they have taken untold millions that they
Speaker 1: never toil to earn. But without our brain and muscle,
Speaker 1: not a single wheel can turn. We can break their
Speaker 1: boughty power gain our freedom. When we learned that the
Speaker 1: Union makes a strong sality farver salp salep makes us
Speaker 1: long in our hands is placed a power greater than
Speaker 1: their hearted gold, greater than the might of atoms, magnified
Speaker 1: a thousand hold. We can bring to birth a new
Speaker 1: world from the ashes of the old. For the Union
Speaker 1: makes a strong salve sate strong