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

skip right past that. It's all marketing, you know, it's all marketing. Yeah, Spencer, are you a how do you? Are you a big fan of the First World War? You? Are you a World War One stand? Yeah, I'm a I'm a big World War One stand. You love trenches, trench foot, oh my god, and like mustard gas. Oh hell yeah, mustard gas, Oh my god, child soldiers being massacred by the thousand, just pumping people into a meeting exactly.

World War One was awesome for everybody, but it was a particularly good thing for coal miners and for unions in general. Um, because the United States, right, we we got involved in World War One. Spoilers, um and uh it uh it it wouldn't. Um, we had to go to like the the whole country had to get on a war footing because the US military and on once upon a time actually was weird the idea that we would have a standing military that was bigger than just

a couple of thousand guys um. And so we had to like really quickly make an army because we just kind of didn't have one when World War One kicked off. We had like a few thousand guys on horses who were used to like shooting it out with Poncho Villa, but that was about it. So we like had to build this army up suddenly. And that's like that that takes a lot of fucking coal, right, Like at this point, all of your fucking industry bullshit is fueled by coal. So we had to get a lot of coal real

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

more valuable. So suddenly coal miners, which had kind of just been treated like trash before this, as you might have guessed from the fact that they machine gun them from an armored train, Um, they're valuable. Now you can't just machine gun them. Um. And so the federal government actually kicks in some protections from miners and starts treating

them really well. Uh. The National War Labor Board, which President Wilson instituted to help manage American industry, pushed for the eight hour work day, granted raises to laborers, and supported equal pay for women doing what was then still considered to be men's work. Equal pay for equal work was the idea, and where we are still not there. Uh, but they start talking about it now right like it

stops being prior to World War One. Like if you're kind of on the fringe, if you're saying emen should get paid for doing the same job that a man is doing, like that's a loony kind of like how as soon as the fucking like everybody's laughing about basic income being like a fringe position And then a plague hits and everybody's like, oh, maybe this is actually a

normal thing that should exist. Yeah. Yeah, So all of that ship starts to happen because of this whole, this whole war thing, And I don't want to make it out to like Wilson was like super pro labor because the i w W, the Wobblies, the group who, like one of their members wrote the song that been in the last episode with Wilson brutally cracks down on them because there are a lot of them are like fucking anarchists, right, Um, they're very interesting group because like the the the guy

who wrote Solidarity Forever fucking hated the communist like governments um that that came out of like the end of World War One, and also hated capitalists. Interesting group, interesting person worth reading about. But President Wilson fucking cracked the ship down on those guys because, um, they were seen as being like two politically radical and it's easy to

punish radicals during a wartime. But the actual union men working, like the the UMW, like these coal miners, these were seen as being like fundamentally pretty American and they were also necessary. So Wilson did support miners war, and things got more and things got a lot better for particularly mine workers during this war. Um so yeah. President Wilson declared at the outset of US involvement that a lack of coal was quote the most serious danger facing the

United States in this current crisis. He declared coal miners immune to the draft. And for the first time, these rough and tumble rednecks who were used to being treated like disposable assets, started to realize that they were actually really valuable and kind of critical to the nation working. Uh And they had to promise not to strike during the war, but in exchange for this promise, they received

a substantial raise. Now, the result of all this was that by the time the war ended and the troops started to return home, coal miners had started to get used to the idea that they were valuable, skilled workers performing a critical task. Now, if you're at Dusk Capital, Spencer, no, that's fine, it's it's it's it's super boring, um and and a real snooze fest. Uh So. Dust Capital is a book written way back in eighteen sixty seven by Karl Marx who Karl Marks was the founder of the

Marx Brothers. He invented uh comedy. Um, but he also had some theories about labor. Yeah, and the big mustache and had some theories about labor to um. Lennon read a book on him in the song American Pie Uh anyway uh so um yeah, Karl Marks in Dust Capital landed on something that's generally referred to as immiseration theory and Admiseration theory is the idea that, um, because cutting wages and benefits to workers is the easiest way to

increase profits. Right, So, like, if you operate a coal mine, the cost of building um, you know, mine carts, the cost of donkeys to like toe mine carts, the cost of you know, electricity to light the minds. These are all fixed costs, right, These things cost what they cost. But you can cut what you pay the workers, you can cut their benefits, and that will increase your profits.

So because doing this is the easiest way to increase profits, Mars was like workers in capitalist societies are going to be victims of a gradual chiseling away of their quality of life. Um, so pay will get cut, you know, and you know you you might you might say that things in the modern day that would be an example, this would be like monitored bathroom breaks, robotic trackers to

inform your boss when you're not loading Amazon packages. Enough things that, in Marks's words quote, destroy the actual content of his labor by turning it into a torment. Uh, they transform his life into working time and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all in production of surplus value or at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes conversely a means for the development of these methods.

It follows therefore, that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker be his payment higher low must grow worse. So this is this is This is a big part of Marxist theory, and it suggests Marx kind of suggested that amiseration is what helped tends to produce revolutions. People get so fed up with being abused and chiseled

away at that they revolt. Um. Now, this is definitely true in a number of cases, and you can point to certain specific cases where like, this is what happened to workers and it caused a revolt. But I think one of the issues that kind of people who are really in the market Marxist theory have is that they kind of over apply it. And it is a fact that that a miseration theory actually doesn't always hold true,

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

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

Um and Davies is suggesting that social revolutions occur after things actually get better for a while and then suddenly get worse and people just are furious, and you can see, like the strikes that we talked about in the last episode, we're kind of the result of miners just getting chiseled away at for so long that they got really piste um.

And what we're going to talk about today is more an example of what Davies is talking about, is things getting better, like during World War One, things get a lot better for miners, and then after World War One that changes sharply and people get really fucking piste off, and everything that we're about to to talk about today happens. So things were all sunshine and roses for labor during the war. Woodrow Wilson crackdown, like I said on the I w w UM, but the government was willing to

work with unions to express the proper amount of patriotism. Um. That said, they were still terrified of anything that smelled even a little bit like communism. And this fear only increased is the Russian Revolution heated up and the Bolsheviks got down to some serious Bolsheviking as soon as the

war I mean, it wasn't even a joke. As soon as World War One was over and more young men returned home, that opened up the labor market, and so bosses began to correspondingly cut wages and benefits to their workers again to try to claw back more control, power

and profit, and this led to immediate strikes. Obviously, m yeah, the strikes started among the nation's steel workers, but in over the course of like the fall of nineteen nineteen early nineteen twenty, there were like several thousand strikes in the United States from all sorts of different works, including police officers. Cops have unions and they strike to they just also break up strikes by other unions. UM so again,

maybe something to think about. So in September nineteen nineteen, half of America's steel workers go on strikes and Woodrow Wilson uses federal troops to violently break the strike, and this for shadows how labor would be treated over the coming years. But while the steel workers could be crushed rather simply, mine workers were in a much better position

to resist. For one thing, they had more institutional support within the government because of like systems that had been set up during World War One, to support miners um so they were also the best organized chunk of laborers within the country. By this point, United Mine Workers was more than half a million men strong, and the union then possessed the ability to shut down almost the entire coal industry. And if you shut down the coal industry,

you basically shut down the United States. Now, by September of nineteen nineteen, when the u m W held their annual convention, workers were pissed. Wages had been slashed and workers had been laid off as soon as the fighting stopped, and demand felt this made miners eel as if they'd been bait and switched, which they sort of had been, and they Yeah, this particular chant was common among miners at the time, and I think it gets across the

general feeling of many. We mind the cold of transport soldiers, we kept the home fires all aglow, we put old Kaiser out of business. What's our reward? We want to know. So they're a little bit pissed. Yeah, So the union calls a strike. Uh, and this was still illegal under

wartime laws which had not been lifted yet. In President Wilson promised that the law will be enforced, which was generally taken to mean that federal troops would be used to shut down any strike, and a tedious game of political back and forth followed, with the government issuing court injunctions against the strike that rendered the union unable to call for a walk off. So the unions like, we're

gonna strike. The government says, actually, that's fucking illegal, and the union says, okay, we're not going to call for a strike. But then four hundred thousand coal industry workers just walk off the job anyway, But it's not a union strike. It's just four hundred thousand Americans being like fuck you. Then like, what are you gonna do. You're gonna come to our houses and kill us all, Like, all, we gotta deliberate the coal mines. Yeah, reopened the economy,

Yeah exactly. Yeah, you can go in there and liberate them. Do the job if you think it's so fucking easy. So the problem with this was that winter had started a hit by the point that all these guys come off the job, and co shortages during the fall and winter mean that a lot of Americans start suffering right because they can't heat their homes um and this pisss off a lot of normal American citizens who might otherwise have sympathized with the union because like they're freezing in

their houses. Um. So, the union was ultimately stymied in this nationwide strike by a mix of public disapproval and the fact that there were still a lot of non union mines in West Virginia, in Mingo County to be specific. And these were very productive minds that put out enough coal to keep critical US industry afloat. So normally Americans are suffering, but the things that are necessary to maintain, like the nation's existence, that ship keeps going because of

these non union mines in West Virginia. And eventually the UMW is forced to cave and the miners have to go back to work. And yeah, the bosses buy in large one this round, and their victory made it clear to the union men that they could not successfully execute a nationwide strike without unionizing the minds of West Virginia. Mm hmm. Yeah. So that's good and valuable lesson, a valuable lesson. So to us, all, to us all, um, As I have often said, Mingo County is the enemy.

Um still true to this day. So Mingo County was the mine operators stronghold in West Virginia, and they fought like devils to keep union organizers out and to clamp down on any individual miners who might try to change the status quo. They were aided in this by the Logan County Sheriff's Department, which was wholly owned corporate interests and dedicated to crushing worker organization. The cause of the union was made all the more difficult by cultural factors

in Mingo County. Most of the miners there were farmers first, men who saw coal mining as a temporary placeholder gig when prices were lower crop yields were poor. They didn't truly identify as miners, and so it was hard to organize them. Mingo County remained resistant to the cause of

organized labor until early nineteen twenty. Now, in the wake of that strike, the union goes to the table with the bosses and you know, they basically try to iron out what differences they can so that there won't be another strike because it still hurts the mine company's profits. And this arbitration commission like concludes by recommending a significant raise for union miners twenty seven to avert future strikes.

So union miners get a raise. Non union miners, the miners in Mingo County who had allowed the bosses to in the strike, they don't get a raise because they're not part of the union. So these guys just fucked over the union and a strike, and then they immediately see, oh, this is why we have a union, because it increases

the amount of money that we make. Um. Yeah, So over on the other side of the holler, their union neighbors were suddenly getting paid as shipload more Mingo County miners started demanding raises from their bosses, pointing out that they loyally kept working during the strike and this surely meant that they deserved the increased pay. And this did not convince the people who were their bosses. Shocking. Yeah, I'm shocked. As Robert Shogun writes, quote the response of

the Howard Colliery at Chadowroy typify and management's attitude. The Howard manager offered a modest increase, but then boosted prices in the company store when some miners complained they were pistol whipped by mine guards. Yeah. Not. This is actually probably going to surprise a lot of people, but most folks don't like to be pistol whipped. It's not great. I know, I know, I take some controversial takes, and that's going to be one of them. But I'm generally

anti pistol whipping. I'm not gonna say there's a time in a place for pistol whipping, but it's a bad thing to receive. You know, you'd rather be the giver of a pistol whipping than the receiver. Yeah, mm hmm. So at Burnwell colon Coke, one impatient miner posted a notice at the entrance to the miners of Burnwell Coal Company, we shall have this raise. We want this raise which the government had granted us. The response from the president

of Burnwell was not long in coming. He said, as one of his employees recalled, he would let his mind go until moss grows over it, until it falls in the Huckleberry ridge before he would ever work a union man. Eighty of the ninety two Burnwell miners walked off their jobs and sent two of their number to Charleston to ask District seventeen for a charter. Hundreds of other miners elsewhere in Mingo did much the same thing. In accordance

with union policy. They were extructed by the head of the union to return home, reclaim their jobs, and reopen the minds. Then the union promise they would be welcomed into the union. The discontents did as they were bidden. As the last week of April began, the organizing drives

swept like wildfire through Mingo County. The union counted three hundred new members in one day, and hundreds more than next, And of course, true to form, the bosses fired every single man who came into work with a union card, and they then sent armed goons in to force these men out of their company homes. So hundreds of workers unionized.

They wind up homeless, their families wind up homeless, and the union has to set up and pay for miners camps to put these guys up and keep them in their families alive while they begin to unionize the minds of Mingo County and start to strike. So, how how late? How much later was this than the last episodes? This is eight years later? This is nineteen nineteen twenty one is when all this happens. So it's like enough time to forget, but not like for the people who lived it.

They're like, oh ship not again. Yeah, yeah, and a lot of the people, the people organizing this strike on behalf of the union had also in large part taken part in the ship that happened in the last episode. And also all of the folks cracking down on them, like the people in charge of Baldwin Felts and everything. All of these folks are a lot of these folks are still around, so both sides have more experience and are bringing what they experienced at the last set of

strikes into this one. So um yeah. And one of the things that's interesting to me about this is that these workers had refused to unionize and it kind of sucked over the union, but then the union basically spends a shipload of money buying them tents and food and helping to like take care of them as they begin their strike, because that's just the way the ship works. So the whole situation infuriated larger and larger sections of the minor Mingo County minor population as they see their

friends and family members kicked out and made homeless. And by May nineteen twenty three thousand of Mingo Counties four thousand miners had been unionized. Now they were aided in this by the fact that much of the local government in Mingo County was pro union. The town of Mattawuan, which is like one of the big towns in the area. The town of Mattawuan's mayor, cable Testerman had been elected by miners and he was loyal to them rather than the mind bosses. Yeah, it's a funny name, that's all.

It's a funny name. Yeah, a lot of great names in this people didn't know how silly their names were. Back in the day when the county sheriff's so so not the county sheriff's the state police in West Virginia were in the pay of the mind bosses. And like the boss of the state police was a captain named Bracus, and he was totally pro mine like corporate mind company. But like a lot of the county sheriffs were very

pro minor. Some of them were pro like. It kind of depended on the county a lot like Logan County was really shitty and pro mine company. Um, but Mingo County, you know, things were a little bit more you you had a lot more sympathy for the miners. And the police chief of the town of mattawan was profoundly pro minor,

and his name was Sid Hatfield. Like the old governor Doc Hatfield, Sid came from a family that was infamous for fighting and feuding, and at twenty seven years old, Sid was one of the best gunmen in the eight Then as now, the redneck farmers of West Virginia were all quick to brag about their handiness with a gun, but even among a crowd of marksmen, Sid Hatfield stood out. He always carried two pistols. He was known in duels for shooting them through his pockets, sometimes just to kill

people faster he was. He was kind of a badass, um. Yeah. He always carried two long pistols, and he was said to be equally accurate using either hand. He had a habit of showing off his skill by tossing a potato into the air and splitting it open with a shot from his gun. In nineteen fifteen, he had a semi famous duel with a mine foreman that left the foreman dead.

Hatfield had claimed self defense and been cleared of all charges. Now, in general, local law enforcement around Mingo County was unwilling to help the mind companies evict union men from their homes uh. The sheriff's department would only assist when proper notice was given, and when that and that interfered with the desire of mine operators to throw out unionized workers on the same day they were fired. So again the bosses called on the services of the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency.

Many of these men were deputized by friendly West Virginia sheriffs, which gave them official license to enforce laws in the mining camps and to carry guns. The bosses use them to collect rent, to guard payroll, and to suppress union organizing. So that's good. I'm in favor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You might compare them in Shadow Under like nightA rant or whatever, which is why Shadow Run has so many, like four pay police departments. That's a thing that happened, like that's

not like a like yeah, so like the Pinkerton's. Yeah, there are another and they do. They do a lot of union crushing. It's just it's mainly Baldwin Felts here in West Virginia. So the Baldwin Felts men were particularly despised for their undercover work. The agency regularly deployed men to hide among the miners and pretend to be union sympathizers.

One of these men, Charlie Lively, went so far as to organize several Union local outposts in Mingo County during the spring of nineteen So Lively would like set up union groups and then he would provide names of all the people who were secretly meeting to the company, who would then like fire and and evict those people. Um Lively and his agents would also act as agent provocateurs, so when like miners would hold protests, they would create violence at those protests and able in order to justify

violent crackdowns by mine guards. That happens today right well, all the time, dude, all the fucking time. Yeah, yeah. So the head of the Mingo County operation was a fellow named Albert Felts, one of the leaders of the Baldwin Felts Agency. He and his men had been tasked by their employer with serving a series of evictions on families who lived in Mattawan. Since the local police, led by Chief Hatfield, would not help, he asked his brother Tom Felts, who was directing the agency, to send him

a bunch of reinforcements. Mattawan was the heart of unionist resistance in Mingo, and Albert knew that evicting families there would be dangerous work. Uh so he he's there were about six other men. He approached Mayor Testament and asked if it would be okay for uh he and his in to set machine guns up on the roofs of some local buildings in Manawan in case things got out of town. He's basically like, hey, we gotta evict a

bunch of people might piss off the locals. Can I put machine guns up on your roof to murder your citizens if they get angry? Now, the mayor made a controversial call and said, no, you cannot set up machine gun nests on the roof of local buildings. Brave. Yeah, So he's he's the opposite of the Jaws mayor. Um kind of. I don't know the Jaws mayor doesn't really square with this, but he's everyone's cultural touchdowne for a bad mayor, so imagine him is not looking like that?

Um so yeah. Albert offers next to bribe the mayor with a thousand dollars for the right to set up a killing field in the middle of town, and to his credit, the mayor says no, Well, can I at least set up a killing field? Yeah? What can? I just want to have the ability to machine gun every one of your voters. Why is this a problem. What about some sort of death bog? What about a deaf bog? What about I don't know, a murder forest, murder forest. Yeah.

So on May nineteenth, nineteen twenty, Albert Felts his reinforcements arrived seven men, including his other brother, Lee Felts. This gave him a total of thirteen armed detectives. Uh. And detective at this point is a word that just means mercenary. Like, these guys are detecting ship, they're armed thugs. Yeah, I solve the mystery of why I beat that man to

death with a blackjack. It's because it was Paul. I remember when I learned that, like, oh, private detectives are just people that you hire to uh monitor other people. They're just kind of like paid stalkers. And I was like, oh, that's it's a very different picture. You know, that's a broad generalization. But still and yeah, and here they're just paid. They just are are men with guns who do whatever the people hiring the mask and in this case it's

throw people out of their homes. So Albert Felts gets thirteen detectives and when he gets his reinforcements, um so yeah. He was worried about the danger of doing this work without machine gun nests to back him up, but he and his men hopped into three cars and drove out to the edge of town to start evicting the ship out of some miners. Now the Baldwin feltsmen were all heavily armed, and the miners in the area could do nothing but stand by and watch as they tossed furniture

and valuables out onto the street. This kind of work was routine for the Baldwin feltsman and they intended to destroy the lives of a number of families and then hop on the train to get back to their homes at the end of the day. Now, the Baldwin Felts detectives were interrupted in their task by Sid Hatfield, the police chief and Mayor Testament. Again, Albert tried bribery, this time offering Sid two or three hundred dollars a month for his allegiance. Hatfield turned him down and demanded to

know what authority Felts had to evict people. Felts replied that he'd gotten a court order from the capital in Charleston, but he didn't have it on him. So Hatfield and Testament are like, that's unacceptable. You don't even have the fucking court order. You have no we have no way to know that you you have a right to evict these people, uh, and Felt just shrugged and said, basically, like, I have thirteen men with guns. What are the two

of you going to do about this? So the mayor and the police chief go back downtown and they attempt to like get on the telegraph or whatever, and they call up warrants from the local court to try and arrest the Baldwin feltsman for unlawfully processing evictions. But it doesn't really work out. Things aren't very fast back then, and while they do this, an armed posse of locals, mostly miners, start to congregate in downtown Matajuan, which is

why Albert felt what had some machine gun nests there. Um. So by the time the Baldwin feltsmen finished their work and return to the hotel they'd been staying at, there were an awful lot of angry men with guns in the middle of Mattawan ready to do violence. So the Baldwin Felds men get back and they're packing up to get to the train station, and there's another confrontation between

Mayor Testament, sid Hatfield and the detectives. The two groups threatened to arrest each other, and then, as historian Robert Shogun writes, quote, there would be nearly as many versions of what happened next as there were witnesses to the scene. By some accounts, Albert felt shot the Mayor, then World and fired into the hardware store at sid Hatfield. Others said the first shots came from the store itself and

from Hatfield's guns, striking both Felts and Testament. At any rate, everyone agreed that the first men to fall were Cable Testament and Albert Felts. Then all hell broke loose. Immediately, Hugh Combs's deputies and some of the other miners had been looking on raked the street with gunfire. Albert Felts, his brother, Lee, and Cunningham drew their pistols and returned fire,

but they were badly outgunned. Most of their comrades, whose guns were packed away, scrambled for cover behind trees and fences. But Combs's men were relentless. One after the other, the Baldwin Felts agents fell, so at the end of the blood letting, three Mottawan locals, including Mayor Testament, were dead, along with seven Baldwin Felts detectives, including both Felts brothers, and most of the killing on this day was done

by Sid Hatfield. Now, it was rare for cops to wind up on the side of union strikers, and this, plus Sid's well earned reputation is kind of a larger than life gun slinger made him an instant hero of union men nationwide. Like they fucking love Sid Hatfield because he shoots a bunch of detectives. Yeah yeah, he like, I mean those were and he got the two brothers. It's like he took out the ball almost, although yeah, I'm sure there's more bosses. There's more bosses. He took

out a boss. And like every post, every like photo you see of Sid Hatfield from this period of time, he's pointing both of his guns directly at the cameraman, like smiling and posing like he's They weren't great on gun safety back then. A lot of pointing guns at people to get good photos. Yeah, So the United Mine Workers Union puts together a propaganda film called Smiling Sid, which they played in camps to help inspire in organized miners.

Sid Hatfield becomes the focus of regular newspaper stories and photographs inevitably capture him pointing again both of his guns at the camera. There was a trial for Sid Hatfield, of course, but the Mingo County jury decided that Smiling Sid had done nothing wrong. It also happened that several witnesses hostile to Hatfield died mysteriously right before the trial. Obviously, the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency and the surviving Felts brother

we're not about to take this lying down. They attempted to frame Hatfield and one of his deputies for the destruction of coal company property at a nearby county where the legal situation was friendlier. So Hatfield and his deputy had to travel to McDowell County, West Virginia to stand trial. Now, there was no real evidence against them, but the goal

was never to convict them. In August of nine, Sid and his deputy arrived in town to go to their trial, and as they stepped up to the courthouse doors, a group of Baldwin Felt Mine guards, including that labor spy I was talking about earlier. Lively, drove up and just pumped them full of gunfire and kill both men. Now, the men who murdered, said Hatfield, were tried in turn, but McDow County Justice proved his unwilling to convict them, as Mingo County Justice was to convict their victims. So

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

We're back. Oh my Christ, sweet bleeding Jesus, we are back. What a good time. So yeah, that's the hat Field stuff. It's a bummer. Um. And while all this is happening, So this like occurs over the course of about a year, you know, you've got the Mattawan massacre as it's known um and then you've got Sid Hatfield's assassination. You know, there's two a little less than a year apart, but

this happens like one. And while all this drama is progressing, and like there's a bunch of court cases and ship and hat Fields, you know, becoming a public figure. While all this is going down, the overall situation in Mingo County had continued to degenerate. Striking miners had formed into a series of heavily armed camps, and groups of them started regularly sallying out to carry out hyper attacks and acts of sabotage on mine company infrastructure, and also to

assassinate mine guards. Now, West Virginia's governor at this time was fundamentally a coward, and his first instinct was to beg President Harding to send in federal troops to help calm the violence. Harding replied that he wouldn't send in federal troops until he was convinced the governor had actually

taken some sort of action. So the governor enacted West Virginia's Public Safety Law, which enabled him to seize authority for Mingo County law enforcement from the local police, who sided with the miners and handed over to the head of the state police, a guy named Bracas who was in the pay of the mine owners and was a real piece of ship. So that's good. Yeah, I guess that must have happened in history before. But that seems to be drastic to be all like the police, they're

not the police. Yeah, the police aren't policing the way we want him to police. They're not the police anymore. This other guy that we pay is now the police. Yeah. Yeah. It is important to note that there is there is a history in in the labor movement of East sighting with workers and being very useful in that, but also there's a history of the state just being like when

they do that, you're not the police anymore. Yeah. So Bracus gets to create new police because the police that were there didn't hate minors enough, and he immediately uses his powers to create a law and order community made up of two volunteers. And these were mostly wealthier men from Mingo County, business owners and landed gentry who would just be given rifles by the state and the legal

authority to violently suppress their poor working class foes. So that's cool, yeah, but maynight, Yeah, it's awesome and good and cool. I I also love it. And what's even cooler is that today, if this happened, no one would even need to give them rifles because they already have them, and a lot of the people that would be shooting at don't, which is part of a anyway. On May nine, the governor declared a state of martial law in West Virginia.

He put Major Thomas B. Davis of the of the of the of the state, you know, National Guard or whatever the militia in charge of finally suppressing the strikers. And Major Davis was a real piece of ship. So Davis had joined the U. S Military to fight in the Spanish American War, which is a bad war to have joined to fight in, um, but he also failed

to see any action in it. Um. So, even though he never got any combat, he decided he really liked military life, and when his regiment was disbanded, he joined the West Virginia National Guard to stay in uniform. UH Davis had commanded a unit during the Paint Creek Strike of nineteen twelve, and the whole experience had revealed and Robert Shogun's words a nonchalance towards civil liberties on the part of Davis, which is not a thing you want

to be nonchalant about. Um, be chalant about civil liberties? Is my ship out of those? Yeah, you want to chalant the hell out of him? Yeah, don't non the anyway. Here's Robert Shogen quote. This is talking about what he had done in uh uh, the nineteen twelve strike that we talked about last episode. It also talks about some shitty things that the governor, who was otherwise seemed pretty cool um Dr Hatfield got up to. So it's a

useful paragraph. Quote. The military commission that had held sway over defendants charged with violating Governor Glasscox martial law decrees selected him as its Provost Marshal, him being Davis, despite the fact that the civil courts in the martial law district were open. The military Commission, sitting in the town of Pratt and Kenawa County, ruled on offenses ranging from larceny, adultery,

and disorderly conduct to disobeying sentries and perjury. A nearby freight terminal served as a bullpen to hold prisoners, among whom was Mother Jones. On occasion, the commission tried as many as thirty prisoners at a time. Dispensing with such formalities his indictments or juries, Davis saw to it that those convicted were hustled off not to the county jail but to the Moundsville State Prison. With Davis's active assistance,

the Commission rode rough shot over civil courts. When the County Circuit Court issued an order forbidding enforcement of the commissions sentences, Major Davis, acting on orders from Governor Hatfield, who had by now succeeded Glasscock, blocked the county sheriff from serving the writ on the National Guard officer who

headed the Commission. In May of nineteen thirteen, after a pro labor newspaper, the Socialist and Labor Star editorially denounced the coal barons and attacked Governor Hatfield for arresting a union lawyer and suppressing the Labor Argus sister paper to the Star, Davis led a raid on the Stars offices,

bearing warrants from Hatfield himself. Davis and his posse of guardsmen and sheriff's deputies forced their way into the paper's offices in Huntington's overpower to guard and wreaked havoc destroying type and printing equipment. From there, Davis and his commandos invaded the editor's home, season correspondents and books and rummaging through his files and searched for the paper subscription list. The editor and assistant editor were imprisoned for two weeks.

So that's cool. So that's this guy's backstory. That's gonna be like his that very precedented in history. I mean, I'm sure you take out the press, but yeah, that just seems like such a I mean, you know, obviously it's like you cut them off at their communication. But at the same time, it seems like such bystanders. You know. Yet historically, uh, it's pretty dangerous to run a socialist newspaper in the United States of America. A lot of them got murdered, a lot of them got deported, a

lot of them got cracked down on. There's a long, beautiful history of that. It's one of our proudest traditions in the United States. Um. Yeah, it's cool and good. So um yeah, So this is that's the backstory of this guy Major Davis, who winds up in charge of the state of West Virginia's efforts to suppress the Strikers. And end the violence UM, which they do by using more violence. So Davis's first task in charge was to

vet the volunteers for the county's new vigilance committees. And these are like the rich guys who volunteered to shoot at poor people UM. And Davis ensured that no union men, farmers, or black men were allowed on the commission or given firearms. Citing his authority under martial law, Major Davis banned all union gatherings and only union gatherings. He also banned the distribution of pro union newspapers. He rescinded all gun permits for union men as well, effectively stripping them of their

constitutional right to bear arms. So that's good. So Davis's first actions targeted union organizers, arresting them for trying to hold gatherings and having several of them brutally beaten by his own men. He also put it in order for a creative new Thompson submachine guns, which he hoped would aid the Mingo police and clearing out strikers and their families. The miners, however, did not wait for this to happen. On a group of snipers from one of the striking

workers camps opened fire on camp guards. State police and National guardsmen from nearby Kentucky came in to provide backup, and two of them were killed by sniper fire. The snipers were eventually driven off, several was arrested and one was killed, and the whole encounter convinced the mine bosses that it was necessary to break up these striking camps, which had basically evolved into armed militia compounds. Now. Major Davis's first plan for how to handle this situation was

to create concentration camps on US soil. He wanted to send soldiers into the strike camps and four out most of the committed union men and then reorganize the camps, which would then be filled with women and children and put them under semi permanent military guard. So yeah, he just was like, what have we just made some concentration camps out of this? That seems like a call. There's only the same ideas like that. Guys don't have new ideas.

It's all the one idea really, which is, yeah, use weapons that you have and they don't, to lock them into prisons of one sort or another and make them do what you want or just die if that's what you're wanting to do. Yeah, that is the only plan. Ever, like when you get right down to it, which is cool and good, does not echo in history or into the modern day and anyway. So as a prelude to this, uh, this concentration camp policy, Major Davis began sending police and

soldiers on a series of raids against camps in Lick Creek. Now, there were a series of gun fights involving hundreds of men sniping at each other and like milelong skirmish lines, and Davis ordering them to our machine guns into the campus press strikers. A bunch of different gunfights like this,

multiple battles occur. So there's all these raids which kill a number of people, and you know, happen over the course of days and weeks um and you know, the death toll of all these raids, combined with the anger over the assassination of sid Hatfield, which happens in early August of nine, all of this eventually pushes the striking miners into massive retaliation. On October three, thousand of them

gathered with all of the guns that they could carry. Now, since Davis's men had been rating their strongholds, they decided to target, a stronghold of the mine bosses Logan County. And I'm gonna read a quote now from a writ up by a professor named Hoit Wheeler, a labor professor, talking about what was happening in Logan County at the time. Quote.

Logan County in nineteen twenty one has been described as a leer in the face of liberty, a feudal barony defended by soldiers of fortune in the pay of mine owners. The ruler of this feudal barony was the Sheriff of Logan County, Don Chaffin. It is instead of Chafing that in his heyday, when clothed with official power, he was a hard drinking, swaggering, bragging, bullying gunman who ruled his kingdom of Logan with a mailed fist. In Logan County, it was the practice for coal companies to pay the

salaries of deputy sheriffs. These deputies were used systematically by Chaffin to prevent union organizers from operating in Logan County. Organizers were beaten and jailed at will. So this army of miners from their camps organizes at Lynz Creek, which is about sixty five miles from the Logan County line, and they start marching. Two UMW officers who are terrified of the bloodshed that might ensue if these guys reach Logan County, they actually intercept the miners and they begged

them to call off the march. There basically, we can negotiate this, we can work things out with the companies. There's no need for this attorney into a massive blood bath. Um and the miners agree, and the mining this army of miners starts to back away, and while they're backing away, Sheriff Chaffin of Logan County decides to launch an attack

while they're retreating, and he kills two men. After a massive battle, um now pisces off the striking miners, and suddenly they stop retreating and backing away, and in fact, three thousand more men joined them, and like swell the force to six thousand, and this army of six thousand men starts advancing on Blair Mountain, a ridgeline that separates the Union chunk of Logan County, which is pretty tiny from the larger non Union chunk, and by the time

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

One witness who was present described the scene of the army this way. One big redheaded fellow hopped off the tray a lot of them to trains to get up to the front, and got up on the platform and waived his high powered rifle and said, the Coal River hell cats have arrived. Now watch us work. He called for detailed number seventy four. He got up on some high ground and kept hollering for details seventy four, and

there were about twenty men all armed. They had on the customary overalls and belt cartridges and a couple of big forty four stuck in their belt and high powered rifles. He called those men in and he called the roll and then started off up Coal River, and word was being passed around through the crowd. So on the opposite side of Blair Mountain, Sheriff Chaffin had about a thousand men at his command, amount about thousands like police and

stuff wrong with another two thousand volunteers, mostly these vigilance countymen. UM. So he's got about three thousand fighters in total. But he also has several commercial pilots and he has three planes. So that's that's about to matter in a second. Now, the assault of the miners begins on August thirty one, and it is ugly from the jump. The miners had the advantage of numbers, but they were assaulting an entrenched enemy.

They're trying to attack the top of this mountain. Um, So they're attacking an entrenched enemy with the high ground and access to a number of gatling guns and other automatic weapons. Battle was joined at a number of sections across the line, and the fighting was vicious. Sheriff Chafin

eventually decided to send out his planes. Now, initially, the thing that he had like been legally authorized to do was to load them up with copies of a proclamation from President Harding basically saying like stop stop all this um. But instead of loading them up with proclamations. On Thursday, September one, he ordered them loaded with pipe bombs and tear gas bombs and just starts dropping them on crowds

of miners. Now, this doesn't work very well. The Sheriff's air SATs air force was markedly ineffective, but it is part of what makes the Battle of Blair Mountains so historic. This was not just a strike or a riot. This was a full fledged military action, a war on American soil against American citizens, um, which included air power and machine guns. It's a wild but people don't here learn

about this ship. Yeah, It's like people talk about like the Oklahoma bombing and stuff, and this seems like the same kind of level of escalation. Yeah, except an I don't know. I'm I'm bann at history. You're good at history. Yeah, I mean, like the Oklahoma City bombing people know about because it was just like one asshole with no good grievance, but like on the part of a bunch of right

wing nutfox um murdering people. Um. But these guys were had a real grievance, and it was a grievance that kind of cuts to the heart of inequalities in the center of American society. So we never talked about the time that they got bombed and tear gassed and shot at with machine guns. Yeah, we just would you would you just leave that out of the history books. Um? No, The eight hour workday was entirely gained by polite people

with signs protesting. That's why. That's why we have a weekend, not the men who charged machine gun nests and sniped it corporate guards. Yeah, it's cool, Like, this is cool history. This is what the industry should be. It's like, this is you You've got to imagine that if we told the stories like this, people would be would be a lot more interested in history, our history. Yeah, the reason we have these things like the weekend and the eight hour work day is that and this is not just

you know what happened in West Virginia. All over the country, there were a number of actions like this. This is kind of like the biggest and most you know too, But like all of these things that we consider just a part of life, like the fact that you're supposed to get a weekend, all of these things were bought in blood by men who were willing to kill for these rights by men who are willing to die for these things, and we don't talk about that even though

it's cool and interesting because it might give people ideas. Yeah, I mean, they sacrificed a lot, but I also like retweeted a petition, so you know that is the same thing. Yeah, yes, they were. These men were retweeting with their rifles. Yeah, every every way, every one of the hundred thousand bullets fired in that one battle was a tweet. It's all about the ratio, then, is now. Yeah. Yeah, they ratioed the mine bosses by strafing them with thirty six Yeah,

but um, it's for an outbreak. You know what also supports the strafing of mine guards with high caliber hunting rifles. The products and services that support this podcast. We're back, We're back, and where we just left off, the sheriff of Logan County had ordered chemical weapons and bombs deployed

by air against attacking workers. Um, so that's pretty cool. Um. Now, over the course of days, uh, this battle escalates and fighting continues again for days, and federal troops are finally sent in, which you know, it takes a while to get there, and the union men know that federal troops are coming. They also know that like they can't fight federal troops, right, you know, the army has cannons and

better bombers and a whole lot of machine guns. Um. So they realized they only have like one last ditch chance to like win this fight before the army arrives, and they launched a desperate assault across the entire Blair Mountain line. And I'm gonna quote again from the Battle for Blair Mountain by Robert Shogen about this last assault quote.

In preparation for their attack, the insurgents dispatched a patrol to destroy a railroad bridge on the Guyan Dot line of the Norfolk and Western, hoping to keep reinforcements from reaching the defender's positions. The bridge was set on fire, but a century who extinguished the blaze discovered a charge of dynamite and saved it from being blown up. But the miners went ahead with their planned assault anyway. That same morning, the attack began with a feint at the

center of the defense lines at Blair Mountain. The miners opened up on an outpost manned by the Bluefield Boys, a volunteer contingent from the town with machine gun and rifle fire. Having gained the attention of the defenders, the miners sent their main force against the left and right flanks of the defenders. Attack was pushed desperately, reported one local journalist from his vantage point in a machine gun

nest on the defense ramparts. The enemies seemed to have no sense of fear whatever and advanced over the crest of the hill and the face of machine gun and rifle fire. But in reality that the defenders gave as good as they got. We couldn't fire a shot, but what they would rake our line from top to bottom, one of the miners told reporters to this beleaguered insurgent.

The offenders seemed to be able to volley back a hundred rounds for every shot fired at them, and when it came to devious tactics, the defenders were at least a match for their attackers. At one point, the defenders in the first line of trenches abandoned their posts, seemingly driven off by the force of the attack. The advancing miners promptly occupied the trench, exulting in the ground they

had gained, but they had little time to celebrate. A hidden machine gun nest, located barely fifty yards away, raked the position and drove them back. Another machine gun nest, protected by a rock cliff and barricades of timber and stones, kept up a steady fire. Fortunately for the miners that could only fire in one direction, but it was enough

to repel several assaults, so the attack fails. In the end, the miners cannot break the line at Blair Mountain and can't take the mountain, and federal troops arrive on September three, and the miners were forced to retreat to their lines and eventually to disband. In the end, fifty to a hundred miners were killed, along with ten to thirty of Sheriff Chaffin's men. Almost a thousand miners were arrested, but

the vast majority of the army dispersed. Many miners hid their weapons and the hills and valleys around Blair Mountain and caches of arms are actually still discovered there today. Oh that's cool, yeah yeah, go arms hunting in Blair County and send me what you find. Just mail it, mail it. The US Post Office loves sending century old munitions and dynamite. Just go ahead, and it's fine, get They'll take what they can get. So yeah, yeah, yeah. There were trials for treason and murder in the wake

of all this. Bill Blizzard was acquitted, but some of the miners were convicted for a variety of crimes. The UMW paid for everyone legal defense, which nearly bankrupted the union, and the immediate wake of the battle was a huge victory for the forces of capitalism. This time, the bosses had won, but the United Mine Workers of America continue to organize, and the Senate Investigating Committee looked into the whole mess, which helped bring national attention to the plight

of miners in West Virginia and elsewhere. The bosses had won on the battlefield, but they did not win in the long battle for public opinion. By nineteen thirty five, the new Deal brought new protections for workers and an end too many of the abuses that had long plagued the coal industry. The u m W succeeded finally in organizing the vast majority of miners in West Virginia. So

that's good. Yeah. The ESU system, which we talked about in our first episode, whereby women were forced to pay for basic necessities by rape, Uh, is believed to have come to an end around nineteen thirty four as a consequence of the Union finally organizing West Virginia. While many aspects of this violent struggle have been studied and covered in detail by historians like Robert Shogun, THEESU system was

allowed to fade from memory. Historian Michael Klein writes that the use of female flesh to extend credit to feed the family was never mentioned by our own regional historians. Now this has led many modern historians to doubt that such a system ever existed. The men who line up on this side, like West Virginia University professor Paul Rakes, will point to the aggression and powerful self defense instincts

shown by the miners at Blair Mountain. Men who were willing to charge machine gun nests to fight for their rights surely would not have taken a system of bureaucratized rape of their wives and sisters lying down. Labor historian Wes Harris has a convincing argument though against this line of reasoning quote, my best guess is they didn't talk about it because if they had talked about it, they would have risked their husbands getting really irritated and going

out and trying to get revenge. Your husband gets killed, you're a widow, you're on the street, you get kicked out of the company house, which is a point like a lot of miners died because they got angry and took up arms against the mine, and a lot of these women were just like, if I let them know what I'm doing to keep the family fed, they'll go get themselves. Was killed, and then we'll be in an

even worse spot. Yeah, I mean, there's it seems like there's no shortage of reasons why you might not, you know, create a big thing of that that almost are you know, at least in modern perspectives, seemed very self evident and don't even need to be discussed. But its like it was a big deal to be able to feel like, no, actually, there's this logic to it. It's so strange. Yeah, Now it's further evidence for the idea that the East House

system was real. Uh. Labor historian West Harris points to the extremely well documented history of child labor in the minds of West Virginia. Now, this was illegal even at the time that we're talking about, but it was not uncommon for ten year olds to be sent down to work um and authorities were almost never called. As a result of this, if a child were to complain to a social worker, his family would lose their company house,

to be forced out onto the street. This is a little bit like how today more than a fifth of U S workers are regularly forced into uncompensated over time. You might also compare it to the fact that in two thousand seventeen, one study found that workers in tin U S States had lost a combine eight billion dollars per year to wage theft from their employees. Now that's

just ten states eight billion dollars in wage theft per year. Now, one of the things that's interesting to me is that the total value of all property theft nationwide on an annual basis is about sixteen billion dollars. So if you're looking at these numbers, you might come to the conclusion that wage theft is almost certainly a larger problem than all other theft combined in the United States, but it's

virtually never prosecuted. That's me, isn't that? It's yeah, one of the I uh, I worked in a place that had waged theft. I don't think I was ever deprived of paid overtime or anything. But there's a lot of people who just straight up didn't get paychecks and stuff, and then we all talked about it. It's like, well,

it seems like there's nothing we can do. We can try and fight and lose and then get sucked over and then everyone gets sucked over or get fired, and yeah, we won't be able to pay rent, will be out of our houses now because of legal protections, will be out of our houses in thirty days as opposed to

the same day. But like you know, um, things you might conclude that things aren't as much better as they should be, and some people might conclude that maybe some folks need to be putting red bandanas around the barrels of rifles today, but that's outside of my purview to advise as a podcast host. UM. So, the battle between labor and the bosses continues, and today it largely does so without unions on the side of labor. Um Unions are are a lot less common than they were back then,

and they have a lot less power. Uh. Strikes are not a thing of the past entirely, um, but they aren't They don't have the teeth that they used to, although in two nineteen UM the threat of airline stewardess is striking uh An. Air traffic control is just not

being able to handle working without pay. During the government shutdown, UM showed us that the mere threat of such things and the right industries can bring swift concessions to the capitalist class because that fucking that situation ended real quick once it looked like the planes weren't gonna be able to fly. Now, the overall situation for labor in America

is not great today. Most of us have never known a United States in which labor was organized and capable of acting on a mass scale to achieve its goals.

While the new labor rights that FDRs administration put in place helped to enshrine UM you know protections into law, and these were very important, the fact that unions basically bowed to the federal government and letting them set all this meant that successive generations of politicians have been able to steadily chisel away at labor rights while unions slowly declined in power and influence. The struggle of labor is the struggle of folks like you and me to live

a decent life. Our predecessors fought and bled for a five day, forty hour work week. They picked up guns, and they braved machine gun fire for the right to organize themselves, to speak their mind, and to live independent lives. Is something more than slaves of the wealthy. Now the next chapter of this history, uh, the chapter that podcast hosts will be talking about in another hundred years. This is not yet and written. But everyone listening here now has a chance to be one of the authors of

this history. Uh. And I'd like to end this episode once we once we plug our plug doubles with another song, another Union ballot by one of America's great folk musicians. Um, whose side are you one? This is also by by Mr Pete Seeker. As you sit in quarantine waiting for whatever the future has in store for us, I think it's it's good to ask yourself the same question that Pete asks everybody in this song. So we're gonna we're gonna play ourselves up with that. But Spencer, do you

first want to plug your plug doubles? Uh? Yeah, at the six sler on all the things it's spelled like it sounds. If you can't spell it, that's fine. You're probably better off. Um, and I did a podcast called Harmon Town. Um, you could listen to the ads. I'm pretty proud of those ads. I'm not super proud of my other output on the podcast. I mean it's fine. It's just like you know, I was just hanging out. It was just some bullshit. But yeah, that's some stuff.

Harmon Quest is a show I did. It's ah, we played D and D and then animated. I think it's pretty accessible. If you love DN D and your friends just don't get it, you might want to show it to them. Um, I don't know. But but really it's about Robert. You know what is this is really about you? Not me? You? So this is this is about all

of us. Uh. My only plugs are are our website behind the Bastards dot com, our podcast on Instagram at bastards Pod, and my podcast The Women's War, which has a lot to say about systems that might be set up that might work a little better than some that we have today. So maybe listen to that. Uh and right now listen to Mr Pete Seeger. Come all of you, good workers, good news do you. I'll tell of how the good old Union has come in here doo dwell, Which side are you all? Which side are you are?

My daddy was a minor, and I'm a minor's son, and I'll stick with the Union till every battle's one. Which side are you all? Which side are you all? They say in Harlem County EI. There are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man or a thug for j H. Player, Which side are you all on? Which side are you are? Or workers? Can you stand it? Or tell me how you can? Will you be a lousy scavel? Will you be, young man? Which side are you all? Which side are you are? Don't scab for

the bosses, don't listen to their lives. Those poor folks haven't got a chance unless we organize. Which side are you are? Which side are you all? Which side are you are? Which side are you are?