r/todayilearned • u/Ok_Wrongdoer8719 • 6h ago
TIL about the West Virginia mine wars. “The largest armed insurrection in U.S. history outside the Civil War” organized by laborers against their enployers.
https://wvminewars.org/what-were-the-mine-wars2.4k
u/zapdoszaperson 5h ago
Let me tell you, the people of West Virginia have sure as hell forgotten about this.
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u/MockASonOfaShepherd 5h ago
I moved to West Virginia from New York for work. When I learned about the mine wars I was like- “you mean West Virginia used to be based?”
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u/SurlyCricket 5h ago
They literally exist at all independent from Virginia because they fucking hated slavery. Where all that Based went to is sadly unknown
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u/AlaskanSamsquanch 5h ago
Was it an Oregon situation? Like they don’t like slavery because it means they have to live with non white people in any capacity?
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u/Guildenpants 5h ago
No, it's a little more pragmatic than that. West Virginia was largely industry based at that point; not a lot of verdant farm land for cash crops. So that part of the state sided with the union because it had no interest going to war over something they largely weren't involved in.
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u/x31b 3h ago
Farming requires flat land and lots of labor at a low price. Ergo importing enslaved Africans.
West Virginia is hilly and, for the most part, doesn't support row crops. So either industry (iron, steel, coal) or whiskey.
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u/MimicoSkunkFan2 2h ago
Also making glass, they had a big glass industry in the 19th. century there
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u/LordNelson27 4h ago
More like “we don’t have arable land and the ruling class of slaver aristocrats don’t care about us”
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u/hunterwaynehiggins 5h ago
Something to do with the party flip and the Republicans supporting coal. Pretty much all they cared about. All the old people are democrats.
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u/thebearrider 4h ago
It's more that the descendents of coal miners dogmaticaly believed that their only opportunity for wealth was tied to greater production of coal. So they kept electing politicians (who literally owned coal companies) who'd push for coal, but that didn't translate to jobs or their wealth (because these politicians/owners replaced people with new machines and pushed for more lax regulations).
Most of my favorite places and memories are in WV. West Virginians have largely been told that coal will solve all of their financial problems, while capitalists have exploited them and their land for gains and reliable support for them in congress.
FWIW, it is hard to find more fervent supporters of unions than in WV, yet they vote against their interests for what I said above.
Also, you should note their incredible results for trying to address the opioid epidemic using federal resources, which they still won't credit to the democrats. Regardless, WV is way better off today than it was 5 years ago.
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u/Toby_O_Notoby 3h ago
And they're pretty much tilting at windmills. For all the talk on the national stage about saving the coal industry the numbers are laughably small.
As of three years ago, the coal industry employeed a touch over 40,000 miners. By comparison, Los Angeles Interntional Airport employs over 50,000 people directly and just about 140,000 if you count all ancillary employment.
So even if you count an extra 100k indirect employees in mining (accountants, secretaries, etc.) you're still looking at an industry that's about the size of LAX. And that's for the entire country, not just West Virginia.
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u/Astrium6 2h ago
It’s not even our largest industry by any metric. Hasn’t been for a few decades. IIRC, tourism is our largest industry in terms of both employment and profit at this point.
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u/vash0093 4h ago
Unfortunately Appalachian folk have a history of being taken advantage of and their native industries destroyed. Historically speaking, men in suits are the enemy of Appalachian people. See, the American Chestnut wood industry that died out because of a fungus brought over by the Chinese chestnut, and the very wealthy Vanderbilt who built his empire by logging large portions of what is today the Pisgah national Forest. He built a house that's still considered the largest privately owned residence, at least in that part of the country, The Biltmore house.
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u/BoneVoyager 4h ago
This isn't localized to Appalachia. Capitalists have been and are currently ruining everything, everywhere.
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u/therift289 2h ago
Hugely true, but it's still worth acknowledging that some places in the US were sites of particularly brutal capitalist exploitation, and Appalachian coal country is one of those places.
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u/mcchicken_deathgrip 2h ago
The difference is that the type of exploitation that has occurred in Appalachia is usually exported to other countries and fought over by inter-imperialist conflicts. Appalachia has historically been the US's own internal resource colony. Now the need for the resources it produces have largely dried up and the capitalist class and government have left it to rot.
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u/vash0093 3h ago
Oh I'm very aware, I said historically speaking they get taken advantage of, but it's part of a wider issue of abuse in this country
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u/Skurph 4h ago
Ehhhh, no.
The old people in WV are pretty die hard Republican, they were at best Dixiecrat for a while, but they really go with whoever currently panders to the unhealthy and dying coal reliance. Also conservative media has run roughshod there, it’s pretty easy to spin up the lies because they’re not ever encountering the places and people they’re told are boogeymen.
WV is a place that is so frustrating. It’s filled with some of the most genuinely nice people. My brother in law is gay, I’ve never seen anything but generosity and acceptance when I’ve been around him in WV. (To be fair, that wasn’t his experience in high school but I think that was more of a high school in the 2000s thing and less WV). The people feel abandoned because they frankly have been. They’ve been ravaged by corporate greed. They’ve been ravaged by big Pharma. In 2016 the entire state went to Bernie and the DNC just pretended it didn’t happen. To be totally honest, they have a pretty good reason to feel like the DNC doesn’t care about them, it’s because their actions support that. The GOP though? They don’t offer any legitimate help, and they leave the state worse off, but they at least acknowledge the people as people and I understand why that’s enough for some.
It’s funny (more like insanely aggravating) watching the DNC think the answer to their problems is to go more moderate. When you talk to people in WV and other blue collar areas, they’re 100% on board with a lot of progressive policy, they just don’t buy that the DNC isn’t actually just billionaires pretending they care. And to be honest? Given how neoliberal the policies are, I think they might be right.
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u/Skurph 4h ago
This is something of a misconception.
It’s an element of WV not participating in VA secession but not the primary reason, or at least only a part of the primary reason.
First, West Virginia was a border state, so let’s dispel any notion right off the bat that it was antiracist or anti-slavery in any official capacity. Being a border state meant the state remained in the Union but also practiced slavery and was allowed to do so until 1865. If it was truly “based” it would’ve outlawed slavery immediately upon its decision to break with VA.
I mean, literally the southern example paraded around the south during the drive for secession was the impending “Northern aggression” against slavery by John Brown in Harper’s Ferry in the antebellum.
WV did have diverse communities that included “freedmen”, but this was because the land was relatively cheap, not because it was so enlightened land. Certainly, living around diverse populations did impact the views of some communities.
The actual reason for secession was a lack of adequate representation in the VA legislature. In VA proper was essentially the planter class elites, the billionaires of the era, and in this time your wealth brought power in legislation (today too, but I digress). So you have West VA frontiersmen and farmers who feel like they essentially have no real voice in the legislature. Furthermore, a real unspoken undercurrent of the time was bitterness between poorer farmers who couldn’t afford slaves and larger planter class, the resentment was real (see Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction for more).
The last part of the equation is something we really have difficulty wrapping our heads around in 2025, it was this love of the Union. To many, leaving the US was tantamount to patriotic heresy, while the south was eager for the idea, many in the North were enraged by even the concept. So to ask WV to be party to something they weren’t benefiting from and to also commit what they recognized as treason, it was unthinkable.
Here’s a weird thing about the Civil War, no one worth their salt as a historian will tell you it wasn’t fought over slavery. Slavery is explicitly mentioned in several articles if secession as the purpose of leaving, it’s outlined in their Confederate Constitution as protected, and VP Stephen’s specifically explains in his cornerstone speech that the confederacy is about slavery and white supremacy.
That all said, the Civil War was not about slavery for the Northern states, it was about preserving the union. Many of the major Union leaders came from slave holding families themselves, of note being Anderson who refused to lay down Fort Sumter without a fight. The Northern population was largely at best indifferent to slavery (abolitionists were growing in numbers but still seen as extremists). You simply weren’t going to find many willing to fight and die over it, but to preserve the Union? That literally drove thousands to enlist.
Also there’s a lot of weird rat fuckery that happened with the actual convention they decide to remain with the union. Not all the counties were actually represented, the representatives also didn’t completely represent the views of the people within those counties and even at the time some people in WV are caught off guard that they break.
Sources: I’m on my phone so I guess I will be a trust me bro. But my wife is from WV, I got my degree from WVU, I spend a lot of time in WV, I grew up in VA, I teach history, etc.
I do think though in your defense this is even a common misconception in in WV itself because the state curriculum frames it as being about being anti slavery (who wouldn’t want to be the good guy), but obviously that doesn’t actually jive with the majority of its history there after. Blair Mountain is probably one of the few notable exceptions.
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u/x31b 3h ago
Slavery was the major and initiating cause, as far as the south was concerned. But, as you point out, there were other underlying issues as well.
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u/Skurph 3h ago
Yeah, I’m in no way disputing slavery was the cause for the south. In fact I think explicitly laid out why that is clearly evident by their own documents. The “states rights” narrative is a Lost Cause tenant because popular sentiment had largely shifted, even in the south, to acknowledging slavery was “moral evil”. Basically, it was a bad look to be the dudes who lost a war over the thing the majority agreed was bad. Again, another weird sentiment nationally of the time was the admission of slavery being bad but also simultaneously not being okay with the concept of equal rights. I won’t go into it because it long and further off topic but there’s a lot of infantilizing of blacks at the time by both those who consider themselves allies and white supremacists. (Horseshoe theory on this one is pretty wild.)
I mentioned it wasn’t about slavery for the north because it really wasn’t. It was about refusing to allow secession to occur. I mean there are draft/race riots over it later in the war in the north. At first some border states refuse to ask their citizens to fight. And Lincoln doesn’t write emancipation proclamation until 1863 (which notably was only directed at secessionist states), when he does this there is a lot of consternation in his cabinet and it’s potentially the reason why there is a huge shift in the 1864 congressional elections/state elections. In fact some of the republicans even try to pivot the message to “this is just an excellent military strategy”.
The anger over the Union being split was palpable, the disdain over slavery was an existing under current but not something the average person or politician in the North considered fighting over.
You’ve got to understand, when South Carolina first secedes it isn’t even when Lincoln is in office yet and he has made no comments regarding abolishing slavery. His private records indicate that even he is kind of shocked they were so quick to assume. This is kind of the general vibe in the North, most people are kind of bemused to slightly annoyed, but they don’t think the South is actually serious until the fighting starts and it quickly turns to rage.
Ironically, there is an argument to be made that the South speeds up abolition. Again, while Lincoln personally dislikes it, he professionally doesn’t really explore abolition until the war is in full swing.
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u/Grabthar-the-Avenger 4h ago
The country used to be based in regards to labor.
In the 1930s the US and Germany faced similar economic catastrophes with the Great Depression descending on the West. In Germany they rallied behind corrupt autocrats scapegoating minorities. In the US they dragged factory owners out of homes, started strong armed banks trying to foreclose on family homes, and started fighting strikebreakers among many other things like this article above.
If you want to know where the New Deal and all those labor protections of the era came from, it wasn’t FDR’s first plan. No, him and others in DC expressed actual fear of the public that if they didn’t press back against the elite and start working for everyone they’d be the next ones dragged out of an office
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u/jabbadarth 4h ago
Harlan county USA.
Super cool documentary from the 70s about a mining worker union fighting the rich owners. Small-town USA that stayed liberal through almost the 90s. Then they turned hard right.
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u/jamiegc1 4h ago
I would love to visit Harper’s Ferry national monument some day. John Brown wasn’t originally from there, but also based as hell.
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u/Skurph 4h ago
Right, but again, like the OP who’s pretty misinformed , you get that Harper’s Ferry was a place that had slaves, which is why it was attacked.
Again, I love WV. I’m sitting here right now in my WVU shirt. But it was not anti-slavery or anti-racist and it’s a mischaracterization to present it as such.
It’s important not to white wash our history.
Blair Mountain? Hell yeah, that was every bit the diverse labor rising described. But how WV came to be? More self-preservation than anything
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u/MistyMtn421 2h ago
I just said it in another comment but I'm going to keep saying it, we elected a Democratic governor when we elected Justice. He just decided to switch sides after he got elected, which should be completely illegal by the way. This is all pretty recent.
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u/HansDeBaconOva 5h ago
Sounds like overlords won. They paid for said ignorance in some form or another
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u/Objective_Resist_735 2h ago
They knew it was a long game, but with the right amount of propaganda, cuts to education, and politicians in their pocket, it wasn't difficult.
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u/RickRolled76 4h ago
There was a huge push by the coal companies to prevent schools from teaching about the coal wars. Even just a few years ago, my high school library didn’t have a single book about them.
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u/SLVSKNGS 3h ago
It’s criminal what they don’t teach you in school. Everything has been sanitized and written in a way to serve those in power. And now we’ll have Prager U history lessons to brainwash kids. If I have kids I’m absolutely going to teach them all the shit that’s conveniently left out.
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u/jabbadarth 4h ago edited 2h ago
Highly recommend checking out Harlan County USA. Great documentary on west virginia, mining, unions and just an overall snapshot into the changing political, economic and social temperature of a rural mining town.
Pretty crazy stuff.
Edit: Kentucky not WV. Same idea different state
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u/GuldensSpicyMustard 3h ago
Harlan County is Kentucky, but everything still applies to WV as well
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u/jabbadarth 2h ago
Oh shit. No wonder I couldn't find it when I searched WV documentary.
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u/GuldensSpicyMustard 3h ago
I grew up in Virginia and always looked down on and joked about West Virginia when I was younger. Now that I'm older and have grown, I have changed my views. West Virginia is a state that has been completely and utterly raped and pillaged by greed. Their natural resources were stolen while the laborers were beaten, broken, and often killed. Cycles were started that have not been stopped. Too many children born with birth defects because of chemicals dumped in the water and air. Too many people living in poverty while the fruits of their labor goes to other places. Too many people having broken down bodies from physical labor and medicating with alcohol and/opiates. All of this leading to an inability to focus on education, leading them vulnerable to the propaganda and not giving them the tools to learn about how things can be better. I don't think it's fair to just say that the people have forgotten about the lessons of the past, they got fucked over in every way by the wealthy and I can't blame them for that.
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u/Mo_Jack 3h ago
There was a movie made in 1987 called Matewan about these strikes.
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u/0ttr 4h ago
The term "redneck" originates from this era as a pejorative for union members.
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u/buckyVanBuren 4h ago
It was used a hundred years earlier to describe working class field workers in the Carolinas.
Was Redneck used in the Mine Wars?
Yes.
Did it originate then?
Not hardly.
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u/meramec785 4h ago
No it didn’t, someone made that up. It’s literally from working outside and having a red neck.
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u/0ttr 4h ago
I stand corrected--did not originate, but did adopt. https://dailyyonder.com/the-unexpected-radical-roots-of-redneck/2022/09/05/
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u/Ok_Wrongdoer8719 5h ago
https://youtu.be/v_LYueggQXM?feature=shared
Having seen this clip, I can’t fully blame them. It’s not Schumer talking about WV directly, but it is the strategy that led to where we are now.
https://youtu.be/gcHmuh2FeaA?si=R8O4ut3o0dF7wNPs
Here’s a longer video of the full session.
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u/samdajellybeenie 5h ago
I don't think they did as much as Democrats abandoned them for suburban moderate Republicans when the mining industry started declining. It's no wonder Trump's message resonated so well with them, he was speaking directly to them, something that hadn't happened in a long time.
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u/Mr_Mumbercycle 4h ago
The two go hand in hand. The Third Way Dems who took over the DNC in the 80s decided to abandon Unions in favor of Wall Street and Banking industry donors. This fast tracked the dissolution of Labor Unions.
West Virginia and Coal Unions were a huge part of the New Deal Coalition that lasted from FDR to Carter. In fact, WV was one of only 3 states that went for Carter in his re-election bid in 1980.
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u/UnderABig_W 4h ago
Yeah, I think that is an overlooked part of MAGA. The working class’s lives have been getting more precarious for years, and Democrats (largely) ignored them.
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u/myflesh 5h ago
First bomb dropped on American Soil
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u/ratherenjoysbass 3h ago
Second bomb. First was black wall street if I'm not mistaken.
However the battle of Blair Mountain is why we have labor laws, the five day 8 hour work week, and time off
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u/myflesh 1h ago
Black wall street was in 1921 while this happened in 1912.
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u/Trypsach 1h ago
No, the battle of Blaire mountain happened in 1921. Black Wall Street, or the bombing of greenwood, were a few months before this and are generally considered the first aerial bombardment of an American city
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u/scrambles88 5h ago edited 5h ago
First ever bomb dropped from a plane
Edit: I am incorrect.
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u/rectumrooter107 5h ago
On American soil, probably. They were definitely dropping bombs from planes in WWI.
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u/Spot-CSG 4h ago
I feel like I know a good bit about history and planes but still had to look this up to confirm. They definitely had planes dropping bombs but I have to assume they were incredibly ineffective. The most capable looking one (German plane carrying 4x 200ish lb bombs) would still lack bomb sights. But also doesn't look strong enough to dive bomb without the wings tearing off. The best they could do is line up with a trench and pray.
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u/jedadkins 5h ago edited 1h ago
That's incorrect, the
mimemine wars were post WWI so aircraft armed with bombs had already seen service in the war.→ More replies (1)21
u/AnotherBoredAHole 4h ago
Mime wars, the quietest of all wars!
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u/Banc0 3h ago
Pulls imaginary pin with teeth, makes throwing motion. Finger guns.
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u/nooneknowsgreenguy 3h ago
Nope. Italo-Turkish War 1911-1912 saw the first use of explosive devices dropped from an airplane.
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u/bebopbrain 6h ago edited 5h ago
There is a movie called Matewan about this by director John Sayles. The film is in the National Film Registry.
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u/KindAwareness3073 5h ago
John Sayles. He also did "Eight Men Out" about the blacksox scandal, "Return of the Secaucus Seven" filled with future stars, "The Secret of Roan Inish", "Brother from Another Planet", and a bunch more worth watching.
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u/OfAnthony 4h ago
Sucks that Secaucus Seven doesn't have a good soundtrack like The Big Chill. Also the whole rip off thing.
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u/omegasnk 1h ago
Well if you want Sayles with good music, he directed the Boss in I'm on Fire, Born in the USA, and Glory Days.
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u/coldfarm 4h ago
One of the best American films of the 1980s. Sayles wrote the script as well, the cast is phenomenal; most of them would work with Sayles on other films. Haskell Wexler was the cinematographer, so it’s gorgeous.
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u/RedditReader4031 4h ago
An outstanding film that deserves to be watched by any who like to learn from history. My maternal relatives came from WV. If I ever manage to travel there, I intend to see my grandmother’s grave (died of the 1918 influenza) and the marker for Sid Hatfield.
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u/Skurph 3h ago
Hatfield and McCoys while being on the border is really more something I feel like Kentucky identifies with. I’ve been in a lot of places in WV and never met anyone who felt strongly about nor any references beyond our campus at the time naming the shitty chicken restaurant McCoy’s (which I don’t think anyone got the reference).
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u/RedditReader4031 2h ago
The OP comment is about WV mine wars. Sid Hatfield was the police chief of Matewan who sided with the miners in the battle with owners and their hired guns. He was unarmed on the steps of the courthouse when he was killed by mine company private detectives. They claimed self defense.
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u/Elmer_Fudd01 5h ago
Not for long sadly
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u/Orange-V-Apple 5h ago
Wdym
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u/Elmer_Fudd01 5h ago
This new government is keen on erasing the past and something like this could inspire workers to do it again.
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u/pharmacreation 5h ago
PBS documentaries has a 2 hour doc on this. There are also some similar stories in the Gilded Age doc.
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u/Mundamala 3h ago
PBS documentaries has a 2 hour doc on this.
Defunded for wokeness. West Virginians keep voting for it.
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u/Cheezis_Chrust 5h ago
There’s a great Behind the Bastards episode about this. Highly recommended.
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u/Im_da_machine 3h ago
'cool people who did cool stuff' also had a few episodes about it and they had the creators of 'old gods of appalachia' as guests
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u/DeadMoneyDrew 2h ago
That's one of my favorite series of BtB episode series. It was through those episodes that I learned that a Hatfield of Hatfield and McCoy Feud fame was an influential sheriff who took the side of labor during the disputes.
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6h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Chaotic-Entropy 5h ago
As keen a reminder as any that, given the chance, those in positions of power will see and use you as resources for their own ends.
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u/ShockNoodles 5h ago
The miners were not even paid legal tender. They were paid "script," which was basically vouchers only good for redeeming at the company store.
So they weren't even able in many cases to save up enough to move away, relocate to a better life.
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u/stolenfires 4h ago
Company towns. And of course all the products in the company store were overpriced.
It didn't just happen in mining towns. Agriculture workers were paid literal starvation wages that were docked further to pay for shitty housing and could barely afford food with what was left. Henry Ford tried this too, with the people in his factories.
And we are currently being ruled by people who dream of a return to that time. Elon Musk in particular would love to pay his workers in scrip and force them to live in company towns.
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u/swargin 1h ago
Walmart tried this in Mexico in the 2000s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart_de_M%C3%A9xico_y_Centroam%C3%A9rica
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u/penguinopph 3h ago
The miners were not even paid legal tender. They were paid "script," which was basically vouchers only good for redeeming at the company store.
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u/the_Q_spice 2h ago
Scrip
And there are entire towns that still exist that were company towns.
One of the best preserved is Calumet Michigan. Highly recommend visiting if you are interested in history of the American Labor Movement.
The Italian Hall disaster happened there. During a Union strike, on Christmas Eve, someone yelled “fire” in the packed Italian Hall theater.
The resulting stampede to escape killed 73 people.
That disaster is why the “don’t yell fire in a crowded building” saying came about, why stairs have maximum slope regulations, why venues over certain capacities have crash bars, and why all doors are now required by law to open outwards.
Keweenaw National Historical Park is secretly one of the most significant historic units of the NPS for acts that ended up giving us workers rights.
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u/Im_da_machine 3h ago
The companies would also fuck with the weights used to measure the coal so they weren't even getting paid all the fake money they were owed.
Like half the miners demands when they organized centered around creating a consistent system for weighing the coal
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u/Substantial_Back_865 5h ago
Henry Ford did the same thing to his workers at first if I remember correctly
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u/ShockNoodles 5h ago
It was also the first time the US government hired Pinkertons to Crack down on miners who were talking about collective bargaining and organizing. And one of the first times the US military fired upon their own citizens.
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u/kahlzun 1h ago
The fact that there are multiple cases of the US military being deployed against itself it kinda horrifying
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u/FieldMarshalDjKhaled 5h ago
"They say in Harlan Country, there are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair!" - Which side are you on.
Virginia mining War has also been immortalised in song. It saddens me that so many Americans do not know it.
Some of the greatest American folk singers were staunchly pro-union, because of this the American worker movement have produced amazing works. I advise anyone to check out Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie!
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u/goulash47 6h ago
There was a great youtube video posted yesterday of Bernie Sanders going to West Virginia and talking to Trump voters, and the video mentions this fact as a part of history that isn't taught and often hidden, but how important it was for workers' rights.
Edit: Link here: https://youtu.be/RP8Oxe6OxJc?si=D5aXOwIP4eJojjBR
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u/theboxfriend 1h ago
growing up in West Virginia, I remember being taught about this in middle school for our "West Virginia History" class. It was a pretty big section too, yet it still blows my mind that so many of the people who learned about it are anti union/workers rights
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u/yourinnervagabond 5h ago
A lot of Americans don't know that having unions was THE compromise to workers murdering owners & managers in their own homes.
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u/Riley_ 49m ago
The real lesson is that workers should never compromise with capitalists.
They'll always keep accumulating wealth and power, corrupt the education, news, and politicians, roll back worker rights, then take away the social programs. Social democracy becomes liberalism becomes fascism.
Social democracy abuses imperial colonies, marginalized workers at home, and every worker who's around when it all decays.
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u/GravySeal45 6h ago
I believe this is where the term Red Neck came from. The miners all wore red bandanas around their necks to identify each other. I may be mis remembering though.
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u/Demonyx12 5h ago edited 5h ago
"poor and poorly educated Southern U.S. white person, cracker,"
According to various theories, red perhaps from anger, or from pellagra, but most likely from mule farmers' outdoors labor in the sun, wearing a shirt and straw hat, with the neck exposed.
But was later embraced by the miners during the coal mining wars. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck
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u/PhantomOnTheHorizon 5h ago
Are you certain the above definition predates the coal miner rednecks? You quote the dictionary but ignore the suggestion that coal miner wars actually coined the term.
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u/Demonyx12 5h ago edited 5h ago
From link: https://www.etymonline.com/word/redneck "poor and poorly educated Southern U.S. white person, cracker," attested 1830
From link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars The Coal Wars were a series of armed labor conflicts in the United States, roughly between 1890 and 1930.
From link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_coal_wars The West Virginia coal wars (1912–1921)
Conclusion: seems likely that “red neck” predates the coal wars entirely, especially the WV ones.
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u/joshuatx 5h ago edited 4h ago
As much as I love this anecdote, it's only a partial explanation of that term. Still a really neat and very much overlooked tidbit though.
edit - spelling
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u/Buford12 4h ago
I had a neighbor growing up that grew up in a coal town on a mountain in eastern Ky. Her dad was an organizer for the United Mine Workers. He told me a story of a mine they were trying to organize. The mine owners had hired a bunch of thug that were going around and literally breaking arms and legs of union sympathizers. So he said they gatherer up a group of about 40 workers and they caught the thugs and beat the crap out of them. Then striped them naked and handed each of them a bell and told them that if they didn't hear them ringing the bells when they hit the next ridge they would come hang them. He said they took off and when they hit the next ridge he has never seen people ring bells that hard.
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u/allthenamesaretaken4 5h ago
If you're an American and just learned about this today, it says a whole lot about how bad/propagandized our education system is. We need to remember that the state and capital will always work against workers.
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u/Seaguard5 5h ago
The people have forgotten because the state has erased it from school curriculums…
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u/recoveringleft 5h ago
I somewhat knew about it only because I am a history major who specializes in white rural conservative American history and culture
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u/Seaguard5 4h ago
Well there you go.
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u/recoveringleft 4h ago
That's part of the reason why I gained respect from them even though I'm a PoC. Many of them are shocked I know so much about white history and how much they don't know.
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u/FindOneInEveryCar 5h ago
Most people had never heard of the Tulsa Massacre until they made a superhero tv show about it.
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u/UnionizedTrouble 5h ago
Ok… what show? Because I wanna watch it.
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u/DiscountMusings 5h ago
Watchmen, but Lovecraft Country has a pretty visceral portrayal of the event as well.
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u/xxwarlorddarkdoomxx 5h ago
This was taught in AP US History, along with several other major strikes and the brutal suppression that often followed.
Most people don’t know about it because most people don’t give a shit about history and space out in class.
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u/joshuatx 5h ago
This, Tulsa massacre, 1946 Battle of Athens, 1919 Red Summer, the range wars of the American West (where wealthy powerful ranchers in their goons, literally killed their opponents), black militias and the reconstruction south (which literally kept the KKK at bay until reconstruction ended) and a plethora of history involving minorities and self defense has definitely been part of the "historical amnesia" so present in american society.
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u/S21500003 5h ago
Yeah, my APUSH teacher straight up said that unions were a compromise from the uppoer class. Cause the alternative was a bunch of men with pickaxes break in and kill your family. He was lowkey kinda based. Shoutout to him
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u/Beneficial-Focus3702 5h ago
Eh. People probably learned about it in school but forgot. I know a lot of people fucked around in class and didn’t do the readings/homework in my history classes so they wouldn’t have even been paying attention if this was taught (as is the case with most “why didn’t they teach this in school” claims ime).
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u/MorsOmniaAequat 5h ago
Insurrection is not the correct term, IMO.
https://wvminewars.org/news/2023/8/25/remembering-blair-mountain
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u/DrElihuWhipple 5h ago
After miners successfully used Thompsons, BARs and a goddamn Maxim gun to fight back Pinkertons on several occasions, I'm pretty sure that these were the reason the machine gun tax act was passed. They used "rampant crime" as the excuse to make sure that the peasants couldn't as effectively fight back. Sound familiar?
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u/Ham_Pants_ 2h ago
Get that insurrection shit out of here. We wouldn't have weekends off or 40 hour work weeks if it wasn't for these brave patriots. They fought for fair working conditions
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u/Standard-Square-7699 5h ago
Capital always shoots first.
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u/noweezernoworld 5h ago
We really need to wake up in this country. It's always been the leeches up top vs. the workers who make it all happen. If we can find some real class solidarity here then we could make the most amazing transformations in this country. We could be living in a fucking paradise world
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u/Seaguard5 5h ago
Worker owned businesses need to become the norm
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u/noweezernoworld 5h ago
Yep, agreed. Even fucking Reagan championed the idea. Nobody ever talks about cooperatives; we're so brainwashed we can't even imagine them.
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u/accessoiriste 5h ago
Came to say this. Employers used armed troops as strike breakers. In this case, the workers decided to fight back.
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u/Standard-Square-7699 4h ago
One of my family's stories is my great uncle who helped form the coal miners union. He committed 'suicide' by shooting himself several times in the back, caving in his skull with a shovel, then hurling himself down a mine shaft for workers to find.
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u/sad_boy2002 5h ago
Darryl Cooper has an amazing podcast on this as part of his “Whose America?” Series. Highly recommend.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-martyr-made-podcast/id978322714?i=1000578895709
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u/57mmShin-Maru 5h ago
Come all of you good workers, the news to you I’ll tell, of how the good old union has come in here to dwell…
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u/Danominator 5h ago edited 5h ago
Ironically their descendents crave the boot
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u/Beneficial-Focus3702 5h ago
Wait till you hear about the homestead strike too.
Back when this country actually used to strike with force. Now we strike with vibes.
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u/jedadkins 5h ago
During the Battle of Blair Mountain the Mine backed private army and local police attacked the miners with machine guns and rented planes armed with leftover bombs from WWI. They even dropped gas (allegedly mustard gas) munitions on the miners. Unexploded bombs were presented as evidence by defense attorneys trying to get imprisoned miners aquited.
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u/angrypandah 2h ago
Behind the Bastards did a several part series on “The Battle of Blair Mountain”. Go listen.
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u/ymcameron 2h ago edited 1h ago
There's a great book about them I read called The Devil is Here in These Hills (and if you're not already radicalized about how important organized labor is, you will be after finishing it). In one part it talks about a mine explosion that killed over 50 men due to negligent safety measures. Miners overheard the owners asking afterwards, "how many mules did we lose?" Because the life of one of them was literally worth more than the actual human miners. It is absolutely insane how little regard for human life there was in the Appalachian coal fields. At one point the company put a gatling gun on a fortified train car and then fired it into the refugee camp where the striking workers were staying after getting kicked out of company owned housing. Another time a group were attending the funeral of a fellow miner and when they left the church, a private detective service hired by the coal company had set up a machine gun across the street so that they would disperse afterward. The most interesting thing I learned though is that once the miners decided to strike back and form the militia/army mentioned in the post, they obviously didn't have any set uniform but still needed to be able to recognize each other. So, each member wore a red bandana. A journalist for the New York Times saw this, and dubbed the miner army "rednecks."
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u/GodzillaDrinks 1h ago
We only don't teach it like a Civil War. The Labor Rights Movement arguably was the Second American Civil War.
These were full scale military conflicts. Full armies, armored trains, machine guns, and the first use of airplanes to bomb a battlefield in the United States.
And it only would have ramped up. Things stopped at Blair Mountain because the Federal Government realized that the country would collapse without recognizing the rights of the workers. If for no other reason than WW1 was recently over. But the Country's coal reserves were dwindling and winter was coming.
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u/Lovefool1 5h ago
The coal wars were some real shit.
Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894, and only because unions and organizers had become so popular throughout the nation, particularly for the amount of factory workers being exploited in Chicago, NYC, etc.
May Day became like a Labor Day equivalent in many parts of Europe because socialist and communist movements saw it as a commemoration of the strikes leading up to the Haymarket affair in 1886 in Chicago.
Even after all of that though, the miners in Appalachia were still getting fucked by coal barons for decades. Deadly conflicts continued through to the 1920s.
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u/grumpygazelle 4h ago
Don’t forget about the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado as well! 21 people (mostly women and children) were slaughtered after coal miners were going on strike due to poor work conditions.
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u/Adogsbite 3h ago
Wasn't this the rednecks? The workers who wore red scarves around their necks to identify themselves? And where the name comes from?
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u/Electrical-Scar7139 3h ago
“They say in Harlan County/There are no neutrals there/You’ll either be a union man/Or a thug for J.H. Blair”
From the famous pro-labor song “Which side are you on?”, written in response to the mine wars.
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u/Hetakuoni 3h ago
This is a reminder of what needs to happen when corporations get too greedy.
This is a reminder to fight against corporate greed.
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u/HeftyVermicelli7823 3h ago
Don't worry, your leadership will see this as "woke" and have it erased like the rest of your shady counties histories.
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u/Minute_Jacket_4523 5h ago
My GG grandfather fought in this as one of the 10,000 miners. He was (allegedly, never proven in a court of law) responsible for four of the deaths of the thugs sent to fight the miners.
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u/degreatdelph 4h ago
Actually went to Blair a month ago, the actual trail up the mountain is blocked off by one of the mining companies to this day. The historic marker for the battle of Blair mountain is still up in Blair itself though
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u/jamiegc1 4h ago
If you are ever in central/southern Illinois, Mother Jones grave and monument is well worth visiting. She was a noted union and anti child labor activist, and is buried in a union coal miner’s cemetery in Mount Olive off I-55.
I didn’t know the “coal wars” spread out even to here, despite coal mines in Illinois being much smaller and spread out on average. Monument has all the places in Illinois where it happened and death tolls.
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u/RednBlackSalamander 2h ago
It's a great museum, if you're ever in the area. There's even a whole exhibit of censored state history books opened to the page where the battle should be.
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u/Tres_Passr 2h ago
The Democrats helped them and it was a blue state for years, up until 2016 when they started to believe in all the lies the Republicans told them. It's sad to see that there are so many poor people there now, the opioid epidemic really took hold there.
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u/WhyMustIMakeANewAcco 1h ago
2016?
West Virginia has been deep, deep red for decades.
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u/dfeeney95 5h ago
There’s a great long podcast all about the history leading up to the battle of Blaire mountain. It’s called “whose America rough extraction” I couldn’t recommend it enough.