Do y'all know about the Battle of Blair Mountain?

I mean, holy shit.

I've seen one historian estimate you might have a better chance fighting in World War I than working in a coal mine during the same time period.

The first world war was seen by some miners as an escape *from* hell.

What I'm trying to say is that working conditions weren't great for miners, their families, or the community in general. Pray, comrades, that they never find minerals worth mining in your home town.

One of the tried and true ways to improve your quality if living (and the quality of life for the entire community and even the entire country) was to unionize and negotiate for your rights.

People were fighting for rights like "only having to work 10 hours a day", and "only having to work 6 days a week". People died for these rights. Murdered by thugs their bosses hired.

People marched, sick, maimed and emaciated, angry and righteous - to shame and scare politicians into legislating safety requirements for their workplace.

(Labor legislation should be thought of as nothing more than a list of things we refuse to have taken from us) https://twitter.com/emgrasmeder/status/1188531181467377666?s=20

But if marching and organizing for a union were so effective, it'd be illegal or violently repressed by politicians and capitalists, right?

Well, in Logan County, West Virginia, King Coal was paying the Sheriff $32,000 a year (approaching half a million in today's money) to look the other way while hired thugs destroyed the lives of pro-union folks.

If you were pro-union, the coal bosses might hire thugs to burn your house down while you and your family are in it, or maybe beat you up and drag you into the desert and leave you tarred, naked, and alone, or just knock you out and leave you drowned in the creek bed.

If thugs are murdering people all over and the sheriff is in the pocket of the capitalists, maybe calling in federal police would help? Let's answer that question by getting back to Blair Mountain, but generally the answer is that the feds are never on your side and ACAB.

The Battle of Blair Mountain took place in Logan County. If you traveled through time to the days of the battle, you'd have to jump over Logan's more recent history. Let's pause in 1970s Logan County for a moment. We'll take a detour to the Buffalo Creek Flood.

The Buffalo Creek Flood. Christ. OK, so wait. Coal is made of carbon, which has a molecular structure that wants to attach to *everything*. Coal in the ground soaks up all sorts of nasty stuff that generally kills humans. That's good! Until we dig it out and set it on fire.

Coal from the ground has nasty stuff in it, and when it burns, we breathe that crap and die, slowly. So they treat the coal first, and as a result create this stuff called blackwater. Blackwater can't be purified or made not-toxic, so they just store it in giant dams in the hills

So Logan County had one of this big sludge ponds. 132 million gallons of toxic-forever no-plan-for-the-future maybe-we'll-blast-it-into-space-someday? blackwater. Sounds safe, right? Right.

The government officials and coal companies of Logan County decided to store this never-will-be-safe blackwater uphill from 5,000 folks in 16 different coal towns. It was deemed one day "satisfactory" and 4 days the dams broke. 125 more people sacrificed on the altar of profit.

(In case you think things have improved since then, there was a similar spill in Kentucky in 2000, it was 300 million gallons, which whistleblowers had tried to prevent. And then there was the 2008 spill in Tennessee of 1.2 billion with a "b" gallons of toxic sludge...)

Such is the story of coal. Such is the story of mining everywhere.

So Logan County, West Virginia. It's 1921. The coal bosses don't give a damn about the miners, the sheriff is in Capital's pocket. The Company owned the town, owned the roads, owned the church, owned the homes, owned the stores, the schools, the newspapers.

Ugh, I'm so sorry, I think I gotta talk about The Company Store if I'm gona talk about coal miners. History is big!

Ok, the Company Store. Coal companies often paid their employees in Scrip and their Company owned grocery stores accepted Scrip. You start working at the mine and you get a loan (in scrip) so you can buy your shovel, then pay it off with scrip over time.

Even if you get out of debt to the company store, you have nothing. You can't buy no train tickets with company scrip. Hell, if you try to walk out of town they'll drive you off the road because they're all company roads, too.

Such is the life of the coal miners in Logan County in 1921. So they decided to organize and demand the right to unionize, peacefully assembly, to be paid in real money, and for honest scales to be used to weigh their 16 tons.

So over 10,000 Logan County miners went on strike, peacefully, until the company hired hundreds of people to break the strike up. Miners were beaten in the middle of the night and thrown out of their company-owned houses, and sometimes shot by sniper rifles fire.

Thrown out of their company-owned homes, the strikers lived in tents in the woods. The strikebreakers would roll in in a fucking armored car called the Death Special with automatic rifles and shoot the pro-union folks indiscriminately.

Looks like I messed up the threading but you should continue here. https://twitter.com/emgrasmeder/status/1189993797419175937?s=20