Darryl Cooper — #22 Whose America?, ep. 1: Rough Extraction

Speaker 1: what is up everybody this

Speaker 2: is Daryl Cooper this is the Martyr Maid podcast and you are about to listen to who's America episode

one this one

Speaker 3: is called rough extraction it's

about the

Speaker 1: West Virginia coal mine wars it happens to be the largest

and

Speaker 1: most serious uprising in the history of the United States since

Speaker 4: the Civil War. You

would have had this

Speaker 5: episode a few days sooner. I really wanted to get it out on Labor Day. But, you

know, this

Speaker 6: story, I love this story. As an American, I love this story as it just... And it's really important to me to get it right. I'm still

Speaker 7: not 100% sure that I got it right, but I put the work in, if nothing else. I've

Speaker 8: literally reworked this thing from scratch four

Speaker 9: times. I've tried recording it a couple times. I was trying to fit in all of the context and all of the great stories that I think are necessary to really get underneath the skin of this story and to give

it the

Speaker 10: dramatic

Speaker 11: oomph i wanted to give it because i want everybody to love this story as much as i do but every time i tried you

know i'd get two

Speaker 11: hours two and a half hours into the thing and realize that i haven't even mentioned coal mining

yet i know

Speaker 12: surprise surprise martyr made podcast takes a long time to get to the point

But, you

Speaker 11: know, it was just going on too long. And so I would try again. I would try again because I didn't want to give up all this great stuff about, you know, the Hatfield and McCoy feud

Speaker 13: Most

Speaker 14: famous Klan feud in American history happened just a few decades, a couple decades, actually, before the story I'm telling here in the very same valley there along the West Virginia, Kentucky border

And

Speaker 14: telling that story, telling its background The social history, the history of the economic and political changes

Speaker 9: That were happening in southern Appalachia at the time Which in a lot of ways led to the Hatfield-McCoy feud Which shed a lot of light on this story And so I wanted to get that in there I

wanted to

Speaker 9: talk about the philosophy and politics Behind America's push toward industrialization And

how

Speaker 15: it came into conflict with

industrialization

Speaker 15: Those few remaining traditional communities that still existed in the country

I wanted to tell you all

Speaker 5: about the history of the Scots-Irish and the English borderers who settled Appalachia

And whose

Speaker 15: culture of honor

the miners

Speaker 15: of West Virginia, wherever they'd come from, were assimilated into

Okay. in the

Speaker 15: end i had no choice but to drop or abbreviate a lot of that and i am quite sad about

it i'm

Speaker 6: still not yeah yeah yeah i just can't redo this thing again so

the good

Speaker 6: news there is a silver lining here the good news is that i've got a sub stack page it's martyrmade.substack.com it's linked

Speaker 9: in the show notes And all of that other material that didn't make it into this episode is going to make for some great content that will be appearing there very soon. The

Hatfield-McCoy

Speaker 16: feud by itself could probably make a series out of that, but I'll at

Speaker 5: least get one hell of an episode out of it. So

if you want to

Speaker 5: learn how everything you thought you knew about the Hatfield-McCoy feud was probably wrong, head

on over to the

Speaker 17: Substack and sign up. It'll be over there soon

Paid

Speaker 17: subscribers to the Substack have

Speaker 18: access to a whole list of articles and podcasts not available on the main feed, the history feed, including episode three of my series on Jeffrey Epstein. Those

of you who

Speaker 18: follow the main feed

Speaker 9: have probably heard the first two. It's on there. Well, the final episode can be found on Substack, and I promise you I bring my flamethrower to that one

Last but not

Speaker 20: least

I want

Speaker 20: to encourage everybody out there to go to originmaine.com That's

Speaker 13: origin, y'all can spell that Maine with an E, like the state, dot com

That is

Speaker 21: the website for Jocko's company, Jocko Willink My co-host on The Unraveling If you have not checked out that podcast, you really should Oh, and by the way, to answer a question I've been getting a lot lately um we will be putting out new unravelings very soon jocko has had

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Speaker 22: schedule to say the least lately i know that's a

shock too so i

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Speaker 9: favorite things

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Speaker 9: make my favorite energy drinks for one I am unfortunately a caffeine addict And these energy drinks

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Speaker 24: drinks That don't make me crash and send me back to the well After an hour or two I love

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Speaker 25: I think they're sweetened with monk fruit They're

really good The

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One of you

Speaker 26: guys out there This was crazy One of you guys was kind enough to Get

me a

Speaker 27: pair of the buffalo hide boots That Origin makes And I gotta say that by itself

Probably

Speaker 28: made all the hours doing this podcast Over the years worth it It was a huge surprise And it really

Speaker 29: meant a lot

But

Speaker 29: then on top of it, I mean, they're easily the best boots I've ever had, just by far

They're the kind of things

Speaker 31: that you want to go out and do hard work in, but then they feel so nice that you almost don't want to do that. So I'm

Speaker 28: not exactly sure how to use them yet, whether to wear them out in the fields or just wear them out when I go to a nice dinner, but I'll figure that out

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Speaker 11: just now, in fact, they've got gear from Jocko's

Speaker 9: new hunting line

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Speaker 9: so if you're into hunting at all

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Speaker 21: I don't know how to describe this stuff exactly

Speaker 9: And I've

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Speaker 9: hunting, you know, off and on my whole life I've never quite seen anything like what Jocko's got going here I don't know how quite to describe it I mean, it looks like you're going hunting while preparing for combat, I guess, maybe But just go check it out Trust me, just go check it out And again, that is originmain.com The link is in the show. Okay. Oh, actually, one other thing. Many

of you guys

Speaker 32: have heard me mention my good friend Daniele Bolelli before. He's the host of one of

Speaker 33: the very best OG history podcasts out there called History on Fire

Now, History on

Speaker 34: Fire was one of the biggest and most popular history podcasts out there, which is why the company Luminary, a

Speaker 35: podcast subscription service, made him an offer he couldn't refuse a few years ago. And so he's been behind a paywall for the last few years. But once he was able to, he opted for freedom and he's now back out in the wild. Not everybody knows that yet. And so this is a public service announcement for history. Anyone who wants more good history content, check

Speaker 36: out History on Fire

For those of you

Speaker 36: who aren't long-time history podcast nerds and haven't been

Speaker 34: introduced to History on Fire, it's a long-form, deep storytelling kind of thing like you're used to with Martyrmaid. Although I will say there are some topics that he covers that, honestly, I think only he can do right. the Caravaggio series is one for sure if you want to dip your toe in to see what it's like I recommend the series on Crazy Horse that's one of my favorites for sure or the one on the Conquest

Speaker 24: of Mexico that's an excellent one so it's called History on Fire and I highly recommend it

like I

Speaker 24: said Martyrmaid taking a long time to get to the point

Speaker 9: surprise surprise but that's about it so again you're

about to

Speaker 9: listen to Martyrmaid

Speaker 6: number 22 who's america episode one rough extraction i hope

you

Speaker 37: enjoy this story as much as i do

here we

Speaker 37: go i'm

content to die

Speaker 38: for my beliefs

so cut off my head and make me a

Speaker 39: martyr

The people

Speaker 39: will always remember it

Speaker 40: No. They

won't forget. Hell does

Speaker 41: exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It

is a

Speaker 42: place. It is somewhere. Hell

does

Speaker 43: exist

B

Speaker 43: But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking

I must go. - Why we must tear

Speaker 44: ourselves apart for this small question of religion

Who's

Speaker 45: America? Who is America

We

Speaker 20: started asking some version of those two questions. When the Pilgrims landed in North America, probably. We're

Speaker 46: still asking those questions, and the answers have changed

over the years

Speaker 47: Who does America belong

to

Speaker 48: Who is America? Who are the Americans

Speaker 49: Back during the Civil

War

Speaker 49: People went to war against the federal government out

of

Speaker 26: loyalty to their states

People in

Speaker 26: Virginia were Virginians first

Their loyalty

Speaker 26: to the United States was born out of that state's participation in the federal system

Their grandparents or

Speaker 26: great-grandparents had lived in Virginia before there ever was a United States. And

so

Speaker 50: when those two loyalties came into conflict

And

Speaker 50: the two identities could

Speaker 11: no longer coexist. They held to the older one, the one that to them was closer

to

Speaker 51: home. Later in the 20th century, the advent

Speaker 9: of post-colonial liberation movements in the third world, a lot of American citizens, whose national origins were in the global south, the formerly colonized

world. have

Speaker 9: often been encouraged to think of themselves as diaspora populations, as Hispanics or Africans or Asians or Middle Easterners who just happen to be residing in the United States. But

that

Speaker 12: national origin or that ethnic identity, they're told from a certain standpoint, should be their primary mode of identification

Marxists

Speaker 12: never got much

Speaker 47: hold in the U.S., but they would have had us understand ourselves in terms of class relations, right

Speaker 48: A

bunch of

Speaker 48: bourgeois exploiters and then the real Americans, the workers. Some groups

Speaker 52: the Catholic immigrants, for example, Jews, Irish, Italians, Slobs, other Europeans, over

the years

Speaker 9: were castigated for slavery

Not

Speaker 9: assimilating quickly enough

Speaker 53: Not assimilating into American society. Being hyphenated Americans, they were called

Even as

Speaker 14: their assimilation was resisted and sometimes blocked by important segments of American society

Speaker 9: So who's

Speaker 54: America

The author Colin Woodward

Speaker 54: brought out an interesting formulation in his

Speaker 21: great little book... American nations it's called subtitled the history of the 11 regional cultures

Speaker 55: in North America I

know you've

Speaker 55: heard me mention the book Albion Seed before about the four major British

Speaker 56: migrations into what became America it's a fantastic book and this is actually a great supplement for that book

and it's

Speaker 49: one for people who want a little bit easier and shorter read

so

Speaker 9: Woodward ignores state and national boundaries altogether and

he

Speaker 57: gives us a gerrymandered map of the u.s canada and northern mexico that tries to mark the cultural and economic zones

Speaker 20: created by patterns of settlement and migration of successive waves of new americans over the years as

Speaker 18: they come in

And

Speaker 18: break against geographic and rival cultural barriers and slosh

Speaker 13: around and bump up against each other. As

the book's title

Speaker 20: says, Woodward identifies 11 of these regions, and he gives them names like Yankeedom

which is

Speaker 9: probably pretty self-explanatory you would think, but yes, founded when the Pilgrims hit Plymouth Rock, but then spreading to... Eventually encompass New England and

Speaker 58: the northern strips of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa

And then the Great

Speaker 9: Lakes region up into Michigan and Wisconsin. And even

on the other

Speaker 9: side of the Great Lakes, the Canadian shoreline in Windsor, around there, he defines as Yankeedom

For

Speaker 59: cultural and economic and historical reasons that he goes over

Encompassing

Speaker 60: northern

Speaker 18: Mexico, west Texas. The southern parts of the southwest and Baja and southern

Speaker 57: California is the nation he calls El Norte

which he reminds us is

Speaker 61: the oldest of the American nations, settled by the Spanish in the 16th century, in which today

Speaker 9: even in the northern Mexican locales like Chihuahua, Sonora, or Baja, has an economy that faces more toward America than it

Speaker 62: does toward Mexico City or anything south of it

He points to

Speaker 63: the Deep South, founded by English

Speaker 64: slavers who came from Barbados and brought with them a particularly harsh and despotic racial

Speaker 63: caste

system. He talks

Speaker 63: about the Cavalier Tidewater region of the Virginia Lowlands and Maryland, Southern Delaware, Northeastern North Carolina

Speaker 65: I guess would be in there. There's

the

Speaker 66: Midlands, the Far West, the

Speaker 20: Left Coast, and the tiny and short-lived little region of New Netherland, he calls it. And there's New France up in Canada over in

Speaker 11: the east. And then there's the region that I want to talk to you all about today

Woodward

Speaker 5: calls

Speaker 67: it Greater Appalachia. Quote, Greater Appalachia was founded in the early 18th century by wave upon wave of rough bellicose settlers from the

Speaker 68: war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, Northern England, and the Scottish lowlands. Lampooned by writers, journalists, filmmakers, and television producers as rednecks, hillbillies, crackers, and white trash

Speaker 69: These clannish

Speaker 70: Scots-Irish and North English frontiersmen spread across the Highland South

Speaker 71: and on into the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois

Speaker 72: the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks, the eastern two-thirds of Oklahoma, and the hill country of Texas, clashing with Indians, Mexicans, and Yankees as they migrated

In the

Speaker 51: British Isles, this culture had formed in a state of near-constant war and upheaval, fostering a warrior ethic and a deep commitment to individual liberty and personal sovereignty. Intensely suspicious of aristocrats and social reformers alike, these American borderlanders

Speaker 73: despised Yankee teachers, Tidewater lords, and Deep South aristocrats

In the

Speaker 11: Civil War, much of the region fought for the Union, with secession movements in western Virginia, creating West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and northern Alabama. The

Speaker 74: Borderlanders' combative culture

Speaker 53: has provided a large portion of the nation's military, from officers like Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, and

Speaker 59: Douglas MacArthur, to the enlisted fighting men in Afghanistan and Iraq

They

Speaker 53: also gave the continent bluegrass and country music, stock car racing, and evangelical fundamentalism

Speaker 9: You know, when the federal government sends out census takers to get a read on the demographics of the country

every ten

Speaker 9: years, one

Speaker 61: of the questions that they always ask is

Speaker 47: about our ethnicity or our national origin

And you

Speaker 47: can say Latino or you can say Mexican, you

can say

Speaker 47: Scottish or British, African or

Speaker 75: Nigerian, whatever you think applies from a broad range of options. Well

Speaker 62: throughout the greater Appalachia region settled by those Scots, Irish and English borderers who were then joined

Speaker 52: over the years by Southern blacks, Central and Southern Europeans and others

The

Speaker 52: vast majority of

Speaker 73: people in that region simply give their ethnicity as American. It's

the only region in the

Speaker 76: country where that's the case. And

today, I want

Speaker 67: to tell you a story about these Americans. In

the summer of

Speaker 72: 1912, in

the mountains

Speaker 72: of southern West Virginia, in the

summer of 1912, the

Speaker 77: Americans were near a state of revolution

Over the

Speaker 71: course of just a couple decades, they

had had

Speaker 71: imposed on them a

Speaker 73: social, a cultural and political and economic transformation more total and more jarring

Speaker 78: more rapid than any group

ever. Had

Speaker 78: experienced in American history With the possible exception of the Native Americans

At the time of the

Speaker 29: Civil War Which at the time is within living memory From any of the residents here

Southern

Speaker 53: Appalachia was as isolated Politically, culturally, and economically As any place in the United States I mean, these people were up in the mountains Living their own lives by themselves

Speaker 12: And had

Speaker 26: been for a hundred years

There

Speaker 26: were parts of it that were not electrified until the 1960s

The terrain

Speaker 26: there, and

I was there

Speaker 79: last year for a week, and it is gorgeous country out there, but I've got to

Speaker 61: tell you

the terrain, it's

Speaker 61: rough. It consists of rugged

Speaker 80: wooded hills interrupted by narrow valleys along numerous creeks and small rivers

which makes

Speaker 81: it totally unsuitable for

Speaker 61: large-scale farming or cash crop export. The hillsides, they just jut straight out of the ground, and they're so steep that they can't be cultivated, and they really can't be used for much of anything other than hunting or, depending on the hillside, maybe

Speaker 9: grazing a few livestock. What

this land could

Speaker 9: support, though, was

Speaker 60: small, self-sufficient family farms

And so

Speaker 20: slowly but surely, the people worked their way south through the hills, following old Indian trails. The

first arrivals

Speaker 20: would come in and claim the river and

Speaker 9: creek beds where the tillable land was, and the new arrivals and the grown sons of those families would then move down to the next hollow for their plot. And that's how Appalachia

Speaker 58: was largely settled. And

you couldn't build

Speaker 58: towns there

There's no

Speaker 26: room to build them, and no infrastructure to support them

In this story, we're going

Speaker 26: to be

Speaker 60: spending a lot of time in the Tug Valley, which

cups a

Speaker 60: river for called the Tug that serves as the border

Speaker 26: between West Virginia and Kentucky. Well

there were no

Speaker 26: roads into that valley until the 1900s, after Americans had been living there a good hundred years

The

Speaker 26: whole community had been up there for a hundred years. There were no roads into that area

And trade

Speaker 26: outside the

Speaker 73: region, virtually non-existent

Even trade

Speaker 73: from one valley to the next valley was extremely limited because it

Speaker 79: was just not a simple matter to get around these mountains, especially with cargo, before the roads and the railroads came. And unlike

Much of

Speaker 79: the eastern United States, with the Ohio River, the Mississippi River, all these navigable rivers that

made it

Speaker 79: easy to transport people and cargo and information over large swaths of land, there was none of that. You've got a bunch

Speaker 26: of very small and usually

Speaker 9: short rivers running through rugged mountains. If

you wanted to get a

Speaker 9: message to someone in the Tug Valley, you

had to hike

Speaker 9: in there and go tell them

Each one

Speaker 61: of these isolated little valleys Had

its own

Speaker 61: little community And

its

Speaker 58: own little culture Sometimes there were even differences in dialect

Speaker 82: There was no division of labor It was a primitive economy in that sense

Speaker 61: Every household was a self-sufficient unit

Up until the day the

Speaker 61: coal and railroad companies showed

up

Speaker 83: These people were still tanning their own leather to make their own shoes. They were making their own thread and wax

Speaker 5: Making their own string and rope and cloth from flax and wool

They were

Speaker 5: still carving their own

dishes

Speaker 26: in bowls

from cucumber

Speaker 26: and poplar wood in the hills around them

This is a

Speaker 26: traditional community

And

Speaker 84: so outsiders

And I

Speaker 14: don't just mean people from New York and Philadelphia, but people from the growing towns to the east and north right there in West Virginia or in the other direction in Kentucky looked at them and

Speaker 61: saw desperately poor people living a primitive lifestyle, people desperately in need of the uplifting hand of the more educated and reform-minded people in

Speaker 85: the cities

But what

Speaker 85: they couldn't see was that there was a real tight-knit community

Speaker 11: life there, of a kind that was fading and dying out in the rest of America by that point in our history. And

the poverty, even

Speaker 9: was, you know, sort of in the

eye of

Speaker 9: the beholder. I mean

the people

Speaker 9: weren't rich, obviously, by any measure, but

They

Speaker 61: also didn't spend 14 hours a day working like people in the northern

Speaker 86: factory cities did

They didn't

Speaker 86: employ slaves. These people were

Speaker 61: isolated. They were impoverished from an income standpoint. They were living a primitive lifestyle, traditional lifestyle in many ways. But they were

Speaker 9: free

They were free. That's

Speaker 9: why they had come to America These people more than anyone else Came from a part of England where they had just been run over In one

Speaker 62: direction or another by external authority For hundreds, really thousands of years You can

Speaker 87: follow it all the way back to Julius Caesar These people have been resisting control

Speaker 14: by outside authorities And

when they came

Speaker 14: over to America They didn't linger in the cities

Speaker 9: on the coast They

didn't linger in the cities on the coast

Speaker 9: They didn't want to be around all that. They went straight out over into south-central Pennsylvania and then down into Appalachia and they found their home

They were free and they

Speaker 9: had everything they needed to live and they had plenty of leisure time besides

In Altina

Speaker 9: Waller's great book on the culture of southern Appalachia in the aftermath of the Civil War, she writes

Speaker 67: quote

If the

Speaker 67: importance of land was an 18th century heritage, the Tug Valley social structure was much more egalitarian in practice than that of Tidewater

Speaker 71: Virginia. In the mountainous terrain, it was not possible to imitate the plantation system and

Speaker 88: its polarized society, and small farms dominated. In 1850, and I just

Just

Speaker 89: check this part out

Speaker 61: Just think about what this means as far as the type of society we're talking about and the relationship the people there have

Speaker 85: to one another. In 1850, more than two-thirds of Pike and Logan counties—those are the two Tug Valley counties

Speaker 11: straddling the West Virginia-Kentucky line—more than two-thirds of Pike and Logan County households

Speaker 51: owned their own farms

But even

Speaker 51: the one-third of households who reported no land holdings do not represent a pauper class. Many

such

Speaker 53: households

Speaker 71: consisted of young families living on the larger farm of one or the other spouse's families. Such households were part of the parents' domestic economy until such time as the children obtained

Speaker 11: their own land

Thus, most

Speaker 11: residents owned or could soon expect to own

land

Speaker 90: Self-sufficient, small farms of 30 to 35 cultivated acres and 300 acres of unimproved land

Speaker 62: often mountainsides too steep for anything but hunting or perhaps cattle grazing

Whatever social

Speaker 73: differentiation existed, economic activity was virtually the same for everyone, and

Speaker 90: poverty was almost unknown

All

Speaker 90: families participated in a domestic

Speaker 72: semi-subsistence economy that included cultivating corn, wheat, oats, tobacco, and vegetables. Men and women tended domestic animals such as cattle

Speaker 53: swine, sheep, horses, and sometimes oxen. Women engaged in home manufactures for family consumption while men supplemented the family diet with the abundant wild game

and fish

Speaker 51: Differences between an average and a wealthy family were not in quality of life

but simply

Speaker 51: in quantity of land, animals, and production

of

Speaker 11: home manufactures. The undiversified, subsistence economy of Tug Valley residents

Speaker 53: extended up and down the social scale. It sustained a pre-modern lifestyle of hard

Speaker 71: work alleviated by seasonal rhythms and individual flexibility

a

Speaker 71: lack of distinction between work and recreation, and

a sense of predictability. This subsistence or

Speaker 92: semi-subsistence economy, however, did not preclude economic and social interaction, interactions that fostered a strong sense of community. If

trade beyond

Speaker 92: the mountains was almost non-existent, barter and market exchanges within the Tug Valley community itself were extensive, Families were productive economic units whose tasks were shared with relatives, neighbors, and friends more

Speaker 72: frequently than not. Hunting, fencing, planting, harvesting, horse trading, and house building were all tasks shared by the men in the neighborhood. Women got together for

Speaker 93: canning, sewing, and quilting. End quote

There's a Japanese

Speaker 67: proverb that goes, Negara Maui Tata

Naga

Speaker 67: Dessa Mauikara, and I know

Speaker 21: with 99% certainty that I just annihilated that. Sorry, but that's how it was spelled

Speaker 6: in English

Speaker 21: so blame the author of

Speaker 94: the book I got it from. What it means is, the capital has its order, the

Speaker 16: village, its customs. You

might say the

Speaker 16: capital has its laws, the village, its customs

Well, that had

Speaker 16: very much applied to... the

Speaker 62: Scots-Irish and the Borderlanders for well over a thousand years back in the British Isles and it followed them, that tenancy

Speaker 9: to Appalachia when they migrated to North America

The

Speaker 95: Mountaineers were far, very far from the

Speaker 61: attention of state and federal government authorities and even local government, which they did have county governments, didn't supersede

the

Speaker 79: natural and organic community hierarchy. It reflected it

Speaker 9: and reinforced it. The heads of the prominent and respected families in the area, in other words, the men who were already looked to as the leaders

Speaker 96: in the community, they would hold the government posts like sheriff or judge or what have you

The majority of

Speaker 51: the people in the late 1800s there were still illiterate

And

Speaker 51: they had an oral culture's understanding of customary versus legal culture. They lived in a world where deals were made by

Speaker 9: handshakes with eye contact

Where they

Speaker 9: were binding, not

because of the

Speaker 9: letter of some abstract law or contract, but because in a tight-knit community, everybody knew everybody else's business. Everybody would have known what the agreement was and outlined. And

so in all

Speaker 9: but the most

Speaker 59: complicated or difficult cases

There

Speaker 59: tend to be a consensus over

Speaker 54: who was in the right or who was in the wrong

The respected men

Speaker 54: serving in local government

Speaker 97: positions exercise their authority, in other words, not as representatives of

Speaker 67: some distant system or power structure. So, you know, I don't know, not like the U.S. Marshall in Old West stories where he's the lone representative

of

Speaker 57: United States law in these here parts. It wasn't like that

And the

Speaker 57: leading men who occupied those local government posts, they exercised

Speaker 84: their authority as

Speaker 61: fellow members of the community. And their decisions weren't guided by legal technicalities, because they weren't representing some

they

Speaker 61: weren't representing the laws and decisions of the state legislature or the U.S. Congress. They were there to help lead and manage their community. So they didn't make their decisions by legal technicalities, they made

them by -- they

Speaker 61: common

Speaker 9: sense and local custom as they perceived it

and of

Speaker 57: course modern people hear that by

Speaker 98: that I even

Speaker 57: mean people from the more developed parts of the country back then heard it and

Speaker 26: they think well this is a government of men not a government of laws

Speaker 99: why how could objectivity and equality before the law ever exist in a place like that

and the

Speaker 99: answer is

Speaker 89: it couldn't Objectivity was not the goal And to outsiders it looked like anarchy and disorder But

it

Speaker 61: wasn't that Like any community there were rules And everybody knew what they were If

two men came

Speaker 61: in with a dispute A

he said

Speaker 61: he said dispute or something happened And one of

Speaker 57: them, everybody in the community knows everybody else They all know each other very well

And

Speaker 57: they know that this guy over here doesn't lie, is honest in his dealings, is generous and helpful in the community. And this other guy over here is kind of a ne'er-do-well who's always causing problems. And

Speaker 14: these guys end up in court, and one of them says one thing, one of them says the other. It's

not going to

Speaker 14: come down to a technicality in the law. They're going to look at these two people and... Everybody's going to kind of know what happened Just like in a very very small group of people Like your friends or family When something

Speaker 84: happens You usually don't have to hear all the details Given who's involved You can probably get a pretty good idea A defendant

Speaker 61: in a civil or criminal dispute Was not coming in and arguing his case Before some objective standard He was arguing his case To the community in which he lived

Thank you. and

Speaker 61: on which he depended in a court

Speaker 2: presided over by a leading citizen everybody in the community agreed was a reasonable and a fair man and so it

was not

Speaker 2: anarchy

Speaker 14: because decisions that were made through these means were almost always respected for

the simple reason

Speaker 58: that anyone who tried to buck the system knew that they would be going against the whole community and it very rarely happened

These were

Speaker 61: some of the very last people In America Who were still living in A truly traditional way It was self-sufficient households Organized

Speaker 89: Into a community that governed itself By common agreement And it could have

Speaker 9: done just fine without any government at all No question about that The

Speaker 79: Civil War Gave them the opportunity to prove that And during the Civil War The

Civil War

Speaker 79: Civil society just

Speaker 12: completely broke down in southern West Virginia in many ways When Union forces under future President James Garfield came in and started burning things down Arresting people, they burned down the

Speaker 100: courthouse And

so the courts, for

Speaker 100: example, didn't function throughout the Civil War in there The local citizens were out in the forest fighting a guerrilla

Speaker 101: war against the northern occupiers

When the war

Speaker 102: was over Those leading

Speaker 17: citizens We'll be right

back. In

Speaker 17: the county, you know, those natural leaders that everyone looked to without having to be told to. Most of those guys were now excluded from local government by the northern reconstruction regime because of their real or suspected sympathies for the Confederacy. So the civil war ends and

Speaker 12: the whole traditional way that these people were used to governing themselves

was

Speaker 17: was completely thrown out and turned on its head those positions were all taken up now by people from the cities people from other walks of life they weren't the natural leaders in the community many many times residents

of

Speaker 103: southern appalachia after the war went

Speaker 15: to work immediately trying to put their communities back together along lines that they recognized

But even

Speaker 104: as they were getting

Speaker 62: started with the rebuilding project, there was another war coming their way

Like many

Speaker 62: wars

Speaker 12: this one was first announced by the arrival of refugees driven before the invading force

See, long

Speaker 2: before any

of the

Speaker 2: residents had any idea, land speculators from the big cities knew that railroads

Speaker 17: and mining companies Steel concerns and Wall Street firms

Were

Speaker 2: gearing up to develop the coal resources in Appalachia It's one of

Speaker 105: the richest coal regions in the world

That meant that those

Speaker 9: impoverished mountaineers Living up there on their small farms Were sitting on land that was going to explode in value very soon And so, very quietly at first

Speaker 18: Out-of-towners started coming in You know, waiving $100 bills like the song goes to try to get these families to sell out

Speaker 20: cheap because they didn't know any better. A few did, but

not very

Speaker 20: many, not enough. And

so clever men

Speaker 67: went to the county registrars to see which of those mountaineer families' ancestors had failed maybe

Speaker 106: to cross every I and dot every T during the Wild West period three or four generations back when the hills were settled

They

Speaker 107: checked to

see... Who

Speaker 107: was fully

Speaker 9: current on their property taxes

Going back

Speaker 9: a hundred years

These people These

Speaker 26: people had never Really thought about government The government had never much thought about them

Their

Speaker 14: ancestors settled these places A hundred, a hundred, twenty, a hundred and fifty years ago And they just lived out there in the wilderness Growing and fishing and hunting Just enough food to feed

Speaker 55: themselves Taking care of themselves

Not

Speaker 55: bothering anybody, not asking anything from anybody

There was very little

Speaker 79: cash money circulating in the area at all. And for the most

Speaker 14: part, the furthest thing from any of their minds was that they might owe tribute to some distant government

Pretty soon, families

Speaker 11: started getting served with summons to come to court

and prove

Speaker 11: that the land they lived on for generations was really theirs

And

Speaker 11: some rich guy or some corporation from a faraway city would have went and found someone with a discrepancy and said, well, they don't really own this land, so I'm putting a claim down on that land. I'll pay X amount to it for the county, to the county, etc. Those

clever rich men

Speaker 9: from the big city who dragged these people into court, once they got there, obviously had massive advantages. Like, for example, I don't know, they had lawyers or they were literate

They were

Speaker 9: dragging these mountain people into a world they didn't understand at all, and they just took advantage of them

Speaker 47: hard. There

were many

Speaker 47: recorded instances

Speaker 14: of outright fraud. In

one case, an

Speaker 14: out-of-town businessman signed a contract in the presence of witnesses with

a

Speaker 15: local farmer to purchase a piece of his land for such and such amount

Well, the

Speaker 15: farmer put his mark to the

Speaker 14: paper. He was an illiterate farmer, put his mark to the paper, and the businessman gave him his down payment, and they went on their way, the farmer expecting to settle up the rest of the payment soon. Well

when that

Speaker 14: wasn't forthcoming, the farmer went to the courthouse to go complain, and he brought his copy of the contract

it was

Speaker 14: only then that this illiterate farmer was made to understand that he had not

signed a

Speaker 14: contract to sell part of his land

Speaker 9: for such and such an amount, but

had in

Speaker 9: fact signed to sell all of it for the amount of the small down payment that he'd already gotten. The

farmer just

Speaker 14: did not live in a world where

a trick like

Speaker 14: that was really possible, because in his world

Speaker 85: you many people would have been privy to the engagement as there were there were witnesses so when it went

Speaker 89: to court the judge who would have been the head of a prominent local family would listen and voice the decision of the entire community the common sense ethical decision as they would understand

Speaker 61: it when he said well this businessman obviously what he did wasn't fair you took advantage of this man's illiteracy in front of witnesses no less so i'm

I'm

Speaker 9: going to give you protection to get you out of the county safely, but I would not advise a return visit. That's how it would have been handled

Now, all of a sudden, that's

Speaker 89: just not how things were

All of a

Speaker 89: sudden, we had gone very quickly from a customary culture to

a

Speaker 61: legal culture

In the case of this

Speaker 61: farmer, it was he who soon

Speaker 14: enough received a court summons

When he

Speaker 14: went to court, expecting to confront the man who was trying to steal his family's inheritance, the land they'd settled

Speaker 86: for several generations, that man wasn't even there. He lived out of state. It

was just his

Speaker 86: lawyers there. The

farmer tried to plead his

Speaker 86: case in terms that made sense to him

Speaker 14: in terms of fairness and common sense. He

made a

Speaker 14: moral and ethical plea. He was trying to make the point that this just wasn't right

And the

Speaker 14: people in the courtroom may have even agreed with him, but the lawyers just kept saying, well, what does the contract say? What does the contract say? You say our client agreed to different terms verbally, but where's the proof for that? The writing on the page is pretty plain. And that is your mark, is it not? That

farmer lost his

Speaker 14: family's land

And

Speaker 61: something like that happened to a lot

A

Speaker 61: lot of families

Pretty

Speaker 85: soon, even the people who could prove clean title and

that

Speaker 9: they were documented to be up to date on their taxes

were finding

Speaker 9: that the neighborhood wasn't quite what it used to be

The neighbors to the

Speaker 9: left and the neighbors to the

Speaker 14: right had both been run off their land

On both

Speaker 14: plots of land, to either side, you're starting to see a lot of people you don't recognize. A lot of people no one recognizes coming around all

Speaker 47: the time

They start cutting

Speaker 47: down all the trees and using the lumber to lay railroad tracks and build buildings

They start

Speaker 47: importing strange machinery

Speaker 14: and punching holes into the mountainside

And then, like a flash

Speaker 14: flood

Speaker 51: I mean, that's the only metaphor I can think of that makes sense

is

Speaker 51: Like a flash flood, they begin importing thousands and then

Speaker 9: tens of thousands of workers from big East Coast cities, many of them straight off the immigration boat, speaking any number of mutually indecipherable languages

This is in a sparsely

Speaker 26: populated community, and they are just overwhelming them

A newspaper

Speaker 26: article from a century

Speaker 75: ago, written by a visiting New Yorker, read, quote

Miners

Speaker 109: came into the valley with a rush: Welsh coal-diggers from the pits of Kidwelly, Englishmen

Speaker 110: from Lancashire, Belgians from the coal

Speaker 53: basins of Hainaut and Liège. These mingled with much larger numbers of Italians, Slavs, Austrians, and Poles. The hills of the state resounded to the languages of foreign lands. More than thirty nationalities are represented among the workmen in the mines

today. American

Speaker 53: miners, however, outnumber the foreigners. They have come from the coal fields of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and other states. Negroes from the southern cotton fields have found employment in the mines. And, not the least, the mountaineers of the state themselves

These men came from all

Speaker 55: walks of life. They weren't screening them when they put them on the train

Speaker 111: and sent them down to dig coal. And so a lot of them were unattached men who had questionable backgrounds. And

so now to that

Speaker 112: person who hasn't sold out his land and wants

Speaker 47: to stay, now he's starting to

see a

Speaker 47: new element move into the neighborhood

your

Speaker 20: one mine operator recalled that quote the thousands of men soon tens of thousands who dug that

Speaker 113: first coal were a hard-bitten lot they drank and fought and gambled and whored

with the forest

Speaker 47: stripped from the mountainsides

Speaker 20: the game

Speaker 47: that

the

Speaker 20: people and their ancestors had hunted for meat for so many years was no longer to be found in abundance

The

Speaker 114: rivers were all fished

Speaker 26: out by the countless new arrivals. The

people had depended

Speaker 26: on hunting and fishing to supplement their diets. It was a necessary, not just important, a necessary

Speaker 14: aspect of their lives. And everybody knew that in the community, and that's why it had always been considered not

Speaker 26: just unwise, but utterly immoral. And anti-social For people to cut down their forest To sell as lumber Like really it was looked

at the

Speaker 26: way People might look at a drug dealer or a pimp today If you were going around doing Large scale timber operations You'd

Speaker 115: cut down a tree here and a tree there To Build a barn or whatever you gotta do But

everybody

Speaker 110: understood that we need these forests here To support the herds of game The squirrels, the rabbits, everything else That we all need to live

Make matters worse And

Speaker 89: In what forests remained, government agents

were all

Speaker 89: of a sudden out there on the prowl for

Speaker 100: poachers, a term that in the past meant to these people that you were trespassing to hunt someone else's land without their permission, but which now had acquired the novel meaning of hunting outside the limited parameters defined by the state or federal government

Now, I'm all for conservation and

Speaker 14: conservation laws, but again, these

Speaker 102: people... And this was, this was, they couldn't eat without it

Speaker 116: This was how they lived

The hills were also all of a

Speaker 116: sudden crawling with revenue agents

Speaker 63: who were coming

in and

Speaker 63: busting the local people for making and trading their own liquor without paying the liquor

taxes. the

Speaker 6: people were just doing what they had always done what their ancestors had always done putting aside a little plot to grow some grain and cobbling

Speaker 26: together a makeshift home home distillery these people couldn't exactly go to bevmo and whip out their visa card you know if they wanted

liquor they

Speaker 6: made it themselves it's just the only way to

do it they

Speaker 6: drank it themselves or they shared it with friends and family

Or

Speaker 9: on market days or community gatherings. They might sell or trade some of it to other people

And nobody cared. Because

Speaker 79: nobody cared what these people were doing by themselves up in their hills. But

now, all

Speaker 79: of a

Speaker 17: sudden, very important people with a lot of resources looked at those hills and saw dollar

Speaker 117: signs. And so they cared very much what the

Speaker 118: people who lived there were up to

So

Speaker 84: the place... was just not what it had been, even five or ten years earlier. And

pretty

Speaker 14: soon, that

Speaker 11: farmer who had the clean title and was all up to date on his taxes, he just decides there's nothing left for him to do, except sell his land and try to move somewhere else

Many of them headed to

Speaker 47: other parts of Appalachia, to

family or

Speaker 67: to find a new place to settle. But

they were

Speaker 67: already pretty far

Speaker 24: south of Appalachia

On the

Speaker 24: path of settlement There wasn't a whole lot of extra room left to move into

Where they

Speaker 31: did move They brought with them warnings About this invasion That was heading their way

Many of

Speaker 31: them had

Speaker 47: nowhere to go

They

Speaker 63: either left the state Entirely Or they did the only thing there was to do And so As the same New York

Speaker 67: newspaper editorial read

The

Speaker 67: watching the mines creep nearer and nearer to their cabins

Speaker 110: Residents have looked with foreboding at first and then, realizing the futility of any efforts to stand aside, they've shouldered picks

Speaker 47: and entered the mouths of the black tunnels

One of the men who

Speaker 47: followed that

Speaker 55: path was named Frank Keeney. Frank Keeney's family had hunted and farmed the hills

Speaker 18: of Clay County, West Virginia

for a

Speaker 18: hundred years when they got word that mining and lumber companies had claimed ownership of their land

They

Speaker 35: lost their

Speaker 22: land and some of the family was able to find farmland some distance away and went there to set up until the corporations came for them

Speaker 28: as well

Others went to work

Speaker 31: for the timber companies that had taken their land from them because they didn't know what else to do

Some of

Speaker 11: them, Frank Keeney's parents moved down to

Speaker 97: Kanawha County to a place called Cabin Creek and they became coal miners there

this is

Speaker 21: the story

of I would say a

Speaker 21: lot of people you know just about everybody up in those hills that's their story

in the

Speaker 119: late 18 and early 1900s

in

Speaker 11: Kanawha County

Frank

Speaker 11: Keeney was born there all this happened

Speaker 9: two years before he was born and so two years after his family gets to Kanawa he's born and by the time he was a boy he could climb to the top of the highest mountain and look around and all he would lay his eyes on were coal mines as far as the eye could see

in

Speaker 18: the earlier quote from Altina Waller's book she mentioned that at the time of the Civil War virtually

Speaker 59: everybody

in

Speaker 59: these southern counties lived on a self-sufficient farm that either they or their family owned

just

Speaker 120: like that I mean just like that

Speaker 70: in the blink of an eye the length of one boy's short childhood that number was down from virtually everybody to single digits

the

Speaker 110: companies

Speaker 95: owned everything they owned all the land they owned the roads that came in and out and moved around within the land

They began importing

Speaker 9: workers, but there was nowhere for them to live, and so the companies built houses, and they owned all the houses, and

they took the

Speaker 9: rent out of the miners' paychecks

The workers and

Speaker 18: their families needed food, and they needed supplies for daily life. There wasn't any market

Speaker 12: infrastructure for that, so the company built and stocked up a store and

deducted what

Speaker 12: the miners owed to it from their

Speaker 47: paychecks

The

Speaker 47: company didn't provide anything to the miners for work They didn't provide boots They

Speaker 12: didn't provide helmets They didn't provide picks or shovels Or any other tools or supplies That the miners needed to actually mine the coal

Speaker 26: The miners had to buy all of that themselves From the company store Just to work in the mines They

had to pay

Speaker 26: the company to sharpen

Speaker 9: their tools The

miners even

Speaker 9: had to buy the explosives For

the miners that

Speaker 9: they used to break apart the earth from the company store of the company that

Speaker 26: they were digging coal for

Well, since many of

Speaker 26: the miners were destitute immigrants or former black sharecroppers or just penniless

Speaker 61: locals

they had to go

Speaker 61: into debt to the company store just to get started on their first day as a miner. And

the company

Speaker 61: made sure that many of them never, ever got back to even

The law

Speaker 113: said that children had to go to school And

so the

Speaker 113: company built the school And hired the teachers The company

Speaker 11: controlled the curriculum To prepare the minor's children for their own graduation Into the life of a minor School

only went up

Speaker 11: to 8th grade in most places There was no high

Speaker 53: school Because after that the boys were expected to be up on the mountain

Speaker 121: working as trapper boys, opening and closing the mine's air vents or in some other capacity to prepare them for that life

The company owned

Speaker 53: the church and

hired the minister. His sermons were

Speaker 122: monitored and were expected to reinforce company policy

Many of the

Speaker 122: ministers provided

Speaker 101: regular reports on what the miners were saying and thinking

In

Speaker 88: fact, company teachers, doctors, store clerks, saloon keepers, preachers, all

Speaker 92: the company employees who were not miners, they formed a separate class

above the

Speaker 62: miners. They were company people. The miners were a liquid labor force that could come and

go and

Speaker 62: every single one of them was replaceable. And

Speaker 25: so

The

Speaker 25: company men, the teachers, doctors, et cetera, were

all

Speaker 123: expected, as part of their job description, to act as company spies and report on the words and the activities of the minors

Well, so many workers

Speaker 63: coming in from all walks of life, speaking any number of languages, most of them young, single men

you

Speaker 6: know, that's an environment asking for a little bit of disorderliness......and

Speaker 124: so someone had to keep order

Speaker 113: and so the company paid the police force. They bought the police force. Either

by hiring and

Speaker 113: arming sheriff's deputies......or by bringing in private mercenaries that they called mine guards. The

mine guards came

Speaker 113: from the

Speaker 125: Baldwin-Feltz

Speaker 47: Detective Agency. Which... It sounds like some kind of Sherlock Holmes outfit. It ain't that. Like the Pinkerton Detective Agency and other

less

Speaker 35: notorious ones from the 19th and 20th century, Baldwin Feltz was more like a domestic version of Blackwater, the private military company we put to

use in

Speaker 35: Afghanistan and Iraq

And

Speaker 59: their primary purpose, from

the steel

Speaker 59: mills of Pennsylvania to the factories of Chicago

In

Speaker 59: the minds of West Virginia and Colorado and Montana and all the rest of the

Speaker 63: country, their purpose was to make sure that no one mentioned the words labor union in the same sentence. In 1892, Pinkertons, and if you don't know about them, you will before this series is over. As an American, you should spit whenever you say that name

In

Speaker 63: 1892, Pinkerton's opened fire on a crowd of people during the homestead strike at Andrew Carnegie's steel mill, killed and wounded more than a dozen people. The

journalist I was just

Speaker 50: quoting, he toured many of these company towns, and he provided a maybe

Speaker 11: surface-level outsider's account, but it's an insightful one, one that bears insight into the effects that this kind of

Speaker 50: life has

can

Speaker 113: have on the people who live it quote

less than

Speaker 113: 20 years ago parts of those just again i

Speaker 20: just want to drive that home again i'm sorry to interrupt but this all happened less than 20 years just imagine the level of transformation

Speaker 12: we're talking about here less

than 20

Speaker 12: years ago parts of those vast stretches of low mountains that cover so much of west

Speaker 11: virginia slumbered in solitude

The

Speaker 11: traveler rode horseback up the stony beds of mountain streams and sought shelter at night in a lonely settler's hut or on the slope of an inhospitable mountain

Bears lumbered

Speaker 11: through the

Speaker 90: wilderness, and wildcats howled at night

No railroad

Speaker 90: had yet penetrated the region

People lived in

Speaker 53: small groups here and there in

Speaker 51: the valleys. Life

on the

Speaker 51: whole was simple and devoted chiefly to agriculture. The earth reposed peacefully

Today, in

Speaker 126: traversing this region, you pass coal mining village after coal mining village

Speaker 67: as you ride up the valley of the Guyandot River, or through McDowell, Mingo, and other counties, where the hills stood in untouched quietness two decades ago. Evidences of the transformation are on every hand. The houses of those who work in the mines are never

out of

Speaker 67: sight. Large mouths gape blackly at you from the hillsides. Gaunt tipples, headhouses, and other

Speaker 127: buildings stare at you from the slopes of the mountains. Railroads send their sightings

Speaker 71: in many directions. Long lines of squat minecars run along their narrow-gauge tracks and disappear around the curves of the hills

The

Speaker 5: earth is scraped and ugly. The blackness of coal is over everything

And

Speaker 71: mounds of fine coal stand about. Peacefulness and quiet have departed

and let us

Speaker 71: see what kind of civilization has resulted the typical coal mining town is not a town in the ordinary sense at

all the

Speaker 71: place where the town stands is the point at which a seam has been opened buildings have been erected and machinery has been installed

The

Speaker 128: dwellings that cluster about the tipple or straggle along the bed of the creek are not occupied by self-dependent citizens

Speaker 100: of a community which gives many opportunities for employment and presents a variety of facets to the world at large

They are

Speaker 14: occupied solely by the men who work in the mines

The town is the

Speaker 14: adjunct and necessary

Speaker 9: convenience of an industry. If the mines should disappear, it too would cease to exist. The town is

the adjunct and necessary convenience of an industry. It is

Speaker 9: not even called a town in the language of the locality

Speaker 11: It is called a camp

No one owns his

Speaker 11: own house. He cannot acquire so much title to property. No one runs a

Speaker 68: store, operates a garage, or sells groceries or haberdashery to his fellow townsmen. No

one amuses

Speaker 53: them in a movie

Speaker 88: theater. There is no main street of small independent businesses owned by different people and making up that mosaic of commercial life

Speaker 71: that is typical of villages everywhere

There is little, if

Speaker 71: any, participation in common group

Speaker 67: activities. No

body of

Speaker 67: elected councilman ever passes on repairs for roads

Speaker 126: No group of people ever gets together and decides that the old schoolhouse is too ramshackle for the children or that the old church needs repainting

No

Speaker 71: family physician builds up a successful practice by competing with other physicians. No lawyer settles disputes over property rights among his neighbors

Speaker 88: It

is not accurate to

Speaker 88: say that no one does these things. The coal company does them all

It owns all the

Speaker 53: houses and rents them to the miner. Even in the more enlightened company towns, the company owns the store, the pool room, the movie theater, the school, and the church

The

Speaker 53: company employs the physicians and collects a small monthly sum from each

Speaker 71: minor to help pay him

The company owns

Speaker 71: all the land and everything upon it. It therefore controls the life and activities of the little community. It is responsible for the sanitation. The company's ownership sometimes extends to the roads so that it can control ingress and egress. In some counties, the company is the employer of the deputy sheriffs and is therefore responsible for police supervision

In

Speaker 71: Logan County, the mine operators paid out $61,000 last year in salaries for deputy sheriffs

Miners in West

Speaker 71: Virginia are not paid as workers elsewhere are paid

They do not

Speaker 71: receive in cash all that they have earned

On their

Speaker 71: semi-monthly paydays, they are given statements showing how much they owe the company and how much the company owes them

Among the items

Speaker 71: charged against them in this account is the indebtedness incurred at the company's store. for. Other items

Speaker 129: are rent for their

Speaker 130: houses, lighting, heating, doctor's services, use of a hospital, and even the sharpening of tools and the use of a company

Speaker 70: wash house in which to clean up after a day's work

The law of West

Speaker 70: Virginia prohibits companies from issuing scrip in payment of wages

Speaker 130: specifying that if such scrip is issued, it shall be held to be a promise

Speaker 110: to pay the sum specified therein in lawful money

But

Speaker 110: the law is never enforced, and the companies generally issue the script. I'll

read one last

Speaker 106: paragraph here from this. This is from Winthrop D. Lane about 100 years ago in the New York publication called Survey. Quote, this

is an important

Speaker 131: part

Speaker 88: that's why I broke here

What began

Speaker 88: as a means of taking care of the emergent needs of workers became a settled condition

Speaker 51: everywhere. Today, 400,000 men, women, and children in West Virginia are living this subservient existence

They are

Speaker 51: caught up

in a

Speaker 51: civilization

Speaker 132: within a civilization, an

alien order

Speaker 132: embedded in a democracy

Speaker 133: So, since

the company

Speaker 133: houses were property

the

Speaker 101: workers... had no right to privacy they had no right to personal space it wasn't their personal or private space they

didn't

Speaker 59: even have tenants rights you know the kind of thing you would think of normally if you were paying rent on a house you would get certain rights that go at

Speaker 5: that house none

of that applied the company

Speaker 5: decided which visitors you were allowed to have

homes could be

Speaker 53: searched and were searched at any time they could wake you up in the middle of the night march your family out and go tear

Speaker 11: your place up if they wanted to without warning

the

Speaker 11: way corrections officers would do a cell inspection

Among the items that

Speaker 11: were most commonly searched for were any books and pamphlets that were considered contrary to the company's interests because the company decided what books and what newspapers and

Speaker 9: other media was allowed on its property

Very often the only

Speaker 9: newspapers allowed were the ones that the coal mine operators themselves had set up

Speaker 76: anybody found with unauthorized reading material was just fired on the spot

If he had a

Speaker 53: family, he and his family were given notice to get out of their company house and get out of town

Anybody who

Speaker 123: was fired was also blacklisted because the coal companies worked together to keep track of people that they considered troublemakers. And so a fired worker couldn't

just

Speaker 9: move over to the next mountain or the next coal field. He would find that he was not welcome anywhere

And so

Speaker 53: this destitute worker

With no

Speaker 53: money Because he's not paid in cash He's paid in company script

For a

Speaker 53: company store That he's no longer allowed

Speaker 63: to use Would take his meager belongings He'd just have to leave the region All together with his family I mean literally leave the whole region

Speaker 26: Ownership of the company's store and any saloons or other facilities the miners

Speaker 113: used would give the company a way to reduce the miners' pay kind of through the back door. They

didn't want to cut

Speaker 124: their wages maybe

Speaker 51: and start a big fight

Speaker 124: so they would just raise prices on the supplies that they sold the miners that they needed to actually go up

Speaker 11: and mine. They

would raise the prices on

Speaker 11: food or other supplies that they needed at home

Speaker 134: Sometimes when the miners Would successfully negotiate a pay raise The

coal

Speaker 6: companies would argue And fight about it And act like they were trying to put it off And then

Speaker 9: they would give them a little compromise pay raise And then they would just raise prices in the company store Accordingly to make up

for it Company mine

Speaker 13: guards Would patrol voting stations During elections And intimidating workers to make

Speaker 12: sure they voted the way the company wanted, or just not vote at all. And sometimes workers were just handed out ballots from the company that had already been filled out for

them. Anybody, anybody

Speaker 26: who was heard promoting political candidates or policies that were not favored by the company was just

Speaker 9: immediately fired and evicted from the town. And

so in this way

Speaker 9: the coal companies

with

Speaker 9: control of this whole population of miners like they had, were able to fill up the sheriff's offices, fill up the county courts and other offices, even a lot of the state government with its own hired men

When a miner was hurt

Speaker 57: or killed on the job

the question

Speaker 57: of whether the mine operator was responsible went before

Speaker 61: adjudicators who were chosen and paid by the company. When accusations of abuse were made against the mine guards or other company officials

Those

Speaker 61: reports had to be made

Speaker 135: to sheriffs who were elected and very often just simply paid by the company. They

were heard by

Speaker 115: judges who were approved and elected by the company. I

mean that quite

Speaker 115: literally. The

Speaker 113: historian David Allen Corbin writes, quote, The Logan County Coal Operators Association formed its police bulwark

Speaker 88: from a local source. It simply hired the county sheriff, Don Chafin, and his deputies

The

Speaker 90: treasurer of the Logan County Coal Operators Association testified that the association had paid Chafin $2,725

Speaker 67: a month to work for it

That is

Speaker 67: 40,000 a month today

Sheriff Chafin

Speaker 62: only had an official salary from the department of several hundred dollars a month. I think it was like $365 a month is what he made. And when he was already in his mid-30s, he already reported over a million dollars in

Speaker 67: assets

So

Speaker 67: it gives you an idea of the scope of this. The

deputy

Speaker 71: sheriffs, like the county sheriff, were paid by personal checks from the coal operators. In

Speaker 88: one year, the association paid out $61,517 to these deputies for protection against the union. The

anti-union

Speaker 67: activities of the Logan County sheriffs and his deputies became a national disgrace and part of the region's folklore

more. Two

Speaker 67: deputies were stationed at each railroad depot and on each train to prevent union organizers from entering Logan County. All strangers, upon coming into the county, were searched and forced to identify themselves. When

the clerk

Speaker 67: for the West Virginia Department of Mines, Toby Heiser, arrived in Logan, he was accosted by several deputies in order to

Speaker 50: identify himself. He refused to do so, and the deputies dragged him off the train, beat him, and forced him to leave the county

A

Speaker 50: newspaper reporter from Washington, D.C., after

Speaker 53: a visit to Logan County, wrote

of

Speaker 5: the kingdom of Logan, he reigns supreme by virtue of a state machine blocked by the power of the operators

The American Civil

Speaker 20: Liberties Union declared that Logan County had become a national scandal, and a U.S. Senate investigating committee

Speaker 63: denounced the Logan deputy sheriff's system as vicious and un-American. He said

it was contrary

Speaker 63: to the genius and spirit of our institutions

Okay. A United

Speaker 126: Mine Workers of America official told the U.S. Senate committee, I would just love to see this committee go down

Speaker 136: to Logan County without anybody knowing

who

Speaker 5: they were. And Senator Burton K. Wheeler responded, They'd probably throw the Senate committee in jail, end quote

So that's what's

Speaker 76: going on. Okay? That's what's going on. The companies run everything. Everyone works for the company

Speaker 123: including the government, and most of the company employees who weren't miners were expected to

Speaker 75: be involved with keeping the miners under control. Again, company teachers, preachers, doctors, store clerks, saloon keepers, all those type of employees, they were all expected to

Speaker 137: act as company spies

The

Speaker 72: company owned and ran the post office and all the miners' incoming and outcoming mail was monitored

Anyone heard

Speaker 128: complaining about any of this was fired and evicted

Speaker 100: and blacklisted

and

Speaker 12: sometimes beaten. Now

all of this was

Speaker 12: done, of course, according to the companies, to protect the miners from the predations of those

Speaker 20: radicals

at

Speaker 20: the united mine workers union had already gotten its claws into the coal fields of ohio pennsylvania and other states

was even

Speaker 20: making inroads into the northern parts of west virginia

but the

Speaker 20: operators were determined that

the

Speaker 59: union would never under any circumstances be allowed to

Speaker 50: infect their coal fields in southern

west virginia Give

Speaker 50: you some idea of the scope of this thing

Everybody can

Speaker 50: kind of understand

Speaker 138: When you go to work each day You're at the store, the office Or wherever it is that you work That the company runs the show It's their

Speaker 137: property It's their rules But

in West

Speaker 137: Virginia alone The operating coal fields Were larger than the states of Rhode Island

Speaker 13: Massachusetts And Delaware combined end

And

Speaker 113: 94% of the miners there lived this way that I'm describing in company towns. So that's an area the size of three states in which the laws

Speaker 139: and constitution of the United States and the state of West Virginia were

not the

Speaker 139: day-to-day practical ruling authority. In

which, as Winthrop Lane

Speaker 140: wrote, represented a civilization within a civilization. An alien order embedded in a democracy

It

Speaker 141: was an industrial dictatorship, like really a

Speaker 142: dictatorial government the size of three states in West Virginia alone just planted right here in the middle of America

The president of the American

Speaker 143: Federation of Labor

Samuel

Speaker 51: Gompers, wrote in 1913

A

Speaker 51: powerful and subtle conspiracy between organized capital

Speaker 126: and the governmental agents of the state of West Virginia gives indications of the existence of an invisible government that steals from the workers the liberty they are told they have

A U.S. congressman

Speaker 123: visiting the coal fields from Wisconsin said, One

cannot

Speaker 67: imagine the power of the mining companies. It elects senators and judges. It owns both the Republican and Democratic parties in the state

Speaker 144: All laws are made to suit the mine owners. All the judges are elected through their influence, even up to the judges of the state Supreme Court

Maybe the thing that

Speaker 144: gets me more

Speaker 145: than just about anything

Speaker 146: in this whole story, this whole

Speaker 11: sequence of events, for some reason, the one that just gets me the most is

that most

Speaker 11: of these coal operations

that

Speaker 11: exerted

Speaker 52: so much social and political and economic control over the lives of the

Speaker 90: people in West Virginia were

owned by

Speaker 90: people who had never set foot in the state, would never set foot in the state

Some were

Speaker 62: owned by men in Charleston, the capital of West Virginia, or other cities closer to home, little towns

but most

Speaker 12: were not. Most were owned by out-of-state

Speaker 147: interests. Big out-of-state corporate interest

Speaker 67: J.P. Morgan's U.S. Steel Company owned or operated 150,000

Speaker 13: acres in West Virginia. The Norfolk and Western Railway conglomerate

Speaker 9: ran the Pocahontas Coal & Coat Company, owned just about all of it. At

the time of

Speaker 9: purchase in 1902, I think, it was about 300,000 acres

Those are

Speaker 12: just two. There's many more like that. Giant, distant corporations

Thank you. A

Speaker 12: chunk of a U.S. state The size

of Rhode

Speaker 12: Island Delaware and

Speaker 126: Massachusetts And running them as Dictatorships And police states really It

comes to

Speaker 76: very much Resemble, actually Very much resemble The economic relationship Between the core and

Speaker 148: the periphery Under colonialism Under traditional colonialism Thank

you. West

Speaker 149: Virginia had essentially been

Speaker 150: reduced To an economic colony Of

Speaker 124: Wall Street and other out-of-state financiers and corporations It really

Speaker 151: really does resemble that system Under colonialism, the colonies had two

Speaker 11: primary economic roles They were to provide cheap labor To extract natural resources

Speaker 12: That

would then be

Speaker 12: shipped back to the mother country And then the mother country

would

Speaker 12: use those natural resources to manufacture the higher-value-added finished

Speaker 87: products for

which the

Speaker 87: colony then served as a market. That was its secondary function

In that

Speaker 62: system, the colonies would be forbidden

Speaker 135: or prevented from using the resources that they extract to create higher-end finished products themselves. They performed the low-end work of resource extraction

so

Speaker 135: that the imperial core could profit from the manufacturing part actual ownership of all the resources remains with the core the people in the place where the resources are extracted they might receive

Speaker 152: wages but not profits

it's a system that

Speaker 152: prevents the

Speaker 11: colonized territories from ever truly developing economically

It's

Speaker 9: actually designed to prevent that

Because a

Speaker 9: colony is not perceived

By the

Speaker 9: core as a society It's perceived as an operation

Speaker 21: As

one of the

Speaker 153: quotes said It's an appendage to an industrial

Speaker 88: operation And so things like economic development These things just don't play a role It's not a society The fact that children are born

Speaker 70: And families live their whole lives there

Speaker 25: Thank you so much for having me

Speaker 35: here

for

Speaker 25: multiple generations, it's all incidental. The miners were viewed as a liquid commodity. Fungible labor. Easily replaceable, faceless people. You just could be swapped out with the next batch of clueless immigrants

Speaker 35: that just arrived, desperate and hungry from Central or Eastern Europe

More than one person

Speaker 154: over the years has expressed in one

way or

Speaker 154: another I'll

see you next

Speaker 154: time. bewilderment or outrage that industrial

Speaker 155: civilization at the time ran on coal coal heated virtually all the homes and businesses around the country

Speaker 79: it powered the country's railroads and and its power grids through coal-fired power plants even the US Navy

ran on coal And so if

Speaker 116: you were an alien from Mars Who

Speaker 156: was coming and hovering over the planet Earth And looking down and seeing a whole civilization That runs on this one precious resource

Speaker 102: You

could be

Speaker 102: forgiven for thinking That the people who lived where those resources were And dug it out of the ground Were probably some of the richest people on the planet But

in

Speaker 54: fact they were poor as dirt

And

Speaker 157: living under I mean what is honestly what would approach slave like conditions

Speaker 62: in many ways it's taken on different guises over the years from direct conquest and enslavement of the natives like

Speaker 50: in the early days of new world colonization to the more familiar style mastered by the Dutch and the British and

Speaker 52: against which the American colonies fought a violent rebellion you know all of this core periphery stuff I'm talking it's all in the declaration of independence

and All the

Speaker 123: way up to the more modern post-World War II version, where, you know, I don't know, the CIA overthrows a populist leader

Speaker 62: in Africa and replaces

him with a

Speaker 62: dictator who gives good terms to ExxonMobil and then uses the money from that to kill his challengers and stuff his Swiss bank

Speaker 76: account, you know, modern colonialism. Well

nowadays, we

Speaker 76: usually think colonialism and we think of the traditional terms of European imperialists colonizing less developed countries in the global south

In

Speaker 76: very large countries, there's a reason that a country like the Netherlands or a country like England did that. It's because they didn't have a lot

Speaker 158: of land

They wanted to

Speaker 158: open new markets or develop more resources, they had to go do it somewhere else. But

in very

Speaker 158: large countries like

Speaker 62: the United States, like Russia, like China, you

often see

Speaker 62: similar dynamics... I mean, really similar dynamics that emerge within the borders of the country itself

You have

Speaker 62: internal colonialism

Speaker 52: internally colonized populations

And so

Speaker 35: again, to repeat this point one more time because I really want to drill it in there

the hills of

Speaker 159: southern West Virginia over the course of about 20 years

were

Speaker 97: transformed into

by

Speaker 97: outside financial interests from a society of self-sufficient yeoman

Speaker 160: farmers

into an

Speaker 160: economic colony wholly owned by faraway corporations. It

all happened more

Speaker 161: quickly than the people affected by it could react. Before they were able to wrap their heads around what was

Speaker 162: happening, it had already happened

The

Speaker 162: communities that used to exist there were completely shattered by the transformation

It wasn't

Speaker 104: an easy task to rebuild any kind of community under conditions where people spoke a dozen

Speaker 154: or more languages, and where the coal companies were suspicious of any collective activity on the

part of their

Speaker 9: miners. The power of the operators depended on their ability to negotiate as a

Speaker 136: monolith with miners

who

Speaker 136: could only negotiate as individuals. Every individual miner is immediately

Speaker 83: replaceable

You'd be the

Speaker 83: best

Speaker 163: coal miner in the whole wide world

and they

Speaker 163: could replace you with a guy who's just learning the job, and the whole operation is not going to be affected

Speaker 20: 1

And so, no

Speaker 20: matter who you are, Mr. Miner Man, if you don't like the working conditions

Speaker 53: or you don't like the pay

If you

Speaker 53: don't like the attitude of the mine guards or the rules in the company town, no problem

There are

Speaker 53: thousands of other people

Speaker 67: who can be plugged into your slot. The only way that

the

Speaker 92: miners could ever

hope to

Speaker 92: meet on something

Speaker 63: like equal terms

really meet

Speaker 63: with the men who ran these companies as fellow human beings

was to do it

Speaker 66: together

Speaker 66: Because a miner is easily replaceable But the miners Are not replaceable

United Mine

Speaker 164: Workers of America Our

Speaker 33: branch of the International Union Was founded in Ohio In 1890 And

right

Speaker 91: away began making inroads Into coal fields in the Midwest During the business depression of 1894 Operators

pretty

Speaker 35: much everywhere, started cutting the pay of their miners without warning or negotiation, and so the UMW called for a nationwide strike. It was

their first

Speaker 35: major strike that they had called for

There were a lot of

Speaker 100: British and German miners up in the Midwest, and these men understood the goals and purpose of a labor union, and so the Midwestern coal

Speaker 158: miners walked off the job. But

the coal fields of

Speaker 158: southern West Virginia

places

Speaker 158: only very recently developed and built up you know there were some of the last ones to be built up they were worked by locals or recently arrived central and southern europeans

Speaker 100: and southern blacks who had no union experience whatsoever and so they didn't walk out and they kept

working and so

Speaker 100: as all

Speaker 70: those mines up in the midwest and the northern areas shut down

the

Speaker 70: ones in southern west virginia kept going and as a result business from those striking midwestern coal fields was taken up by the non-union west virginia mining operations

did a lot of damage to those

Speaker 70: midwestern coal companies and it completely failed to get the umw anything that they had wanted and eventually

the operators

Speaker 70: up there just came to him and said look we're

Speaker 165: we're gonna all go bankrupt here if you keep this up because There's this other region down here that's just taking all the business, and so the UMW just had to call it off

Well, after

Speaker 166: operators continued to cut wages

three years later

Speaker 57: the UMW called another strike

This time, 1897. And this

Speaker 97: time, they were better prepared

and met

Speaker 97: with unprecedented

Speaker 167: success in coal fields everywhere in the country

tens

Speaker 167: of thousands of

Speaker 168: union and non-union miners walked

Speaker 11: off the job en masse

Speaker 145: everywhere in the country that is except for southern west virginia

Speaker 9: and

so labor

Speaker 9: organizers from all over the united states pour into west virginia to get these miners there organized explain to them what a union is and what it's for and why they need

one

Speaker 57: and just to get them organized and Samuel Gompers, the head of the AFL He came in and he said The success of this strike depends This is a nationwide

Speaker 9: strike He said it depends on one factor

That the

Speaker 9: miners of West Virginia Will suspend operations Gompers

was

Speaker 52: joined by a whole bunch of Well known labor activists at the time Eugene Debs was

Speaker 59: there A whole bunch of people

But the coal

Speaker 63: companies in West Virginia Were very well prepared Company police and mine guards Rode the trains and patrolled the train stations They turned back any

Speaker 47: labor organizer That tried to enter into those southern counties Not just onto their property by the way But into the counties, period

The

Speaker 50: organizers who got through anyway And were discovered Were thrown in jail

They

Speaker 27: were fined Very often they were beaten Sometimes they were shot at By company guards or police

Thank you. John

Speaker 67: Mitchell, who was vice president of the United Mine Workers of America at the time, he was chased and shot at by company guards and had to flee for his life by swimming across a

mountain

Speaker 169: stream. The operators went to their

Speaker 47: pet judges and got rubber-stamped injunctions against the labor organizations, ordering them to cease all efforts to organize the miners of West

Speaker 71: Virginia. The state very

Speaker 170: quickly became a focal point of the whole nationwide labor

movement. The

Speaker 57: AFL, the Knights of Labor, the UMWA, 28 other national and international unions sent representatives to convene a council in Wheeling, West Virginia to

try to

Speaker 171: coordinate and publicize their efforts. Mass

meetings

Speaker 172: were held all over the country by workers to express indignation at the court's interference with the constitutional rights of the organizers and minors

in West

Speaker 172: Virginia

Speaker 62: Still, Southern West Virginia was impenetrable to the Union. One

organizer

Speaker 158: reported that he'd managed to establish a local at a mine in McDowell

Speaker 100: County, but that it soon dissolved because the miners there were unwilling to participate for fear of being fired, evicted, and blacklisted

David Alan Corbin

Speaker 91: in his great study, it's called Life, Work, and Rebellion in the

Speaker 11: Coalfields, The West Virginia Miners, 1880-1922, by David Alan Corbin, great book

He

Speaker 11: writes: "The miners knew their

Speaker 67: operators. When local unions were formed and miners took offices in the locals

Speaker 126: the coal companies reacted swiftly and harshly. The truth is, an organizer wrote, that as fast as men organize, the companies are discharging them

and

Speaker 144: turning them out of their

Speaker 25: houses. The coal companies also reacted against the organizers when they became successful. Most of the organizers

Speaker 67: were threatened, some of them were beaten, and nearly all of them had their efforts halted by injunctions or were jailed, often on

Speaker 11: charges such as holding meetings on Sunday, and thereby violating the Sabbath. Well, despite

all that, the

Speaker 173: strike

Speaker 50: overall was still a huge success. membership in the umwa increased tenfold and

Speaker 59: the union dues from that refilled the union's empty treasury and gave him a sense of confidence

going

Speaker 12: forward into the future because for the first time minor solidarity had been put on display

Speaker 135: in large sections of the country and

so the

Speaker 174: operators associations up in ohio and illinois indiana and western pennsylvania

Speaker 113: great big giant coal field called the central field up there

finally broke

Speaker 113: with precedent and agreed to sit down and negotiate

Speaker 106: with united mine workers regarding wages and working conditions

Speaker 60: the result was the central competitive field agreement which made the unionization of the midwestern

Speaker 63: coal fields official

They

Speaker 63: recognized the UMWA as the miner's instrument for collective bargaining. The wage increases and other

Speaker 70: accommodations were really secondary to getting their union recognized. Without

a union, wage

Speaker 70: increases and other accommodations can always be rolled back tomorrow. You need a union. Critically, those Midwestern

coal

Speaker 115: companies that made this agreement

They

Speaker 115: extracted a very

Speaker 100: important promise from the United Mine Workers of America

They told them that

Speaker 100: the concessions they were making in the agreement were going to

Speaker 136: drive up their operating costs

Speaker 57: and would allow the non-union fields to the south in West Virginia to undercut and out-compete them like they had before. And

so as

Speaker 62: part of the agreement

the

Speaker 62: United Mine Workers committed themselves to unionizing southern West

Speaker 100: Virginia come hell or high water

And the coal

Speaker 100: companies there, though, were not going to observe any limits to prevent that from happening

As far as the coal

Speaker 47: companies of southern West Virginia were concerned, a unionized workforce was a threat to their very existence

You know, the

Speaker 70: coal fields in West

Speaker 175: Virginia were further away from the major coal-consuming regions on the eastern seaboard or the Great Lakes or even the Mississippi Valley. West

Virginia didn't really

Speaker 176: consume a lot of coal

so

Speaker 70: it all had to be sold out of state for the most part, whereas the coal fields in Ohio and Pennsylvania

They

Speaker 70: sold a lot of coal to their

Speaker 67: own states, very short distance away, which meant that the transportation costs for them were a lot lower

so

Speaker 50: the built-in costs in West Virginia were

going to be higher, and the only

Speaker 50: lever that they had to keep themselves competitive was oil. wages like the cost of

Speaker 100: extracting the coal was the labor to do it was the only other major cost besides transportation

and since

Speaker 100: their transport costs were

Speaker 35: higher there was just a constant downward pressure on the wages of west virginia miners a lot of corner cutting a

lot of

Speaker 35: things that became more advanced in the northern

Speaker 47: mines as far as safety and things like that that didn't make it to the southern mines in west virginia

Because

Speaker 47: they cost money. And so as a result, the West Virginia mines were

Speaker 146: the most dangerous in the country

The West Virginia

Speaker 146: mine

Speaker 160: operators, they actually, they were really paranoid. They actually saw the United Mine Workers of America as a tool that was being used against them

In a

Speaker 113: conspiracy, they really believed that this was happening, by the Midwestern coal companies to try to cripple their operations and steal their business

Speaker 13: That's what they thought. So they were determined to keep the union out at all costs. As

far as the union was

Speaker 71: concerned, southern West Virginian mines had to be unionized, or else they would always

and

Speaker 92: forever make it mathematically untenable for other mines around the country to accept the union. to irreconcilable

Speaker 61: positions. The UMWA had not made headway into southern West Virginia so far. And part

of

Speaker 5: that was because of the efforts of the coal mine operators. But a big part of it had to

Speaker 123: do with the fact that they had so far consistently failed to understand or really address the concerns

Speaker 125: of the West Virginia miners, which were different from people in other parts of the country

And

Speaker 177: whether it was because the immigrant black and local

Speaker 60: miners were kind of accustomed to being poor and were isolated from the temptations of civilization, maybe it was that, or maybe it was because a portion of the miners saw the

Speaker 124: job as a part-time supplement to a mixed lifestyle that included hunting and fishing and small-scale gardening, whatever the reason was, the miners in southern Appalachia were simply not that concerned about how much they were being paid

not that they

Speaker 165: didn't care at all it just was not a priority negotiating higher wages was how the union sold itself to miners everywhere else it's how it tried to sell itself

Speaker 12: to the West Virginians but for the most part they were not receptive

it took

Speaker 12: the UMWA a

Speaker 5: long time to figure out that the highest priority in West Virginia

Speaker 35: the central issue For the miners of West Virginia

Was the

Speaker 35: oppressive

Speaker 61: conditions

Of the

Speaker 61: company town And especially The abuses of the private security forces Hired by the companies

That's what

Speaker 136: they wanted help with The UMWA didn't really get this at first And so it hindered their organizing

Speaker 35: efforts But they were soon to learn the hard

way Just

Speaker 35: what the miners of southern West Virginia Had been dealing with Corbin writes Quote

The coal

Speaker 35: operators were determined

Speaker 67: to prevent the UMWA from again invading the state, believing, as did Justin Collins, that if the coal operator

Speaker 71: undertakes to fight the Union, he will have to fight force with force. More

and more

Speaker 88: operators formed police barricades against these invaders by hiring mercenaries from the Baldwin-Feltz Detective Agency. By 1910, Baldwin-Feltz guards could be

Speaker 71: found in nearly every company town in southern West Virginia

The

Speaker 71: principal work of these guards, according to the head of the agency, Tom Feltz, was to protect the operators against organized labor. In

protecting the

Speaker 67: coal establishment from union agitators, the Baldwin-Feltz guards were effective and brutal. Whereas in earlier years, during quiet periods, national organizers moved relatively unmolested around the state

by

Speaker 154: 1907 they were surrounded and harassed by Baldwin-Feltz guards from the time they boarded a train in Cincinnati headed for West Virginia

The arrival of UMWA

Speaker 53: organizers often meant headlines for local labor newspapers. The February 10

Speaker 71: 1910 issue of the Labor Argus read, All

right

Speaker 71: Horrible Butchery of Representatives of United Mine Workers

Speaker 11: by Brutal and Bloodthirsty Guards in the New River Field. The September 8, 1910 edition of the paper headlined, Guards Brutally Assault Union Men, Two Members

Speaker 71: of the International Executive Board of United Mine Workers of America, Beaten Up by Coal Company Thugs

The United Mine

Speaker 71: Workers Journal stigmatized West Virginia as the Black Belt, clarifying

We do

Speaker 71: not mean that they employ nothing but colored men, but that it is a region where it is not safe for an organizer to

Speaker 136: let his business be known. By 1912, UMWA officials openly admitted that they no longer encouraged organizers to enter the state of West

Speaker 35: Virginia because of the danger posed by

Speaker 72: the Baldwin Feltz guards. The vigilance of the Baldwin Feltz guards against Union agitators carried over into the everyday internal affairs of the company town

If a

Speaker 72: miner showed too much independence or became inquisitive or complained, he was suspected of being a union agitator and might be beaten and driven out of town. The guards forcibly prohibited

Speaker 67: the assembly of more than three miners at night, a practice they called bunching for fear that one of the miners might be an organizer preaching unionism

Describing the

Speaker 70: guards' activities, a miner recollected, they rode horses and wouldn't let anyone they didn't like walk on the railroad tracks. Worse, though, you

Speaker 116: couldn't go into the office and tell about mistakes or complain about the store. The guards would just kick you

off the porch

Speaker 116: These guards

Speaker 67: gained a national reputation for their beating, maiming, and murdering of union miners and organizers. In fact, Edward Levinson, in his book "I

Speaker 20: Break Strikes," a general study of industrial spy and strike-breaking agencies throughout the United States, awarded the Baldwin-Felts agency the blue ribbon for

Speaker 5: wanton, cold-blooded murders

Miners throughout the

Speaker 5: country reported that they were appalled by the activities of

Speaker 136: the Baldwin-Felts guards in West Virginia

and they

Speaker 136: made it known that they would not permit themselves to be subjugated in such a manner

Indeed, in

Speaker 136: the speech that precipitated the massacre

Speaker 88: by miners of 19

Speaker 13: mine guards at Heron, Illinois, A miner had declared, we must show the world that this ain't West Virginia. The

southern West Virginia

Speaker 13: miners hated the Baldwin-Feltz guards more than did any other group of miners

During one

Speaker 67: strike, when the miners finally unleashed their wrath against these guards, a miner told a journalist, I never had to kill a man and hope never to be compelled to kill one

But I

Speaker 67: would kill a dozen of these guards as I would kill

Speaker 178: a dozen rats if they should attempt to lord it over us as they've been accustomed to do. End quote

Speaker 179: Oh, story

gets me

Speaker 179: worked up, guys

Take a

Speaker 179: breath here and settle down a little bit. All right

So it

Speaker 180: took until 1912

to... for the

Speaker 180: coal miners of southern West

Speaker 20: Virginia to finally rise up. In

the end, it

Speaker 20: was the very measures the coal companies took to prevent that from happening that

ended up

Speaker 57: ensuring that it did happen

The West

Speaker 57: Virginia miners had shown little interest in striking for higher wages or better working conditions

Very

Speaker 67: little interest in the Union, but the paranoid operators used subversion and brute force just to make sure, and that was what drove the miners to

Speaker 66: rebellion

It began at a place

Speaker 66: called Paint Creek in Kanawha

Speaker 181: County

Miners there at Paint Creek

Speaker 50: had been some of the few in southern West Virginia who had managed to negotiate a collective

Speaker 57: agreement with their operators

But on

Speaker 57: March 31, 1912

Speaker 67: that contract expired, and negotiations between the miners and the Kanoa Coal Operators Association began. The

miners were asking for a pay

Speaker 67: raise of two and a half cents per ton of coal dug. Miners, by and large, were not paid by the hour. They were paid according to how much coal they delivered. And

the miners also

Speaker 67: demanded recognition of their union

And the miners also demanded recognition of their union

Speaker 145: Of

Speaker 67: their right to bargain collectively

But the

Speaker 113: operators refused. They said they couldn't remain profitable if they accommodated

Speaker 11: that two and a half cent pay raise. So the miners compromised. They said, OK, fine, we'll accept another contract on the

Speaker 50: existing pay scale

Just accept

Speaker 50: our union

And still the

Speaker 50: operators refused

And so the miners cleaned up

Speaker 33: their work areas and walked off the job on April 19th, 1912

Well, soon, the more

Speaker 113: skittish operators, worried about maintaining their downstream relationships, hurried back to the table and agreed to concessions, and their mines were opened up again by early May. That

was in much Oconomowoc

Speaker 154: County, but the operators at Paint Creek refused to compromise and

Speaker 35: instead imported 300 Baldwin Feltz mine guards to watch over their property and

Speaker 182: be their enforcers

The

Speaker 183: guards. well they did what they knew how to do from corbin quote the

Speaker 67: baldwin felt guards built iron and concrete forts that they equipped with machine guns throughout the strike districts then evicted striking miners from their company houses

Speaker 184: destroying forty thousand dollars worth of miners furniture in the process

The guards

Speaker 71: then began to intimidate the strikers in their tent colonies at Holly Grove and Eskdale. The guards often prevented the

Speaker 67: strikers from leaving their tent colonies and prohibited the use of company-owned bridges, forcing the strikers and their families at gunpoint to wade through waist-high streams. They

also stopped

Speaker 67: the strikers and their families from using the passenger trains into

Speaker 185: Charleston

The

Speaker 185: son of a miner who attempted to do so was kicked in the face and warned, Get off, you damn son of

Speaker 186: a bitch, or I will shoot your brains

Speaker 76: out. He

was then

Speaker 76: literally thrown off the train. The

mine guards

Speaker 185: also began to kill the striking miners, both individually, for example, a black miner chasing his stray cow, and collectively. On June 5th, the guards launched a surprise attack on one of the tent colonies, wounding several people. "...thereafter, according to a local union leader, every day or two they would sneak into the hills and sprinkle the canvas tent cities with showers

Speaker 187: of lead and pellets, caring not if their bullets hit men, women, or children." About

two years after

Speaker 188: this strike, mine guards from Baldwin Feltz and the Colorado

Speaker 67: National Guard, which was being manned and funded by a Rockefeller mining company

Speaker 47: indiscriminately attacked a miner's tent city in Ludlow, Colorado and

sprayed it

Speaker 47: with machine gun fire and then burned it

Speaker 13: down with people hiding in little pits under the tents from the gunfire. They got burned to death. Twenty people, twelve children and two women, some men, were massacred in one night

The full story of the

Speaker 13: Ludlow massacre

Speaker 125: is in the

Speaker 94: prologue to this podcast series

The

Speaker 94: guards were very callous in carrying out the evictions

Speaker 113: Most of the time They would surprise

Speaker 125: families in the morning March them out of their homes at gunpoint if necessary And

one or two

Speaker 189: would guard the

Speaker 32: family While the rest of them carried the family's furniture And their other belongings outside and dumped it by the creek

They forced

Speaker 67: their way into the home of Charlie and Ed Fish And and found Ed's wife, Willie Fish, holding a sick

Speaker 138: newborn

They marched

Speaker 138: her and her newborn outside, deposited the crib along with the rest of the furniture on a wagon out there

They told Willie's

Speaker 113: sister-in-law that they used to hate doing this kind of work, but chuckled and said they'd gotten used to it

On

Speaker 63: Wednesday, May 29th, 1912

for

Speaker 63: the first time the miners struck back

that morning a

Speaker 50: group of mine guards had poured themselves some coffee and

Speaker 113: they were walking by the company

store to

Speaker 113: get some breakfast when shots rang out from the nearby hillside

started peppering

Speaker 35: around them so they rushed back to their barracks and shots start coming

Speaker 12: down from another hillside

the guards

Speaker 12: grab their rifles as shots are hitting the Guards in another larger bunkhouse nearby rushed out with weapons and began firing at

Speaker 11: puffs of smoke on the hillsides

The attack was wild and

Speaker 11: poorly planned, and nobody

Speaker 21: on

Speaker 174: either side was hit, but

Speaker 21: the psychological impact was large. The mine guards were shaken

Speaker 113: by the fact that the miners had actually come at them

And so a

Speaker 113: swivel-mounted Gatling gun was stationed in front of the company store

covering

Speaker 125: the whole hillside with its field of fire. Next to the machine gun was a giant searchlight which

Speaker 190: would sweep the trees in the cabins from dusk till dawn

Early the next

Speaker 35: morning, a guard patrol spotted a group of miners making their way through the woods and took off after them, gunfire going in both directions

It was a

Speaker 62: group of Italians, and one of the miners was shot and killed, and the black miner, who was just out looking for his cow

Speaker 142: was also hit. The

leader of this group of

Speaker 142: guards who was chasing them up into the

Speaker 12: hills was a man named Ernest Galgeau. He was one of the most notorious of all the guards. This

is a

Speaker 12: guy who was a known murderer before he was ever hired to Baldwin Feltz. He

was known by all the

Speaker 35: Paint Creek miners as one of the meanest bullies employed by the company

his

Speaker 62: posse is tearing through the hills, kicking in the doors of cabins, looking for miners, any miners they can find, really. And they come up on the home of Ed and Charlie Fish, who

had not

Speaker 62: been involved in the shooting

Speaker 113: Ed was sick in bed. Only their wives were there

And so

Speaker 135: Ed's wife, Willie Fish, is a girl who's just about 18 years old

Speaker 5: She remembered what happened. Quote, They, meaning the miners, came through my yard, jabbering in Italian, but I couldn't understand half of what they said

I was

Speaker 5: telling them

to

Speaker 88: go on and scatter. As

quick as I

Speaker 88: got them out, I turned my chickens out. I had about two or three hundred chickens, and put them in the yard so they would scratch out as much of the tracks as they could. The guards came and asked, "'How long you been out here

I've been

Speaker 88: out here about an hour feeding my chickens.' They said, "'Have you seen anybody?' I said, "'I haven't seen a soul

I'd

Speaker 88: look them right in the eye and lie like a sailor, end quote

Then the guards

Speaker 59: came to the cabin of Tony and Janina Sevilla, another Italian family

Tony was away out

Speaker 59: of state looking for another job, and so Janina and the children were the only ones there

Speaker 12: She remembered what happened, quote, I

heard this

Speaker 116: shooting, and I went to the door to see what was the matter. I

saw the

Speaker 116: guards coming down the hill

Those

Speaker 128: guards were going into the other neighbor houses there and they began to pick up the men they could find in the houses

They came to our

Speaker 128: house and they opened the door and then they came in and looked under the bed

and on

Speaker 128: the bed was my baby and it was asleep

and I told

Speaker 128: the guards to let the baby alone

They struck me

Speaker 88: and I fell down and they kicked me in the stomach and they hit me with their fists here

She's pointing

Speaker 88: to where they hit her

And

Speaker 128: then they knocked me down again

When the

Speaker 128: guards

Speaker 136: left, Janina Sevilla was on her knees, weeping, and praying that the five-month-old baby in her belly was okay. Six

of the Italian

Speaker 136: miners were rounded up and

marched out of the

Speaker 9: hills at gunpoint. One

of them, named

Speaker 9: Frank Russi, was released after a few days and made his way home to take care of his sick and pregnant wife. And

then ten

Speaker 9: days later, mine

Speaker 191: guards broke down his

Speaker 9: door

He

Speaker 11: wasn't around. They found the wife there alone, pregnant and sick

And so she

Speaker 11: runs to the home of a nearby friend whose husband was the mine foreman while the guards cleaned out her house and dumped everything they had out in the dirt

And then a few

Speaker 12: days after that

Speaker 192: the friend's husband, the one that took her in, the mine foreman, was fired from his job because his wife had helped Rusey's wife

Having

Speaker 160: adopted this strategy of cruel... Really cruel brutality against the miners. You know, there was nothing business-like about it

These

Speaker 50: Baldwin-Felz guys that they would hire

you know

Speaker 50: sure, some of them would be former cops and maybe those guys would be the leaders that everybody else had to follow

but a

Speaker 50: lot of their ranks were just manned up by thugs from the

Speaker 12: cities. Guys, I mean, Ernest Gaugeau was a known murderer

And they're hiring

Speaker 12: him and giving him a gun and saying, go up there and throw these people out of their homes, go do this, go do that. These are hard men, and they had to be hard men, because they're going up there to go against coal miners, to throw them out of their houses and chase them away from the mine. The coal miners are tough people

and so the

Speaker 12: guys who got sent up there against them had to be tough people, but they weren't always the most savory

Speaker 160: bunch, and there was really a cruel streak to how the operators in southern

West

Speaker 193: Virginia handled these things

And so the

Speaker 50: company then set about Replacing the miners Started bringing in train loads of scab labor From other parts of the country

And

Speaker 100: this The miners were not prepared to tolerate Because that was the one way That they could truly defeat their strike

Now

Speaker 106: these poor Replacement workers Most of these guys had no idea What

Speaker 194: they were walking into They were walking into something that was becoming a war zone Very quickly The story of Lawrence O'Brien

Speaker 195: A

Amen. who was a

Speaker 195: replacement worker brought in from New York City and his story

Speaker 121: provides an illustrative example Lawrence O'Brien is this guy who lives in New York City he's a skilled machinist

O'Brien gets laid

Speaker 35: off from his job and he's out looking for work and he sees an ad they're looking for machinists and boilermakers and other skilled workers to get on a train and go down to West Virginia to work on motors and other gear at the mines

And

Speaker 35: so he signs up on the spot, along with several of his Irish buddies, a whole bunch of Italian and Polish immigrants who literally just got off the boat. I mean, they are still trailing their luggage behind them from their trip. They came straight from the docks

And they don't even

Speaker 35: have time to go home for a change of clothing. He calls his

wife. Tells

Speaker 192: her that he's found a good job It's in West Virginia But they pay $5 a day He has to leave right now And he'll write for his suitcase when he gets there And so he's on the train 200 other guys Right

away he

Speaker 196: notices the guards And he thinks, huh, that's interesting

Huh no food

Speaker 36: was served and so when they change trains in Washington he tries to go into the station to buy a sandwich but the guards won't let him leave when

they get

Speaker 36: to the

Speaker 109: Paint Creek area guards

take

Speaker 36: out their rifles start patrolling the cars and they tell everyone

Speaker 197: order everyone

Speaker 36: to pull down the blinds on their windows so Brian's starting to worry maybe he made a little mistake here

The train

Speaker 36: stops at

Speaker 35: different mining camps along the way and each time deposits a few workers in the hands of some guards who march them off

When O'Brien and

Speaker 198: his friends get to their destination

they're told

Speaker 198: by the mine superintendent

that

Speaker 196: they're going to be digging coal first thing in the

morning

Speaker 196: Again all these guys are machinists And

Speaker 199: other skilled workers So they're like huh No sir we're machinists Not miners We were hired to come down And

Speaker 36: do machinist work And they're told We don't need machinists You're going to go into the mines And

they decide

Speaker 34: they have no choice None of them have any money And so they're at least going to go Work in the mines long enough To pay for their trip

home O'Brien

Speaker 36: works there a

Speaker 200: full month

And then he

Speaker 192: goes in to collect his wages For digging coal from morning till night Six days a week For a month And

they give

Speaker 192: him just over three dollars He's

supposed to

Speaker 192: be making five dollars a day But they said that's all he was owed After they took out the cost of his trip down there And his supplies And his rent And every other expense O'Brien got off

Speaker 12: easy

many

Speaker 12: others who were lied to about the jobs that waited for them down in West Virginia were kept under guard and not

Speaker 9: allowed to leave

They owed the company

Speaker 9: money for the train ride down there and the food they'd been fed. And so, at the very least, they were going to have to work that off. And they were not allowed

Speaker 192: to leave. Two men who had come in with O'Brien from

New York... They

Speaker 192: escaped on foot

Speaker 109: and appeared after a long journey in Charleston, the capital of the state, saying that they had been told by guards that they would be shot if they tried to leave. Three

other workers signed

Speaker 109: a letter to the State Labor Commission stating that at least 150 men were being held by guards captive at Kayford and forced to work

Speaker 10: They'd been working for three weeks without pay, and the company said they still owed money and wouldn't get back to even for several more weeks at least, so they were being held and forced to work

Oconomowoc

Speaker 201: County, West Virginia, was a powder keg

And all it needed was

Speaker 202: a spark

And that spark

Speaker 202: rolled in on the

Speaker 33: morning train on

the 9th

Speaker 33: of June, 1912

Her

Speaker 36: name was Mary Harris Jones. Better known by her affectionate nickname, Mother Jones. 75 or 80 years old at the time, thereabouts. No one was ever quite sure

Speaker 201: exactly what year she was born. Mother Jones was all five feet tall at the very most and cut the figure of your great-grandmother

Speaker 203: and

Well

Speaker 178: she lit powder kegs for a living. She

wore a

Speaker 178: full-length black dress, this little old lady, with a black shawl

Speaker 83: and a little white bonnet, lace around her neck. Her eyes sat behind

Speaker 123: rimless glasses and ringlets of white hair surrounded her little old face, every

inch

Speaker 204: the grandmother

But she moved

Speaker 204: well

She

Speaker 204: had

Speaker 192: limitless energy

even into her

Speaker 192: 80s, everybody says that. Her voice was

Speaker 35: loud and strong, and it still carried that Irish lilt she learned in the country of her birth. Her

grandfather had

Speaker 35: been hanged by the British for Irish

Speaker 205: revolutionary activity, so this was in her blood. Her

father took the family to

Speaker 33: Canada and then to the United States during the Great Potato Famine when she was a girl

and And

Speaker 33: in America, she'd married a union

Speaker 36: man, a union worker

And they were

Speaker 192: living a typical family life down in Memphis, Tennessee, until during a

Speaker 113: yellow fever epidemic in 1867, she watched her husband and all four of her children

Speaker 12: three girls and a boy, all under five years old, die within one week of each other

And so this

Speaker 12: woman, alone, she moves herself to Chicago. and opens a dress shop, tries to start

Speaker 206: rebuilding

Speaker 109: her heart and her life. But

a short

Speaker 109: time later, the great Chicago fire of 1871 burns down most of the city, including her shop. And

then something

Speaker 207: happened. You

can leave it to

Speaker 207: legend to say exactly what it was, but something happened. Because after the great

Speaker 67: fire, this woman

Speaker 190: who had no

Speaker 67: one and had

Speaker 190: nothing

She began to

Speaker 190: speak out on behalf of laboring men and women

Speaker 36: in America. By

the time of the trouble in

Speaker 36: Kanawha County, Mother Jones had been at the forefront of the American labor movement for many years. She was recognized all over the country

And she

Speaker 192: helped, as Lon Savage writes, quote, organize copper miner unions in Michigan and streetcar strikes in New York. She organized chemical workers in New Jersey, as well as women bottlers in Milwaukee breweries and shirtwaist makers in Philadelphia

Speaker 207: She spoke to Finnish iron ore miners and Polish steel workers at Gary. She

led an army

Speaker 207: of little children from Philadelphia to New York and on to

Speaker 192: Teddy Roosevelt's home at Oyster Bay to protest child labor

She

Speaker 184: walked the halls of Congress and conferred with presidents and millionaires. But coal miners were her

Speaker 192: boys. No

one could

Speaker 192: match her in bringing America's attention to the horrors of the coal digger's life. She gazed down into the black hole of Ludlow, where miners' wives and children were burned to death. She'd stood before gunmen and dared them to shoot

She

Speaker 192: led miners' wives, carrying mops and beating tin pans like cymbals, through Pennsylvania's mountains to dramatize their husbands' grievances. Colorado coal operators feared her so much, they held her under military

Speaker 10: confinement for weeks without charge or hearing

End quote. In an

Speaker 208: interview, she was quoted saying

I am simply a

Speaker 72: social revolutionist

I

Speaker 72: believe in the collective ownership of the means of wealth

At this

Speaker 72: time, the natural commodities of this country are cornered in the hands of a few. The

man who owns

Speaker 72: the means of wealth gets the major profit, and the worker who produces the wealth takes what he can get. I

do not believe in

Speaker 72: socialism by a party name. It

has been the

Speaker 72: rule of the centuries to sound a name until it acquires a magic power

Sooner or

Speaker 72: later, and perhaps sooner than we think, Evolution and revolution will have accomplished the overturning of the system under which we now live

and the

Speaker 72: worker will have gained his own. This change will come as the result of education. My work, my life

Speaker 209: work

has been

Speaker 209: to try to educate the worker to a sense of the wrongs he has had to suffer, and does suffer

and to stir

Speaker 209: up the oppressed to a point of getting off their knees and demanding that which I believe to be rightly theirs. When force

is

Speaker 209: used to hinder the worker in his efforts to obtain the things which are his, he

has the right

Speaker 209: to meet force with force. He

has the right to

Speaker 209: strike for what is his due, and

he has no

Speaker 209: right to be satisfied with less

The people want

Speaker 209: to do right, but they've been hoodwinked for ages. But

now they're

Speaker 72: awakening. Oh yes, they're awakening. And

the day of

Speaker 72: their enfranchisement is near at hand. End quote

Mother

Speaker 210: Jones had been there She'd been through it On her first ever visit to

Speaker 35: West Virginia During the 1897 organizing drive John Mitchell, the leader of the UNW at the time When he got there, he found her in jail She was eventually

Speaker 192: released And

Speaker 36: straight from the jail, she walked right back up into the hills And into the hollows, knocking on the doors of miners

cabins

Speaker 201: finding them there, finding them here, even going down into the mines to speak to them

Speaker 47: if she had to. And

she just walked

Speaker 47: the hills talking to these men about their situation

Another time she was

Speaker 47: giving a speech

Speaker 36: to West Virginia miners when shots rang out. Everybody scatters for cover, and

Speaker 192: so she hops on the back of her friend who carries her across a creek off into the wilderness

And, She had

Speaker 192: tended miners' wounds after gunfights with guards. Once

when she was

Speaker 192: arrested for calling on miners to strike, she sent the courtroom into a tizzy and berated the judge as a company scab while he lectured her that her behavior was entirely unworthy of a good woman. Her

previous trips to

Speaker 192: West Virginia had

really

Speaker 109: radicalized her against the coal operators

On a

Speaker 109: visit in 1907, she

Speaker 211: visited a miner's camp, going to each ramshackle cabin to speak with the families, as she always did, and she describes it in her autobiography. Quote, I

sent two boys

Speaker 211: across a little gully to a log cabin

Speaker 72: to get a cup of tea for me

The miner

Speaker 72: came out and beckoned me to come over. I

went, and

Speaker 72: as I entered the door, my eyes rested on a straw mattress on which rested a beautiful young girl

She

Speaker 72: looked at me with the most gentle eyes "'I had ever saw in a human being. "'The

wind came

Speaker 72: in through the cracks of the floor "'and would raise the

Speaker 192: bedclothes a little. "'I

said to the

Speaker 192: father, "'What

is wrong

Speaker 35: with your girl?' "'Consumption,' said he. "'I couldn't earn enough in the mines "'and she went to work in a boarding house. "'They worked her so hard she took sick. "'Consumption. "'Around a fireplace sat a

Speaker 212: group of dirty children, "'ragged and neglected-looking.' "'He gave us tea and bread.' "'A great crowd came up the mountainside that afternoon. "'The superintendent sent one of his lackeys, a colored fellow. "'When the miners told me who he was "'and that

Speaker 88: he was sent there as a spy, I said to him, "'See here, young man, don't you know that the immortal Lincoln, "'a white man, gave you freedom from slavery? "'Why

do you

Speaker 88: now betray your white brothers "'who are fighting for industrial freedom?' "'Mother,' said

Speaker 33: he

I

Speaker 33: can't make myself scarce, but you know something? My hearing and my eyesight ain't so good today

That afternoon, up

Speaker 33: there on the

Speaker 72: mountainside, we organized a strong union

The next

Speaker 72: day, the man who gave me food, his name was Mike Harrington

went to the

Speaker 192: mines to go to work, but he was told to go to the office and get his pay. No

man could

Speaker 20: work in the mines, the superintendent said, who entertained agitators in his home

Mike

Speaker 20: said to him, "'I didn't entertain her. "'She paid me for the tea and bread. "'It makes no difference,' said he. "'You had Mother Jones

Speaker 53: in your house, and that is

enough.' "'He went

Speaker 53: home, and when he opened the door, "'his

Speaker 71: sick daughter said, "'Father, have you lost your job

She

Speaker 192: started to sob. "'That brought on a coughing fit, "'from which she fell back onto the pillow exhausted. "'That little girl died shortly thereafter

that

Speaker 192: afternoon he was ordered to leave his house as it was owned by the company they buried the little girl and moved to an

old barn mike was later

Speaker 184: made an organizer for the united mine workers and he made one of the most faithful workers i've

Speaker 213: ever seen

Speaker 184: end quote

she

Speaker 213: describes another visit in 1903

Speaker 109: quote

i went to stanford

Speaker 109: mountain where the men were on strike i

went The

Speaker 36: court had issued an injunction forbidding the strikers from going near the mines. A group of miners walked along the public road nowhere near the mines. The next morning they held a meeting in front of their own hall

Speaker 209: which they themselves had built, and a United States Deputy Marshal came into the meeting with warrants for 30 members for violating the injunction

Speaker 90: The men said, "We did not break any law. We did not go near the mines and you know it. We were on the public road." Well, said the deputy, we're going to arrest you anyway

They defied him to

Speaker 88: arrest them, insisting they had not violated the law. They

gave him

Speaker 88: 25 minutes to leave the town. They

sent for his

Speaker 88: brother, who

Speaker 209: was a company doctor, and told him to take him out. That

night, I went to hold a

Speaker 209: meeting with them. They told me what had happened. I said, boys, it would have been better if you had surrendered, especially as you had the truth on your side

Speaker 72: and you had not been near the mines

After the

Speaker 72: meeting, I went to the nearby camp, Montgomery, and there was a little hotel and the railway station. Before leaving, the boys, who came to the edge of the town with me, said, "Will you be coming back soon, Mother?" I had no idea how

Speaker 209: soon it would be. The next morning, I went to the station to get an early train, and the agent says to me

Did you

Speaker 53: hear what trouble they had up in Stamford Mountain last

night?" I think

Speaker 53: you're mistaken, young man, I answered, for I just came down from there myself

Speaker 70: last night

Well, he said

Speaker 70: they've had some trouble there all the same. Anyone hurt? Yes. I was taking railway messages and couldn't get all the details. Some shooting. I said, take back my ticket. I must go up

there. I took the short

Speaker 209: trail up the hillside to Stanford Mountain. It seemed to me as I came toward the camp as if those wretched shacks were huddling closer in terror. everything was

Speaker 72: deathly still as

i came near

Speaker 72: the nearer the miners homes i could hear sobbing

then i saw

Speaker 72: between the

Speaker 109: stilts that propped up a miner's shack the clay red with blood i

pushed the

Speaker 109: door open on a mattress wet with blood lay a miner his brains had been blown out while he slept

his shack

Speaker 209: was riddled with bullets

in five

Speaker 209: other shacks men lay dead

and

Speaker 209: one of them a baby boy and his mother sobbed over the father's corpse

The coroner

Speaker 209: came. He found that these six men had been murdered in their beds while they peacefully slept, shot by gunmen in the employ of the coal company

The coroner went. The men were

Speaker 109: buried on the mountainside, and nothing was ever done to punish the men who had taken their lives

well it

Speaker 113: doesn't take but a few experiences like that to set anybody on the war path and

Speaker 214: mother jones had more than a few of those experiences she

was the patron

Speaker 36: saint of miners across the country but mother jones was no mascot

she had

Speaker 36: been organizing machinists in butte montana when she saw a note in the local newspaper about the trouble

Speaker 35: in west virginia and so she decided on the spot to cut her work short and caught the east to appalachia

when she pulled

Speaker 63: in that june morning

even in the

Speaker 63: capital there in charleston the tension was thick in the

air taxi drivers

Speaker 113: approached to give her a lift to town and but she turned him down. She said she's perfectly capable of walking a mile or two to the business district. And

so she does. She

Speaker 113: gets there, goes to a hotel

Speaker 35: washes herself up, eats some breakfast. Again, this is the morning that she arrived. And just after

Speaker 33: washing up and eating breakfast

no rest for

Speaker 33: the weary, she's back on the move again to the train station to take a smaller train up to Kanawha County

Well, on the

Speaker 88: train, she meets the Union's district president, who hadn't expected to see her. And

so he invites her

Speaker 47: with him to a mass meeting. And so that's where they went. They

get off the train

Speaker 47: at Paint Creek

Speaker 146: Junction. And she looks around, and the first thing she notices are gunmen everywhere

Speaker 196: Everything

Speaker 20: was still, she remembered

And no

Speaker 20: one would know the bloody war that was raging in those silent

Speaker 52: hills except for the sight of those guns and the strange, terrified look on everyone's faces

So she

Speaker 35: got on another train from the junction, a smaller, even smaller one, and took Yed up into the hollow, running parallel with a creek and a busted-up

Speaker 55: road. She's

passing by

Speaker 55: the dilapidated homes of miners with their little gardens off to the side. She was passing through

Speaker 109: areas... entirely devoted to mining so that the landscape looked like you know Mordor

finally they arrived

Speaker 12: to their destination and word gets around that Mother Jones has come to help the miners and so the people start to stream in start to assemble

one of

Speaker 206: them was the friend who had carried her across the creek on his back those years ago he told her he wasn't able to carry her anymore since the

Speaker 35: Baldwin Feltz guards had thrown him off a train and injured

Speaker 57: his back

about half of

Speaker 57: the miners were europeans italians poles hungarians mostly

Speaker 36: another 25 were black men who had come up from the south to get out of the fruitless toil of the sharecropper and

then the

Speaker 146: other 25 were men from right there in west virginia and

so she went

Speaker 109: around and worked the crowd shook their hands

and

Speaker 109: speaking to them as individuals or small groups and

Speaker 212: listening to

Speaker 79: their tales of abuse at the hands of the Baldwin-Felz guards. When

all the

Speaker 79: people were assembled who were going to come, she starts talking. She starts exhorting the

Speaker 175: miners. She

Speaker 36: knows exactly how to rile these men up. She would challenge them. She would condemn them and make fun of them for failing to have not already fought back

The

Speaker 109: whole thing would be laced with her trademark profanities. The miners loved that

She went for a full

Speaker 36: 90 minutes, and the crowd was wrapped the entire time, laughing when she wanted him to laugh, cheering or jeering as she conducted him, crying or shouting with rage like on cue

Speaker 47: A news account of the event later reported that she put all the other speakers, most of whom were half her age, in the shade

So she settles into her hotel

Speaker 3: back in Charleston. settles in for the long haul and shuttles back and forth to minors camps

Speaker 13: in Kahnawauk County all summer long

She made

Speaker 72: speeches on a daily basis and mass meetings sprung up anywhere that she was rumored to be headed

Ginny Savage

Speaker 5: Ayers writes, quote, Her voice rocked people with its power, its clarity, its command, its hint of Irish brogue and feminine charm. Poet Carl Sandburg called it a singing voice

It was

Speaker 130: low and pleasant, UMWA leader John Brophy once said, with

Speaker 11: great carrying power. And when she got excited, the intensity of it became something you could almost feel physically

Well, come July

Speaker 11: 4th, she speaks

to a

Speaker 35: crowd at a Beckley courthouse and tells the people there to stop thinking in terms of political

Speaker 83: parties

Stop

Speaker 83: thinking in terms of elections, and start thinking in terms

Speaker 36: of labor and capital. Later

in the month, she

Speaker 36: spoke to striking miners on the Coal River, and we're not exactly sure what she said there, but it was enough that the Charleston

Speaker 215: newspaper reported that it had provoked a great deal of enthusiasm, as well as unrest in the neighborhood. The

very next day, a group of

Speaker 13: those miners armed themselves

and

Speaker 13: assembled on coal company land to protest the use of scab labor

Most, if

Speaker 13: not all of them, had seen Mother Jones the day before

and

Speaker 62: they were fired up

she says, for I

Speaker 53: had told them their jobs were their bread and butter, and that they should fight for that at any and all times, for the comfort of their wives and their babies depended on it

The deputy sheriff went

Speaker 53: up there to disperse the minors

Speaker 109: but when he got there, he found that the minors numbered at least 150, and he was by himself

and so

Speaker 113: they approached him and said that sheriff we're gonna disarm you now and so he starts to raise his gun at them and from somewhere in the crowd he was shot five times not killed though

Speaker 146: well

the county sheriff

Speaker 146: puts in an emergency call to the governor's office he

says

Speaker 201: that things are now growing beyond the ability of local law enforcement to control law enforcement's being attacked

the

Speaker 12: governor must send the national guard immediately

and And so

Speaker 12: soon, a company of soldiers and a machine gun squad, who

were

Speaker 36: supposed to be leaving for training in Pennsylvania, turned around, canceled those plans, they're going to Boone County, West Virginia. Mother

Jones was blamed for that

Speaker 72: violence, she didn't deny responsibility. I not only advised the miners to buy rifles, but personally raised the money which paid for them

If the

Speaker 72: state of West Virginia allows the coal companies to hire and arm such thugs as the Baldwin-Felds detectives for the purpose of

Speaker 209: shooting down the miners

then

Speaker 209: I would not be fit to live under the flag of this country if I let my boys go empty-handed

Winchester and

Speaker 109: Springfield's rifles and stacks of ammunition were flowing into

Speaker 202: Paint Creek

and the rest of

Speaker 202: Kahnawa County, headed for both the miners and the Baldwin-Feltz guards. People were gearing up for war

Miners who had more

Speaker 202: than one gun gave one to miners who didn't have one

The miners

Speaker 202: weren't being permitted to bring or transport guns, so they had to be smuggled

Even miners

Speaker 36: wives got in on the act

Willie Fish

Speaker 36: the miner's wife who covered the tracks of the fleeing

Speaker 47: Italians by releasing her chickens into the yard, she

smuggled guns and

Speaker 47: ammunition for the miners under her tea gowns and her big linen coat. I

said I'd get them

Speaker 72: off the hill. They said, how? And I said, you just have somebody meet me at Banner and I'll get the guns off

and I

Speaker 72: slipped one down my dress on this side. I had

Speaker 90: one gun on either side of me, and I had a pocket full of shells. I could hardly walk, and I'd go right down past the store. They didn't think about me carrying anything like that

I'd go up

Speaker 90: to banner a little piece, and then a man would pop out of the bushes, and I'd give him a countersign

The

Speaker 192: miners were all using call

Speaker 3: and response passwords to identify each other

I'd give

Speaker 66: him a gun and a handful of shells, and

And

Speaker 66: he would take back to the bushes. Then I'd go a little further, and another man would pop out of

Speaker 90: the bushes. Usually I carried two at a time. Sometimes I'd take bags of shells instead of guns. And I carried all the

Speaker 196: guns off the hill

Rumors were

Speaker 216: circulating that miners from other areas were making their way to Paint Creek to

Speaker 36: join the strike

And One

Speaker 35: evening in late July, two Baldwin-Feltz guards from Fayette County were coming through the area called Holly Grove on their way up to Paint Creek Junction. They were riding one of these old

Speaker 123: two-seater pedal-powered bicycles that rode on railroad tracks. You don't really see those anymore

Speaker 75: Well, the guards' names were Bill Phalp and Robert Stringer

And as they made

Speaker 75: their way through Holly Grove, all of a sudden shots broke out and Robert Stringer went down, shot in

Speaker 10: the head

The

Speaker 10: other one, Bill Fout, pulls his revolver and starts shooting back, but he was hit in the back in the arm and he goes flying off the railroad bike down an embankment. He

tore his shirt and tied

Speaker 109: up his injured arm and then shed his blood-soaked

Speaker 35: coat and ran away, managed to get away through the woods to a hospital a few miles out. When

Fout and Stringer don't

Speaker 182: arrive as expected, the other mine guards

who are

Speaker 182: waiting for him become concerned

And so the

Speaker 182: murderous guard that I mentioned earlier

Speaker 206: Ernest Gaozhou and two others, arm themselves and head in the direction of Holly Grove. And

Speaker 35: when they get there, they find Stringer's body. They figured Fowlp was likely dead as well, and there were probably hostiles all around, so they didn't linger. They went back to get reinforcements. And then the next morning

Speaker 20: Gaozhou leads a posse back there. When

they get

Speaker 20: there, they find two young teenage girls and they find two young teenage girls who were kind of edging up some distance away from stringer's corpse they'd just never seen a dead body before and their curiosity got the

best of them when the girls

Speaker 178: see the guards they try to retreat across a bridge but the guards catch up with them and put guns in their faces in

Speaker 109: order to get off the bridge and go wade through the creek and

so they do

Speaker 109: that and the guards are pointing guns

Speaker 55: at them and directing curses at them the

whole time And the

Speaker 55: guards then burst into the tents in the homes of the sleeping miners, sticking guns in people's faces. They round up 22 men, abuse

Speaker 136: them, make them get close and stare at the corpse. The

miners in the hills

Speaker 88: around saw these captive men being led away, and so they start to take pot shots at the guards from the trees. So

the

Speaker 67: guards

put

Speaker 67: their captives, the miners, between them and the direction of the gunfire to use them as hostages and human shields as they made their escape

They got Stringer's

Speaker 9: body and then headed back to Mucklow from where they'd come

But when they got

Speaker 12: to Mucklow, the four guards that they had left there were already engaged in their own gun battle with miners in the hills

One of

Speaker 12: those four had managed to get the Gatling gun

and

Speaker 13: he was using it to strafe the hillsides, but the miners managed to mitigate its effects, somewhat at least, by aiming at the ammunition belt, feeding bullets into the gun, and severing it

Guards from a

Speaker 12: nearby station heard the

Speaker 36: gunfire. They rushed to the scene. On

their way, they ran

Speaker 36: up on a group of miners who had been firing down into the camp, and they all spun on each other, and one of the men with the guards was killed. Okay. it's

Speaker 12: becoming a full-scale battle. Well, finally, Gaujo returns with his posse and those 22 captured men, and

Speaker 47: the prisoners are forced to sit down in front of the Gatling gun to act as human shields as the automatic sprays over their heads into the hills. The

battle went on

Speaker 62: for about an hour. Thousands and thousands of rounds fired. Several people killed. After

it was

Speaker 26: over, the guards continued to abuse the prisoners

One

Speaker 26: of the things about the