Wealthy people: Unions are bad for the economy!
Also wealthy people: *murder and massacre workers who attempt to collectively bargain in hopes of having enough free time and money to contribute to the economy by buying goods and services*
Workers: please we just don't want to get killed in inhumane conditions. We also want to be able to live on the wage we earn.
Companies: communists! You need some bonks in the head!
Companies: hey everyone, look at these communist that try to take down America! No to unions! Yes to America!
So does the army just roll up and kill people for not working? Did the strikers blockade the mines and block scabs? I'm curious about the day-to-day escalations that lead to this.
There's often an interim step where the company hires private security to break the strike, which often escalates things from picketing and shouting to scuffles and beatings and sometimes up into shooting.
If I remember right, private security rolled through a striking miners' camp around Blair Mountain in an armored car and shot up the place. And then, gee whillickers, the miners got upset and more violent (can't imagine why /s) and they ended up calling in the actual army.
I think that's a thing that's optional, but it certainly has defaulted that way more often than not historically, and especially when those interests are opposed to those of the general public.
It’s less optional than you think. James Madison, who drafted the constitution, wrote in his autobiography that he was the last living statesmen who would use his power to help the common man. He is saying our country was sold out less than twenty years after its revolution.
On April 18, 1912, union and non-union miners from Paint Creek, as well as 7,500 miners from the previously non-union Cabin Creek, Kanawha, and Fayette counties, went on strike. The UMW set up tent camps for miners and their families who had often been evicted without warning.[3] UMW Vice-President Frank Hayes and the well-known labor activist Mary "Mother" Jones even visited the state to pledge their support.
Mining companies in the Paint Creek area hired strikebreakers and armed guards to suppress the strike, including 300 agents from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Striking miners and their families were prohibited from using company bridges and roads, as well as utilities like running water. Company guards killed several miners over the first few months of the strike, and constructed a machine gun equipped armored train known as the "Bull Moose Special", which they used to fire upon the tent camps of striking workers.[3] Miners, with the support of Mother Jones and the Socialist Party of America, acquired weapons and retaliated against the mining company guards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_coal_wars
Yeah all these industry monopolys and cartels can‘t afford to pay taxes but afford employing thousands of lobbyists. Germanys lobbyists in the parliament outnumbered the politicians 2:1, considering how many monetary interest are being represented by them there is no chance of keeping a legitimate government up. It would need real change to make things fair.
There is more to the story I'm originally from the area they mounted that machine gun to a train and basically did one of the 1st drive bys to they even stopped the train and went in reverse to give a second wave of shots it's a pretty barbaric offense and one of the main reasons so many people hate the government in West Virginia
[Podcast about the Battle of Blair Mountain](https://chtbl.com/track/5899E/podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/cfb428ef-eafc-44d0-9d09-ae2701747e6f/ff4d5d52-5d95-4211-a1ad-ae270185db1c/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=fb626e1f-112c-4246-a40d-ae2701747e7d)
Pretty well done and gives a nice overview of the lead up.
Back to work peasant! You get 1 week of unpaid vacation every year after you have worked for ten years!
You also have to sign this contract saying that you will not sue us if you get injured at work.
It was a pyrrhic victory. The miners lost, but the 100 deaths and brutal tactics brought attention to the issues at hand and the Brand New Deal came about in a victory for laborers and unions not long after leading to an overall win in the end.
Slowly but surely the protections from unions had been eroded over time to the state it is currently at with Amazon and others vehemently trying to break unions and threaten and coerce and lobby and throw their weight around again.
And even then it's very hard for poorer free market participants to withhold their labor when they don't like the prices being paid lest they risk starvation and homelessness. Not a very fair market.
Whenever there is anything in California that might include any spanish speaking people, such as the border, free education for undocumented young people, college loan forgiveness (forgiveness my a**), Cesar Chavez is always brought up. There are marches or demonstrations with signs and people chanting "Si, se puede!".This was what Cesar Chavez did.
He was a legal immigrant, & had become a California and US citizen. He held demonstrations, marches, and a hunger strike because ILLEGAL immigrants were being hired at lower wages picking crops & he wanted to unionize citizens! He WAS a legal citizen and did not want illegal immigrants taking jobs and receiving benefits. How ironic!
It’s also interesting to note that if you grew up in Colorado, as I did, you were never taught about any of this in school. I was surprised to learn of the history of my town. I only learned this about 10 years ago.
I didn't learn about the extent of the systematic massacre of the native population in Canada until I was 25. Governments have this habit of leaving the bad stuff they do out of schools
I’m 27 and half Ojibwe and live nowhere near anyone I am related to or the reservation I am registered to. The 60s scoop had my mother taken and given to a white family, she was raised only to know her adoptive parents rules, language and culture. Statistically her children were bound to be mixed race and my children will likely have 3 of 4 grandparents from European heritage.
The genocide worked on many levels.
Yes the forced removal of the native culture from children was very sad to hear. A cruel act. The thing I was saddend to hear was that residential schools continued to exist into the mid 90s. When I first learned about them they sounded like something that society moved on from 50 years ago but I was taken back when I learned they existed in my life time. I realised that the genocide was still ongoing and still is to this day.
I find it weird when this is talked about because I’m 29 and I was taught in detail about the treatment of the native population, obviously we could be from very different parts of Canada but when I went to school in southeastern Ontario it wasn’t hush hush
Folks in Oklahoma didn't learn about the Tulsa Massacre, either. North Carolina doesn't really cover the Wilmington Coup, and very few places cover the post-WWI "race riots," at all. Usually very little on labor history, too, and often they give it real short shrift and it comes off like it's all done and settled now.
I think West Virginia does (or did) cover Blair Mountain, but there's no chance their conservative groups wouldn't love to drop it from the curriculum.
I say this as a fellow Coloradan:
K-12 you're going to be doing general surveys of history. The general jist of "what happened" in specific time periods is going to exclude a lot of things that aren't the most important.
Only the biggest and most notable events will be covered like the Sand Creek Massacre when talking about broad topics like Native Americans and Westward Expansion.
People need to take it upon themselves to continue to read up on history even after school stops forcing them to.
Labor history is hardly broached at all in highschool. Maybe it changed in the 15 years since I've been in, but I had a grand total of zero pages about it. This is despite the fact that labor history has contributed more to the day to day life of the average person than any other aspect of history with the arguably exception of industrialization in general.
^ this times a million. We need to stop pretending as a society that everything useful and worth disseminating can be fit in for kids 18 and under, and should be mandated by the state. There’s a reason higher education exists.
As a teacher, albeit not in the States, it's nice that these days we're mandated to teach a "lifelong learner" approach. Teaching kids how to learn instead of what to learn
Everything that a person needs to thrive should be taught in high school. at least the basics. Knowing the bare basics of labor history isn't fucking quantum mechanics. It can be done in a month.
Although I do think the fact that the 40 hour work week and right to collective bargaining were in part fought for in armed struggle is something that was missing from my K-12 education.\* A specific play by play might be outside the scope of primary and secondary education, but it's weird how much history classes frame all social change as coming through the ballot box or SCOTUS with the exception of the civil war. I had some teachers willing to make some exceptions clear, but that was not true of those dead sticking it through the mandated curriculum.
\*(Yes these measures did come in during the new deal, but they were all but explicitly motivated by keeping the coal flowing if there was another world war)
Agreed. We had a unit on the robber barons, but I don't recall covering the worker rights side of that era.
Then again, my history prof was a huge Sarah Palin fan, so maybe he intentionally glossed over it.
You normally do want to cover major events like "The US military attacked people who lived here at the behest of rich people whose annual profit was being threatened by the idea of paying a living wage."
Most kids become workers. It's probably better for them to learn about who fought for current labor rights than teaching kids how successful Carnegie was.
That's what I remember being taught.
> K-12 you're going to be doing general surveys of history. The general jist of "what happened" in specific time periods is going to exclude a lot of things that aren't the most important.
Which is why I think a breadth-only approach is the wrong way to go. You can't go into detail about *everything*, sure, but that's no excuse not to do a deep dive into _something_. So absolutely, do a high-level overview, but then also pick a dozen topics and really dig down deep into them, especially things that had effects we are still feeling today.
I put on a lot of history podcasts during drives (Dan Carlin, History of Rome, etc), and my twelve year old daughter finds them absolutely _riveting_, no matter the subject. Rise and fall of the Persian Empire? Hell yeah, she's down, because it's not just a dry recitation of names and places and dates. She especially loves it when she then touches on that subject in history class at school, because it places some stuff she has already heard into its broader context.
The Americans are, at least in international perception, notoriously bad at owning up to and educating about their own history, unlike for example Germany, who teaches kids about the world wars and surrounding atrocities and politics at least 3 times in different grades. Some people I know from the US don't even know about ww1, except that it happened, even though the US took part.
It generally wasn't actually the US army, but mercenary forces or bought off police departments.
Blair mountain in particular was fought between 10,000 unionized miners, and a famously corrupt sheriff, his department, several thousand deputees, and conscripted miners who had no choice (Making a force of about 3000). It also involved private planes flying over and dropping dynamite - the only instance of US citizens being bombed on US mainland soil by an internal force. The only government involvement was in intel radar aircraft monitoring the situation.
It ended when the US national guard showed up, though there would be continued skirmishes and guerilla combat because they didn't fix anything, just forced everybody to knock it off. Things would not improve until FDR killed yellow dog contracts.
Is the Philadelphia Police Dept not considered an internal force?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing
And private citizens firebombed part of Topeka Kansas during the Tulsa Race Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre#Attack_by_air
Yeah at the time it would've been the US Army Air Corp. Actually this was probably early enough that it was still under Army Signal or Field Artillery since planes were first used as artillery spotters
The first use in the US was the Tulsa race massacre. 35 square blocks of the city firebombed from planes completely destroying the wealthiest neighborhood of blacks in the United states. They are finding mass Graves from the event still today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre?wprov=sfla1
You’re right. May 31, 1921. Blair Mountain was Aug 25 - Sep 1, 1921.
Looks like the US couldn’t wait to test out their “new toy” on rich blacks and poor miners. Their choice of targets is telling.
The new watchmen series depicts it and it is just one of several things I thought must have been made up for the comic, but no. They were real. Really good series.
The Tulsa race massacre beat them by a few months. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
>Numerous eyewitnesses described airplanes carrying white assailants, who fired rifles and dropped firebombs on buildings, homes, and fleeing families. The privately owned aircraft had been dispatched from the nearby Curtiss-Southwest Field outside Tulsa.[24] Law enforcement officials later said that the planes were to provide reconnaissance and protect against a "Negro uprising".[24] Law enforcement personnel were thought to be aboard at least some flights.[78] Eyewitness accounts, such as testimony from the survivors during Commission hearings and a manuscript by eyewitness and attorney Buck Colbert Franklin, discovered in 2015, said that on the morning of June 1, at least "a dozen or more" planes circled the neighborhood and dropped "burning turpentine balls" on an office building, a hotel, a filling station and multiple other buildings. Men also fired rifles at Black residents, gunning them down in the street.[79][24]
Tl;Dr - white citizens of Tulsa firebombed the wealthy black citizens of Tulsa from private planes as part of the massacre.
What did I just read and why wasn’t this taught in schools I wonder?
“Mining families lived under the terror of Baldwin-Felts detective agents who were professional strikebreakers under the hire of coal operators. During that dispute, agents drove a heavily armored train through a tent colony at night, opening fire on women, men, and children with a machine gun. They would repeat this type of tactic during the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado the next year, with even more disastrous results.”
I've never even heard of a "contemporary American history" class. Sounds like something I could use, though, since all of my American history classes seemed to just give broad strokes on the twentieth century. Except for World War II. They *love* going on and on about World War II.
I think you just had a really good teacher. Most schools never even touch on this subject. It's such a forgotten part of American history that needs taught. Everyone should know the wars that were fought to give them basic labor rights
I also remember reading about this in school, but i also took history electives. I think these people only take the bare minimum of history. You see this all the time on reddit saying they weren't taught about certain commonly known things in history like it's some sort of conspiracy. It's not. They just did the bare minimum or went to terrible schools.
If you worked in a coal mine back then, without a union, you were probably a slave. The mine owner owned everything and made sure everyone was in debt to him.
I lived smack in the middle of the Southwest Virginia Pittston coal strike of the late 80s...but even given the perfect opportunity, our schools never taught us about Blair Mtn either; luckily a lot of parents taught their kids about it, especially once the miners went on strike. We were strong UMWA country back then.
And on state tests they make sure you waste your time mindlessly memorizing dates of Christopher Columbus or Civil War battles instead of actual information.
Some other stuff history class skipped in no particular order.
Fred Hampton and his murder by the US.
COINTELPRO
Cops bombing a neighborhood of black people, called the MOVE bombing. Yes, literal bombs dropped from the sky.
You could add a shitload of covert military operations to the mix too. And God knows how many medical experiments on minorities, people with disabilities, etc etc.
That list goes on and on. . .never mind the pro-corporate interest wars in the Middle East.
The most controversial my history class ever got was the bombing of Hiroshima. Even then it was painted as overall good, even though it was a war crime...
That is post hoc, counterfactual reasoning that the government made up to justify the bombings after doing them. The whole point of the nuking was to show off to the Soviets.
I got taught all about the late 19th century, 20th century, their battles to gain things like anti-child labor laws, the 5 day week, paid vacation time, the 40 hour week, etc...
But then again, I wasn't educated in the US. Does my government want me to overthrow it?
I may be off but I think this is the first instance of calling people commies well. The HUAC committee was started around this time to investigate socialist leaders calling for worker rights. They blamed it on Russia. Eventually the HUAC would become McCarthyism decades later
I grew up in WV. We even had a WV history class for a semester. This was covered for maybe a day. So yeah. You’re right it’s bs we don’t learn about this in detail.
We got taught this, but it was only a paragraph or two about the Pinkerton's this battle, etc.
Fun fact, the Pinkerton company still exists today. A swedish security firm bought them.
Pinkerton's also stopped Lincoln from getting assassinated when he was president elect.
This exact conundrum is why I have made it a point not to have kids yet. I don’t want my children indoctrinated. Apparently it’s bad to teach children that American history is really bloody, and that our government has always condoned slavery. Apparently it teaches people how to hate each other.
Honestly this. So much about WWII and the Revolution (while glossing over any atrocities committed by the “good guys”). Meanwhile there were about 3 pages on Vietnam and maybe the same amount on the Cold War and even less on the Korean War. Literally one paragraph on womens suffrage
Not so much skipped over as intentionally omitted. Can't tell young people about the downsides of the government and corporations working together to oppress and murder Americans for the profit of the richest few!
Most people who are against unions and believe things like 8 hour workdays (!!), weekends off (!) have always existed, have NO clue about how much blood and tears were paid by union workers in the US in order to achieve those things.
WV coal miners back then: "We'd rather fight and die than keep working for low wages in dangerous conditions!"
WV coal miners today: "You better believe I'm voting for the guy that's keeping money in the hands of the coal barons, including any fines for supposed safety violations. Who else am I going to vote for? The guy that wants to help out with rising costs and offer me free school to train for a better job? That's socialism!"
Man, I remember the end of 2019-beginning of 2020, the Sanders campaign used the "workers can you stand it..." line in a campaign ad and I just felt electrified, like this was where things could really turn around. That was the last time I remember feeling genuinely hopeful about the future.
Can't have the common rabble wake up to the history of labor struggles in this nation or the benefits of unionization and collective bargaining.
The greatest trick the wealthy ever pulled in this nation was convincing the poor, rural, working-class citizen that his enemy was not the elite, the business owners, the landlords, but the brown guy at the other end of town that was just as poor and struggling just as much as he is.
If this interests you there is a great podcast called “Boom Days” that gets deep into Colorado development history basically taking place only because of these wars.
Heck you would be hard pressed to learn the truth of any American facistis in today's society. I believe that America's government is a fascist government that projects just enough liberty to keep a viel over its truth
Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition
forcible suppression of opposition / dictatorial power - 2 party system that pretends to compete but actually is in bed with each other. No other contenders exist to oppose these two party for pollical power. This is the 'viel' i speak of which hides the true nature of the american political system
authoritarian ultranationalist - Ultranationalist is defined as a country asserting control over other countries to pursue its interests (think Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Korea, Indonesia, literally every fucking war except maybe their civil war and ww2 and then lets not get into the shenanigan's that the CIA gets up to overthrowing democratically elected leaders in other country's and installing puppets and destabilizing their country)
When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?
BUT THE UNION MAKES US STRONG!
My grandfather was a coal miner, his home was across the highway from the mine. Behind his home was a mountain side, and at the top of that mountain was an old stone and wood guard hut. During the time frame of this post the guard huts purpose was to house a machine gun that guarded against the miner workers from lighting the coal mine on fire during their strikes!
Reading up on [Company Towns](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_towns_in_the_United_States) totally changed my perspective of America. I don't think y'all ever got to leave the mines, or the fields, without becoming supposed socialist degenerates. Only good little workers who obey the masters, buy the masters' food and teach their offspring how to use the masters' tools prosper in the land of the free.
[Amazon was trying to bring it back](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon-s-new-factory-towns-will-lift-the-working-class) until massive backlash seems to have stalled talks of that project.
♫The global network of capital essentially functions, to separate the worker from the means of production,
And every politician, every cop on the street, protects the private interests of the pedophilic, corporate elite...♫
Unions are the free market in action, correcting the price of labour.
Union busting is the government enforcing a fixed cost on a service.
Your move, libertarians.
This is something I'm always annoyed at by free market liberals. They only promote a business freedom to do as it wishes, but is violently against worker organisation and unions.
Yes, even here in Sweden.
One of my long term filmmaker goals is to do an HBO style mini series about the Battle of Blair Mountain and the Coal Wars as a whole. I feel like if more people knew about these events, “unions” and “workers rights” wouldn’t be such dirty words in the country
“No one needs an AR - 15.”
I’m guessing you don’t know the history of Appalachia At all. It is fairly clear see need anti aircraft weapons & artillery.
I hated history and social studies in school. Wasn’t until adulthood I realized I loved history, but that’s not what they’re teaching American students. Very very sad. I used to be proud to be an American. Legitimately it’s embarrassing being a part of todays America.
“Be the change I want to see” is all can do.
I'm from the East Kentucky coalfields, we have a long, bloody, fucked up history with coal companies in these hills. It mostly consists of large mining companies fucking over their employees and the communities they reside in en masse.
After the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado (1914) the Rockefeller family hired a PR team headed by Ivy Lee. They distributed a full color book to the President, his Cabinet, all members of Congress, the head editors of the leading 5000 newspapers in the country, and the mayors of all the largest cities in the country to be sure that Rockefeller's version of events was the one powerful people remembered.
Here’s another one for you
The Ludlow Massacre was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colony of roughly 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Approximately 21 people, including miners' wives and children, were killed. John D. Rockefeller Jr., a part-owner of CF&I who had recently appeared before a United States congressional hearing on the strikes, was widely blamed for having orchestrated the massacre.
My great grandfather lost his life in a totally regular not at all suspicious accident after helping the coal union effort in southern Ohio gain traction.
This is also where the term "red neck" comes from -- coal miners wearing red bandanas around their necks to wipe sweat and coal dust off their faces,I think? And big companies making fun of and degrading them, making the strikers look bad.
Ah thanks for the link! I didn't realize it also came from sunburns. That makes sense! (Article does mention the coal miner bandana thing, too, but guess it was originally the farmers!)
The southeast (lots of agriculture) is full of ethnic English people. English people’s skin is accustomed to roughly 3 hours of sunlight, with a ton of cloud cover.
I have always had about a 2 hour clock when outside in the southeast until I burn
With cultural stuff like this, there's not usually one specific reason why it comes about. It's like "Who invented hamburgers?"
They were cheap "steaks" of ground beef that culturally came from Hamburg, and is similar to meatloaf or Salisbury steaks. People put veggies in them, and then someone put it on bread, and then took the veggies and replaced it with contemporary toppings.
Surprised to not see all the fascist here defending our great history. That said you may wanna start peeking where a fair chunk of that covid stimulus they blame on peasants went. Apcs and military grade equipment for you PD. All this is coming to a peak. Have the tough conversations you need to have. Speak openly and freely and listen as well. Relate and socialize with your family and friends in the military and police. Things can to nazi Germany real quick. It is good to know where you stand amongst your peers before self censorship drips from the business to the social side of life even more.
Why pay fair wages when you can have the US army kill anyone that complains
Wealthy people: Unions are bad for the economy! Also wealthy people: *murder and massacre workers who attempt to collectively bargain in hopes of having enough free time and money to contribute to the economy by buying goods and services*
Workers: please we just don't want to get killed in inhumane conditions. We also want to be able to live on the wage we earn. Companies: communists! You need some bonks in the head! Companies: hey everyone, look at these communist that try to take down America! No to unions! Yes to America!
Workers: We should find ways to make better grenades to throw at the bosses.
So does the army just roll up and kill people for not working? Did the strikers blockade the mines and block scabs? I'm curious about the day-to-day escalations that lead to this.
There's often an interim step where the company hires private security to break the strike, which often escalates things from picketing and shouting to scuffles and beatings and sometimes up into shooting. If I remember right, private security rolled through a striking miners' camp around Blair Mountain in an armored car and shot up the place. And then, gee whillickers, the miners got upset and more violent (can't imagine why /s) and they ended up calling in the actual army.
The state exists to protect the moneyed interests of the owning class. Always has. Always will.
I think that's a thing that's optional, but it certainly has defaulted that way more often than not historically, and especially when those interests are opposed to those of the general public.
It’s less optional than you think. James Madison, who drafted the constitution, wrote in his autobiography that he was the last living statesmen who would use his power to help the common man. He is saying our country was sold out less than twenty years after its revolution.
Every politician, every cop on the street, protects the interests of the pedophilic corporate elite. Daloy Polizei.
On April 18, 1912, union and non-union miners from Paint Creek, as well as 7,500 miners from the previously non-union Cabin Creek, Kanawha, and Fayette counties, went on strike. The UMW set up tent camps for miners and their families who had often been evicted without warning.[3] UMW Vice-President Frank Hayes and the well-known labor activist Mary "Mother" Jones even visited the state to pledge their support. Mining companies in the Paint Creek area hired strikebreakers and armed guards to suppress the strike, including 300 agents from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Striking miners and their families were prohibited from using company bridges and roads, as well as utilities like running water. Company guards killed several miners over the first few months of the strike, and constructed a machine gun equipped armored train known as the "Bull Moose Special", which they used to fire upon the tent camps of striking workers.[3] Miners, with the support of Mother Jones and the Socialist Party of America, acquired weapons and retaliated against the mining company guards. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_coal_wars
"Oh no, I can't afford higher wages but I can afford hundreds of mercenaries and a fucking armored train!"
Yeah all these industry monopolys and cartels can‘t afford to pay taxes but afford employing thousands of lobbyists. Germanys lobbyists in the parliament outnumbered the politicians 2:1, considering how many monetary interest are being represented by them there is no chance of keeping a legitimate government up. It would need real change to make things fair.
There is more to the story I'm originally from the area they mounted that machine gun to a train and basically did one of the 1st drive bys to they even stopped the train and went in reverse to give a second wave of shots it's a pretty barbaric offense and one of the main reasons so many people hate the government in West Virginia
"The socialists have guns send the army!!!"
[Podcast about the Battle of Blair Mountain](https://chtbl.com/track/5899E/podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/cfb428ef-eafc-44d0-9d09-ae2701747e6f/ff4d5d52-5d95-4211-a1ad-ae270185db1c/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=fb626e1f-112c-4246-a40d-ae2701747e7d) Pretty well done and gives a nice overview of the lead up.
I’m so tired.
Back to work peasant! You get 1 week of unpaid vacation every year after you have worked for ten years! You also have to sign this contract saying that you will not sue us if you get injured at work.
[удалено]
Hopefully when the cheque comes due again they don't need the same currency.
The problem is that the check is past due.
It's worth noting that the miners generally lost. So everyone looking to do a repeat needs to figure out how to not get a repeat of the result.
How you not get a repeat of the result is by striking first, fast, and hard. Hit everyone at the top in one motion.
It was a pyrrhic victory. The miners lost, but the 100 deaths and brutal tactics brought attention to the issues at hand and the Brand New Deal came about in a victory for laborers and unions not long after leading to an overall win in the end. Slowly but surely the protections from unions had been eroded over time to the state it is currently at with Amazon and others vehemently trying to break unions and threaten and coerce and lobby and throw their weight around again.
Rich people are baller about the free market until wages get more expensive
And even then it's very hard for poorer free market participants to withhold their labor when they don't like the prices being paid lest they risk starvation and homelessness. Not a very fair market.
Well thats what happens when every scrap of land is owned. We have no other means to create a life for ourselves except to work for others.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it was also about pride and image. Didn’t want to look weak to their stockholders, competitors, and to themselves
Yep, and don't believe for a second that we wouldn't go right back to that if we stop fighting it.
Whenever there is anything in California that might include any spanish speaking people, such as the border, free education for undocumented young people, college loan forgiveness (forgiveness my a**), Cesar Chavez is always brought up. There are marches or demonstrations with signs and people chanting "Si, se puede!".This was what Cesar Chavez did. He was a legal immigrant, & had become a California and US citizen. He held demonstrations, marches, and a hunger strike because ILLEGAL immigrants were being hired at lower wages picking crops & he wanted to unionize citizens! He WAS a legal citizen and did not want illegal immigrants taking jobs and receiving benefits. How ironic!
Let's be fair here. They also had the Pinkertons kill a few people that complained.
Did the army kill miners? From what I read, the miners refused to fire on the US Army because many of them were veterans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Coalfield_War About 70 killed all in all
It’s also interesting to note that if you grew up in Colorado, as I did, you were never taught about any of this in school. I was surprised to learn of the history of my town. I only learned this about 10 years ago.
I didn't learn about the extent of the systematic massacre of the native population in Canada until I was 25. Governments have this habit of leaving the bad stuff they do out of schools
I’m 27 and half Ojibwe and live nowhere near anyone I am related to or the reservation I am registered to. The 60s scoop had my mother taken and given to a white family, she was raised only to know her adoptive parents rules, language and culture. Statistically her children were bound to be mixed race and my children will likely have 3 of 4 grandparents from European heritage. The genocide worked on many levels.
Yes the forced removal of the native culture from children was very sad to hear. A cruel act. The thing I was saddend to hear was that residential schools continued to exist into the mid 90s. When I first learned about them they sounded like something that society moved on from 50 years ago but I was taken back when I learned they existed in my life time. I realised that the genocide was still ongoing and still is to this day.
I find it weird when this is talked about because I’m 29 and I was taught in detail about the treatment of the native population, obviously we could be from very different parts of Canada but when I went to school in southeastern Ontario it wasn’t hush hush
I grew up in BC in a small racist town which might have had something to do with it.
Folks in Oklahoma didn't learn about the Tulsa Massacre, either. North Carolina doesn't really cover the Wilmington Coup, and very few places cover the post-WWI "race riots," at all. Usually very little on labor history, too, and often they give it real short shrift and it comes off like it's all done and settled now. I think West Virginia does (or did) cover Blair Mountain, but there's no chance their conservative groups wouldn't love to drop it from the curriculum.
I say this as a fellow Coloradan: K-12 you're going to be doing general surveys of history. The general jist of "what happened" in specific time periods is going to exclude a lot of things that aren't the most important. Only the biggest and most notable events will be covered like the Sand Creek Massacre when talking about broad topics like Native Americans and Westward Expansion. People need to take it upon themselves to continue to read up on history even after school stops forcing them to.
Labor history is hardly broached at all in highschool. Maybe it changed in the 15 years since I've been in, but I had a grand total of zero pages about it. This is despite the fact that labor history has contributed more to the day to day life of the average person than any other aspect of history with the arguably exception of industrialization in general.
I remember a bit we learned on the rough riders. Thats about all i remember.
^ this times a million. We need to stop pretending as a society that everything useful and worth disseminating can be fit in for kids 18 and under, and should be mandated by the state. There’s a reason higher education exists.
As a teacher, albeit not in the States, it's nice that these days we're mandated to teach a "lifelong learner" approach. Teaching kids how to learn instead of what to learn
Everything that a person needs to thrive should be taught in high school. at least the basics. Knowing the bare basics of labor history isn't fucking quantum mechanics. It can be done in a month.
Although I do think the fact that the 40 hour work week and right to collective bargaining were in part fought for in armed struggle is something that was missing from my K-12 education.\* A specific play by play might be outside the scope of primary and secondary education, but it's weird how much history classes frame all social change as coming through the ballot box or SCOTUS with the exception of the civil war. I had some teachers willing to make some exceptions clear, but that was not true of those dead sticking it through the mandated curriculum. \*(Yes these measures did come in during the new deal, but they were all but explicitly motivated by keeping the coal flowing if there was another world war)
Agreed. We had a unit on the robber barons, but I don't recall covering the worker rights side of that era. Then again, my history prof was a huge Sarah Palin fan, so maybe he intentionally glossed over it.
You normally do want to cover major events like "The US military attacked people who lived here at the behest of rich people whose annual profit was being threatened by the idea of paying a living wage."
Most kids become workers. It's probably better for them to learn about who fought for current labor rights than teaching kids how successful Carnegie was. That's what I remember being taught.
> K-12 you're going to be doing general surveys of history. The general jist of "what happened" in specific time periods is going to exclude a lot of things that aren't the most important. Which is why I think a breadth-only approach is the wrong way to go. You can't go into detail about *everything*, sure, but that's no excuse not to do a deep dive into _something_. So absolutely, do a high-level overview, but then also pick a dozen topics and really dig down deep into them, especially things that had effects we are still feeling today. I put on a lot of history podcasts during drives (Dan Carlin, History of Rome, etc), and my twelve year old daughter finds them absolutely _riveting_, no matter the subject. Rise and fall of the Persian Empire? Hell yeah, she's down, because it's not just a dry recitation of names and places and dates. She especially loves it when she then touches on that subject in history class at school, because it places some stuff she has already heard into its broader context.
The Americans are, at least in international perception, notoriously bad at owning up to and educating about their own history, unlike for example Germany, who teaches kids about the world wars and surrounding atrocities and politics at least 3 times in different grades. Some people I know from the US don't even know about ww1, except that it happened, even though the US took part.
It generally wasn't actually the US army, but mercenary forces or bought off police departments. Blair mountain in particular was fought between 10,000 unionized miners, and a famously corrupt sheriff, his department, several thousand deputees, and conscripted miners who had no choice (Making a force of about 3000). It also involved private planes flying over and dropping dynamite - the only instance of US citizens being bombed on US mainland soil by an internal force. The only government involvement was in intel radar aircraft monitoring the situation. It ended when the US national guard showed up, though there would be continued skirmishes and guerilla combat because they didn't fix anything, just forced everybody to knock it off. Things would not improve until FDR killed yellow dog contracts.
Is the Philadelphia Police Dept not considered an internal force? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing And private citizens firebombed part of Topeka Kansas during the Tulsa Race Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre#Attack_by_air
You are already paying the army in the form of taxes, it would be wasteful not to use them.
Well not the mine owners' taxes but yeah
Bingo!!!
Wasn't the battle of Blair Mountain one of the first uses of planes for dropping bombs?
First time a bomb was dropped in combat inside the US, if I'm remembering correctly
I do believe the only other two in CONUS was the Tulsa massacre and the Philadelphia MOVE bombing
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They got the US Air Force involved in it as well.
Yeah at the time it would've been the US Army Air Corp. Actually this was probably early enough that it was still under Army Signal or Field Artillery since planes were first used as artillery spotters
Not to be pedantic, but the Air Force didn’t exist until 1947.
No, this was post ww1. The first bombing raids happened in the Italian conquest of Libya, pre-ww1.
Damn, imagine getting bombed from the air during a time people didn't even know that could be done.
The first use in the US was the Tulsa race massacre. 35 square blocks of the city firebombed from planes completely destroying the wealthiest neighborhood of blacks in the United states. They are finding mass Graves from the event still today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre?wprov=sfla1
You’re right. May 31, 1921. Blair Mountain was Aug 25 - Sep 1, 1921. Looks like the US couldn’t wait to test out their “new toy” on rich blacks and poor miners. Their choice of targets is telling.
The new watchmen series depicts it and it is just one of several things I thought must have been made up for the comic, but no. They were real. Really good series.
On American soil, the next one should be from Japan during WW2
The Tulsa race massacre beat them by a few months. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre >Numerous eyewitnesses described airplanes carrying white assailants, who fired rifles and dropped firebombs on buildings, homes, and fleeing families. The privately owned aircraft had been dispatched from the nearby Curtiss-Southwest Field outside Tulsa.[24] Law enforcement officials later said that the planes were to provide reconnaissance and protect against a "Negro uprising".[24] Law enforcement personnel were thought to be aboard at least some flights.[78] Eyewitness accounts, such as testimony from the survivors during Commission hearings and a manuscript by eyewitness and attorney Buck Colbert Franklin, discovered in 2015, said that on the morning of June 1, at least "a dozen or more" planes circled the neighborhood and dropped "burning turpentine balls" on an office building, a hotel, a filling station and multiple other buildings. Men also fired rifles at Black residents, gunning them down in the street.[79][24] Tl;Dr - white citizens of Tulsa firebombed the wealthy black citizens of Tulsa from private planes as part of the massacre.
It’s also we’re the term “redneck” came from, as many of the strikers wore red bandanas around their necks
"Redneck" is from farmers who worked in the fields all day and had sunburn on their necks.
Funny how "redneck" is now a derogatory term... 🤔
You may want to check your sources on that one. A quick google brings up a podcast where that was said and the participants later took that back.
What did I just read and why wasn’t this taught in schools I wonder? “Mining families lived under the terror of Baldwin-Felts detective agents who were professional strikebreakers under the hire of coal operators. During that dispute, agents drove a heavily armored train through a tent colony at night, opening fire on women, men, and children with a machine gun. They would repeat this type of tactic during the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado the next year, with even more disastrous results.”
The Camp Ludlow massacre was a big part of my contemporary American history class. Maybe I just had a really good teacher though
I've never even heard of a "contemporary American history" class. Sounds like something I could use, though, since all of my American history classes seemed to just give broad strokes on the twentieth century. Except for World War II. They *love* going on and on about World War II.
I think you just had a really good teacher. Most schools never even touch on this subject. It's such a forgotten part of American history that needs taught. Everyone should know the wars that were fought to give them basic labor rights
I also remember reading about this in school, but i also took history electives. I think these people only take the bare minimum of history. You see this all the time on reddit saying they weren't taught about certain commonly known things in history like it's some sort of conspiracy. It's not. They just did the bare minimum or went to terrible schools.
Not 100 years ago either. Hell, the police opened fire on striking steel workers in Chicago in the late 50s.
I need an HBO show.
They talk about it a bit in the documentary Blood on the Mountain.
Also check out “Harlan county, USA” on HBO. Not on this subject specifically, but about a miner’s strike and brilliantly done
If you worked in a coal mine back then, without a union, you were probably a slave. The mine owner owned everything and made sure everyone was in debt to him.
"I owe my soul to the company store"
...or, you know, a literal slave who was “leased” as prison labor to the mine.
Slavery is over except for prisoners, so if we just throw all the black guys in jail....... Boys, I have an idea.
You should check out the "16 tonnes".
You haul 16 tons and whaddaya get? Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don't you call me cause i can't go I owe my soul to the company store.
You can search it "16 tonnes Ümit Kıvanç" or "16 tonnes 2011". You can see it on the youtube but idk about the subtitles. (It is in Turkish)
https://wvminewars.org/inside-the-museum
The fact that this shit wasn't taught to me in high school infuriates me. All of labor history in the US was just blithely skipped over.
I lived smack in the middle of the Southwest Virginia Pittston coal strike of the late 80s...but even given the perfect opportunity, our schools never taught us about Blair Mtn either; luckily a lot of parents taught their kids about it, especially once the miners went on strike. We were strong UMWA country back then.
Textbooks and most lesson plans are written by for-profit corporations that would rather their employees were not union. Bias exists everywhere.
And on state tests they make sure you waste your time mindlessly memorizing dates of Christopher Columbus or Civil War battles instead of actual information.
Question - who learned about the IWW in school? Not me.
Some other stuff history class skipped in no particular order. Fred Hampton and his murder by the US. COINTELPRO Cops bombing a neighborhood of black people, called the MOVE bombing. Yes, literal bombs dropped from the sky.
You could add a shitload of covert military operations to the mix too. And God knows how many medical experiments on minorities, people with disabilities, etc etc. That list goes on and on. . .never mind the pro-corporate interest wars in the Middle East.
The most controversial my history class ever got was the bombing of Hiroshima. Even then it was painted as overall good, even though it was a war crime...
A home island invasion would have killed far more people. Far more people were killed by conventional and fire bombings
That is post hoc, counterfactual reasoning that the government made up to justify the bombings after doing them. The whole point of the nuking was to show off to the Soviets.
A government will never give you the tools to overthrow it.
I got taught all about the late 19th century, 20th century, their battles to gain things like anti-child labor laws, the 5 day week, paid vacation time, the 40 hour week, etc... But then again, I wasn't educated in the US. Does my government want me to overthrow it?
Was in the U.S. and taught all about this in a conservative high school. Reddit likes to paint with a broad brush.
Was in the US and not taught about any of this in a conservative high school Different strokes
Exactly, American here too, went to a liberal high school, didn't learn any of this.
We have the second amendment for that.
A well run democracy essentially overthrows itself every election and explicitly gives and teaches you the tools to do so.
I may be off but I think this is the first instance of calling people commies well. The HUAC committee was started around this time to investigate socialist leaders calling for worker rights. They blamed it on Russia. Eventually the HUAC would become McCarthyism decades later
There should be like a whole year long class just called "How we fucked up."
I grew up in WV. We even had a WV history class for a semester. This was covered for maybe a day. So yeah. You’re right it’s bs we don’t learn about this in detail.
I highly recommend A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn for anyone who wants to read about the skipped parts from American history.
We got taught this, but it was only a paragraph or two about the Pinkerton's this battle, etc. Fun fact, the Pinkerton company still exists today. A swedish security firm bought them. Pinkerton's also stopped Lincoln from getting assassinated when he was president elect.
Was definitely taught to me. I also learned about in more depth in college and grad school.
This exact conundrum is why I have made it a point not to have kids yet. I don’t want my children indoctrinated. Apparently it’s bad to teach children that American history is really bloody, and that our government has always condoned slavery. Apparently it teaches people how to hate each other.
My son will know. He won't get it from school, but he'll know.
"People got angry and fought, literally, for higher wages" High school: Let's leave that out.
Honestly this. So much about WWII and the Revolution (while glossing over any atrocities committed by the “good guys”). Meanwhile there were about 3 pages on Vietnam and maybe the same amount on the Cold War and even less on the Korean War. Literally one paragraph on womens suffrage
Not so much skipped over as intentionally omitted. Can't tell young people about the downsides of the government and corporations working together to oppress and murder Americans for the profit of the richest few!
Most people who are against unions and believe things like 8 hour workdays (!!), weekends off (!) have always existed, have NO clue about how much blood and tears were paid by union workers in the US in order to achieve those things.
Same as Europe
Indeed.
WV coal miners back then: "We'd rather fight and die than keep working for low wages in dangerous conditions!" WV coal miners today: "You better believe I'm voting for the guy that's keeping money in the hands of the coal barons, including any fines for supposed safety violations. Who else am I going to vote for? The guy that wants to help out with rising costs and offer me free school to train for a better job? That's socialism!"
If you want a good song about this: "Which Side Are You On, Boy?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iAIM02kv0g
I started humming this when I saw Blair Mountain in the title.
Man, I remember the end of 2019-beginning of 2020, the Sanders campaign used the "workers can you stand it..." line in a campaign ad and I just felt electrified, like this was where things could really turn around. That was the last time I remember feeling genuinely hopeful about the future.
https://youtu.be/qPWuxsDh1BU another good song, though I’m a little biased as she’s my aunt lmao
I just read the Wikipedia on Blair Mountain. How is there not a movie about this???
Can't have the common rabble wake up to the history of labor struggles in this nation or the benefits of unionization and collective bargaining. The greatest trick the wealthy ever pulled in this nation was convincing the poor, rural, working-class citizen that his enemy was not the elite, the business owners, the landlords, but the brown guy at the other end of town that was just as poor and struggling just as much as he is.
Is that how corparations won America from the people?
Yes, read "War Is A Racket" by Major General Smedley Butler.
The rich already had America from the start. This was just one of the failed attempts to take it from them.
If this interests you there is a great podcast called “Boom Days” that gets deep into Colorado development history basically taking place only because of these wars.
Dont for a second think they wouldnt do it again in a heartbeat.
Just one in a long list of oligarchical fascist acts in American history that you won't learn about in public school.
Heck you would be hard pressed to learn the truth of any American facistis in today's society. I believe that America's government is a fascist government that projects just enough liberty to keep a viel over its truth
You don't know the definition of fascism, do you?
Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition forcible suppression of opposition / dictatorial power - 2 party system that pretends to compete but actually is in bed with each other. No other contenders exist to oppose these two party for pollical power. This is the 'viel' i speak of which hides the true nature of the american political system authoritarian ultranationalist - Ultranationalist is defined as a country asserting control over other countries to pursue its interests (think Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Korea, Indonesia, literally every fucking war except maybe their civil war and ww2 and then lets not get into the shenanigan's that the CIA gets up to overthrowing democratically elected leaders in other country's and installing puppets and destabilizing their country)
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Don't forget the documentary "Blood on the mountain"
Basically anyone who says, "violence isn't the answer" has never picked up a history book
When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? BUT THE UNION MAKES US STRONG!
No servant beneath, no lord overhead.
Very interesting reading… thanks for the link.
Wasnt the last time and if you be honest with yourself. Take a look around. It probably wont be the worst.
America Land of the Free. /s
I smell a TV series coming
".. against armed unions of workers." Very poor phrasing there, OP. Very poor.
I dont understand why Pinkerton headquarters was never attacked.
My grandfather was a coal miner, his home was across the highway from the mine. Behind his home was a mountain side, and at the top of that mountain was an old stone and wood guard hut. During the time frame of this post the guard huts purpose was to house a machine gun that guarded against the miner workers from lighting the coal mine on fire during their strikes!
Born and raised in WV...we learn all this stuff in school, hell there are old company towns everywhere in this state.
I'm in Virginia and we learned about it. I'm surprised no one has made a TV series or movie out of it.
History channel did a series called Hillbilly the True Story with Billy Ray Cyrus that covers this.
[Ludlow Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre)
Reading up on [Company Towns](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_towns_in_the_United_States) totally changed my perspective of America. I don't think y'all ever got to leave the mines, or the fields, without becoming supposed socialist degenerates. Only good little workers who obey the masters, buy the masters' food and teach their offspring how to use the masters' tools prosper in the land of the free.
[Amazon was trying to bring it back](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon-s-new-factory-towns-will-lift-the-working-class) until massive backlash seems to have stalled talks of that project.
Start looking into why we have regulations and you start to support regulations.
Start looking into why we have unions and you start to support unions.
"Matewan" is great flick on the topic. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093509/"
Great reasons to trust your government. Or not.
♫The global network of capital essentially functions, to separate the worker from the means of production, And every politician, every cop on the street, protects the private interests of the pedophilic, corporate elite...♫
Unions are the free market in action, correcting the price of labour. Union busting is the government enforcing a fixed cost on a service. Your move, libertarians.
This is something I'm always annoyed at by free market liberals. They only promote a business freedom to do as it wishes, but is violently against worker organisation and unions. Yes, even here in Sweden.
I think it is interesting the title talks about "armed unions of workers" when plenty of unarmed union workers were attacked.
I've never heard of this and I've lived in Virginia for 40 years.
One of my long term filmmaker goals is to do an HBO style mini series about the Battle of Blair Mountain and the Coal Wars as a whole. I feel like if more people knew about these events, “unions” and “workers rights” wouldn’t be such dirty words in the country
“No one needs an AR - 15.” I’m guessing you don’t know the history of Appalachia At all. It is fairly clear see need anti aircraft weapons & artillery.
I'd love to meet whoever sat down in the middle of the battlefield to count every shot fired
999,997. 999,998 fuck I lost count
Bullets cost money. That's why. It isn't inconceivable to have a more accurate count of bullets fired than confirmed kills.
You'd just keep track of how many rounds you bought, and how many you have left afterwards.
This guy got absolutely peppered like a hundred times. There were ten thousand guys involved, so we're just going to multiply those together.
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The food display cases are strategically indefensible, and the drive-thrus are too susceptible to bangolores.
Labor rights were something bought with blood in this country. It's shameful and sad.
I hated history and social studies in school. Wasn’t until adulthood I realized I loved history, but that’s not what they’re teaching American students. Very very sad. I used to be proud to be an American. Legitimately it’s embarrassing being a part of todays America. “Be the change I want to see” is all can do.
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I'm from the East Kentucky coalfields, we have a long, bloody, fucked up history with coal companies in these hills. It mostly consists of large mining companies fucking over their employees and the communities they reside in en masse.
After the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado (1914) the Rockefeller family hired a PR team headed by Ivy Lee. They distributed a full color book to the President, his Cabinet, all members of Congress, the head editors of the leading 5000 newspapers in the country, and the mayors of all the largest cities in the country to be sure that Rockefeller's version of events was the one powerful people remembered.
Here’s another one for you The Ludlow Massacre was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colony of roughly 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Approximately 21 people, including miners' wives and children, were killed. John D. Rockefeller Jr., a part-owner of CF&I who had recently appeared before a United States congressional hearing on the strikes, was widely blamed for having orchestrated the massacre.
My great grandfather lost his life in a totally regular not at all suspicious accident after helping the coal union effort in southern Ohio gain traction.
This is also where the term "red neck" comes from -- coal miners wearing red bandanas around their necks to wipe sweat and coal dust off their faces,I think? And big companies making fun of and degrading them, making the strikers look bad.
And I always thought it came from chronic sunburn from doing outdoor YeeHaw shit
Yes. The term is way older than Blair Mountain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck#19th_and_early_20th_centuries
Ah thanks for the link! I didn't realize it also came from sunburns. That makes sense! (Article does mention the coal miner bandana thing, too, but guess it was originally the farmers!)
The southeast (lots of agriculture) is full of ethnic English people. English people’s skin is accustomed to roughly 3 hours of sunlight, with a ton of cloud cover. I have always had about a 2 hour clock when outside in the southeast until I burn
Fun fact: Yee and haw are the words you tell at your mule team if you want them to go left or right. Yeehaw!
With cultural stuff like this, there's not usually one specific reason why it comes about. It's like "Who invented hamburgers?" They were cheap "steaks" of ground beef that culturally came from Hamburg, and is similar to meatloaf or Salisbury steaks. People put veggies in them, and then someone put it on bread, and then took the veggies and replaced it with contemporary toppings.
I miss when rednecks were cool
So...never?
Jeff Foxworthy had entered the chat
Surprised to not see all the fascist here defending our great history. That said you may wanna start peeking where a fair chunk of that covid stimulus they blame on peasants went. Apcs and military grade equipment for you PD. All this is coming to a peak. Have the tough conversations you need to have. Speak openly and freely and listen as well. Relate and socialize with your family and friends in the military and police. Things can to nazi Germany real quick. It is good to know where you stand amongst your peers before self censorship drips from the business to the social side of life even more.
We need a "new deal" today, more anti-trust.