About this episode

This episode explores the Battle of Blair Mountain, a significant labor uprising in American history involving coal miners fighting for union rights.

The Battle of Blair Mountain stands as the largest armed insurrection on American soil since the Civil War, yet for nearly a century it was virtually absent from the nation's textbooks and public memory. In the late summer of nineteen twenty-one, roughly ten thousand coal miners in southern West Virginia, many of them World War One veterans, picked up rifles, tied red bandanas around their necks, and marched through the Appalachian mountains to fight for the right to join a union. They were met at Blair Mountain by roughly three thousand deputies, mine guards, and armed civilians funded by the coal industry, entrenched in machine gun nests and fortified positions along a ten-mile ridgeline. For five days the two sides fought a pitched battle that saw roughly a million rounds fired and private biplanes dropping homemade pipe bombs on American citizens. The fighting ended only when President Warren G. Harding deployed federal troops and Army bomber squadrons to the region. This episode traces the full arc of the West Virginia mine wars, from the brutal company town system and the scrip economy that trapped miners in perpetual debt, through the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of…

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