Robert Evans and Spencer Crittenden detail the 1912 Battle of Blair Mountain, a "second American Civil War" in West Virginia where miners fought abusive coal operators using smuggled rifles against Baldwin-Felts mercenaries. Despite martial law, the Bull Moose Special armored train, and the Latimer Massacre, the strike culminated in victory under Governor Henry Hatfield, securing the Central Competitive Field Agreement for an eight-hour day. A U.S. Senate investigation blamed private ownership and greed rather than union aggression, fostering cross-racial solidarity that inspired "Solidarity Forever" and proving that corporate violence often masks systemic exploitation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:07
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode of my next guest.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
Getting Some Space00:03:11
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, America, and welcome to the internet.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast.
It's called Behind the Bastards, and it's about bad people.
That's the introduction that I have for you today, and I hope you all enjoyed it.
My guest today is Spencer Crittenden.
Spencer, how are you doing today?
Oh, I'm great.
Should I match that energy?
Because I don't think that's possible.
No, no, but you nailed it.
That was perfect.
That was the energy I brought you in to provide.
Perfect.
Spencer, you are, I mean, among other things, you're kind of the reason that DD, a big part of the reason that DD went from something that I shamefully hid from bullies when I was in high school to something that is, I don't know, I'll call it cool.
I'm going to say it's cool now to play Dungeons and Dragons, and it's all on you, buddy.
So thank you for that.
This is my opportunity to say that.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you for saying that.
I mean, I keep telling people that, but no one believes me.
So that's validation I need.
Now, you and I have casted a couple of pods together in the past, have we not?
Yeah, you went on Harmon Town a couple times?
Was it once?
It was twice.
Twice.
Yeah, twice.
And how it was fun.
I mean, I don't know.
A lot of times we have people on that don't know much.
Like, it's not like they're not experts in their field or whatever, but they're just not on to talk about stuff that they have a real perspective on or information or things that aren't pulled out of their ass.
So it was really refreshing for that reason.
Yeah, I mean, I pull a lot of stuff out of my ass, but rarely on camera or a stage.
So, how has your quarantine been, Spencer?
How are you?
How are you holding up in the plague?
So, it's kind of funny because I'm getting a bit too much of my roommate.
We're kind of getting in each other's way.
And I was like, man, it would be nice to be living alone.
And then the other day we were doing errands together, and she's like, Man, it's so great that we're not living alone.
And I was like, oh, okay.
That's your version of this then, huh?
But I'm getting a little stir-crazy.
I would like more space in the past.
I would just go for car rides to kind of just get myself some space.
And I can't really do that.
I mean, technically, maybe it just seems like a risk.
I don't know.
I don't think it's really a, I don't know how California is handling it law-wise.
I think it's driving alone in your car is a pretty safe thing, I would say.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm, you know, it's one of those things I think everybody who's quarantined with like roommates or romantic partners is like, oh my God, I wish I was alone right now.
This would be so much easier if I was alone.
And I think everyone who's quarantined alone is like, oh my God, I wish I had a roommate or I wish my boyfriend or girlfriend was here.
It's terrible being alone.
And I think the answer is that it just sucks to be quarantined.
Quarantined in Separate States00:02:39
Yeah, that's the lesson I'm taking out of this is that it's not great to be locked in in your house.
Well, no matter who it's with.
I feel like I love being locked in my house.
So it would just be interesting.
I wish I had like a good control group to really make this experiment pop.
Now, Spencer, let me ask you: the president has recently stated that people should liberate a series of Midwestern states.
Have you jumped onto the call to start the Boogaloo?
Are you grabbing your go bag and your AR-15 to liberate the Sparrow in your neighborhood?
Yeah, I'm going to have to.
Come back up at force.
It all sounds good.
Like liberation.
You know, like who can get who could stand opposed to that?
That is a great question.
And it actually ties in a little bit to our episode today because obviously everyone in America is thinking about a civil war, like a new one, right?
And, you know, we're also, there's a lot of thoughts back to the old Civil War.
You know, it's some of those protests in Michigan and whatnot.
People are waving Confederate flags, which doesn't really make a lot of sense in Michigan, but that's just what you're doing.
You don't remember the Confederate state of Michigan?
Yes, the great Jefferson Davis famed Detroiter.
Yeah, so we're all thinking about civil wars.
And, you know, when people in America think about the civil wars, we either think about the big civil war, which is civil wars go worldwide in the top three or seven, somewhere around there.
Definitely a great civil war.
Or they're thinking about the possibility of a new civil war.
And people will often call that the second American Civil War.
But what if, Spencer, what if I were to tell you that this country actually already had a second civil war?
One with machine guns and aerial bombardment and trenches and blood and guts.
What if I were to tell you that already happened?
Well, I would have to laugh you out of the room.
Well, that would be hard because we are quarantined in separate states.
I would have to laugh you to your death.
Yeah, laugh me off of the internet.
Well, don't start laughing yet, Spencer, because it turns out there was a second American Civil War, and it happened in West Virginia.
Now, most U.S. history textbooks have a painful allergy to talking about it because it all hinges on the labor movement.
And for whatever reason, the people who write our textbooks don't like to talk about the reason that weekends exist.
But today, in this two-part episode, we're going to talk about the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Have you ever heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain?
No, literally, no.
I'm not a big history guy.
The Battle of Blair Mountain00:14:56
Awesome.
Even that sounds wild.
Yeah, it's a fucking cool story.
It's like, it's like it's a cyberpunk story in a steampunk setting.
That's how I would.
If I was trying to like, if I was trying to sell the Netflix TV show version of this, that's how I would package it in a fucking elevator pitch.
That's awesome.
It's pretty cool.
I mean, a lot of people die horribly, and a lot of people get raped, but it's like just, I don't know what point I was making.
It's interesting.
That is very cyberpunk.
Yeah.
So it all starts with coal, Spencer.
In the late 1800s, coal became increasingly critical to the economic productivity and the infrastructure of the United States.
And the richest veins of coal were underground.
So this necessitated large groups of men riding down to those veins through vast holes in the earth and hacking out big chunks of coal.
The structural supports that like kept them alive and kept the world from collapsing on them were often also made of coal.
It was extraordinarily dangerous.
There was like trapped sulfur gas and shit everywhere or methane gas everywhere and like explosions happened all the time.
Mine collapses were very common.
It's one of the most dangerous jobs people ever had to the extent that like it like more Americans died from coal collapses over the decades than died fighting in Vietnam.
I wanted a lot of Minecraft and that does not track with my experience.
Minecraft has benefited a lot from the decades of mine safety reforms.
So thank you.
Thank you, Minecraft.
Thank you, Notch, famed QAnoner and fascist.
Yeah.
So for an example of some so fuckingly terrible coal disasters, because I know everybody comes to the show for that sort of thing.
There was the Eccles Mine disaster in West Virginia in April of 1914.
This was a methane explosion that occurred while 246 miners were underground and 180 of them died instantly.
In 1909, there was a mine explosion in Cherry, Illinois, which destroyed the entire town and killed 259 men and boys because an awful lot of boys worked in mines.
Their little hands could reach the coal better.
So that's cool.
That's terrifying.
Yeah, it sucks.
Between 1890 and 1917, at least 26,000 American miners were killed on the job, mostly in explosion.
12,000 miners were maimed every year, often permanently disabled.
So not a great job, I would say.
Right.
Yeah, less, I think less people are maimed podcasting every year.
Sophie, are less than 12,000 people maimed while podcasting every year?
Cannot confirm or deny.
I'm trying to get those numbers up with the machetes, but we still, I don't, I mean, I maybe maim a thousand people in a year, you know, if I'm really, if I'm really getting the let out.
So yeah, it sucked to be a coal miner.
It was not a great job, right?
Men took the gig because they needed money, and mining often paid well.
Or at least the pay that the bosses advertised was generally good.
Capitalism being what it was, the people who owned the mines had a variety of fun tactics that they used to fuck over the human beings who made their business profitable.
One of these tactics was called cribbing.
See, miners were paid based on the tonnage of coal that they mined.
Every car that left the mines was supposed to hold a specific payload of one ton or 2,000 pounds.
However, the mine operator got to actually purchase and set up the cars, and they would regularly rig them to hold more coal than they were supposed to hold.
The wooden contraptions that they added to the sides of the cart to enable this were called cribs and hence the name cribbing.
It was not uncommon for miners to be paid for digging out 2,000 pounds when they had actually dug out 2,500 pounds.
So that's stealing 500 pounds of coal from a miner.
That's a lot of bullshit.
So like they put like a wooden basket around it so they could add more coal and then they essentially said that was one load of coal when it was more like two or one and a half.
Yeah, it was more like one and a quarter, but like, yeah, yeah, they would they would get extra coal for free, basically.
Yeah.
So that's cool.
Mine operators would also, yeah, it's not great.
It's not great.
Mine operators would also often dock the pay of their miners when they found slate and rock mixed in with the coal.
The man who did the weighing was the judge of this.
And since he was paid directly by the mine owner, it was not uncommon for him to just cheat the miners and lie about how much non-coal wound up in the coal.
So that's cool, too.
Yeah, my skin is.
And then, of course, your skin is crawling.
Yeah, that's horrible.
It's just oh, man, it gets so much worse.
I mean, just as a spoiler, we're about to talk about something called bureaucratized rape.
So strap in, man.
What a great episode.
But first, let's talk about company stores.
Have you ever heard that song that goes, you work 16 tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don't you call me?
Because I can't go.
I own my soul to the company store.
That song?
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
Well, it's a song about coal mining back in these days.
And the company store is a thing that like a lot of mining towns or mines would have.
And they didn't start out as necessarily exploitative.
So like a lot of mines in the late 1800s and early 1900s were out in the middle of nowhere and there would be like no town near the mine and the miners would have to live nearby because it was just the only way for the work to happen.
So the company would have to set up a store where they could buy food and necessities.
So like not inherently exploitative, but having the only place where miners can shop be owned by their employer also is super prone to exploitation, right?
Like you can see how an asshole who would do something like cribbing could also take advantage of that bullshit.
So there's been a lot of research done in company stores and a surprising amount of them actually don't seem to have been abusive and prices were in line with prices at independent businesses.
But a lot of them were horrifically abusive and would like jack up prices to way above what they would cost.
And some companies would actually make it, would ban or fire miners from going into other towns to shop at stores that weren't owned by the company.
Yeah.
And West Virginia was a place where this was particularly common because West Virginia then and now was out in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Like it's it is just nowhere stand.
So you could really get away with a lot of fucking over miners out there.
And another way they would fuck over miners was debt peonage.
So pay for miners at this period happened like once a month.
And you also had to have been working for a full month to get any pay.
And obviously, I don't know if you're aware of this, but if people don't get food and water for a month, they die.
Oh, yeah.
I've heard such things.
Yeah, yeah.
So companies would have to offer script to workers who hadn't gotten paid yet.
And this was like basically an advance on their salary.
And if workers didn't make quite as much as they thought they were going to make and they'd already spent the company script, they could wind up in a situation where they were indebted to the company for long periods of time and basically just kept having to take script to keep their family fed and never quite got out of debt.
So it's like some really bad situations happened in this shit.
And company stores came along with a lot of other things because in a lot of cases, you had company towns.
So like the company would be responsible for like the school and be responsible for the store and be responsible for housing all of their workers.
That doesn't necessarily sound bad.
Although company houses were often squalid hovels, they also sometimes were houses of decent quality.
But the fact that you were living in a house owned by your company meant that you had no real security.
If you got fired for any reason, the company would kick you out of your home the same day because you didn't have any kind of lease or legal protections.
So they had the ability to kick you out of your home and make you homeless in the middle of the fucking mountains at the drop of a hat.
So that's not a great situation.
I don't know.
Does your industry work that way, Spencer?
Mine does not.
Yeah, no.
I don't know.
It's the parallels to like your, what do you call it?
Medical insurance coverage is very to me, but it's similarly horrifying.
Yes, there are definitely modern day parallels, but we should also acknowledge it was way worse back then.
Oh, like even though it still sucks now.
But like, yeah, that's actually a very good point you make that like it's kind of like health insurance where you can be fucked immediately if your company kicks you off.
In the metaphorical mountains.
In the metaphorical mountains, in the mountains of not being able to get your insulin.
Right.
Which I guess is, I don't know.
Let's say Mount Hood.
Mount Hood is the mountain of insulin, I've always said.
Okay.
So, yeah, there's a song called Company Town by Carl Sandberg that I think conveys how many miners felt about their situation.
I'm just going to read out the lyrics.
You live in a company house.
You go to a company school.
You work for this company according to company rules.
You all drink company water and all use company lights.
The company preacher teaches us what the company thinks is right.
So there's like that video game, right, that just came out about like you're in space, but it's kind of like this.
What the fuck is that game?
Animal Crossing.
No, Although that has its own, there's a lot, a lot of lessons about capitalism and Animal Crossing.
Oh, are you talking about the one where you have to like junk a space hulk and that's your job for like the outer worlds?
The outer worlds.
Yeah, and it's got like town.
You're in like a planet that's owned by the company and they've got a preacher, I think.
And like, yeah, that's what they're this is like this is all based on actual labor history, like that, some of the shit in that game.
They just have laser pistols, which they did not back then, as a heads up.
Yeah.
Which is lame.
They should have had laser pistols.
This would be a funner story.
It would go way different.
Yeah.
Maybe not.
So company stores also gave the company a way to increase profits when the value of coal dropped.
They could just soak their employees by raising the price of goods.
And company houses gave them a strong lever to raise up if employees ever complained about working conditions.
If you don't like that the boss's one-ton cart is actually one and a half tons, well, now you're homeless.
So like, yeah.
If this sounds a little bit like slavery to you, it actually did to a number of black miners who were former slaves themselves.
So as a result of a lot of the stuff we're going to talk about in this episode, there were a number of Senate inquiries.
And in one of the Senate inquiries, the Senate wound up talking to a black miner named Mr. Eccles.
And he asked about like what he thought was the problem with the mining industry.
So here's what he said in the Senate.
Quote, I will tell you, the miners asked the contractors or operators to give them an opportunity to weigh the coal, and they announced that they will not weigh it.
They promised to pay us by the ton, but they don't do it.
They promised according to whatever the coal is to pay us by the ton, and we want them to put it on the scales.
All they do is say that so-and-so much, and we have to take it.
There are some things that we cannot stand for.
I was raised a slave.
My master and mistress called me and I answered.
And I know the time when I was a slave, and I felt just like I feel now.
So it is not devaluing the suffering of slavery to compare what these miners went through with slavery because some of them were former slaves and they specifically said, this is actually not all that different.
Yeah, wasn't there like tenant farming or something, which seems very similar.
Sharecropping.
Yeah, there's a lot of similarities with sharecropping, but that is a story for another day.
And this is, you know, miners where there were a lot of black miners and white miners, and there were times when they worked together and times when they would like wind up like white miners would throw black miners under the bus to get a better deal.
Like both of those things happened.
We're not going to get into the kind of racial history of the coal labor strikes and stuff as much as maybe we ought to, because there's just a lot.
These are all labor history is very complicated and nuanced.
So I'm doing my best to tell a discreet story, and I apologize for some things that will not be covered in as much detail as they should.
So yeah, coal miners sucked.
Coal mining sucked.
Coal miners were the same as everybody else.
This podcast takes a hard stance against coal miners.
Fuck you, coal miners.
We just pivot right to just tearing a hole through coal miners.
And the companies were right because these people were motherfuckers.
Yeah, this has been building to me just attacking coal miners for six episodes.
No, okay, so yeah, all the problems I've talked about were existed for coal miners everywhere in the United States, from New Mexico to Michigan.
But one particular piece of fuckery, and maybe the most abusive thing that ever happened to American coal miners, was unique to West Virginia, which also had a lot of the richest coal veins in the country.
So back in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis, there's this guy named Esau, right?
And Esau was a starving hunter who stumbled into his brother's tent begging for food.
And his younger brother Jacob agreed to feed Esau, but only in exchange for Esau giving up his birthright as the firstborn son in the family.
A bunch of other stuff happens in that biblical story, but it's not important.
I just needed to tell you who Esau is so we can get to the rest of this.
So, mine operators had a problem, Spencer.
And that problem was that sometimes their miners would get sick or would be injured and would not be able to work for a period of time.
And since there was no social safety net at all, this meant that they and their family would probably starve to death.
Now, the company didn't necessarily want these people just to kick them out because a lot of times they'd get better.
And, you know, coal miners who were good at their job are valuable.
So they found a way to deal with this that was still profitable to them.
And the way that they dealt with this was to take, usually to take the next oldest male member of the family and make them take their father's place.
But some children were too small to effectively work a coal mine.
And in these cases, the company provided the wife of a stricken miner with what was known as Esau script.
Now, this was a special type of script currency, only usable for food and other necessities.
And I'm going to quote now from an article I found on Counter Punch based on the book, Truth Be Told: Perspectives on the Great West Virginia Mine War by labor historian Wes Harris.
Quote: ESOW was issued only to women, and it was a form of script that would enable a woman to purchase food for her children during the time that her husband could not work.
The ESOW was only good for 30 days, and if her husband went back to work within those 30 days, then the company would forgive the debt.
And if he did not go back to work at the end of 30 days, then the script became a loan that was due and payable in full on day 30.
At the time, most coal miners' wives did not hold jobs, but they still had to pay back the loan, which was a collateralized loan.
And the women themselves were the collateral.
Their physical selves would be used to pay the debt.
You picking up on what this means?
Coal Mining Rape Dollars00:04:11
Yeah, a little, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it was coal mining rape dollars.
That's what we're talking about here: coal miner rape bucks.
Yeah.
So the women, I mean, you could quibble, I guess, over whether or not to call it rape.
The women who did this for their families tended to consent in the sense that they agreed to give up access to their bodies in exchange for ESO script to stop their family from starving to death.
But since the only real worst, yeah, exactly.
Like, it's not really consent if your children will die if you don't do it, right?
Right.
No, that's hostages.
Yeah, yeah, the coal mining, the company had hostages.
Yes.
I feel comfortable calling it broadly rape.
Yeah, the article continues.
Many of these incidents allegedly occurred at the Whipple Colliery Company store located in Oak Hill, West Virginia, where women would walk up to a room on the third floor to try on shoes and, in the process, be raped by coal company guards.
The Whipple Company store was one of three company stores built by cold baron Justice Collins in Fayette County, West Virginia.
Joy Lynn, who now co-owns the Whipple Company store and has turned it into a museum, told Klein that she has had as many as 10 women visit the museum who referred to the third floor space as the rape room because that is how the mine guards forced the women to pay for their shoes.
They would have to keep their mouths shut tight about what had happened to them upstairs, Lynn said, because the mining companies would threaten to kick them out of their company-owned houses.
Yeah.
So that's cool.
It's not.
Are you a it's not good, but I don't know.
This is this is terrible that my mind's going to that, but like, yeah, what's the exchange rate?
Like, I mean, is that something they quantified?
But it's like they got shoes.
Yeah, I don't know what that doesn't seem, I mean, nothing is worth anything, but like, don't get me wrong, but it's just like, ah, I don't know.
Yeah, I think it was more like while you're in.
I mean, so there actually was an amount of an exchange rate that was set up.
And we don't have as much detail on the ESOW system as we want because it was very much kept under wraps.
And these women did not like to talk about it.
And the company certainly didn't like to talk about it.
The term that one labor historian used for it is bureaucratized rape.
And there would be situations where because of their debt, women would be essentially rented to a coal mining company.
And sometimes like young girls, like a wife would, if she was too old for the company to want or whatever, would give up her daughter.
And there were cases of like 12-year-old girls who were rented out to the coal company for like periods of four to six months, and sometimes more than once.
Like you incur some debt, you give up your daughter for four to six months.
She pays off the debt, then you incur more debt and you give her back up.
Like stuff like that would be set a lot of the time.
So usually it was like a set limit of time that you would have to spend prostituting yourself or your daughter to coal company guards in exchange for you know necessities.
Right.
Yeah.
So that's good.
Yeah.
So coal mercenaries, like the guards who manned the coal mines were generally mercenaries.
A lot of them were former soldiers or cops or detectives and stuff who got hired by the coal companies to brutally enforce order in the mining camps.
They took to calling these women comfort girls or comfort wives, which is actually, interestingly enough, a term virtually identical to the one Japanese troops used for the sex slaves they took during the occupation of Manchuria, which is a neat little bit of historical resonance there.
That's always fun.
Yeah.
So this was not something that people discussed a lot at the time, and this has led to a lot of controversy around the ESOW system among historians, which we'll talk about at the very end of the second part of this episode.
But historian Wes Harris gives one reason why the vast majority of women caught up in the ESOW system never said anything about it.
Quote, my sense is they weren't ashamed.
It wasn't something they were embarrassed about.
It was very much in the same vein as the men going into the coal mine and taking risks they had no business taking.
It's like you do what you have to do to feed your family.
They didn't talk about it, but they certainly weren't ashamed of it.
Why would you be ashamed of feeding your kids?
So yeah, this is some complicated shit.
But Spencer, you know what won't molest children as script currency?
Feeding Your Family00:04:32
I can think of a lot of things.
No, I don't think it's what you're going for.
Only one.
The products and oh boy, this is a bad ad plug.
I don't like that.
No, yeah.
But buy these, purchase items, please.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ango Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Mine Owners Bring Big Guns00:15:39
Whew, we are back and we are just still recovering from that really, really rough ad transition.
I hit my head on that segue.
Yeah, yeah, it's bad.
It's as bad as the segue that the guy who owned the Segway Company plunged off of that cliff in Scotland on.
That's the kind of, that's a bad segue.
Oh, boy.
Good lord in heaven.
So yeah, in short, what I've been talking about all episodes so far is just kind of making the point that the coal miners in America, and particularly in West Virginia, had it rough.
They had a lot of bullshit to deal with.
They were not treated well, and they had reason to be very angry.
And people all throughout history have rebelled violently against their leaders for a lot less than coal miners put up with.
Yeah.
Now, unfortunately, coal miners tended to be poor as shit.
They had no real political influence, at least not on the national level.
And so the only way they could combat all these abuses was to come together and form a labor union.
In 1885, coal miners formed the National Federation of Miners, which eventually evolved into the United Mine Workers or UWM or UMW.
Sorry, I just miswrote it there.
In his book, The Battle of Blair Mountain, historian Robert Shogun writes this about the UMW.
Quote, The UMW grew rapidly, but it faced a major problem in one state, West Virginia, where the union movement lagged far behind.
This reality had been driven home to the union in 1897 when it staged a nationwide walkout in protest against wage cuts brought on by the depression that devastated the economy for most of the decade.
Over 100,000 miners responded, and the strike paralyzed the northern fields.
Now, like most such fights, this strike was essentially a waiting competition.
If the mining company ran out of money before the miners starved, the miners won and got what they wanted.
In West Virginia, there were enough non-union mines to allow big business to hold out.
So the new union called in for backup, bringing in the big guns of the American Federation of Labor in to try to help them rally non-union miners to the cause.
As the struggle picked up steam, famous left-wing organizers flocked to West Virginia.
Men like Eugene V. Debs, founder of the American Railways Union, and Mother Jones, who'd grown prominent from organizing miners in Pennsylvania.
So you see what's happening here?
Like the miners are trying to strike, but enough mines in West Virginia are non-unionized that like the mine companies are able to pull out enough coal that they don't go bankrupt, so they hold on.
So like the only way for the mining, for the unions to like win in the long term is to unionize miners in West Virginia.
So they start bringing people into West Virginia to help them organize miners there.
So workers outside West Virginia, supported by groups like the AFL, supported their brothers in the mines.
And so the mine owners found themselves forced to get creative to counter all of this.
And by creative, I mean violent.
Company police began cracking down on organizers at non-union mines and forcing them out of the state.
Since these miners all lived in company housing, it was a simple manner of firing and evicting anybody who talked about joining a union.
Workers around the country started to hold mass protests in support of the workers in West Virginia.
But solidarity only goes so far.
One organizer, sent by the AFL to work with black miners in McDowell County, wrote that trying to plan under the thumb of company police was, quote, taking one's life into his hands.
Quote, while we never had any injunctions issued against us, like by a court, we had men in Winchesters against us, which were in most cases just as effective.
So he's pointing out it was actually illegal to try to stop these guys from organizing, but like you couldn't like legally stop them, right?
Like courts couldn't stop them from trying to organize.
They had a right to do that, but you could just send out men to shoot them.
And since there was no law in a lot of these places, that worked just as well.
And company police regularly conducted drive-by shootings.
They would abduct and beat organizers and often even murder them.
John Mitchell, who became the president of the United Mine Workers eventually, was attacked by company guards at a meeting.
They opened fire and he only survived by jumping into a mountain stream and swimming away.
So this is like...
We're not talking about just like, you know, Amazon just got very rightly slammed because they fired a guy who was trying to create a like organize a union of warehouse workers, which is like fucked up and should be illegal.
We'll see if they actually face any consequences to it.
And we shouldn't, I'm not going to say that like Amazon shouldn't be slammed viciously for what they've done.
But it was like the stakes were a lot higher back in these days or those days, right?
Like they were like machine gunning people.
Yeah.
It's intense.
It's pretty cool.
Pretty cool, Spencer.
Yeah, well, it's like there's not, I mean, they're not shooting people these days, but there's not a lot of consequences for fucking over people who try to unionize these days, right?
In the court of law, it doesn't really go very well.
No, because like, you know, they have all of the money in the entire world.
So they can, you know, even if what they're doing is illegal, they can elongate the court case that will eventually, you know, I think it's probable that Amazon will eventually pay fines for what they're doing, but they'll have made so much more money by breaking the law by the time.
Like I'm sure they have bean counters who are like, these laws we can afford to break because the fines will probably be this amount and we'll make this amount by breaking the law.
You know.
Yeah, I mean, a fine is just a price for breaking the law.
It's like you actually can break the law if you pay the Lawbrick tax.
Yeah, exactly.
Which is why instead of fines, the company, in my opinion, instead of fining Amazon, when they are caught doing something like this, Jeff Bezos should be forced to stand in crotchless pants in front of a group of, we'll pick, by lottery, let's say 150 employees from the specific factory where the violation occurred, and they each get to kick him in the nuts.
And it's televised.
Well, that's that zombie song that you were taunting me with.
By the Cranberries.
I love that song.
Great song about the Irish Civil War.
I don't see why we're bringing that into here, but I do think that Jeff Bezos would think twice before cracking down on unions if he had to be kicked in the nuts for several hours by 150 different people.
And that's the only thing that would be a deterrent.
Over and over and over again.
I feel like he'd think twice every time he heard that.
Pretty good cover of the song by state radio, but this is beside the point.
So in many rural counties, the local sheriff's department was completely owned by one or more mining companies.
And normal police were very regularly owned as strikebreakers.
It's almost as if police are, I don't know, you might call them like if we could divide people who work from people who have capital into classes and police are in the same class as miners, but they're like kind of betraying them in exchange for money, like a traitor to their class.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm sure no one's had this thought other than me.
So yeah, the most infamous example of this happened in 1897, the Latimer massacre in Pennsylvania.
150 armed Luzerne County deputies confronted 300 to 400 immigrant coal miners on their way to a pro-union protest.
They fired into the crowd of peaceful demonstrators, hitting many in the back and killing 19 people.
But shit like this happened all the time.
You would regularly have police just start shooting into a crowd because that's actually a really good way.
I don't know if you've ever tried to break up a crowd, but firing wildly into it tends to, people don't like that.
Yeah.
Oddly enough.
You can't stay there.
No, no, most people don't.
Yeah, exactly.
Most people hate bullets for reasons that I think are mysterious, but there's documentation of this.
So, despite numerous atrocities, the miners of the UMW held out.
They viewed what was happening as a struggle for their very survival.
And I'm going to quote from a union official named Frank Keeney, who was a participant in a lot of this stuff.
I'm a native West Virginian.
There are others like me working in the mines here.
We don't propose to get out of the way when a lot of capitalists from New York and London come down here and tell us to get off the earth.
They played that game on the American Indian.
They gave him the end of the log to sit on and then pushed him off that.
We don't propose to be pushed off.
They say that we shall not organize West Virginia.
They are mistaken.
If Frank Keeney can't do it, someone will take his place who can.
But West Virginia will be organized and it will be organized completely.
So a lot of brave people in the union movement at this period.
But also they're like, it's almost like a situation.
I think what Keeney would say is that it's not even bravery.
There's just nothing, it's the choice between organizing or extermination.
They will kill us all by chiseling away at our lives if we don't do this.
And it seems like they probably had real world kind of analogs that they can see in very recent history as like, oh, it's happening to us.
Yeah, they were probably a bit woker than the average American.
Like you see Keeney there kind of acknowledging that like what was done to the Native Americans was horrific and like seeing that like, oh, and now the descendants of the people who killed all of them are executing the same sort of thing here.
Like that's his attitude, which is at least acknowledging that what happened to the Native peoples of this continent was bad.
So that's interesting.
Like you can see some like early sort of intersectionality, solidarity, like that kind of thought starting to get woven through the labor movement.
Yeah, and eventually through blood, toil, and tears, the miners of West Virginia forced their employers to the table.
The result of their victory was the Central Competitive Field Agreement, a sort of Magna Carta between miners and mine operators in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.
It did not fix prices for coal, but it set a scale for wages and established some minimal conditions for miners.
The biggest win was that miners got an eight-hour workday, which is better than a however long until you collapse dead of a heart attack workday.
Now, the success of the 1897 strike drew huge amounts of people to the United Mine Workers banner.
By 1901, it had more than a quarter of a million members.
In a few short years, this very new union had become the largest union in the country.
But all was still not well.
And in the wake of the strike, mine operators did their best to claw back as much as they could from their employees.
One major tactic for doing this was to have the Czech weighmen, the guys who weighed the coal for the company, rig the company's scales to show lower weights than were actually being pulled through.
So they just keep finding ways to fuck with miners on the weights.
And so the miners would be like, no, we need to have union men there watching the weighing of the coal.
And the company said, no, you can't do that.
Yada yada yada.
And as the 1900s dawned, unions began agitating against this practice too, as described in this miner ballad.
Quote, union miners stand together.
Heed no operator's tail.
Keep your hand upon the dollar and your eye upon the scale.
Good songs from miners in this period.
Things were particularly bad in West Virginia, as is usual even to this day in West Virginia, where mine owners were increasingly shady and huge numbers of miners lived in unbelievably squalid camps.
In Cabin and Paint Creek, more than 35,000 non-union miners and their families lived in coal camps.
And life in these places was the very worst of coal mining.
Only company stores were available, and mine owners banned workers from traveling to nearby towns to purchase goods.
The situation grew increasingly desperate, and many within the camps began to look to the union as their only hope for a better life.
In April of 1912, the non-union miners in Paint Creek, who announced their desire to form a union and submitted a list of demands that included union recognition, the right to free speech and peaceable assembly.
This is something they were demanding from their companies, which denied it to them.
Which you may recognize as an inherent human right, but not for coal miners.
Yeah, an end to the blacklisting of union men, an end to mandatory company stores, and an end to cribbing.
They also demanded that mine owners establish 2,000 pounds as the official weight of a ton.
You may recognize that 2,000 pounds is in fact the weight of a ton, but they demanded the right to check the mine scales and to have union representatives watch this process.
Now, the mine operators rejected these demands, and the miners of Cabin Creek went on strike.
For a month, the strike went peacefully, with the UMW providing food and other necessities from striking miners.
So part of what a big union that covered multiple states like the UMW would do is you would pay dues, and those dues would not only go to paying for union officials and like, you know, essentially lobbying, but when a strike happened, it would go to make sure that like people, strikers who weren't working didn't starve to death so that you could actually strike long enough to get what you wanted.
This is kind of the whole point of a union, really.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, when it became clear to the companies, the people who owned the mines that these workers were striking from, that this was not going to end quickly, the coal companies decided to bring in the big guns, which were, again, literal guns.
And in this case, they were wielded by the men from the Baldwin Phelps Detective Agency.
And Baldwin Feltz was essentially one of the era's equivalents to a group like Blackwater.
These guys were mercenaries, and a lot of them were, in fact, former soldiers with combat experience.
And they worked in the United States and cracked down on labor.
Now, the agency brought in 300 detectives to act as strikebreakers.
One contemporary journalist who interviewed a number of these men wrote, These guards were professional strikebreakers.
I'll try it on a dozen industrial battlefields and willing to shoot with or without provocation.
They immediately began a campaign of assault, intimidation, and terrorism.
And I'm going to quote next from a study by Hoyt and Wheeler, a labor historian with the University of Wyoming.
Quote, The first action of the mine guards was to evict miners and their families from company-owned houses.
Personal belongings were loaded on to trains, transported off company property, and dumped beside the railroad tracks.
Miners and their families took up residence in tent colonies established by the United Mine Workers Union.
At this juncture, Mary Mother Jones, an aged but vigorous and profane labor agitator, was brought into the fray by the union.
Mother Jones was a veteran combatant in the labor wars, in which the United Mine Workers Union became involved.
She's perhaps the most colorful character of this era of American labor history.
At a speech on the steps of the state capitol in Charleston, she told a large gathering of miners, arm yourselves, return home and kill every goddamned mine guard on the creeks.
Blow up the mines and drive the damned scabs out of the valleys.
Man, this is like Shadowrun shit, except it's not the future.
It definitely happened.
It's like this already happened.
It's insane.
Well, one of the things you realize when you read about labor history is that a lot of the great cyberpunk, including Shadowrun, the guys who like wrote that stuff starting in the late 1980s, early 90s, knew a lot of this history and were explicitly being like, we see this coming back again.
Because we're paying attention to the news, like the Reagan era, the chiseling away of workers' rights, like the things that were gained by the fighting in this era.
They were just kind of predicting that as this stuff is chiseled away, these fights are going to start up again.
Only people will have move-by-wire systems installed in their reflexes and fancy machine guns and the internet.
Yeah.
But yes, you're right.
This is very cyberpunk and would make like an adapted setting like this would make a pretty fucking cool Shadowrun campaign.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
So the union provided these striking miners with the tools to do just what Mother Jones suggested.
Militia Sent to Strike Zone00:07:48
Because unions, by the way, unions are considered kind of boring today.
They were not in these days.
So the UMW smuggled in six machine guns, a thousand rifles, and 50,000 rounds of ammunition just to start.
And this seems like a lot of weaponry, but all it really did was even the scales because the coal operators had also purchased huge amounts of weaponry for their guards, the Baldwin Feltzmen.
Both sides loaded up with weapons and began to advance on one another.
Now, the governor of West Virginia at the time was a fellow named Richard Glasscock, and it was within his power to stop the mine operators from hiring mercenaries and deploying crooked, heavily armed cops to break the strike.
The fact that he refused to do so was noted by Mother Jones.
In her public speeches, she refused to refer to Glasscock by his name, calling him a Crystal Peter for modesty's sake.
That's so good.
That's really good, right?
Isn't that funny?
Oh, man.
Yeah, it's pretty, pretty great.
In August, she told him during a speech to miners, I warn this little governor that unless he rids Paint Creek and Cabinet Creek of these goddamn Baldwin Feltz mine guard thugs, there is going to be one hell of a lot of bloodletting in these hills.
Now, officially, the government of West Virginia was not super thrilled with any of this, and Governor Glasscock volunteered to mediate the strike, but the mine operators said no.
Union miners responded by posting up on the mountainsides of the valley and sniping at mine guards, killing a number of them.
So we are like, yeah.
And remember, like mine guards had been shooting and abducting and beating and murdering people prior to this, too.
Like this is a cycle of violence here.
Now, so yeah, the miners start sniping from the mountainsides and killing mine guards.
So the operators of the mines respond by building fortresses to protect their guards and to protect the scabs who are working the mines.
So because the mine companies had built fortresses, there's nothing for the miners to do but to launch an assault at these fortresses.
And they start at a place called Mucklow on Paint Creek.
And a massive battle results.
More than 100,000 shots were fired and 16 people were killed over the course of multiple days.
I've got to picture these fortresses.
Like, what are they building?
You know, I'm imagining mostly wooden ramparts and the like.
A lot of cases, if you look at like the forts, they would just like take huge stacks of what were firewood and they would place like cannons within them.
Like, which by the way, like is better than nothing.
If you have, if your only cover is a wood pile, wood will stop a lot of rounds if it's thick enough.
But also, shards of wood get kicked up.
This is why sandbags are ideal.
If you are a modern day striker and you want to build a decent fortification to stop, say, the kind of rifles that police have access to, a sandbag is going to have less wood shrapnel than a pile of wood, just as a heads up.
This is all good information.
Important info for, I don't know, let's say three weeks from now.
So more skirmishes followed the Battle of Mucklow, culminating in a massive assault by 6,000 armed Union miners on September 1st, 1912.
These are armies.
Like, these are literal armies of people.
Like, wars have been thought, like, most medieval wars involved less human beings armed and fighting than are taking, like, fighting in just West Virginia.
It's fucking crazy.
Yeah.
So the army assembled at the mouths of Paint and Cabin Creek, and it sent a message to the mine operators.
If they continued to use strike breakers, the miners would murder every single mine guard and destroy all company infrastructure in the area.
And of course, the bosses refused to back down.
They just hired more armed guards and prepared to fight.
The whole situation might have ended in a massive bloodbath if the governor hadn't declared martial law and activated the state militia to pull both sides apart from one another.
Now, of course, this militia was made up primarily of upper-middle-class gentry of West Virginia.
These were conservative men and they had an instinctive hatred of low-income immigrant laborers.
And the strike was broken up and the militia deactivated.
Many of them stayed on as mine guards for the coal companies, which provided them with enough security to reopen the mines with more scabs.
And of course, the miners grabbed their guns and started shooting again, and then the whole situation started over that November.
Martial law was declared a second time, and the mine guards basically just threw on official government uniforms and then cracked out on miners with the approval of the state.
Union men who were arrested during this period were tried by military tribunals under military law, and many were sentenced to long prison terms.
This was often illegal, as the courts were happy to sentence miners for crimes committed well before the actual period of martial law.
The crackdown was eventually successful, and by January, the strike had been broken.
But it started up again in February, leading to a third declaration of martial law.
So this is not going super well for anybody, really.
Yeah.
This is a civil war I could get behind.
Absolutely.
Definitely a better civil war than the last one.
I mean, as in all civil war, well, not all civil wars.
As in most civil wars, one side is objectively shitty here.
Yeah.
But yeah, so by this point, the chief mine operator, a guy named Quinn Morton, was fed up with all of this back and forth.
So his company paid for a special armored train, which they filled with Kanawha sheriff's deputies and mine guards and called the Bull Moose Special.
So they drove this armored train filled with armed men through the Paint Creek miners' camp, and their official purpose was to serve a warrant to a guy named John Doe for inciting a riot.
Wow.
I'm going to read Professor Hoyt Wheeler's recitation of what happened next.
As the train passed through Holly Grove, a miners' tent colony, Morton and his mine guards sprayed rifle and machine gun fire into the colony.
Morton was reported to have said, We gave them hell and had a lot of fun.
Let's go back and give them another round.
Why?
At least one person was killed and a number were wounded.
We'll never get an accurate count of what happened.
But yeah, now we've got armored vehicles charging into an encampment and stuff.
Like, yeah.
The miners retaliated by launching a mass assault on a corporate encampment.
A multi-hour gun battle left another 16 people, most of them mine guards, dead.
With the guards in flight, miners dynamited critical infrastructure and successfully turned back a train loaded with scabs sent by the bosses to take their jobs.
In response, Governor Glasscock sent the militia in.
Now, in March, a new governor took office, Dr. Henry Hatfield of the famous Hatfield family.
You know, the Hatfields and McCoy's, the feuding families.
Yeah, you're going to hear a lot about Hatfields this episode.
So Dr. Henry Hatfield was more sympathetic to the strikers, and he visited the strike area with his medical equipment to provide aid as one of his first official acts in office.
When he arrived, he found Mother Jones locked in a local jail.
She'd been convicted of rioting by a military tribunal and sentenced to 20 years in prison, and she was very clearly near death.
Her temperature was 104 degrees, and Dr. Hatfield immediately ascertained that she'd been left without any medical care in her cell.
He ordered her removed to the Capitol and provided with medical attention.
Dr. Hatfield, the new governor, spent two days at the front talking to miners and providing them with medical assistance.
The mine operators complained that he was toadying to these men, and they sent a delegation to complain.
One of these corporate representatives told the governor to his face that it was unwise for him to enter the strike zone.
Dr. Hatfield responded by punching this man repeatedly in his face and knocking him to the ground.
Oh my God.
Solid governoring there.
Governor Punches Corporate Rep00:03:50
Like, yeah.
The idea of repeated punches to a face before someone gets knocked down is pretty funny to me.
It is.
It is.
And Robert, you know what won't punch you in the face.
You know what won't repeatedly punch...
Well, actually, you want them to punch this kind of person into the face.
I...
Where are you going there, buddy?
Buy some products.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Union Makes Us Strong00:15:52
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out a Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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So Governor Hatfield punches a guy out.
Then he orders the mine operators to settle with the miners in the next few days.
And he threatens that if they don't come to a settlement, then he'll settle the strike for them.
The mine operators failed to do this, possibly in an attempt to call the governor's bluff.
But Dr. Henry Hatfield was not a bluffing man.
He immediately rescinded the sentences of all the men convicted under military courts.
Then he mandated that the striking union men should get the majority of the things that they'd asked for.
And he sounds pretty awesome, and he was definitely better than Governor Glasscock, but we're going to talk about some shitty things that Dr. Hatfield did as governor in this.
But he was, you know, broadly pro-union, at least compared to his predecessor.
So that's good.
So, yeah, now, in his last year of office, Governor Glasscock had appointed a commission to investigate the causes of the strike, and they kind of finished their work after the strike was ended by the next Governor Hatfield.
And not surprisingly, the men that Governor Glasscock had picked to figure out the cause of the strike, they did a bunch of research and shockingly found that actually wages in Paint Creek were very fair, and there was no good reason for the miners to have gone on strike.
They noted that, quote, as to the main causes of the trouble, this arises, in our judgment, from the efforts of the United Mine Workers to organize the union and the whole chain of events alongside said creeks.
The desire to make the present strike region the place for the insertion of a thin edge of unionism with the ultimate aim of organizing the whole state.
So they decided that, like, yeah, this state commission comes to the conclusion that it's all the union's fault that things got so bad.
Now, thankfully, the United States Senate also gets involved and decides to investigate the strike.
And, you know, they come to a bit more fairer conclusions than the state of West Virginia's handpicked men.
They actually call the former governor Glasscock to testify, and he tells them under oath his stance changes a bit.
And he admits that the trouble had commenced after the operators on Paint Creek had declined to enter into a new agreement with the striking miners.
Yeah.
And during his testimony in front of the Senate, one of the senators questioning him asks Governor Glasscock, it seems to be that the mind guards were the disturbing element among which this trouble arose.
And Governor Glasscock responded, that was my impression, Senator.
Yes, sir.
So that's interesting.
Yeah.
Now, in the end, the Senate committee concluded the basic cause is the private ownership of great public necessities, such as coal.
This coupled with human greed incident to such ownership has brought about the deplorable and un-American conditions in the West Virginia coal fields.
Now, this is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.
One of them is that we have coal is not so much a great public necessity these days.
But you might call in the middle, particularly, of a gigantic pandemic, in which case people aren't able to shop at the wide variety of stores that they normally get their necessities from.
Might call a service that ships things to people's door nationwide and provides an avenue for small and medium and even large businesses to get their products into the hands of Americans who need them during these times.
You might call such a business a great public necessity.
And you might say that the rampaging infections in Amazon workhouses and their illegal crackdowns on union labor, you might call that an example of human greed incident to the ownership of such great public necessities, bringing about deplorable non-American conditions.
You might say that.
I will.
I'll say it right now.
Actually, I can't remember all the words, but just imagine me saying it.
Yeah, I think we can all get that into our head.
So the coal companies lost this battle, but they were not about to give up on their greater war against their own laborers.
As Robert Shogun writes in the Battle for Blair Mountain, quote, Coal Age, the journal of the coal operators, it's like a magazine for coal company men, declared that the so-called strike on Cabin and Paint Creeks was in reality an armed insurrection formulated by agitators hired by the union and afterwards reinforced by socialists.
That's how they, you can, that's how they wanted that to be pronounced.
I'm canceling my subscription to Coal Age right now.
Oh, now don't, don't, don't be a reactionary.
Coal Age has a lot of good, like, how else are you going to learn who the best strike breakers are?
Something we all need.
This podcast is heavily supported by Coal Age.
Please keep your subscriptions active, people.
So the coal operators now saw the miners in the union not simply as economic adversaries, but as a diabolical force, not merely seeking unionization but domination of the West Virginia coal industry and of the United States.
Mine operators in Mingo County were particularly worried about the Cabin and Paint Creek strike.
Their non-union workforce was perpetually restive, and it was not exactly a secret that UMW representatives had started reaching out to these men.
The operators in Mingo County condemned the union as unlawful per se, revolutionary in character, and a menace to the free institutions of the country.
For their part, the union responded to victory by expanding their ambitions.
In 1912, the United Mine Workers Union amended their constitution, adding a clause that miners were entitled to the full social value of their product.
What does that mean?
What do you think that would mean?
The full social saying that workers are entitled to the full social value of their product.
It sounds like they should be owning the means of production.
That might be a way to interpret that, Spencer.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, basically, in the way, you know, because we have like minutes of the actual debates, because like there were debates even within the union, like they weren't all of one mind.
And kind of, yeah, one of the ways you'll hear this said is that like just, and this is kind of like the simplest way to state it, if you work an hour, what you get back should be worth an hour of your life.
And I think a lot of people would argue that an hour of their life is worth more than $7 or even $15.
Another way to look at this is that whatever work you do, the profit that that work generates, you are entitled to.
Not the bosses, not the shareholders, not the corporate executives who drive armored trains through mining encampments and fire machine guns at striking laborers.
Yeah.
So miners in the wake of this start to talk about writing capitalists out of the social contract, essentially.
And as you might imagine, these capitalists are not super happy with this.
They begin to gear up for the next round of combat.
But in the meantime, the union men celebrated, not just in West Virginia, but all around the country.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the victory in West Virginia was the fact that black and white coal miners had largely collaborated in order to achieve victory.
Now, it would be too much to say that the white miners considered black miners their equals.
Mining camps were still very much segregated.
And it is fair to say that almost everyone in this story, even the heroes, were pretty racist by modern standards.
Sure.
But they were at least able to overcome that in a large degree to kind of work together to make the situation better for everybody.
And this was part of a start of kind of like the birth of, yeah, this kind of understanding, you know, that we're, we all have, are in this fight together to improve standards for working people.
Did they like try and divide?
Like, did the bosses try and divide people along racial lines or anything?
Yes.
And in many cases, and in many strikes around the country, they were very successful in this.
They weren't successful in this particular strike, which is something that makes it noteworthy because this often worked.
Often, bosses would be successful in basically getting white laborers to throw black laborers under the bus to get better terms.
So, like, and that was a way to be like, what?
You want us to say that everybody gets this minimum pay, even black people?
Like, then we're saying they're equal to you.
So, like, that definitely happened a number of times, but it didn't work at this strike.
That's just so, like, I can just see that, but it's like, oh, so what you're saying is we got to accept that black people deserve the same stuff as we do.
That is one bridge too far, my good man.
Like, it's just so.
Yeah, and it's, it's this, you know, there's different, it's very different because they're like, we're kind of eliminating the racism front.
But in the modern day, you'll hear people talk about like, well, okay, basic income seems like a great idea, but what if X group, you know, what if like rich people, what if like whatever group gets it?
Like, that's not fair.
And like, part of the, like, obviously, like, one of the problems with that is that when you start saying stuff like, we need a basic income, we need free college, we need, um, uh, we need uh uh universal health care, and people start bringing like, what about this group?
What about that group?
Um, you know, what they're really saying is, I don't believe that this is an inherent right.
I think certain individual groups might deserve it, but I don't see it as an inherent right.
And I think one of the lessons of the labor movement is that this shit only works when you act when you really treat it like an inherent right and you reject attempts to divide people, even among groups that might make sense to you at the time.
Because in reality, if you're agreeing to that division at all, you are against the idea that people have a right to this sort of thing.
Yeah.
So, all of this, Spencer, particularly kind of the cross-racial solidarity that was evident in this strike, helped inspire one of America's few non-racist white guys at the time, a fellow named Ralph Chaplin.
And Ralph was a member of the International Workers of the World, or the IWW, the Wobblies, some people call them.
This is a group that's around today, and they're very far-left, you know, anti-capitalist workers union.
And Ralph Chaplin, inspired by the strike in West Virginia, wrote a song called Solidarity Forever.
And right after we get through some plugs, I'm going to close this out by playing that song.
But first, Spencer, you want to plug your pluggables?
Drop a peasone?
Yeah, man.
I am on Twitter at the Sixler, T-H-E-S-I-X, L-E-R.
I'm on everything else is at the Sixler.
Don't follow me on Twitter.
I don't tweet good stuff.
It's bad.
I have a show called HarmonQuest.
If you like it, you can watch it on VRV or YouTube or, you know, I don't know.
I'm sure it's downloadable illegally.
And if you like it, send Netflix an email and say, you guys got to buy this show.
You guys got to make more of this, Netflix.
You know what's up.
Send Netflix an email, find their CEO's mailing address, and send them letters written in blood.
Whatever works to get.
Yeah.
I'm telling people to, if you can get a goblin head, mail a goblin head to the door of Netflix.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Please continue committing the felonies that we urge in most episodes.
Yeah.
Or dumb.
You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com.
You can find us on Twitter at BastardsPod and also on Instagram at the same thing.
I have a podcast called The Women's War that might provide a little bit of a suggestion on how to rebuild society after the collapse that seems increasingly likely hit.
So check that out too.
And now I'm going to close us out by playing the song that I was just telling you about, Solidarity Forever, which was inspired by this West Virginia strike.
And this is a recording by the great American folk musician, Pete Seeger.
Here we go.
Solidarity forever.
Solidarity forever.
For the Union makes us strong.
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.
Solidarity forever.
For the union makes us strong.
It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade, dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid.
Now we stand outcast and starving amid the wonders we have made.
But the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever.
For the union makes us strong.
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn.
But without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn that the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever.
Solidarity forever.
For the union makes us strong.
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of atoms, magnified a thousand fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
For the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever.
For the union makes us strong.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
Shaping Our Future with AI00:01:53
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, woo, woo, woo.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.