abrickonjupiter:

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses:

afloweroutofstone:

socialistexan:

Europeans: “I don’t understand you Americans, if your working conditions, wages, and social safety net are so bad, why do you not simply unionize or strike?”

Americans:

Also there’s literally so many restrictions on unions and strikes at this point that striking on any significant scale is nearly de facto illegal

WHY HAVE I NEVER HEARD ABOUT THE LUDLOW MASSACRE, WHY WASN’T I TAUGHT THIS IN CLASS

Ya’ll literally forgot The Battle of Blair Mountain and the eastern strikes that happened before it, tho. It’s a huge part of Union history in which the US military got involved and possibly the origin of the word redneck (for the red scarves on the unionists’ necks, though a good chunk of the exploited miners were not white or Scotch-Irish: see the movie Matewan with James Earl Jones and Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina) and nobody fucking remembers it, hence I literally got a fucking tattoo of one of the miners on my arm.

Short version: Coal companies bought land out from beneath citizens’ feet and forced them to live on that very land subsisting on company credits to buy things from company stores on homes or in literal camps that belonged to the companies. They hired a Pinkerton-like folks called the Baldwin-Felts to muscle them around. This included a tactic called the Bull Moose Special, wherein they’d load a gatling gun onto a moving train and opened fire as they passed. Mother Jones, the namesake of the leftist periodical ya’ll might’ve heard about, was a major figure who showed up to help the miners protest. It all pretty much ended with the fights escalating into a small war, and the military intervening by sending federal troops. This all happened in Mingo and Logan Counties, WV, btw, though the preceding coal conflicts like Paint Creek-Cabin Creek happened in PA and the coal part of Appalachia.

And no one fucking tells you about this shit, but that’s none of my goddamn business.