Infamies of Capitalism: Blair Mountain
People like to talk about the evils of communism while neglecting all the atrocities committed in the name of capitalism. In Libya, some pilots flew their jets to neutral territory rather than strafe and bomb their fellow countrymen. President Warren Harding placed the same choice upon US pilots when he ordered troops to suppress the unionization of coal mines in West Virginia.
By August 29, battle was fully joined. Chafin’s men, though outnumbered, had the advantage of higher positions and better weaponry. Private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners. A combination of gas and explosive bombs left over from the fighting in World War I were dropped in several locations near the towns of Jeffery, Sharples and Blair. At least one did not explode and was recovered by the miners; it was used months later to great effect during treason and murder trials following the battle. On orders from the famous General Billy Mitchell, Army bombers from Maryland were also used for aerial surveillance, a rare example of Air Power being used by the federal government against US citizens. One Martin bomber crashed on the return flight, killing the three members of the crew. Sporadic gun battles continued for a week, with the miners at one time nearly breaking through to the town of Logan and their target destinations, the non-unionized counties to the south, Logan and Mingo. Up to 30 deaths were reported by Chafin’s side and 50-100 on the union miners side, with many hundreds more injured. By September 2, federal troops had arrived. Realizing he would lose a lot of good miners if the battle continued with the military, union leader Bill Blizzard passed the word for the miners to start heading home the following day. Miners fearing jail and confiscation of their guns found clever ways to hide rifles and hand guns in the woods before leaving Logan County. Collectors and researchers to this day are still finding weapons and ammunition embedded in old trees and in rock crevices. Thousands of spent and live cartridges have made it into private collections.
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Statement of one of our dear leaders of free-enterprise and a non-union workplace:
“They don’t suffer; they can’t even speak English.”
– George Baer, president of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, during the United Mine Workers
of America strike in 1902. The strikers were 150,000 mostly Catholic* Slavic-born miners.
NB Henry: Both Roman and Greek Catholics.
You’re saying this is comparable to the Gulags? I think such an idea is outrageous. It’s also unclear what this has to do with “capitalism”.
Read about the conditions workers in the mines and their families endured, and then compare these to the gulags. Are they identical? No. Are they both grievous offenses against the dignity of human beings? Yes. And the abuse of workers was justified under the banner of communism, and the attempts of the workers to unionize in defense of their rights was denounced as communism.
The story about the hidden guns and ammo reminds me of a story from the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. When Sandanista guerrillas entered a remote village, they were met by an old man who presented them with a handful of rusty cartridges. He had buried them in the 1930′s after the collapse of Sandino’s rebellion, and had been patiently saving them for Sandino and his men to come back and claim them.
Wow. I did not know this story.Sad & not surprising.
I think an important distinction can be made. Was this a sin by capitalists, or a crime of capitalism? Capitalism is an economic system. Capitalists are people, subject to the fallen nature that all people have. The state has a monopoly on the use of force. The companies that used force to impose their will likely broke the law. The government was remiss in enforcing the law. I see it as a failure of people, not of a system. Had people done their part, the system would have worked. There is nothing about capitalism that exludes collective bargaining by unions.
Regarding whether the failings of communism are a failing of the system or the people, I’d say it’s both. The system demands compliance and people enforce that compliance. There is a failure of both. The Gulag was a natural outcome of both communism and our fallen nature, unlike Blair Mountain which was an outcome of our fallen nature, and a notable aberration from normal capitalism.