The Battle For Blair Mountain

Correct and you or I will Not be here.... =)

Oh there you are!

Hi attilatheblond I had to step away for a few... Got a whole lot of wood work to do... How's Things???

Profit over people is correct, if you dont like it then keep complaining from the bottom

I was not complaining, just stating the obvious... Always a Pleasure to see you Prijedor... =)

Things are better. Getting tough enough to read the news again! LOL

Cool, well let me know when you can drop by msj and I will send you a PM with images of what I have been making for the last year and a half... I am very Stoked with my latest piece... =)

May actually have time to do that this week ! Looking forward to it.

Right On attliatheblond... I love that you can send pics in PM's over there... I may just send the images tonight if I find time... =)

Thanks dudley----interesting link, I'm checking into it now.

attilatheblond, exposed a Missouri connection in these comments about Blair Mountain. Mid-MO here.
Thanks for the post Wetdog!

More than that dudley. Remember the John Prine song, Muehlenberg County?

Poppa, won't you take me back down to Muehlenberg county?
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay?
I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking,
Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.

Peabody and their coal trains have been gone for 40 years from north central Missouri. But the destruction and pits are still there.

KB and I had a little discussion about the Berkely Pit/toxic lake in Butte MT, a place important in labor history too, and illustration of an industry gone wrong.

Perhaps taking this issue up in Butte might garner some backing? There are still plenty of families that know the true black heart of extraction companies and the value of holding dear that which keeps that knowledge alive in American culture.

cmc101---please write down your family history, before it is lost. We need to preserve the history of who we are, how we got here, what has gone before.

We can't know where we are going without knowing where we have been.

They want to enslave your body to work for them. But even worse, they want to steal your soul. They want to erase the memory of the pain, struggle and sacrifice of your forebearers----and make you a mindless robot to feed their greed.

I say, don't let that happen. Write down your history. Not on a computer where they can hit a key and delete your soul----get it on paper, get it on metal plaques and carved into stone monuments. That is why I think Blair Mountain should be a national park. So that you, and all the rest of us with similar stories of our ancestors won't have our souls stolen from us. We need to remember for all time, because the struggle that they fought for continues for all time.

I do have a hard copy a film ,three cd's I have to change my media every time some body upgrade then there divorce,disaster family secrets spite closet problems but i still got copies and you ought to here the treats it is like music

Good for you, you are a historian.

cmc101,

Please contact local library and/or historical society. Many libraries are working on heritage projects where they take oral history and any documents families care to share and digitizing them. It is a big effort to preserve history as close to the source as possible.

Some libraries, participating in such projects (here in MT, it is a state wide effort with help of the State Historical Library) to get things preserved before papers and photos crumble from oxidation and before no family members are left to tell the stories. It's important work and needs public participation to really get the history right. Sadly, budgets are being cut and no $$ to promote.

But call. Maybe your local library has a digital recorder and/or means of copying your history to archives. Somebody down the line will be most grateful to find your family's history. It will help put the lie to the official histories being published for the agenda of the corporations.

my cousin has a library copy

Thank you for reading and contributing Attilatheblond. I'm glad you think it is important too----it isn't just this generation that is fighting this fight---it has been going on a long time.

I feel like we not only owe it to ourselves and future generations not to fail, we owe it to our parents, grandparents and great grandparents not to fail.

I think that most people have no idea how hard past generations have fought and how much they sacrificed for the same things we are struggling for now.

I don't want to see those who gave so much forgotten or just dismissed as "frivolous".

I think this is every bit as much a battle for freedom against slavery and tyranny as D Day or Gettysburg. I think it is entirely fitting and proper that Blair Mountain should be made a national park. The story should be told, and not forgotten.

When I read ANYTHING in the news re the attacks on labor and organized labor in particular, my mind flashes back to an old photo from my mom's childhood. It was a long photo, kept rolled up in her little metal strong box, a sacred thing.

International Typographical Union picnic. Mom was probably 10-12 and in the front row with the other kids. Grandpa, a tall man, was in the back row. Grandma, a crippled lady with very limited mobility was not in the picture. Most likely, she was with the Ladies' Axillary, setting out fried chicken and pies. A sacred thing, the annual picnic. A time for sharing joys, fears, concerns, and history, with others who really understood, who really were your brothers and sisters in struggle if not in blood.

Odd thing about my grandpa's fever for active and strong unions, his dad was a newspaper publisher. Sure, he founded and publishes SMALL papers in small, newly formed communities, as the west was opened up to homesteaders and people with little but hope took Mr. Greeley's advice. My great granddad probably heard that advice at the table, when Mr. Greeley would visit a more established publisher, one who fancied himself a king maker and self appointed adviser to a tall, gaunt chap named Lincoln.

A long way from the salons of privilege and power, Grandpa grew up as part of a family that traveled the west, because 'every town needs a good newspaper for the democracy to work', He learned his letters sitting in a hand made high chair, well worn by the bottoms of 3 older brothers, playing with type in the print shop of a small, new, promising western town. Son of a New York newspaperman and Irish immigrant mother, he learned the trade from the bottom up and from a very early age. He saw land barons ride rough shod over homesteaders. He learned the smell of corrupt politicians. He stepped over bodies in the street, left from gunfights the previous night, to get to the railroad station to pick up the all important 'newspapers from back east' which he then delivered to his father and what few folks in town could afford the luxury of a paper that wasn't just local.

And he read. He could tell you mountains of things about any given community just from studying one issue of their local paper. But that was back when there were still some local, independent papers, back when I was young and we all knew to bring him a paper from anywhere we visited. Information, REAL information was important. And the people who gathered it, delivered it, were important. The workers in the communities who read it were important. Without information, people wouldn't pick good representatives and leaders. Without information, understanding, following history in the making, the workers would be victims of the Robber Barons, over and over and over again.

Without good jobs, people could not survive, maybe even prosper a little, enough to get their kids moving in a direction where they might survive a little easier, prosper a little more, offer a little better start to their kids..

Unions were important to my granddad, a man who bore long witness to a lot of abuse of the working people by a class that did not 'work' save effort spent plotting more ways to exploit those of lesser resource, lesser advantage.

He never owned much, a small farm outside St. Joe. He worked that and worked at the local paper, where he could do any job. He worked after 'retirement' because he could fill in for anyone who was on vacation or taken ill. And he had a brass plated union membership card, cause he couldn't afford gold, but knew that card's worth and wanted it to at least represent the gold it was.

The 'boys at the paper' all took deep cuts in the hours they worked during the Great Depression. They did that so no one (or more) would be laid off completely. They were Union, They were Brothers. They all knew the struggles and the value of working together, getting a bit less per man perhaps, but assuring the survival of all.

Yeah, a sacred thing, that old photo of those faces. A reminder of shared effort, sometimes shared sacrifice, always shared hope and work.

History is something we seem to have lost sight of. The Hoarder Class knows what my granddad and his dad knew: Information and Brotherhood was how the democracy would work.

Anyone who doubts for one second the power of the written word needs to read this post!

Thank you.

BTW----where near St. Joe? I grew up in that area.

Near St Joe means just barely out of town (St Joe, MO) on the east, back then. Probably a housing tract now LOL.

edited to add: But it was the Oklahoma Territories & points west that he grew up in.

I grew up in Macon, MO----just down highway 36 east.

Interesting! Thanks

This type of brotherhood pride has no resistance we may have lost our way but recalling the why there is a strong underground of real labor willing to come forth in the time of need
I am confident that Wisconsin has a lot of wind behind their people

I have relatives that was drop in the desert and told to walk in the 1800s

Still happening in 2011

Yes I know the lawlessness is supported by indifference and our elite church members
that don't want to pay their rent for living on earth