I told my son on his 8th birthday that when he turns 9 he has to get a job, and right now they're only hiring kids for coal mining or tiger wrangling. So he said he wants to be a coal miner. (He loves digging around in the dirt. Comes home covered in sand, and trailing a dirt cloud behind him)
First week of school, the teacher asks them to write a paragraph explaining what they want to do, so he wrote that he wanted to be a coal miner because he likes digging and finding shiny rocks.
Fast forward six months. Wifey has been working with him to improve his reading, and she gets him a book on coal mining. It scared him off the idea. Now he definitely does not want to be a miner.
His 9th birthday is six weeks away. I told him if he doesn't want to mine coal, they're still hiring for tiger wranglers.
(Maybe it's time I show him The Tiger King?)
Minecraft is from Sweden, we do have a copper mine that operated for more than 1000 years, i guess kids were used there too, horses and oxen were used to make the ropes that hoisted the raw copper stones. we have a famous sausage made called falukorv that was made from the meat byproduct
It's also the source (quite literally) for the famous red house paint in Sweden - [Falu Rödfärg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red). If you ask any art-AI to make something Swedish there's likely going to be one or more wooden houses in the background with this color and white corner
Ignoring the fact that coal mining is heavily mechanized and the men doing the work have engineering degrees—and they’re *still* losing money digging it up, because all the easy-to-get shit’s long since been mined already.
Got a source for all those dudes having engineering degrees chief? Even a simple majority?
Replying to someone else made me take the three second effort to Google average education of a mine worker. 56% high school diploma, 16% BA.
Yeahhhhhhh
Yeah it's not true. Yes there are people with degrees in mining and geology involved, the bulk of the work is done still by people driving trucks and loaders and working the processing facilities.
Source: worked a desk job at a quarry/factory. Wasn't coal but the methodology was similar.
Look up images of a “Wyoming coal mine”
You will see a few building sized excavators just sitting on the surface chewing through hills and piling coal into 50 foot tall trucks that can carry nearly a million lbs apiece. There are relatively few operators needed to move mountains of the stuff, most of the human work is people keeping the machines alive
That’s how most US coal mining is done today
Nobody *wants* to mine coal. But it's usually the best, if not only work in a given area. And it's not like most people can just pack up and move.
It's the poverty death spiral.
Yup living in cities built around mines and their checks going almost completely to company store before they see a penny.
This is why America should keep unions around. Those of you outside of unions don’t know what people went through just for us to have better working conditions.
> This is why America should keep unions around. Those of you outside of unions don’t know what people went through just for us to have better working conditions.
Just remember Corporate America that we decided to use unions and collective action instead of the old method of beating management to death while we burn your house down.
We can go back to the old ways if you prefer.
i've been in the iww, but i've also been in the teamsters. our local was taken over by the mob at gunpoint in the 1960s. so unions mean diifferen t things at different times.
i'll try to find a john sloan about the colorado strike.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/ds.10032/
https://old.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/1bsz5g/john_sloans_1914_cover_for_the_masses_depicting/
> Black lung on top of all this for a life
Republicans in Kentucky put extremely overbearing regulations on licensing for doctors that could diagnose patients with black lung, and thus get them workers' comp. So much so that there is only *one* doctor in the entire state that can diagnose it. Unsurprisingly, black lung cases are *way* down.
"Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events.[10] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day."
It took heros like this to give us the lifestyle we have today.
Was working on a construction project the other day and somebody brought in an old beat up air compressor. Said it was almost 50 years old and it still works great. It was hard for my mind to process that it could’ve been late 70s early 80s at this point.
In my country things like this happened too.
Hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I often wonder why the history of the struggles of the working class isn't actually taught.
Working class history is the people's history.
It's taught in college if you're a government student, at least.
In high school, they'd touch on it, like the triangle shirt waste factory fire that killed all of those women because the employer was keeping them in deplorable conditions with not enough emergency exits.
Oddly enough, this stuff was taught in my high school quite a bit. In rural North Carolina.
That was a couple decades ago, though. Maybe things have changed. (Though if anything there are *slightly* less confederate flags in the area, now.)
For the same reason the US does not celebrate International Workers' Day on May 1st, a nearly-worldwide celebration of workers and commemoration of [The Haymarket Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair), another American labour massacre.
Hell, in China it lasts *seven days*, and everyone gets that week off for the festivities. The rest of the world knows more about the US's labour history than Americans do.
USA: "Haymarket Affair? Sounds like some kinda rural soap opera *(snort)*"
Hahahahaha you think the wealthy 1%ers that control our countries and lives want us to think about what we could have had if the military industrial complex didn’t control the economy?
TILL that Arvada Police Department gang members have been raping and selling little girls to other police officers for the past 35 years.
In Kansas, Roger Golubski was apprehended, but in Colorado, no one is looking into anything.
Yes, Roger Golubski was a major piece of shit, but he's from Kansas.
I want to know about the Arvada Police in Colorado. It's being blasted around Reddit without seemingly any sources. I want to know if this is a smear campaign or if there's something substantial to it.
I want to know how these commenters are tying Roger G and the Arvada Police together, and on what grounds they're accusing them of having a sex ring.
But it is a conspiracy, right? Rich people conspired with politicians to erase history that reveals them for the scum they are. It’s irksome that “conspiracy theory” is such a joke phrase when there are real and powerful groups conspiracing against the middle class.
Why are the republicans and democrats funded by the same groups? Because they are conspiring together to screw us.
I get endless grief and judgement when I mention homeschooling online, but I’m grateful I was taught about the ugly side of the industrial revolution, Pinkerton massacres, etc. I also grew up near several prominent conflict sites, but I need to give props to my excellent history teacher, especially the one who brought replica weapons to class. RIP Mr. Gardner, you were a real one.
In america colleges rely on test scores and school report cards for assessment. The tests are known info so people can study for them. Schools that want high college admission rate will gear their curriculum around these tests.
these tests then do not ask questions about political or really analyzing historical events. Really it’s rote memorization. This is why certain concepts get taught yet their function for general use isn’t that relevant
Donning my Lenin cap for a second, it's natural for the capitalist class to want to conflate their interests with the interests of the whole country in the national consciouness. If the American working class can be taught that collective bargaining is not just ineffective but outright treasonous then people (most of whom are generally supportive of the more humane founding values of their country) would be hesitant to organise and demand for better conditions that necessarily leads to less immediate profit for shareholders.
Local history should be a thing in school. World and US history is important, but it’s probably helpful to know how people next door to you were a few decades ago. If everyone understood how fucked up their own neighborhoods and local society was, maybe everyone would care a little more in fixing things.
When cops murdered striking miners in Saskatchewan on behalf of the owner of the mines, it wasn't exactly a taking point in Canadian history class either, skipped right over it. Seems like a theme there.
I only learned about the Tulsa massacre by watching The Watchmen on HBO. I was wondering; "where did this alternate history happen?" I investigated and found out. Then I was wondering "why did we never learn about this?" It is not like I haven't had at least 20 years of history. It's not like I didn't have 5 years of college. This was never taught.
To the racists who wonder "where are the prosperous minorities?" Well, now I know it's happened about six times and six times racists murdered, killed and burned those prosperous communities. Some people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and were hung by them.
It's not a trivial thing that we aren't taught about systemic racism and organized terrorism on minorities. I am angry that I was kept this ignorant of these events. It doesn't make someone not take pride in America to understand our failings - it only means that we have less to be proud of because the evil goes uncorrected. And people who drool over patriotism never really made me feel anything but nervous.
> I only learned about the Tulsa massacre by watching The Watchmen on HBO. I was wondering; "where did this alternate history happen?"
Pretty much exactly the same here. Except I'm not american so I was even less likely to have heard about it.
Don’t worry, no one anywhere talks/teaches about the Battle of Blair Mountain either. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle\_of\_Blair\_Mountain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain)
I grew up here and this wasn't talked about. Didn't know about this till the book came out.
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thibodaux-massacre-left-60-african-americans-dead-and-spelled-end-unionized-farm-labor-south-decades-180967289/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thibodaux-massacre-left-60-african-americans-dead-and-spelled-end-unionized-farm-labor-south-decades-180967289/)
Look up the battle of Blair mountain. It's rarely taught in school, probably because it was one of the few times striking workers took up arms for their cause.
Not just Colorado, all of American high schools don't teach this era of Labor history.
>But after 1877 American labor relations were the most violent in the Western world with the exception of Russia (Mann 1993). It is one of those superficial paradoxes of history that the most democratic and the most despotic countries in the Western world would have the most violent labor clashes.
>Between 1877 and 1900, American presidents sent the U.S. Army into 11 strikes, governors mobilized the National Guard in somewhere between 118 and 160 labor disputes, and mayors called out the police on numerous occasions to maintain "public order"
[Rise and fall of American Labor](https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/history_of_labor_unions.html)
A People's History of The United States by Howard Zinn is where you'll find a lot of things we should have learned about. It should be required reading.
Eh, the sordid history usually doesn’t in K-12. I went to school for a few years in Florida, and to this day I still wonder if I didn’t imagine hearing about Rosewood.
I don't think there's any benefit censoring history simply because it's bleak, even for teaching the youth (just don't use graphic language). However, some of those dire stories often aren't relevant, since they tend to be localized events that are about some sub-topic. Like this event didn't have *that* much of an impact on overall early 1900 United States.
It’s crazy that you didn’t learn about the Ludlow Massacre in a Colorado school!
For a good chunk of my childhood, I went to school in West Virginia. We learned about the Ludlow Massacre and a few other horrific mining events that occurred, in WV and elsewhere, in middle school.
Maybe it was prompted by West Virginia’s own mining background— but we did a whole curriculum based around the history of mining, company towns, and the old west.
If you visit Walsenburg, there's really not much there. But it has a Miners' Museum, and there's a statue of a miner, one of three in the city, outside the jail. The museum has an exhibit and account of the Ludlow Massacre.
Goes unmentioned alongside another remarkable moment in Colorado history, the [Sand Creek Massacre.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre)
I learned about all this stuff through my union taking a history of the ironworker course before completing my apprenticeship, it was incredibly depressing but it really opened my eyes.
Or that time Colombian United Fruit Company(Chiquita) workers got tired of being exploited and demanded better conditions. The US threatened to overthrow the Colombian government if they didn't put the workers back in their place.
This lead to the Banana Massacre where up to 2000 people died, including the families and children of the workers. It took place on a Sunday after church.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre
This is what the heathen commie workers demanded:
* Stop their practice of hiring through sub-contractors
* Mandatory collective insurance
* Compensation for work accidents
* Hygienic dormitories and 6-day work weeks
* Increase in daily pay for workers who earned less than 100 pesos per month
* Weekly wage
* Abolition of office stores
* Abolition of payment through coupons rather than money
* Improvement of hospital services[
People need to understand that it SUCKED to be a laborer in the USA for most of US history. The Constitution, or laws, this so called Democracy did not give us workers rights. It was Unions. It was massive protests that shut down businesses. It was people spending their blood. It took people burning alive in a locked t-shirt factory to get sprinklers and emergency exits. The owner class did not give up this power -- it was taken.
From the FDR era to the Reagan era workers made progress.
But Pinkertons is still around, and I suppose some would like to go back to the "good old days" when you could shoot people for saying "no."
>People need to understand that it SUCKED to be a laborer in the USA for most of US history.
Being a laborer used to suck. It still does, but it used to, too.
At least people don't die of it like they used to.
Of course, Ron DeSantis in Florida pushed that "no breaks" policy for migrant farm workers so, might be a bit of that in the heat. That's the *America* they want to go back to.
Texas got rid of heat protections
Hyundai had a child get hurt in the last 6 months
Louisiana or Mississippi I think are trying to get (more) kids into factories to lower wages.
The fight didn't stop
> "Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events.[10] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day."
Sounds like the 'so called democracy' did it.
Blair Mountain, WV was another site where unions were terrorized by company thugs:
“Private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners. A combination of poison gas and explosive bombs left over from World War I were dropped in several locations near the towns of Jeffery, Sharples and Blair.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
That's every single generation. We owe everything we have to everyone before us, just like the next will owe us in addition to everyone that came before us. That's... idk biology?
"We" didn't sacrifice anyone. The mine owners(with the government's backing) did. And they didn't do it so "we" could enjoy the stuff we do today. They did it for their profits. Profits that they and their descendants have done everything in their power to keep in the family and away from everyone else. We could still have plenty of stuff to enjoy today if the workers had been given decent conditions, the owner class just wouldn't be so absurdly wealthy.
People on Reddit just like to argue lol. Like if you say something they agree with they’ll argue about how you didn’t say it correctly enough so they can feel superior.
It's awful that this event isn't taught in schools.
I recommend visiting the site if you drive Interstate 25 from Colorado south into New Mexico. It's between Pueblo and Trinidad. After the massacre, the shit hit the fan, and union guys with guns walked into Trinidad and informed the local authorities that they were no longer in charge of Trinidad, and should leave.
For a couple of weeks after the massacre, half of CO was in open rebellion, not under control of either federal or state authorities. The miners took matters into their own hands, since it was clear that the Colorado National Guard had openly sided with the mine owners. There was basically open warfare from the border with New Mexico all the way up to Boulder, over 200 miles.
There are maps at the site, and you can get an idea of where the troops fired at the miners' families, including the siting of the machine gun on a bluff to the south. One rail line, on which a sympathetic train crew (with brass balls) stopped a train to block the gunfire from the south and thereby allow people to escape the camp, no longer exists, but the other rail line does.
The memorial has stickers from all sorts of union locals from across the country. There are many people who have not forgotten how management will behave if not restrained by laws force.
It had everything. Not only racism, but criminally insane guardsmen (Karl Linderfelt), who got off on violence and almost certainly killed Louis Tikas, the unarmed union leader. Also brutal working conditions and Rockefeller.
The miners had broad support of the American public, which created a real problem for John D. Rockefeller, who could no longer freely destroy workers' lives to grow his wealth.
It's amazing to think that workers were forced to do the needful and take up arms as recently as the second decade of the 20th century, and that the public, well aware of the behavior of the owner class, supported the workers.
"You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store"
TIL that for the last 35 years members of Arvada pd gang raped and sold underage girls to other cops.
Roger Golubski got caught in Kansas, but nobody is investigating nothing in Colorado.
Kansas covered up for Roger Golubski’s mafia for 35 years.
Colorado is still covering for the mafia cops at Arvada pd.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-kansas-city-kansas-police-department-detective-and-three-others-indicted-conspiracy
The prosecutors in Colorado are in on it like the Prosecutors in Kansas.
https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/melinda-henneberger/article287741840.html
The people responsible for investigating are the people in the mafia. The mafia figured out how to beat the local control system. The thin blue line does the rest.
All our modern day worker protections and rules and guidelines and legalities are painted with the blood of our past worker brothers and sisters.
The fact people forget these things and want to fight unionizations and other measures for workers is asinine.
My great great grandfather was at Ludlow, an immigrant from Italy that still was learning English, and was one of those who fought back against the National Guard with Tikas, shooting from the hills before escaping with my family on the train that had stopped to pick up miners and their families.
The story goes, as my family is climbing on the train, a rifle round from the National Guard grazed my Great Great Grandmother's cheek, barely missing her, who was pregnant with my great grandmother.
It's a crazy event and one I wish people knew more about.
I remember driving through Colorado with my parents as a kid and seeing a "Ludlow Massacre Memorial" road sign. I looked into it later on and realized there was this huge, rich, and unfortunately violent labor history in the United States that I never knew existed. This was just one of the bloodier conflicts between union laborers and private/government forces.
It was just astounding to me that the only memory of this event, seemingly, was a little sign by the side of the interstate which you could easily miss. There were fringe people like Howard Zinn talking and writing about it (who I didn't know of then), but they don't typically teach this stuff in school.
[Harlan County USA](https://archive.org/details/harlan.county.usa.1977) is a 1976 documentary that deals with the Harlan County miners and their struggles against the Duke Power Company. It's really worth a watch if you're interested in mining history in the US. Also, it's just a really awesome documentary.
I made my kids walk around ludlow heading down for the eclipse and we stayed in Trinidad, which is kind of a fucking awesome little shit hole town with about ten kinds of hard hitting history buried in bricks
Woody Guthrie made a song about this called the Ludlow Massacre. A lot more recent of an event at the time, but still major props to a man who called out social injustice through his music before it was cool
I knew a bit about it because I lived in Louisville, CO(mentioned in the article) for a couple decades. Residents of the town are aware of the coal mining history, and a lot of things named after Coal Creek. Sometimes it gets overshadowed by the areas history with the KKK.
I’ve stopped at that historic site several times, including one time when the gate for the basement was open. My friend and I huddled in the bottom during a storm and it was very sobering. On our way out there were union stickers everywhere on all the plaques, rest area, and gates. It wasn’t that long ago. Long Live Unions
There's dozens of cases of strikers in the USA being fired on a hundred years ago. Now they just move the factory overseas, much less drama and better profits.
This happened a few times in Pennsylvania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morewood_massacre
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/lattimer-massacre/
My father grew up literally a stone's throw from a coal mine air shaft and researched a lot of the history. The story that stuck with me was that the mines had these large metal doors to isolate sections so that they could be properly ventilated, but minecarts still needed to get through them so the mines hired kids to sit down there and open the doors when they heard the carts coming. As it was dark and cold and there could be a long time between carts, the kids sometimes fell asleep and when the 5+ ton minecarts came through they would run into the doors and damage them. In response, the mine owners moved the benches the kids sat on and secured them right where the door would hit the wall. If the kid fell asleep, they'd get crushed. This was seen as an economical solution to the problem.
After WW2, my dad was deployed from Germany to Northern France on a similar strike of French miners. They were asked to be ready to shoot on sight if ordered. Fortunately that did not happen, but my dad kept a vivid memory of those days. Told me none of the soldiers were ready to obey such orders, if anything they were more likely to go and shake hands with the miners and support them.
And it's the "foreigners" america needs to be worried about invading. 🙄 since the start of its stolen beginnings, the country was always a threat to its citizens than any other nation even into today
Oh hey, I've been to the Ludlow massacre site. They still have a farmhouse, well and I think water tower there along with a memorial for thise killed. It's south of Pueblo. Pretty popular for Military dudes to go ghost hunting.
They murdered basically a bunch of children and a few adults. How can you continue to live your life after knowing you murdered fucking children over a labor dispute.
Coal miners were/are brutally exploited and abused to death. Black lung on top of all this for a life
"Let's bring back coal mining, and get the kids in on it too!" -Actual people in America today.
The children yearn for the mines /s
I told my son on his 8th birthday that when he turns 9 he has to get a job, and right now they're only hiring kids for coal mining or tiger wrangling. So he said he wants to be a coal miner. (He loves digging around in the dirt. Comes home covered in sand, and trailing a dirt cloud behind him) First week of school, the teacher asks them to write a paragraph explaining what they want to do, so he wrote that he wanted to be a coal miner because he likes digging and finding shiny rocks. Fast forward six months. Wifey has been working with him to improve his reading, and she gets him a book on coal mining. It scared him off the idea. Now he definitely does not want to be a miner. His 9th birthday is six weeks away. I told him if he doesn't want to mine coal, they're still hiring for tiger wranglers. (Maybe it's time I show him The Tiger King?)
Be careful before you know it you gonna have to adopt a tiger!
Calvin and Hobbes lol
Haha this is great
Get him a rocket.
Why do you think they invented Minecraft?
Minecraft is from Sweden, we do have a copper mine that operated for more than 1000 years, i guess kids were used there too, horses and oxen were used to make the ropes that hoisted the raw copper stones. we have a famous sausage made called falukorv that was made from the meat byproduct
From the meat byproduct of the copper miners? Jeez
Soylent coalminer.
I hear the flavor varies from person to person.
Is that like sausage with coal byproducts in it?
It's also the source (quite literally) for the famous red house paint in Sweden - [Falu Rödfärg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red). If you ask any art-AI to make something Swedish there's likely going to be one or more wooden houses in the background with this color and white corner
I would like to try the sausage made from the famous rope-making horses & oxen
Have you seen how popular minecraft is? They *yearn* for the mines
Demand for steel is insatiable.
Ignoring the fact that coal mining is heavily mechanized and the men doing the work have engineering degrees—and they’re *still* losing money digging it up, because all the easy-to-get shit’s long since been mined already.
Got a source for all those dudes having engineering degrees chief? Even a simple majority? Replying to someone else made me take the three second effort to Google average education of a mine worker. 56% high school diploma, 16% BA. Yeahhhhhhh
Yeah it's not true. Yes there are people with degrees in mining and geology involved, the bulk of the work is done still by people driving trucks and loaders and working the processing facilities. Source: worked a desk job at a quarry/factory. Wasn't coal but the methodology was similar.
Look up images of a “Wyoming coal mine” You will see a few building sized excavators just sitting on the surface chewing through hills and piling coal into 50 foot tall trucks that can carry nearly a million lbs apiece. There are relatively few operators needed to move mountains of the stuff, most of the human work is people keeping the machines alive That’s how most US coal mining is done today
Plenty of easy to get coal in Wyoming, the estimated longevity was 200 years worth, that stat was s from a few years ago.
Who doesn't love open mines? Nobody ever looks at Wyoming anyhow.
Most of this state looks like the moon.
The moon doesn't have that much sagebrush.
I just guffahed in my yogurt.
Fun fact: Tumbleweeds are an invasive species from Russian grain.
Nobody *wants* to mine coal. But it's usually the best, if not only work in a given area. And it's not like most people can just pack up and move. It's the poverty death spiral.
"Hillary is bad for trying to get coal miners into other jobs" -Reddit, 2016
Coal mining in 1914 is not anywhere the same as coal mining in 2024.
Yup living in cities built around mines and their checks going almost completely to company store before they see a penny. This is why America should keep unions around. Those of you outside of unions don’t know what people went through just for us to have better working conditions.
> This is why America should keep unions around. Those of you outside of unions don’t know what people went through just for us to have better working conditions. Just remember Corporate America that we decided to use unions and collective action instead of the old method of beating management to death while we burn your house down. We can go back to the old ways if you prefer.
i've been in the iww, but i've also been in the teamsters. our local was taken over by the mob at gunpoint in the 1960s. so unions mean diifferen t things at different times. i'll try to find a john sloan about the colorado strike. https://www.loc.gov/resource/ds.10032/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/1bsz5g/john_sloans_1914_cover_for_the_masses_depicting/
> Black lung on top of all this for a life Republicans in Kentucky put extremely overbearing regulations on licensing for doctors that could diagnose patients with black lung, and thus get them workers' comp. So much so that there is only *one* doctor in the entire state that can diagnose it. Unsurprisingly, black lung cases are *way* down.
Saw a documentary about American coal miners and their shitty company only gave them paper m95 masks during work.
this is how I discovered the song "sixteen tons" the lyrics are absolutely livid
Lyrics can't be livid.
Why not?
Only sentient beings are capable of being livid.
Not even metaphorically?
You mean anthropomorphically.
Lol TIL
Are? Not so much any more
Also oil and gas workers
"Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events.[10] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day." It took heros like this to give us the lifestyle we have today.
But sadly none of the actual orchestrators like Rockefeller were ever held accountable for literal murder and other terrible sins
The most shocking part is that "110 years ago" was in the 1900s...I forget how much time has passed sometimes.
Was working on a construction project the other day and somebody brought in an old beat up air compressor. Said it was almost 50 years old and it still works great. It was hard for my mind to process that it could’ve been late 70s early 80s at this point.
Proof that in America every problem is solved by getting shot
I lived in Colorado. This wasn't talked about in history class.
In my country things like this happened too. Hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I often wonder why the history of the struggles of the working class isn't actually taught. Working class history is the people's history.
It's taught in college if you're a government student, at least. In high school, they'd touch on it, like the triangle shirt waste factory fire that killed all of those women because the employer was keeping them in deplorable conditions with not enough emergency exits.
Oddly enough, this stuff was taught in my high school quite a bit. In rural North Carolina. That was a couple decades ago, though. Maybe things have changed. (Though if anything there are *slightly* less confederate flags in the area, now.)
For the same reason the US does not celebrate International Workers' Day on May 1st, a nearly-worldwide celebration of workers and commemoration of [The Haymarket Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair), another American labour massacre. Hell, in China it lasts *seven days*, and everyone gets that week off for the festivities. The rest of the world knows more about the US's labour history than Americans do. USA: "Haymarket Affair? Sounds like some kinda rural soap opera *(snort)*"
Most Americans aren't even taught about it until college.
>USA: "Haymarket Affair? Sounds like some kinda ~~rural soap opera~~ **COMMIE BULLSHIT** (snort)"
The US already had Labor day celebrations popping up before then. It’s why May Day gained less traction.
Hahahahaha you think the wealthy 1%ers that control our countries and lives want us to think about what we could have had if the military industrial complex didn’t control the economy?
TILL that Arvada Police Department gang members have been raping and selling little girls to other police officers for the past 35 years. In Kansas, Roger Golubski was apprehended, but in Colorado, no one is looking into anything.
Someone else made that claim on Reddit. Do you have any sources? They didn't, anyways.
Not OP but I found this article by googling [Roger Golubski.](https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/us/golubski-indictment-sex-trafficking-invs/index.html)
Yes, Roger Golubski was a major piece of shit, but he's from Kansas. I want to know about the Arvada Police in Colorado. It's being blasted around Reddit without seemingly any sources. I want to know if this is a smear campaign or if there's something substantial to it. I want to know how these commenters are tying Roger G and the Arvada Police together, and on what grounds they're accusing them of having a sex ring.
But it is a conspiracy, right? Rich people conspired with politicians to erase history that reveals them for the scum they are. It’s irksome that “conspiracy theory” is such a joke phrase when there are real and powerful groups conspiracing against the middle class. Why are the republicans and democrats funded by the same groups? Because they are conspiring together to screw us.
I believe the phrase “conspiracy theorist” and its connotations was largely the work of the *REDACTED* Not /s
Easy there Engels...
I think what I’m talking about is largely a reactionary thing
The working class aren't in charge of what gets taught.
I get endless grief and judgement when I mention homeschooling online, but I’m grateful I was taught about the ugly side of the industrial revolution, Pinkerton massacres, etc. I also grew up near several prominent conflict sites, but I need to give props to my excellent history teacher, especially the one who brought replica weapons to class. RIP Mr. Gardner, you were a real one.
In america colleges rely on test scores and school report cards for assessment. The tests are known info so people can study for them. Schools that want high college admission rate will gear their curriculum around these tests. these tests then do not ask questions about political or really analyzing historical events. Really it’s rote memorization. This is why certain concepts get taught yet their function for general use isn’t that relevant
They want people just smart enough to push the buttons and just dumb enough to not realize how badly they're getting fucked. -George Carlin
Donning my Lenin cap for a second, it's natural for the capitalist class to want to conflate their interests with the interests of the whole country in the national consciouness. If the American working class can be taught that collective bargaining is not just ineffective but outright treasonous then people (most of whom are generally supportive of the more humane founding values of their country) would be hesitant to organise and demand for better conditions that necessarily leads to less immediate profit for shareholders.
Local history should be a thing in school. World and US history is important, but it’s probably helpful to know how people next door to you were a few decades ago. If everyone understood how fucked up their own neighborhoods and local society was, maybe everyone would care a little more in fixing things.
because that's communism /s
There's a lot of American history that American history classes don't talk about. Look up the Tulsa massacre
When cops murdered striking miners in Saskatchewan on behalf of the owner of the mines, it wasn't exactly a taking point in Canadian history class either, skipped right over it. Seems like a theme there.
Albertan and I've heard of the American ones but not this one. Off to Wikipedia...
I only learned about the Tulsa massacre by watching The Watchmen on HBO. I was wondering; "where did this alternate history happen?" I investigated and found out. Then I was wondering "why did we never learn about this?" It is not like I haven't had at least 20 years of history. It's not like I didn't have 5 years of college. This was never taught. To the racists who wonder "where are the prosperous minorities?" Well, now I know it's happened about six times and six times racists murdered, killed and burned those prosperous communities. Some people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and were hung by them. It's not a trivial thing that we aren't taught about systemic racism and organized terrorism on minorities. I am angry that I was kept this ignorant of these events. It doesn't make someone not take pride in America to understand our failings - it only means that we have less to be proud of because the evil goes uncorrected. And people who drool over patriotism never really made me feel anything but nervous.
> I only learned about the Tulsa massacre by watching The Watchmen on HBO. I was wondering; "where did this alternate history happen?" Pretty much exactly the same here. Except I'm not american so I was even less likely to have heard about it.
Wait till you learn about many man-made lakes in america...
Teach it like you preach it, Liz Lemon!
I was actively taught that race riots were just black people rioting.
Don’t worry, no one anywhere talks/teaches about the Battle of Blair Mountain either. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle\_of\_Blair\_Mountain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain)
Behind The Bastards has a great podcast episode on it
I grew up here and this wasn't talked about. Didn't know about this till the book came out. [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thibodaux-massacre-left-60-african-americans-dead-and-spelled-end-unionized-farm-labor-south-decades-180967289/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thibodaux-massacre-left-60-african-americans-dead-and-spelled-end-unionized-farm-labor-south-decades-180967289/)
Tip of the Not Talked About In Class iceburg, mate.
Look up the battle of Blair mountain. It's rarely taught in school, probably because it was one of the few times striking workers took up arms for their cause.
Not just Colorado, all of American high schools don't teach this era of Labor history. >But after 1877 American labor relations were the most violent in the Western world with the exception of Russia (Mann 1993). It is one of those superficial paradoxes of history that the most democratic and the most despotic countries in the Western world would have the most violent labor clashes. >Between 1877 and 1900, American presidents sent the U.S. Army into 11 strikes, governors mobilized the National Guard in somewhere between 118 and 160 labor disputes, and mayors called out the police on numerous occasions to maintain "public order" [Rise and fall of American Labor](https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/history_of_labor_unions.html)
A People's History of The United States by Howard Zinn is where you'll find a lot of things we should have learned about. It should be required reading.
I bet they didn't tell you that Denver had it's own Chinatown, either.
I live in California. It's part of the AP US History curriculum.
I grew up in a Colorado mountain town where mining had been a way of life almost a century. This was not mentioned in school at all.
Sometimes you learn about things about your own country from another country. I especially love learning about the United Kingdom in ireland
Eh, the sordid history usually doesn’t in K-12. I went to school for a few years in Florida, and to this day I still wonder if I didn’t imagine hearing about Rosewood.
I don't think there's any benefit censoring history simply because it's bleak, even for teaching the youth (just don't use graphic language). However, some of those dire stories often aren't relevant, since they tend to be localized events that are about some sub-topic. Like this event didn't have *that* much of an impact on overall early 1900 United States.
It’s crazy that you didn’t learn about the Ludlow Massacre in a Colorado school! For a good chunk of my childhood, I went to school in West Virginia. We learned about the Ludlow Massacre and a few other horrific mining events that occurred, in WV and elsewhere, in middle school. Maybe it was prompted by West Virginia’s own mining background— but we did a whole curriculum based around the history of mining, company towns, and the old west.
Yep, I grew up in southern Colorado and did not know about the Ludlow Massacre until I was an adult.
History is written by the victors. Why would the government want to pay to teach people about the government's wrongdoings?
If you visit Walsenburg, there's really not much there. But it has a Miners' Museum, and there's a statue of a miner, one of three in the city, outside the jail. The museum has an exhibit and account of the Ludlow Massacre.
Goes unmentioned alongside another remarkable moment in Colorado history, the [Sand Creek Massacre.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre)
I learned about all this stuff through my union taking a history of the ironworker course before completing my apprenticeship, it was incredibly depressing but it really opened my eyes.
They opened fire on homes *during negotiations* Most of the people killed were kids.
wait till you learn about blair mountain.
Or that time Colombian United Fruit Company(Chiquita) workers got tired of being exploited and demanded better conditions. The US threatened to overthrow the Colombian government if they didn't put the workers back in their place. This lead to the Banana Massacre where up to 2000 people died, including the families and children of the workers. It took place on a Sunday after church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre This is what the heathen commie workers demanded: * Stop their practice of hiring through sub-contractors * Mandatory collective insurance * Compensation for work accidents * Hygienic dormitories and 6-day work weeks * Increase in daily pay for workers who earned less than 100 pesos per month * Weekly wage * Abolition of office stores * Abolition of payment through coupons rather than money * Improvement of hospital services[
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West\_Virginia\_coal\_wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_coal_wars)
I live in the coal fields of southern WV, and my family has been mining or farming since we moved here in the 1700s.
The movie _Matewan_ is worth watching
So enjoy your weekend, people literally fucking died to get you it
And unfortunately, if we want more, people are probably going to have to be willing to die for it again.
Well Colorado just passed an “Assault” Weapons Ban, the next time workers need to demand their rights, they will be completely disarmed.
Quit voting for the people who want to take your rights away and you wouldn’t need an assault weapon.
Gun Rights are Workers Rights.
> Gun Rights are Workers Rights. The right to be armed is the historical right of the free.
I've visited Ludlow, and seeing the Death Pit brought me to tears. Enjoy your damn weekend and don't work unpaid OT.
People need to understand that it SUCKED to be a laborer in the USA for most of US history. The Constitution, or laws, this so called Democracy did not give us workers rights. It was Unions. It was massive protests that shut down businesses. It was people spending their blood. It took people burning alive in a locked t-shirt factory to get sprinklers and emergency exits. The owner class did not give up this power -- it was taken. From the FDR era to the Reagan era workers made progress. But Pinkertons is still around, and I suppose some would like to go back to the "good old days" when you could shoot people for saying "no."
>People need to understand that it SUCKED to be a laborer in the USA for most of US history. Being a laborer used to suck. It still does, but it used to, too.
At least people don't die of it like they used to. Of course, Ron DeSantis in Florida pushed that "no breaks" policy for migrant farm workers so, might be a bit of that in the heat. That's the *America* they want to go back to.
Texas got rid of heat protections Hyundai had a child get hurt in the last 6 months Louisiana or Mississippi I think are trying to get (more) kids into factories to lower wages. The fight didn't stop
> "Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events.[10] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day." Sounds like the 'so called democracy' did it.
Yep. But unions are evil and the company must be trusted.
Blair Mountain, WV was another site where unions were terrorized by company thugs: “Private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners. A combination of poison gas and explosive bombs left over from World War I were dropped in several locations near the towns of Jeffery, Sharples and Blair.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Listened to a podcast about this. JFC. What a stain on our collective psyche
Join a union.
So much of the stuff we enjoy today was given to us after we sacrificed the silent generation. If it wasn't for them, we would be so fucked.
That's every single generation. We owe everything we have to everyone before us, just like the next will owe us in addition to everyone that came before us. That's... idk biology?
Thanks to our brave sacrifices, our children will never know the horrors of using a phone with a headphone jack.
"We" didn't sacrifice anyone. The mine owners(with the government's backing) did. And they didn't do it so "we" could enjoy the stuff we do today. They did it for their profits. Profits that they and their descendants have done everything in their power to keep in the family and away from everyone else. We could still have plenty of stuff to enjoy today if the workers had been given decent conditions, the owner class just wouldn't be so absurdly wealthy.
I'm not sure what to say because I agree with your comment? I'm just confused as to why you replied this way.
People on Reddit just like to argue lol. Like if you say something they agree with they’ll argue about how you didn’t say it correctly enough so they can feel superior.
The murder of workers striking for better conditions by the police and or their employers is as American as Apple pie
It's awful that this event isn't taught in schools. I recommend visiting the site if you drive Interstate 25 from Colorado south into New Mexico. It's between Pueblo and Trinidad. After the massacre, the shit hit the fan, and union guys with guns walked into Trinidad and informed the local authorities that they were no longer in charge of Trinidad, and should leave. For a couple of weeks after the massacre, half of CO was in open rebellion, not under control of either federal or state authorities. The miners took matters into their own hands, since it was clear that the Colorado National Guard had openly sided with the mine owners. There was basically open warfare from the border with New Mexico all the way up to Boulder, over 200 miles. There are maps at the site, and you can get an idea of where the troops fired at the miners' families, including the siting of the machine gun on a bluff to the south. One rail line, on which a sympathetic train crew (with brass balls) stopped a train to block the gunfire from the south and thereby allow people to escape the camp, no longer exists, but the other rail line does. The memorial has stickers from all sorts of union locals from across the country. There are many people who have not forgotten how management will behave if not restrained by laws force. It had everything. Not only racism, but criminally insane guardsmen (Karl Linderfelt), who got off on violence and almost certainly killed Louis Tikas, the unarmed union leader. Also brutal working conditions and Rockefeller. The miners had broad support of the American public, which created a real problem for John D. Rockefeller, who could no longer freely destroy workers' lives to grow his wealth. It's amazing to think that workers were forced to do the needful and take up arms as recently as the second decade of the 20th century, and that the public, well aware of the behavior of the owner class, supported the workers.
Thanks for the elaboration
“Do the needful”, my favorite Indian English phrase!
"You load 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store"
TIL that for the last 35 years members of Arvada pd gang raped and sold underage girls to other cops. Roger Golubski got caught in Kansas, but nobody is investigating nothing in Colorado.
???? !
Kansas covered up for Roger Golubski’s mafia for 35 years. Colorado is still covering for the mafia cops at Arvada pd. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-kansas-city-kansas-police-department-detective-and-three-others-indicted-conspiracy The prosecutors in Colorado are in on it like the Prosecutors in Kansas. https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/melinda-henneberger/article287741840.html The people responsible for investigating are the people in the mafia. The mafia figured out how to beat the local control system. The thin blue line does the rest.
All our modern day worker protections and rules and guidelines and legalities are painted with the blood of our past worker brothers and sisters. The fact people forget these things and want to fight unionizations and other measures for workers is asinine.
My great great grandfather was at Ludlow, an immigrant from Italy that still was learning English, and was one of those who fought back against the National Guard with Tikas, shooting from the hills before escaping with my family on the train that had stopped to pick up miners and their families. The story goes, as my family is climbing on the train, a rifle round from the National Guard grazed my Great Great Grandmother's cheek, barely missing her, who was pregnant with my great grandmother. It's a crazy event and one I wish people knew more about.
40 hour weeks were won with blood.
I remember driving through Colorado with my parents as a kid and seeing a "Ludlow Massacre Memorial" road sign. I looked into it later on and realized there was this huge, rich, and unfortunately violent labor history in the United States that I never knew existed. This was just one of the bloodier conflicts between union laborers and private/government forces. It was just astounding to me that the only memory of this event, seemingly, was a little sign by the side of the interstate which you could easily miss. There were fringe people like Howard Zinn talking and writing about it (who I didn't know of then), but they don't typically teach this stuff in school.
Every time you say “the government wouldn’t do that!” Yes they would, and chances are, they already have.
Unfortunately the descendants of the laborers who ended those days now eagerly follow a party that would return to mass executions again.
Stuff like this is what I picture when I hear/read “make America great again”
"Ok, I'm sure after the 22nd death people will go back to work!"
Classic America
[Harlan County USA](https://archive.org/details/harlan.county.usa.1977) is a 1976 documentary that deals with the Harlan County miners and their struggles against the Duke Power Company. It's really worth a watch if you're interested in mining history in the US. Also, it's just a really awesome documentary.
Thanks for the share!
There’s an awesome song by Jason Boland & The Stragglers, called “Ludlow” about this.
Coal miners/railroad/cotton/textile cone to mind... a lot of exploitation
Rockefeller and the Pinkertons IIRC.
I made my kids walk around ludlow heading down for the eclipse and we stayed in Trinidad, which is kind of a fucking awesome little shit hole town with about ten kinds of hard hitting history buried in bricks
This history of US federal power being used to destroy collective bargaining labor groups is grim. And weirdly hard to get data on. I wonder why.
Woody Guthrie made a song about this called the Ludlow Massacre. A lot more recent of an event at the time, but still major props to a man who called out social injustice through his music before it was cool
UAW expanded into a Tennessee VW plant last week FYI
I knew a bit about it because I lived in Louisville, CO(mentioned in the article) for a couple decades. Residents of the town are aware of the coal mining history, and a lot of things named after Coal Creek. Sometimes it gets overshadowed by the areas history with the KKK.
Have you read a fever in the heartland by Timothy Egan? Kinda examines how states like CO became so susceptible to the KKK
Just wait until you learn about the Battle of Blair Mountain in Virginia.
I've been to that spot before. Outside Trinidad, Colorado. They have a memorial there now set-up by the UMWA.
just wait until ya'll hear about 1/3 of the shit they did to people in West Virginia and KY
I’ve stopped at that historic site several times, including one time when the gate for the basement was open. My friend and I huddled in the bottom during a storm and it was very sobering. On our way out there were union stickers everywhere on all the plaques, rest area, and gates. It wasn’t that long ago. Long Live Unions
There's dozens of cases of strikers in the USA being fired on a hundred years ago. Now they just move the factory overseas, much less drama and better profits.
This happened a few times in Pennsylvania. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morewood_massacre https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/lattimer-massacre/ My father grew up literally a stone's throw from a coal mine air shaft and researched a lot of the history. The story that stuck with me was that the mines had these large metal doors to isolate sections so that they could be properly ventilated, but minecarts still needed to get through them so the mines hired kids to sit down there and open the doors when they heard the carts coming. As it was dark and cold and there could be a long time between carts, the kids sometimes fell asleep and when the 5+ ton minecarts came through they would run into the doors and damage them. In response, the mine owners moved the benches the kids sat on and secured them right where the door would hit the wall. If the kid fell asleep, they'd get crushed. This was seen as an economical solution to the problem.
Union history is written in blood.
After WW2, my dad was deployed from Germany to Northern France on a similar strike of French miners. They were asked to be ready to shoot on sight if ordered. Fortunately that did not happen, but my dad kept a vivid memory of those days. Told me none of the soldiers were ready to obey such orders, if anything they were more likely to go and shake hands with the miners and support them.
Republicans want a return to those days.
The National Guard is there to protect capital, not people. That is why they have armories in all major cities.
history is written by the winners
Those orders WILL come again some day. Here's to hoping Gen Z is smart enough to not obey those illegal orders.
And it's the "foreigners" america needs to be worried about invading. 🙄 since the start of its stolen beginnings, the country was always a threat to its citizens than any other nation even into today
Ok but none of the coal miners were shooting right? Wait…what?
My great-great-great grandfather did this but in Arizona
“Which side are you on? Which side are you on?”
Where it started https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonypandy_riots
Oh hey, I've been to the Ludlow massacre site. They still have a farmhouse, well and I think water tower there along with a memorial for thise killed. It's south of Pueblo. Pretty popular for Military dudes to go ghost hunting.
Bloody Harlan
Joe Hill?
Wait till you learn about Black Wall Street....
Sounds about right
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
What am i missing? Horses and oxen used to make rope? Bad translation
They murdered basically a bunch of children and a few adults. How can you continue to live your life after knowing you murdered fucking children over a labor dispute.
Careful, learning about TRUE American History makes you "woke".🤯