Come to West Virginia and we’ll show you how to live ... how to treat people. We’re open for business. West Virginia is truly on the move. Joe Manchin
Wyoming County, West Virginia: Welcome to Oceana: It was a wonderful place to raise children. Oxyana, woman, 2013
Now they experiment with so many pills and most of them are synthetic and they are very addictive and it’s taken a generation of our kids. ibid.
It’s an epidemic here. ibid. woman #2
We got the Oxys, the Xanax, and it completely changes people. ibid. dude
Just about everybody around here’s on dope. ibid. dude #2
If you don’t work in the mines, the only way to make money … is to sell drugs. ibid. dude #3
I pay the doctor $1,000 dollars a month. ibid. dude #4
Hepatitis C here they said is 70-80% of this town. ibid.
Half the babies in the nursery are on Methadone. ibid. doctor
In most cultures where there are coal miners, middle-class people and above think they’re animals. Literally. And treat them that way. American Experience: The Mine Wars, PBS 2016
Strangers rarely found their way into the coal camps of West Virginia. So when a matronly older woman walked into a camp one Fall morning in 1901 the local store keeper was curious … She was the notorious Mother Jones there to convince the coal miners in the region to join her union – United Mine Workers of America. ibid.
Miners in southern West-Virginia had been beaten down by the mine owners. ibid.
The largest armed insurrection since the civil war … A blood-soaked war zone. ibid.
Nearly three quarters of a million men across the country spent ten or twelve hours a day in coal mines. ibid.
There were no elected officials, no independent police forces. ibid.
They forced mining families to shop exclusively at the company store. ibid.
Thousands of West Virginia miners decided to stand with the strikers in Pennsylvania and to fight for their own rights. ibid.
[Justus] Collins like all the West Virginia coal operators saw himself as a man under siege. ibid.
It were 1920 in the south-west field and things was tough. The miners was trying to bring the union to West Virginia and the coal operators and their gun thugs was set on keeping ’em out. Matewan ***** 1987 starring Chris Cooper & James Earl Jones & Mary McDonnell & Will Oldham & David Strathairn & Ken Jenkins & Gordon Clapp & Bob Gunton & John Mostel & Kevin Tighe & John Sayles et al, director John Sayles
We did it, Mamma. We’re going to have the union. ibid. miner
You don’t want to go there, mister. Ain’t nuttin’ but crazy people. ibid. train guard
These picks and shovels are to be considered a loan from the Stone Mountain Coal Company. Their cost will be deducted from the first month’s pay. ibid. company man
I was with the Wobblies. ibid. Convenor
If you stand alone, you’re just so much shit to those people. ibid.
You work, they don’t: that’s all you got to know about the enemy. ibid.
The union didn’t have too much it could give to the people back then. All we got in common is our misery. ibid. commentary
A new day coming: sometimes I could just about see it. But it were a dangerous living for a union man and you didn’t dare turn your back. It was hard time. It was hungry times too. The union relief was spread thin, and hope of a new day could feed your soul but leave your belly rumbling. ibid.
The State of West Virginia issued the DuPont company a permit for them to run their contaminated waste water down through two farms here down into this stream of water. Storyville: Poisoning America: The Devil We Know, BBC 2018
In 1945 Dupont began making Teflon. Today, one of the chemicals used to make it is in the blood of 99% of all Americans. This is where it began. ibid.
DuPont Reassigns 50 Women Workers In Chemical Case: Substance, Produced by 3M, Was Linked During Test. ibid. The Wall Street Journal 8 April 1981
‘The documents in this case they really tell the story about what the company knew.’ ibid.
In 2001, Dupont settled with the Tennants for an undisclosed sum. Mr Tennant was diagnosed with cancer before suffering a fatal heart attack in 2009 at the age of 67. His wife died of cancer two years later. ibid.
‘They called this Fluorine chemical ‘the devil’s piss’ it was so potent.’ ibid.
3M pledged to phase out C8 by the end of 2002. That very same year, DuPont began producing C8 at its plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina. ibid.
In 2002 the US Environmental Protection Agency launched a priority review to determine whether C8 should be regulated. ibid.
The US Environmental Protection Agency fined DuPont $16.5 million dollars for failing to report the health risks related to C8 exposure. ibid.
Gen X is just one of 88,000 unregulated chemicals used in everyday products. ibid.
It attacks from above relentlessly pursuing its victims. It’s believed to be an omen of death and disaster. MonsterQuest s4e5: Mothman, History 2010
Wisconsin: Near some of the last untouched wilderness in the mid-West and the perfect hiding place. Eyewitnesses report seeing a creature seven feet tall with a large wingspan ten to fifteen feet across and weighing an estimated 250 pounds. Part man and part beast it has dark hair and eyes that glow a ghostly red at night. ibid.
The monster came to the public’s attention in 1966 when West Virginia newspapers began reporting on a series of strange sightings. ibid.
1907: The most deadly mine disaster in US history occurred when an explosion killed 361 men and boys in a West Virginia coal mine. Plutocracy: Political Repression in the USA I: Divide & Rule, 2015
In 2012 coal miners in Kanawha Country in West Virginia issued a list of demands including a shorter workday, the right to organise, recognition of a worker’s constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, an end to the blacklisting of union organisers, and alternatives to company stores. The requested pay raise would have cost the company fifteen cents per miner per day. Instead of negotiating, the company hired a private militia to break the strike. ibid.
[Mother] Jones had been declared The Most Dangerous Woman in America. ibid.
Union organisers were blacklisted and beaten. ibid.
The West Virginian mine wars were part of a broader conflict between the forces of labor and the forces of capital. A struggle that claimed the lives of thousands of American workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; thousands more were beaten, maimed, imprisoned, tortured and sent to early graves due to poor working conditions and dismal safety standards. ibid.