The Decline of Hillbilly Socialism

Images:  Workers Alliance meeting, Scott’s Run, WV [1937]; Woman digging refuse coal from snow to heat her home, Scott’s Run, WV [1937]; Gun emplacement at Battle of Blair Mountain, Logan County, WV [1921]

Politics in the USA has been run under a two-party system over the past century.

It is easy to forget that without combined state and corporate-funded violence and corporate media propaganda, the USA might still have a Socialist or Social Democratic Party.

And no, we’re not talking about Communism or Soviet-style collectivism.  We’re talking about a party which would have developed along the lines of modern European social democratic parties – such as those in Scandinavian countries which enjoy taxpayer-funded universal healthcare, third level education free at point of delivery, paid vacations, maternity/paternity and sick leave, etc.

In 1912, Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs of Indiana garnered 6 percent of the popular vote – that’s nearly a million Americans.

In fact, the increasing popularity of socialist policies at the time probably forced other candidates like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt to throw a few token bones to socialist ideas (such as the standard eight hour workday).

The mass unemployment caused by the 1929 stock market crash gave new impetus to groups affiliated with the Socialist Party – groups such as the Workers Alliances.

Mining companies abandoned many of the “company towns” they had built, leaving the inhabitants literally stranded – often penniless, cold, and hungry.

It is worth remembering that the great Wall Street crash came just 8 years after the largest armed uprising in American history outside the Civil War – the Battle of Blair Mountain, in which attempts to unionise the coalfields of SW West Virginia led to a five-day pitched battle between over 10,000 coal miners and around 3000 company-backed strikebreakers and law enforcement officers which left between 50 and 100 miners dead.

The uprising was eventually suppressed by the intervention of 27,000 members of the army/National Guard.

Most mountain folks weren’t out-and-out socialists in the commonly understood political sense.

They were just very clear-eyed about who was community, and who was the enemy.

They most certainly were NOT friends of unimpeded capitalism, coal barons, and Big Business.

It would take decades of concerted and constant anti-socialist indoctrination to mostly erase this proud history of cross-ethnic solidarity and mountain activism from the general consciousness, eventually allowing modern venture capitalists like J. D. Vance to make his ridiculous proclamations of having an affinity with “hillbilly culture”.

#jdvance #hillbilly #socialism #unionism