The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor Highlight

The Battle of Blair Mountain, though experienced as a defeat for the UMWA at the time, went down in history as the closest thing that unions in America have ever had to an actual war. It is one of the bedrock stories of West Virginia’s long annals of class conflict. In the state museum in Charleston today, right next to the gold-domed capitol building, you can see a neatly folded red bandanna that one of the miners wore at Blair Mountain on display in a glass case. Some say that the term “redneck” originated with those miners; that may be apocryphal, but the meaning of the red bandanna in West Virginia is recognizable to everyone there to this day.