When the govt deployed U.S. Army bombers and troops against striking miners in West Virginia

[Tanuki]

I don't think it's a coincidence that Military.com is recalling the Battle of Blair mountain at this moment in time.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/investigations-and-features/2026/01/09/us-army-once-deployed-bombers-and-2500-troops-crush-10000-armed-coal-miners-west-virginia.html

"Ten thousand armed coal miners held Blair Mountain in late August 1921. They faced machine gun nests, private planes dropping bombs, and a growing force of deputies backed by coal company money. Then President Warren Harding made a decision that would end the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War.

He sent in the U.S. Army.

The Battle of Blair Mountain as it is now known, became the most infamous event of the West Virginia Coal Wars. In response, the federal government deployed troops, bombers, and military force to suppress American workers fighting for union rights. The intervention set a precedent that would shape how the military handled domestic unrest for decades.

A System Built on Control
West Virginia's coal miners lived under what historians call an industrial police state. They worked in company-owned mines, lived in company-owned houses, and shopped at company-owned stores. Wages came as scrip, company currency worthless anywhere else.
.....
[The coal companies] deployed the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. These private agents functioned as hired muscle. They beat organizers, evicted families at gunpoint, and even killed union sympathizers. Mine guards patrolled towns on horseback carrying shotguns, rifles, and clubs. Free speech didn't exist. Miners couldn't gather in groups larger than two. Company postmasters read and censored their mail.....(more)

[Attilatheblond]

1. Do a search: The Bisbee Deportation

Here's a Wikipedia page on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisbee_Deportation] It was real and it was a harbinger of things that were to come in SO many ways.

he Bisbee Deportation was the illegal kidnapping and deportation of about 1,300 striking mine workers, their supporters, and citizen bystanders by 2,000 members of a deputized posse, who arrested them beginning on July 12, 1917, in Bisbee, Arizona. The action was orchestrated by Phelps Dodge, the major mining company in the area, which provided lists of workers and others who were to be arrested to the Cochise County sheriff, Harry C. Wheeler. Those arrested were taken to a local baseball park before being loaded onto cattle cars and deported 200 miles (320 km) to Tres Hermanas in New Mexico.

The 16-hour journey was through desert without food and with little water. Once unloaded, the deportees, most without money or transportation, were warned against returning to Bisbee. The U.S. government soon brought in members of the U.S. Army to assist with relocating the deportees to Columbus, New Mexico.

As Phelps Dodge, in collusion with the sheriff, had closed down access to outside communications, it was some time before the story was reported. The company presented their action as reducing threats to United States interests in World War I in Europe, largely because the wartime demand for copper was heavy. The Governor of New Mexico, in consultation with President Woodrow Wilson, provided temporary housing for the deportees. A presidential mediation commission investigated the actions in November 1917, and in its final report, described the deportation as "wholly illegal and without authority in law, either State or Federal (Page 6)."[1]

No individual, company, or agency was ever convicted in connection with the deportations. Arizona and Cochise County never prosecuted the case, and in United States v. Wheeler (1920), the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution by itself does not give the federal government the power to stop kidnappings, even ones involving moving abductees across state lines on federally-regulated railroads.

[ret5hd]

2. watch "Bisbee '17" :