In 1921, ten thousand armed coal miners marched through the mountains of West Virginia toward Logan County. They were trying to unionize the mines. The mine owners responded by deploying private detectives and company gunmen. The state sent troops. The federal government sent biplanes that dropped bombs on the miners.

The Battle of Blair Mountain was one of the largest labor uprisings in American history. Most Americans have never heard of it, which is itself part of the story: the labor movement won massive victories that transformed American life, but those victories were systematically minimized afterward in ways that made them harder to defend.

The Early Fights: 1880s to 1920s

The American labor movement grew out of industrial conditions that were, by any reasonable measure, brutal. In the late 19th century, factory workers routinely worked twelve to sixteen hour days, six or seven days a week, for wages that barely covered survival. Children worked alongside adults in mines and mills. Injuries were common and compensation was rare. Workers who complained were fired, and workers who organized were fired, blacklisted, or killed.

The Knights of Labor emerged in the 1870s and built a broad coalition of workers across trades and industries, including Black workers at a time when most labor organizations excluded them. At their peak in the mid-1880s they had around 700,000 members. The American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886, took a more conservative craft-union approach, organizing skilled workers trade by trade.

The conflict between workers and owners in this period was often violent. The Homestead Strike of 1892 saw Carnegie Steel hire 300 Pinkerton agents to break a steelworkers' strike; a gun battle left ten dead. The Pullman Strike of 1894 was crushed when President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops over the objection of the Illinois governor. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 killed 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, because the owners had locked the exit doors to prevent unauthorized breaks. The fire became a turning point in public opinion about worker safety and organized labor.

The coalfields were particularly violent. In Matewan, West Virginia in 1920, a shootout between town officials, workers, and company gunmen left seven people dead including the mayor. The following year came Blair Mountain. The federal government eventually crushed the uprising, and the coal companies maintained their grip on the region for another decade.

The New Deal Era: 1930s to 1940s

The Great Depression changed the political equation. With unemployment at 25 percent and the economic system visibly failing, the argument that workers should accept whatever conditions owners imposed lost its power. Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 on a platform that included support for organized labor, and the New Deal that followed transformed the legal landscape.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, known as the Wagner Act, guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain collectively and created the National Labor Relations Board to enforce those rights. For the first time, unionizing was not just legal but protected by federal law.

The results were immediate. In 1933, when Roosevelt took office, there were roughly 3 million union members in the United States. By the end of his presidency in 1945, there were more than 12 million. The Congress of Industrial Organizations organized workers in steel, auto, rubber, and other mass industries through a wave of sit-down strikes that forced major concessions from employers. When workers at General Motors sat down in the Flint plants in 1936 and refused to leave for 44 days, GM eventually recognized the union. It was a turning point.

The political alignment that emerged from this period shaped American politics for decades. Union members voted heavily Democratic. The labor movement provided money, organization, and voter mobilization to Democratic campaigns. The party, in turn, supported labor legislation and resisted the most aggressive employer attacks on union rights.

The Long Decline: 1947 to Present

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, passed over Truman's veto by a Republican-controlled Congress with significant Democratic support, began rolling back union power. The law prohibited certain strikes and secondary boycotts, allowed states to pass right-to-work laws that weakened union finances, and gave employers more tools to resist organizing drives. Labor leaders called it the "slave labor act" and lobbied unsuccessfully for its repeal.

Union membership peaked around 35 percent of private sector workers in the mid-1950s and has fallen steadily since. The shift of manufacturing jobs overseas accelerated the decline in industries where unions had been strongest. Reagan's firing of the striking air traffic controllers in 1981 signaled to private employers that the federal government would side with management in labor disputes, and union-busting became a standard corporate strategy.

Today, private sector union membership sits around 6 percent. The legal framework for organizing still exists, but employers have learned to use the slow pace of NLRB proceedings, mandatory captive-audience meetings, threats of job loss, and delays in contract negotiations to wear down organizing campaigns. The labor law that was supposed to protect organizing has become, in practice, a system that makes organizing very difficult.

What the Movement Actually Won

Before unions had significant power, the standard American workweek was six days and the standard workday was twelve hours. There was no federal minimum wage, no overtime pay, no unemployment insurance, no workplace safety regulation, and no prohibition on child labor. Pensions didn't exist for most workers. Employer-provided health insurance was rare.

The labor movement fought for and won all of those things through organizing, striking, occupying factories, marching through mountains, and sometimes dying for the right to collectively bargain. The goodwill of employers and the natural workings of the market produced none of it.

Why This History Connects to Now

The conditions that produced the early labor movement have returned in new forms: long hours, low wages, concentrated corporate power, and a political system answering to owners rather than workers. The mechanisms have changed (the company town has become the gig economy, union-avoidance consultants have replaced the Pinkertons, algorithms do what blacklists once did) but the structure of the problem is the same.

The Labor Party is building for today's version of this fight, not the 1930s version. The specific battles have changed. The fundamental question the labor movement has always asked, who does the political and economic system serve, and what will it take to make it serve ordinary people instead, is the same question the party is asking now.

The people who fought at Blair Mountain were asking it too.

Learn more at votelabor.org.