The Red Bandana Rebellion: The Armed Siege of Blair Mountain

What happens when ten thousand heavily armed, desperate American citizens decide to wage a full-scale, literal war against private corporate armies, local police, and eventually, the United States military? The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 remains the largest and most suppressed armed labor uprising in American history. In the coalfields of West Virginia, miners lived in absolute corporate servitude. They were paid in company scrip, lived in company towns, and were brutally beaten by private Baldwin-Felts detectives if they attempted to unionize. Pushed past the breaking point, thousands of miners tied red bandanas around their necks and marched on Logan County to liberate their imprisoned union leaders. They were met by a heavily entrenched private army equipped with Gatling guns and private biplanes dropping homemade bombs. The battle raged for days until the President ordered federal troops to crush the rebellion. This harrowing historical investigation uncovers the bloody price of American industrialization. It explores the brutal conditions of the coal camps, the strategic trench warfare in the Appalachian mountains, and the decades-long political effort to completely erase the battle from national textbooks. Stand on the frontlines of the labor movement. The Battle of Blair Mountain is a terrifying testament to the lethal violence corporations will unleash to maintain absolute control over the working class.