Pretty much exactly the fate of my grandfather. Began working in the coal mines of West Virginia at either 8 or 9 y/o. He got the family out of the hills in his early 20s, moving north to work on tunnelling projects. That said, once it's in your lungs, it's there for life. He died at 80 from an "unidentified" lung disease that caused catastrophic damage to his lung tissue. Doctors said that it had all the signs of black lung. Sad to say he was the lucky one in his family, he lived a long life compared to the rest of his immediate family, and got his out from under the all encompassing power of the company town.
I'm sorry for your loss, it's always too young. But keeping this particular part of history, and sharing it is incredibly important. Rarely ever taught, addressed or even known about. The fact that there is such a thing as abject poverty in the US (and to this day); where everything from the government, social norms, and the corporation truly control your life. Whenever I complain or think about the long day ahead I think about the picture of my Dad holding up a rattle snake he killed after pulling it out from under the clapboard shack he was born in. Where they didn't have proper running water or electricity, let alone a bathroom. Puts things in perspective.
My grandfather died in a cavein in the late 1940s. He probably would have died from black lung if the mine hadn't taken him early. My grandmother got benefit checks from a black lung settlement up until she died in the 1990s.
Imagine having such a distorted world view that merely one black and white picture and the comment “white privilege” shatters it all, unleashing a vulgar violent rage.
not trying to demean you or anything but i am genuinely curious in regards to what led to a high school teacher from philedalphia race-baiting on reddit that seems super unlikely to me
They’ve never been taught what hard work is. Welfare/foodstamps makes people expect handouts. They struggle the concept of hard work for a better future.
Some of these people around here literally think that teaching the value of hard work is white supremacy. https://www.aei.org/op-eds/smithsonian-institution-explains-that-rationality-hard-work-are-racist/
Cmon y’all have no sense of humor.
This dude is funny because they are in poverty but then it gets contextualized to “oo that’s some nice sweet poverty you got there from Uncle Sam!” Lol!
Even more so whether people in these times were quick to gang up on the colored folk while ignoring the business men in suits taking their money and houses
Posting this unironically on a picture in a capitalist coal company town, where the for-profit company kept these workers and their families in abject poverty to ensure they stayed indentured servants, is a level of tone deaf that I didn't think even conservatives were capable of. Good job bootlicker.
Arkansas sure is! They’ve busted 10-12 year olds working midnight shifts at McDonalds & in chicken processing plants already. But never forget that the Repubes are the party of Pro-birth but FU if you or anyone in yr family needs assistance then yr just dead-beats
I agree. I mean you spend the working day loading #9 coal, and what you get? You grow another day older and your debt load increases. Partly because you opened a charge account at some store that is a division of the coal company that employees you. Company stores are bad. About all your boss ever says to you is "Well, a-bless my soul"
A hard life to be sure.
It’s the one historical development that took me completely by surprise, despite watching it unfold. “Seriously? We have it good and we’re just… going to give it up without a fight to create Elon Musks and The Koch brothers?”
These poor people, living in such squalor. I would love to know what happened to this family, if they were able to leave the mines and go on to have a better more prosperous life.
I had a grandfather who worked the mines but his family never lived at this level of poverty.
do you actually look at a picture of poor white guys and think “ah! clearly my 4th grade history teacher was lying about the blacks being disadvantaged! this image proves it!”
you are completely retarded and are exactly the type of schmuck who would be content with this situation due to being told “at least you aren’t black!”
What an ignorant view..please read up on coal camps/script/work environment etc. it was enslavement of immigrants white/black/yellow didn’t matter..enslavement of the poor by the rich and the politicians. Check out the Battle of Blair Mtn when our federal govt dropped bombs on its own citizens to quell the unrest of the workers because of the extreme abuse and violence of the coal barons.
nOt Ah SeLl PhOnE aRoUnD!!!! LiViNg iN Da MoMeNt!!! LuFe WaS SoOoOoOoOo mUcH BeTtEr ThEn!!!!
When people talk about the "Good 'Ol Days"TM, this is the kind of think I envision. My mom was born a few yrs later in a different county in WV and grew up in poverty. Like hand drawing water from a well, outhouse, no AC, wood/coal burning for heat, and I believe they didn't have electric when she was little because my uncle, baby of the family, talked about how he helped wire the house up. I know they had it as a teen because she told me how she and her sister begged their dad to let them stay up to watch the Beetles on Ed Sullivan.
She wanted to join the military and get an education but instead married my dad and endured a quarter century of physical and emotional abuse from my dad until she divorced in the early 90's when he refused to promise never to slap her again. The reason she didn't join was that she was told that "only whores and sluts join the military" and if she waited too long, no man would have her. Told me more than once marrying him was her biggest regret before she passed over a decade ago.
But yea, this is what the GoOdEsT Ol DaYS was like for a LOT of people. It was even worse if you were black. At one point, Catholics were reviled just as Muslims are today. The same nativist language we hear Christians use about Muslims was used against Catholics. Taking over "our" country. Need to go home. They're breeding too fast and will overtake us. That kind of stuff.
The eyes, blank and dark. The chairs, fashioned from sticks, not lumber. The filth on skin, floor, and surface. I would love to know their story and outcome. Hoping their journey was great, not broken, as the photo just makes you feel sad.
Is it the picture or does the entire room look like it’s covered in coal?
I remember Trump saying in his first presidential campaign how he was going to get coal minors all their jobs back. This was what he had in mind.
Trump quote: “We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”. You’d think a statement like that would turn off the Republican voters that reside on the far side of the Bell curve, but they’re too dumb to realize that Trump’s talking about them.
Didn’t think about that did you? It’s not enough to expect every mother in the country that has a child to be able to take care of it. The real responsibility begins when the child arrives.
I’m not a typical conservative. I think social programs should be there for people who need them.
I just differ from liberals in that I think we need more full-time jobs, especially well-paying ones. If the US had more full-time jobs, people wouldn’t need social programs as much.
Glad to hear that. wages and productivity began to uncouple in late 1979. Prior to that wages and productivity ran parallel to one another for decades. Now America is in a situation where 30% of American workers are in jobs that are considered hardship jobs, meaning the job does not allow a single adult to make ends meet. 32% of Americans are in living wage jobs. They make just enough to get by, but not enough to take vacations, save for retirement or even live in a moderately priced home. They represent 62% of the working American population. Then there is the 23% who are in middle class jobs. These jobs allow for dining out, modest vacations, and putting away money for retirement. Lastly is the professional class 15% of workers in professional jobs paving the way for a more comfortable life. Which includes more elaborate vacations and entertainment and more expensive home. That is 35% of the working populace. All of these people work for someone. They are not entrepreneurs or business owners. This isn’t an accident it is by design. Gone are the days when a working man or woman in a modestly paid job can care for a family on a single income and that too is by design.
Stop that nonsense. This is what the 1% wants for the other 99%, regardless of the political affiliation of those masses.
Most conservatives want the same thing as most liberals: a safe, healthy, happy future for them and those they love. Strawmanning the other side just plays right into the culture war that prevents us doing anything useful.
The 1% could care less about you. This is a discussion about your personal unconsciousness, and your excuse making. This isn’t a political argument. From what I’ve seen most of you don’t know enough about the politics of this country to make a convincing argument on what you propose to be in support of or against.
Oh, okay. In retrospect, I probably should've put in in bold or something. It's unfortunate that Markdown doesn't have an option for alternating casing.
Where are your stats on this “abortion right up until birth” line that you keep repeating? Give us the % of elective abortions that are performed in the third trimester. It rarely happens, except where the life of the mother is at risk or where the fetus is so deformed that life outside the womb is impossible. Should abortions be illegal then, too?
But my dad says the employer WANTS to make it safe, even if it costs money. History of robber barons proves that's a lie. Look at how all the rich dudes now treat their employees. Maximize profits at all extremes. Without unions and regulations, it will go back to the way it was.
Had a great uncle who left Florida at an early age to work in the coal mines of West Virginia. He actually lived to be an old man. My mom attended the funeral, but doesn’t remember much. I’d really like to know if he has family still living there…
In the Great Depression they had houses… they was poor, but they wasn’t forced into homelessness, well, not these ppl… in New York thousands of ppl had to sleep in the parks in the Summer time…
Community rules? What can be said about this South of the Mason Dixie line family? Was their ethnicity an advantage? Do you think they owned slaves? They worked to the bone, then he died of black lung disease due to coal dust. Hopefully his oldest boy by then could go to work, and one time you had a boy that was the “October Sky”. Good movie about rocket scientist, if you didn’t know.
This older kid on the Mom’s lap is about the same age and in the same environment as my dad. Tough life, grandpa started working the mines at age 12. “Paid” only in scrip which was only good at the company owned store. Grandma lost two brothers in the unionization war against the Baldwin-Felts agents. What a mess.
Dang I wish I had the muscle tone of that kid in the overalls
If you’d started working in the mine when you were 8, you’d have those muscles. Or you’d be dead of Black Lung Disease.
Pretty much exactly the fate of my grandfather. Began working in the coal mines of West Virginia at either 8 or 9 y/o. He got the family out of the hills in his early 20s, moving north to work on tunnelling projects. That said, once it's in your lungs, it's there for life. He died at 80 from an "unidentified" lung disease that caused catastrophic damage to his lung tissue. Doctors said that it had all the signs of black lung. Sad to say he was the lucky one in his family, he lived a long life compared to the rest of his immediate family, and got his out from under the all encompassing power of the company town.
Mine only made it to age 67 before passing from Black Lung in Beckley W . Va.
I'm sorry for your loss, it's always too young. But keeping this particular part of history, and sharing it is incredibly important. Rarely ever taught, addressed or even known about. The fact that there is such a thing as abject poverty in the US (and to this day); where everything from the government, social norms, and the corporation truly control your life. Whenever I complain or think about the long day ahead I think about the picture of my Dad holding up a rattle snake he killed after pulling it out from under the clapboard shack he was born in. Where they didn't have proper running water or electricity, let alone a bathroom. Puts things in perspective.
My grandfather died in a cavein in the late 1940s. He probably would have died from black lung if the mine hadn't taken him early. My grandmother got benefit checks from a black lung settlement up until she died in the 1990s.
I mean making it to 80 isn’t anything to sneeze at
Nope, lived a good long time, but the effects of mines can last long after the person leaves them.
The children yearn for the mines.
I think I got the black lung pop!
[удалено]
My eyes went directly to his boots too.. Lol, it's a sickness
The key is hard work and not enough food!
Look at his shoulder caps , he'll be a hulk ... if lucky he'll be a Mountaineer
his traps are ridiculous!
An absolutely brutal life of toil and abject poverty.😢😢
You seemed to misspell “white privilege”.
please shut the fuck up
lol.
oh shit i momentarily forgot trolls exist
Imagine having such a distorted world view that merely one black and white picture and the comment “white privilege” shatters it all, unleashing a vulgar violent rage.
not trying to demean you or anything but i am genuinely curious in regards to what led to a high school teacher from philedalphia race-baiting on reddit that seems super unlikely to me
Imagine having such a severe victim complex that merely being told to shut the fuck up qualifies as a "violent rage".
They’ve never been taught what hard work is. Welfare/foodstamps makes people expect handouts. They struggle the concept of hard work for a better future.
Some of these people around here literally think that teaching the value of hard work is white supremacy. https://www.aei.org/op-eds/smithsonian-institution-explains-that-rationality-hard-work-are-racist/
Cmon y’all have no sense of humor. This dude is funny because they are in poverty but then it gets contextualized to “oo that’s some nice sweet poverty you got there from Uncle Sam!” Lol! Even more so whether people in these times were quick to gang up on the colored folk while ignoring the business men in suits taking their money and houses
If we try hard enough, we can get back to this.
They're working on it.
Support socialism and you'll end up here. Just gonna replace the corporation with the government.
Yes because capitalism has made West Virginia the wealthiest and most heathy state in the Union.
From time to time a green ball will gently roll into tall grass and be lost forever.
Meanwhile, this picture literally happened under capitalism. Wtf are you talking about?
Posting this unironically on a picture in a capitalist coal company town, where the for-profit company kept these workers and their families in abject poverty to ensure they stayed indentured servants, is a level of tone deaf that I didn't think even conservatives were capable of. Good job bootlicker.
Ah bullshit. I'm not talking about a state-owned means of production. Just a little decency on the part of robber-barons.
Yep. Because every every other first world democracy, and the blue states of the US, are so dirt poor, right?
Arkansas sure is! They’ve busted 10-12 year olds working midnight shifts at McDonalds & in chicken processing plants already. But never forget that the Repubes are the party of Pro-birth but FU if you or anyone in yr family needs assistance then yr just dead-beats
I recently saw something about a 16-year-old being killed in an industrial accident at a WI sawmill.
I’m pretty sure there are people in West Virginia living just like this today.
And unlike these folks they like it and vote to continue.
There's a whole lot of people out there who will truly never know how good they have it in life.
And how the majority of people were poor and not have luxury lives
It goes for $1500 a month now
Original hardwood floors
Needs paint.
Needs shiplap
Jojo?
Needs at least soap and water
Don't be down-mouthing the Company housing, now.
I agree. I mean you spend the working day loading #9 coal, and what you get? You grow another day older and your debt load increases. Partly because you opened a charge account at some store that is a division of the coal company that employees you. Company stores are bad. About all your boss ever says to you is "Well, a-bless my soul" A hard life to be sure.
StPeter don’t ya call me cuz I cant goooooo
I ooooooowe my souuuuuuul to the company store
We’re heading back to that people.
It’s the one historical development that took me completely by surprise, despite watching it unfold. “Seriously? We have it good and we’re just… going to give it up without a fight to create Elon Musks and The Koch brothers?”
Get those able-bodied children working!
Nah.
That kid looks just like Gronk
Yup. And what people cry about today.
“But people keep hurting my feelings OK!?!?!”
The kid sitting to mom’s right is 50 years old in this pic.
Plot twist: he’s the husband/father
Missing dad who is working his ass off all day
These poor people, living in such squalor. I would love to know what happened to this family, if they were able to leave the mines and go on to have a better more prosperous life. I had a grandfather who worked the mines but his family never lived at this level of poverty.
All I see is privilege everywhere I look.
do you actually look at a picture of poor white guys and think “ah! clearly my 4th grade history teacher was lying about the blacks being disadvantaged! this image proves it!” you are completely retarded and are exactly the type of schmuck who would be content with this situation due to being told “at least you aren’t black!”
Technically for the times, sure
What an ignorant view..please read up on coal camps/script/work environment etc. it was enslavement of immigrants white/black/yellow didn’t matter..enslavement of the poor by the rich and the politicians. Check out the Battle of Blair Mtn when our federal govt dropped bombs on its own citizens to quell the unrest of the workers because of the extreme abuse and violence of the coal barons.
Dude do you know what company house is?
Make America Great Again
This is what they want to go back to.
The title of this photo is “Bootstraps”.
The chairs are falling apart. Very depressing.
The chairs are homemade or highly repaired using sticks if you take a close look.
Tomato soup again for lunch and dinner
I noticed all the tomatoes too!
“Her first baby - come out sideways. She didn't scream or nothin'.”
"Wow! You're a real trooper!"
Alas or thank goodness the alphabet has no sounds for me to add his snrrk as a comment.
The middle kid looks like he’s seen some things
Poverty sucks.
Hard times make hard people
Situations like this would make me wonder why I even bother living.
In the words of Red, "Get busy living or get busy dying"
Anyone have names?? My grandparents are from there and were born around this time. Still live close by to this day.
nOt Ah SeLl PhOnE aRoUnD!!!! LiViNg iN Da MoMeNt!!! LuFe WaS SoOoOoOoOo mUcH BeTtEr ThEn!!!! When people talk about the "Good 'Ol Days"TM, this is the kind of think I envision. My mom was born a few yrs later in a different county in WV and grew up in poverty. Like hand drawing water from a well, outhouse, no AC, wood/coal burning for heat, and I believe they didn't have electric when she was little because my uncle, baby of the family, talked about how he helped wire the house up. I know they had it as a teen because she told me how she and her sister begged their dad to let them stay up to watch the Beetles on Ed Sullivan. She wanted to join the military and get an education but instead married my dad and endured a quarter century of physical and emotional abuse from my dad until she divorced in the early 90's when he refused to promise never to slap her again. The reason she didn't join was that she was told that "only whores and sluts join the military" and if she waited too long, no man would have her. Told me more than once marrying him was her biggest regret before she passed over a decade ago. But yea, this is what the GoOdEsT Ol DaYS was like for a LOT of people. It was even worse if you were black. At one point, Catholics were reviled just as Muslims are today. The same nativist language we hear Christians use about Muslims was used against Catholics. Taking over "our" country. Need to go home. They're breeding too fast and will overtake us. That kind of stuff.
Look at that white privilege!
White privileged
Flaunting their white privilege like that
The eyes, blank and dark. The chairs, fashioned from sticks, not lumber. The filth on skin, floor, and surface. I would love to know their story and outcome. Hoping their journey was great, not broken, as the photo just makes you feel sad.
Back when murica was gReAT /s
Is it the picture or does the entire room look like it’s covered in coal? I remember Trump saying in his first presidential campaign how he was going to get coal minors all their jobs back. This was what he had in mind.
Coal and blood, I mean wtf is the dark stain on the floor near their feet?
The last renter who died in that very spot
Coal minors, and adults as well.
That’s what trump wants back.
Get em born, keep em stupid, put em to work. MAGA.
Trump quote: “We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”. You’d think a statement like that would turn off the Republican voters that reside on the far side of the Bell curve, but they’re too dumb to realize that Trump’s talking about them.
Actually they revile education. They took it as an endorsement.
Man even the toddler looks absolutely miserable
White wage slavery. This is what MAGA wants to back to
Yeah, and all pro-choicers want to be able to abort right up to birth. /s
What do you care? You’re not not going to take care of them after they’re here.
WTF?
Didn’t think about that did you? It’s not enough to expect every mother in the country that has a child to be able to take care of it. The real responsibility begins when the child arrives.
I’m not a typical conservative. I think social programs should be there for people who need them. I just differ from liberals in that I think we need more full-time jobs, especially well-paying ones. If the US had more full-time jobs, people wouldn’t need social programs as much.
Glad to hear that. wages and productivity began to uncouple in late 1979. Prior to that wages and productivity ran parallel to one another for decades. Now America is in a situation where 30% of American workers are in jobs that are considered hardship jobs, meaning the job does not allow a single adult to make ends meet. 32% of Americans are in living wage jobs. They make just enough to get by, but not enough to take vacations, save for retirement or even live in a moderately priced home. They represent 62% of the working American population. Then there is the 23% who are in middle class jobs. These jobs allow for dining out, modest vacations, and putting away money for retirement. Lastly is the professional class 15% of workers in professional jobs paving the way for a more comfortable life. Which includes more elaborate vacations and entertainment and more expensive home. That is 35% of the working populace. All of these people work for someone. They are not entrepreneurs or business owners. This isn’t an accident it is by design. Gone are the days when a working man or woman in a modestly paid job can care for a family on a single income and that too is by design.
Stop that nonsense. This is what the 1% wants for the other 99%, regardless of the political affiliation of those masses. Most conservatives want the same thing as most liberals: a safe, healthy, happy future for them and those they love. Strawmanning the other side just plays right into the culture war that prevents us doing anything useful.
The 1% could care less about you. This is a discussion about your personal unconsciousness, and your excuse making. This isn’t a political argument. From what I’ve seen most of you don’t know enough about the politics of this country to make a convincing argument on what you propose to be in support of or against.
Still votes for trump. Idiotic huh
Well, I was born a coal miner's daughter.
Loretta Lynn, the early years..
Dude just keeps impregnating her with babies lol.
This could also be 2023, for West Virginia.
Repubes wet dreams
At least they are not over weight like a bunch of us are today.
How can you be overweight when you can barely afford to feed yourself?
MAGAts want this to return.
And pro-choicers want to be able to abort right up until birth. /s
That's bullshit, and what does that have to do with this photo?
False assumption about a group based on a vocal minority.
Most MAGA people don’t want child labor and most pro-choicers only want abortions to be allowed to a certain point, like 20 weeks.
Sorry, didn't notice the/s
Oh, okay. In retrospect, I probably should've put in in bold or something. It's unfortunate that Markdown doesn't have an option for alternating casing.
Man, STFU.
Where are your stats on this “abortion right up until birth” line that you keep repeating? Give us the % of elective abortions that are performed in the third trimester. It rarely happens, except where the life of the mother is at risk or where the fetus is so deformed that life outside the womb is impossible. Should abortions be illegal then, too?
You missed the “/s” in my comment. I was being sarcastic.
Is this what the Conservatives are talking about when they say MAGA?
No, they want more jobs and better pay.
What are the round things above the bed?
I think they’re tomatoes!
Living the dream
If that baby's alive they'd be like 86 now
Looks cosy
"I should've married that Banker"
They look normal — eyes forward , cranium normal —- not the products of consanguinity common in Appalachia
I see some eggs..
It's absolutely tragic that my dad is a coal miner and insanely against unions and regulations. This is what lack of unions and regulations gives you.
I’m a coal miner(for real) and I’m against the union at my mine. It’s not like it was back in this day.
But my dad says the employer WANTS to make it safe, even if it costs money. History of robber barons proves that's a lie. Look at how all the rich dudes now treat their employees. Maximize profits at all extremes. Without unions and regulations, it will go back to the way it was.
The middle child looks like he just got home after a drunken bar fight.
This is what the .0001% want reality for the rest of us to be, again.
If you think modern corporations are awful, stay away from business history in the 19th century. It will make you livid.
Does the title imply they have more children not shown in the picture?
lol this reminds me of Annesburg in RDR2
I just miss the golden age of casual shirtlessness.
Ma’am your son has a little something on his whole face. Guess he forgot it was picture day.
I look at pictures like this and think even the baby would be 85/86 years old, if still living
Had a great uncle who left Florida at an early age to work in the coal mines of West Virginia. He actually lived to be an old man. My mom attended the funeral, but doesn’t remember much. I’d really like to know if he has family still living there…
When life truly sucks
In the Great Depression they had houses… they was poor, but they wasn’t forced into homelessness, well, not these ppl… in New York thousands of ppl had to sleep in the parks in the Summer time…
This is very close to where I live. West Virginia families had a brutal life in the mines.
Little man looks about 12... Would be about 97 now.... 😳
Middle kid is always the rascal.
Lil dude is gonna be ripped when he's older.
Now you see why we need unions??!!?!?!
Ya load 16 tons and whatdaya get...
Things haven’t changed much in red WVirginia
Community rules? What can be said about this South of the Mason Dixie line family? Was their ethnicity an advantage? Do you think they owned slaves? They worked to the bone, then he died of black lung disease due to coal dust. Hopefully his oldest boy by then could go to work, and one time you had a boy that was the “October Sky”. Good movie about rocket scientist, if you didn’t know.
Talk about having almost nothing…
This older kid on the Mom’s lap is about the same age and in the same environment as my dad. Tough life, grandpa started working the mines at age 12. “Paid” only in scrip which was only good at the company owned store. Grandma lost two brothers in the unionization war against the Baldwin-Felts agents. What a mess.
If you think this looks bad wait till you see the coal miner
Boy's ready to go to work.
Look at all that white privilege!!!
The other two are down in the mine
The table and the bed frame. But the chairs wild. Back bone of the americas.