“BTW, name-calling is rather the hallmark of the mind-numbed, robot-like, knee-jerk liberal disrupters who slipin here from time to time from DU.
Go back to your little friends and leave the adults here alone.”
In the early 1920’s there was a faction of labor and particulary the UMWA that supported the Bolsheviks. They tried unsuccessfully to get their support into the constitution of the UMWA convention in Ohio. The saying in the coal fields of Applachia stands today as it did then; “I have never seen a Republican carry a lunch-pale to work”. The early factions of socialism still exist today in the hollows of Applachia.
And also your comments about DU....I stand with my earlier comment. You believe you can post anything without rebuttal. I have worked my entire life in this industry in a management role. My entire family for generations have worked in this industry. THIS generation that I am in is the first that has broken ranks from the DemoRat party. You have been here since 1998 and apparently are annoited. You can call me anything you want including an idiot and thats o.k., tell me to go back to DU? You can guess my response.
No doubt your generation (which is mine) saw for the first time that UMW was not a Dem captive vote ~ they voted for George Bush.
They began working at it when they voted for Ronald Reagan, and even Richard Milhouse Nixon got more than his fair share of coal mining votes given the level of union sponsored vitriol thrown his way. Eisenhower did well.
Try as they could the Wiki writers couldn't get Lewis moved to the left until 1935, and he didn't exactly stay there all that long either.
Concerning those Appalachian Socialists, I've met them ~ strange accents too ~ Polish and Welsh miners only recently brought to America to work.
When the industry began mechanizing in the 50s and mining employment collapsed even they moved North. Still, they were a tiny minority in a sea of folks whose people had been in this country since its foundations.
Now, regarding personal links, one of my grandfather's was a labor union leader and knew Lewis, and Roosevelt, and Willkie, and Eleanor, and you name it. Everybody had to be lobbied back in the '30s and '40s. I even have a pen around here that Roosevelt used to sign the first, last and only pay raise he ever authorized for government employees.
I tend to agree. In Southwest Virginia, UMWA country, there is a union gene that makes young people that have never worked coal vote Democrat because Grandaddy does.
I think it is an ingrained cultural thing that happens totally in the dark with only tradition as the cause. There is no thought or applied reasoning.