#16 tons

[iravaid]

Comic for my old gods of appalachia ttrpg character, Leander 'Lee' Kinsey

[direwolfrules]

I get that this is kinda over shadowed by the, well, everything going on in the book, but why is no one talking about how District 12 was a fucking Company Town. The miners were paid in scrip. Scrip was only supposed to be redeemable in the Capitol Store, but luckily some of the merchants in town would accept it as an alternative form of payment.

Keep in mind I’m American so my knowledge of the subject is very USA history centered, if anyone with knowledge of similar systems in other nations wants to jump in I encourage it.

For those who aren’t aware, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, companies would build entire communities, Company Towns, to house their workers. In the United States this often happened in remote areas where resource extraction jobs such as mining and logging/lumber milling were occurring. These towns would often be the only place to live for miles near these work sites, so even in the locations where it wasn’t required by the company that owned the site for their employees to live in the company town, many had no choice but to do so.

Most company towns were exploitative. You HAD to live in the company town most times, and in many cases the company would charge you rent. Then comes the Company Stores and scrip. The company owned and ran the store in town. So you needed to buy your groceries and toiletries and basic articles for living from the company. Thing was, they’d charge an excessive mark up for these products. So your pay would never quite be enough to afford everything you were buying, leaving you forced to put in on credit. Leaving you in debt to the company. But say you were in a company town just close enough to another community that you’d be able to make the trek to buy stuff from their shops. Surely, in that case, you’d be able to avoid the debt to the company that employs you? This is where scrip comes in. Scrip was an alternative type of currency that was only really good in the company town that issued it. Miners and loggers would be paid in scrip instead of actual money, and the exchange rate was practically worthless. Even if that neighboring community existed, the likelihood it would have a shop that would accept pieces of paper that were only useful as tinder outside of a company town were slim to none.

Company towns were designed to keep workers in debt to the company, and therefore trapped in their employment with the company. They were often lacking in what we would today consider to be basic municipal services, were full of poverty and lacking conditions, and the general awfulness of the practice and environment was one of the factors that lead to the unionization of mine workers.

Which leads me to a bit of Appalachian Coal Mining specific history and another few things I don’t see people talking about in the books. For around a decade in the 1910s-1920s the West Virginia coal wars, also known as the mine wars, raged as part of the dispute between unionizing miners and the mining companies/their union busting mercenaries/the U.S. government. The history is too long for this post, but I encourage everyone to at least read the Wikipedia article. Anyway, the Coal Wars culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain. During the Battle of Blair Mountain, which was the largest labor uprising in US history and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War, about 10,000 miners rose up against the companies and corrupt sheriff’s department that were literally murdering murdering them on courthouse steps for unionizing. The companies and the US Army had bomber planes drop gas and explosive bombs left over from WWI on them.

Anyway, I find it incredibly interesting with this historical context that one of Haymitch’s friends is named Blair. Whether or not Blair Mountain is still known as Blair Mountain during the series is unknown, the only in universe reference we have to what placed used to be named is when Katniss mentions District 12 is in what used to be known as Appalachia. It’s just interesting to me, that a name so tied to Appalachian coal miners rebelling against exploitative companies and corrupt law enforcement, lived on.

I also want to point out that while the miners were bombed and routed at Blair Mountain, though it was technically a win for the companies-government coalition, even though it led to lower numbers of UMW members for the next few years, the fight continued on. And in the 1930s the union won most of what the miners had been fighting for. Something something, District 12 parallel.

Anyway, I leave you with some music to listen to:

[ameliafromafairytale]

Fuck it! Post about why I think “16 Tons” works as the end credits song for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

“16 Tons” is Theee quintessential workers song, and it’s very explicitly about exploitation and class. The beginning stanza is focused on the previewed differences between what “a man” is supposed to be, and what a “poor man” theoretically is.

(I also really love the “A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong” in relation to the ways that Dunk is perceived by others, and how that’s deeply tied to his class)

The narrator of the song, a coal miner based in part on the original lyricists brother, is lamenting a lot of things, including the fact that none of his labor ever gets him anywhere, because of the system he is forced to exist under

in the 1930’s and 40’s when this song was written, an incredibly common practice was to Not pay employees with, real, national currency, but instead pay them with “company scrip”- a form of currency that could only be used at stores owned and operated by the company. Since the money couldn’t be spent anywhere else, these stores got away with massively inflated prices, leading to workers ending up in deeper and deeper debt to the company just to get enough food and supplies to survive.

Union leaders at the time called this, aptly, modern day Serfdom.

The same systems that are at work in 16 Tons are at work even more strongly in Westeros. Dunk’s position as a lowborn orphan who has to put his body on the line to make a living, isn’t insurmountably different from anyone else at his social level, or the exploited working class of our world.

anyone I could really right an essay about this, but the main point is that this song embodies a lot of the same themes as The Hedge knight as a whole; Power, privilege, who has it, and who lacks it.

If Westeros’s had a workers song that captured the same ideas, I probably would have preferred that, but Westeros Doesn’t and I think that’s part of the point ✌🏼

[rockabilly-bebop]

"Sixteen Tons" - The Platters (Lead vocal Herbert Reed) 1957

[union-elvis]

“Some people say a man is made outta mud

A poor man's made outta muscle and blood

Muscle and blood and skin and bones

A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong

—

You load 16 tons, what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt

St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store

—Tennessee Ernie Ford”

—Elvis Presley

[magi-official]

The hand that feeds and 16 tons are possibly the strongest for tool for radicalization

[kuiperoid]

They say that a man is made out of mud. A poor man's made out of muscle and blood.

[serenity2132]

Hey folks of Tumblr! Who wants to see one of the most clueless uses of a song in an advertisement ever?