Plutocracy III: Class War
The third installment in Scott Noble's Plutocracy series turns to the labor wars that erupted across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Archival photographs, newspaper clippings, and period footage trace the Homestead Strike, the Pullman Strike, and the Ludlow Massacre, where Colorado National Guardsmen and private militia opened fire on a tent colony of striking coal miners and their families. Pinkerton agents, company towns, and armed strikebreakers recur throughout as the film builds its case that industrial capitalism in America was maintained by organized violence against workers. Historians and writers narrate the buildup from wage cuts and blacklists to open confrontation, situating each strike within the broader fight over the eight-hour day and the right to unionize. Like the earlier films in the series, it leans on primary documents and firsthand accounts rather than dramatization, letting court records and contemporary press coverage carry the argument that class conflict, not consensus, built the modern American workplace.