American class conflict runs through this film from the Civil War to the early twentieth century, tracing how wealth and power shielded the rich from the costs of both war and labor. During the Civil War, men with money could pay a substitute or a commutation fee to avoid the draft, leaving the fighting and dying disproportionately to the poor. The film moves forward to the coal fields of West Virginia, where miners worked under armed company guards, lived in company towns, and were paid in company scrip, prompting them to organize unions against owners who broke strikes by importing replacement labor and writing contracts designed to keep workers from banding together. Archival material and historical framing carry the argument that inequality in America was built and defended by force, not accident, from battlefield substitutions to mine-camp violence. The throughline is repression: each gain workers made, from union recognition to basic safety, came only after direct confrontation with industrialists and the state power backing them.