In the face of what promised to be a lengthy struggle for the Harlan County coal miners of 1931, their wildcat strike had left thousands jobless and many homeless as well. While their main objectives were a steady job, a decent wage and a program of safety checks in the mines, their immediate concerns were food and shelter for their families.
The United Mine Workers of America initially had promised relief, but this proved too much once its leaders realized the scope of the miners’ needs. Practically bankrupt from its support of activities elsewhere, the union declared itself powerless to help. In addition to withholding strike relief, it also abandoned all plans to organize the county’s miners. For the moment, at least, the UMWA was finished in Harlan.
By June, the strike had failed, and there was no relief on the horizon. Even the Red Cross refused to involve itself in what it termed an “industrial” dispute. Now completely on their own, the miners turned to another, more radical organization for support. The National Miners Union (NMU), recently formed by the American Communist Party, actively courted potential members in the eastern Kentucky coalfields, and many of the miners embraced it in the hope that it would provide the support that the UMWA had withheld.
The first order of business was nourishment. Realizing that “you can’t organize people through their heads; you must organize them through their belly,” the NMU set up seven soup kitchens throughout the county. The operators’ response was not long in coming. The soup kitchen in Evarts was dynamited, miners posted as guards at other soup kitchens were arrested on such flimsy charges as “banding and confederating,” and others were beaten and expelled from the county. On Aug. 30, 1931, at the Clovertown soup kitchen, two miners were shot and killed.
The wife of one of the slain miners, whose death left her with four children under the age of 6 and no means of support, testified at the accused slayer’s trial: “All I knew he was killed for was because he was relief chairman of the kitchen.” After deliberating for five minutes, the jury acquitted the defendant on the grounds that he had acted in self-defense.
Apparently, the fact that union members were seen by the court as “Reds” further exacerbated an already volatile situation. Reportedly, Judge D.C. Jones—whose wife belonged to the Coal Operators Association—had instructed the grand jury, “No one belonging to a ‘Red’ organization has any right to look to this court or to any other court in the country for justice.” In fact, the miners were largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, the implications of being a “Red”; their main concerns were a decent job and food for their families.
Perhaps the most blatant act of violence was perpetrated against a teenage union organizer named Harry Simms. In February 1932, the 19-year-old activist was walking with an acquaintance along the track between Barbourville and Pineville on a relief mission, when two deputies approached on a handcar. Without preamble, one fatally shot the youth in the stomach, making him an overnight martyr.
“Harry Simms was a pal of mine,
We labored side by side,
Expecting to be shot on sight
Or taken for a ride …”
– Jim Garland, “The Ballad of Harry Simms”
This is not to imply that the miners didn’t fight back, and in some instances, instigate a confrontation. Months after Simms was murdered, his killer, who had gone unpunished by the law, was himself found slain. In fact, of the 11 men killed and 20 wounded during the troubles of the 1930s, the miners slew five deputies and wounded three, as well as wounding two National Guardsmen. Sometimes, striking miners would dynamite a mine, tipple or piece of heavy machinery. And there is every indication that what became known as the Battle of Evarts was provoked by the miners.
Almost invariably, however, the odds were overwhelmingly on the side of the owners; and where company gun thugs could commit violent crimes with impunity, miners frequently were arrested on such vague charges as “criminal syndicalism”—a statute against “advocating violence or other illicit means of bringing about political change.” The nature of the charge was irrelevant; once before the court, they had scant hope of acquittal. After the Evarts fight, juries convicted several miners of murder on highly questionable testimony and sentenced them to life imprisonment.
One of the defendants was William B. Jones. A charismatic speaker and unofficial head of the local union, he was something of a hero to his fellow miners. Jones’ conviction was almost certainly based on perjured testimony, since he had repeatedly preached nonviolence, and was, by all reliable reports, sitting on his porch at the time of the fight.
In January 1932, the NMU attempted to organize another strike, but only around 1 percent of the miners participated. This marked the end of NMU involvement in Harlan County. The passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in June—a measure designed to boost the flagging national economy—brought a brief glimmer of hope for improvement in the miners’ situation, but it lacked the power of enforcement and was soon struck down by the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, owner oppression continued apace. A congressional committee was sent to investigate and reported: “It appears that the principal cause of existing conditions in Harlan County is the desire of the mine operators to amass for themselves fortunes through the oppression of their laborers, which they do through the sheriff’s office.”
The following November, the Communist-based National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners sent a delegation to Harlan to investigate conditions firsthand. It was an illustrious group, headed by noted writer and Pulitzer Prize nominee Theodore Dreiser, and included such literary luminaries as John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson. Dreiser’s committee interviewed several miners and their families and presided over hearings in Bell and Harlan counties, whereupon the police summarily ordered them out of eastern Kentucky, and a local grand jury charged Dreiser in absentia with criminal syndicalism and adultery. (He apparently had entertained a woman in his hotel room overnight.)
The Dreiser committee’s report was subsequently published under the title, Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields. Although deliberately incendiary and highly dramatic, it accurately pointed up the harsh treatment afforded journalists who attempted to report what they observed. As The New York Times later attested, “Terror continues to flourish in Harlan County, in the comfortable obscurity furnished by a virtual censorship on news” enforced by “shooting and intimidation of reporters.”
In 1934, Theodore Roosevelt Middleton defeated J.H. Blair for re-election as sheriff. Middleton had attracted miners’ votes by running on a reform platform, promising to rid the sheriff’s office of bias and corruption, and to provide equal protection to union members and representatives. After Middleton’s election, however, he acquired five coal mines, formed an unofficial alliance with an anti-union county judge, and set in motion a period of unprecedented mayhem. Within the year, a state investigatory commission reported, “[I]n Harlan County there exists a virtual reign of terror, financed in general by a group of coal mine operators in collusion with certain public officials; the victims … are the coal miners … There is no doubt that Theodore Middleton, Sheriff of Harlan County, is in league with the operators and is using his many deputies to carry out his purposes.”
Inching Toward the Light
“I hope when I’m gone and the ages shall roll,
My body will blacken and turn into coal.
Then I’ll look from the door of my Heavenly home,
And pity the miner a-digging my bones.”
– Merle Travis, “Dark as a Dungeon”
Meanwhile, there was perceptible, albeit slow and painful, progress. The UMWA, having gained in member strength and financial stability since the Evarts strike, had been doggedly attempting to re-establish itself in the county. And the 1935 passage of the federal Wagner Act, which established the National Labor Relations Board and addressed relations between unions and employers, proved a landmark in the Roosevelt administration’s campaign to promote the growth of organized labor throughout the nation. The new law powerfully affected big coal—banning blacklists, discrimination toward union members, and other company tactics.
Coal companies elsewhere abided by the provisions of the law, but not the mine operators of Harlan County. Typically, when miners in Evarts attempted to celebrate the passage of the Wagner Act, a squad of sheriff’s deputies descended on them, beating several and scattering the crowd. They ramped up the violence, bombing union organizers’ cars and shooting into their homes. The operators periodically brought in the National Guard to again enforce their policies. And in a blatant show of defiance, the Coal Operators Association voted to hire another 15 deputies.
On Feb. 9, 1937, Middleton’s deputies went too far. They fired into the home of minister and union organizer Marshall Musick, killing his 15-year-old son, Bennett, as he sat at his homework. This brutal act stunned the nation, and a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, under Wisconsin Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr., turned its focus on Harlan. Based on its findings, the U.S. Department of Justice prosecuted 69 Harlan County mine operators and law officers for “criminally conspiring to violate the Wagner Act.”
Shortly thereafter, U.S. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson sent 20 FBI agents to Harlan County. Their month-long investigation resulted in federal criminal indictments of 22 companies, 24 operators, Middleton and 22 of his deputies.
Although the subsequent trials ended in hung juries, and Kentucky Gov. A.B. “Happy” Chandler dismissed all charges against Middleton, the experience convinced the mine owners that the federal government would go the distance to support organized labor. As several of the operators signed union contracts, the UMWA’s membership in Harlan County soared. It reached 9,000 by August— around 65 percent of the county’s miners.
In May 1938, Kentucky became the last state to outlaw the private mine-guard system, effectively lopping off the operators’ “executive” arm. The hated anti-union gun thug was no more.
Some mine owners, weary of federal scrutiny and feeling the financial pinch of paying their own legal expenses, withdrew from the Harlan County Coal Operators Association. Those who remained, however, redoubled their anti-union efforts. They bought the next election, and they developed an insidious plan for foiling the UMWA by forming “company unions” composed of foremen and nonunion workers. Once again, they imposed their own conditions and voted union members out of the mines—until the federal government condemned their actions.
In the final year of the decade, with the combined effects of the La Follette investigation, the FBI probe and prosecution, and enforcement of the Wagner Act, FDR’s New Deal had finally reached the miners of Harlan County.
Still, the 1930s did not end tranquilly. In April 1939, the UMWA initiated a national strike for union shops, and better hours and wages. In Harlan County, the striking miners perpetrated acts of violence against non-striking workers. Some 1,250 National Guardsmen subsequently occupied the county to ensure protection and safe passage to and from the job. On July 12, gunfire erupted between pickets and guardsmen at Stanfill, resulting in two dead and four wounded miners, and two injured soldiers. Eventually, 420 miners were indicted, although the charges were dropped after the operators and union reps finally reached an agreement.
The Brookside Strike: 1973-74
“And the wind blows hard up the holler
Through the trees with a whistling sound,
But the sun’s gonna shine in this old mine.
Ain’t no one can turn us around.”
– Si Kahn, “Brookside Strike”
The “Bloody Harlan” of the 1930s left a legacy of unrest in the region that would resurface from time to time in the decades that followed, culminating in a brutal strike in the early 1970s. Known as the Brookside Strike, it took place after the Duke Power Company bought two mines in the county and refused to sign a UMWA contract.
The union itself was in a tenuous position. It was struggling to emerge from a debilitating period in which corruption, collusion with management and murder had been linked to the union’s national president, Tony Boyle, and his supporters. UMWA membership in the coalfields had dropped, and most Harlan County miners were nonunion. Still, in late July 1973, the grassroots swell of discontent with Duke and its subsidiary, Eastover Mining Company, drove the workers to strike—as their member-written flier would state—for “decent wages, decent benefits, decent safety conditions, above all a right to have a say in their own affairs.”
They had gone on strike in 1964, but it failed, with union management colluding with the mine owners and the strike fund going into union management pockets. Now, with new national leadership, the UMWA supported the miners’ action.
Over the next year, it played out much as it had in the 1930s. Once again, the owners employed gun thugs to intimidate the striking miners. Daniel H. Pollitt, a member of the Citizens’ Inquiry into the Brookside Strike, later testified that Duke—in a move that echoed the practices of the earlier mine owners—obtained work releases for a number of penitentiary “lifers” and used them as armed guards. Over the next several months, the strikebreakers fired into miners’ homes with machine guns, broke up union meetings, and disrupted picket lines. Again, the owners evicted striking miners and their families from company housing. Again, the local courts were on the side of management. And again, a company thug shot and killed a miner in front of witnesses and walked out of court a free man.
However, with the unflagging support of the miners’ wives, the local community and a force of retired miners behind the striking workers, the picket lines held. In August 1974, with the U.S. Department of Labor acting as mediator, Duke agreed to negotiate. The megacorporation offered the Brookside miners an acceptable contract. The strike was over.
For the miners of eastern Kentucky, the decades-long struggle for representation and acknowledgment of their basic human rights was hard-won and came at a bitter price, leaving—both figuratively and literally—blood on the coal.
Part I of “The Price of Coal: Bloody Harlan and the Coal War of the 1930s” appeared in the October issue of Kentucky Monthly.