After nearly 40 years of working in coalmines, David . They say no action has been taken on this report. The committee has invited owners as well as workers to participate in the hearings, but the impression we get is that management will not appear. What a marvelous view! "I cain't get a job nowhere in this county. Its profits in 1973 were $90 million, up 14 percent from the year before. In the bloody 1930s coal wars, miners known to be union members were fired and evicted from company-owned homes. On May 5, 1931 the pot boiled over; in Harlan County Kentucky, heavily armed deputies and company men, called "gun thugs" by miners, confronted disgruntled union men on a road near Evarts. He does say, I think primarily for the record, that he would like to see negotiations begin again. "Yarborough says he just don't want nobody tellin' him how to run his mine," Deaton says. The Red Cross eventually became involved in the county along with several local charities. "I've seen some hurt and some killed. Si sticks a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco in his cheek and begins to fill us in on the background of the Brookside strike. This series of skirmishes and strikes, lasting from early 1931 into 1939, began because of the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association's (HCCOA) decision to cut miners' wages by 10%. Yarborough says that he will not agree to the contract applying to Eastover's subcontractors. Daniels was one of the most hated deputies in the county due to his anti-union views. He said that when the coal industry was at its height in 1928, the peak of . Strike benefits are $100 weekly for a family, $90 for a couple, and $80 for a single man. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. He says that negotiations were broken off on November 28, 1973, because of the miners' insistence on the full terms of the standard UMW contract. Blaine Sergent, coal leader, putting up his check at the end of a workday in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1946. There was an addition to where miners could choose their own representation for these negotiations. 4 . It is also women's day before the Citizens In-quiry. Freda Armes says, "I take a cloth and strain the water to cook with. The group included John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and a number of other writers and artists. Why is garbage left on the roadway? All during the day they worked in shifts, trying to penetrate to the point where the explosion occurred. Grover Jennings says that six months ago he applied for a job at the Mary Helen mine and was apparently accepted, but that when he went back for his physical, Clyde Goitis, an official at the mine, said, "Buddy, there just ain't no way I can do anything for you. Si has signed on as head of the staff for the Citizens Inquiry, which is funded with a five-thousanddollar grant from the Field Foundation. Pic from Harlan County USA of a Coal Camp. the meeting room. Prior to the strike, the pay of the Brookside miners started and stopped at the face of coal. These guards were legally able to protect these men during their off duty time. Perched atop Inspiration Mountain is the modern Mount Aire Motel. The three houses with baths rent for $24 a month, plus $14 a month for electricity. However, they did make a greater effort than the United Mine Workers with relief as they opened soup kitchens around the county. Troops had to be called into the county three times to maintain order. Five miles north of Harlan, we drive up Inspiration Mountain. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners' sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. Following this episode, the women say, Norman Yarborough asked Judge Hogg to hold the UMW and a number of miners and women in contempt of the Judge's order limiting the number of picketers to six. The remaining workforce then went on strike as a sign of solidarity with those that were fired from their jobs. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". In one of these, the septic tank has been out of order for several months. He discusses the formation and activities of the Harlan County Coal Operators Association . She says that the women decided that they couldn't fight guns with switches and that they had taken sticks with them the next time. There had been several clashes with the "scabs," the mine guards, and the state police, Kahn says. Former Director of Harlan County Coal Operators Association. Norman Yarborough, head of Eastover Mining Company, is not coming either. These charities began to give aid to blacklisted miners who were unable to find employment as the soup kitchens had closed once the NMU had closed its doors. While their main objectives were a steady job, a decent wage and a program of safety checks . This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. Their activities began with a demonstration and march in Harlan on September 27, 1973. Three Point, Harlan County, Kentucky September 16, 1943 No. 25 (N.L.R.B. Carl Horn of Duke Power and Arnold Miller of the UMW had talked, and negotiations had been resumed. Now, forty-three years later, Harlan County is again gripped in a UMW strike, this time at the Brookside mine of the Eastover Mining Company, and another citizens' group has been formed. (Eastover offered fifty cents a ton.) those in the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association, were run as open shops from October 27, 1933 - March 31, 1935. The decade-long conflict between miners and the coal operators who adamantly resisted unionization has been immortalized in folksong by Florence Reece and Aunt Molly Jackson, contemplated in prose by Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, and long been obscured by . You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. A third generation coal operator, he served as President of the Harlan County Coal Operators and the Harlan Mining Institute, as Vice President of the Kentucky Coal Association and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Associated Industries of Kentucky. Unlike the previous Coal Wars that took place in West Virginia with the Paint-Creek Strike of 1912 and Matewan that lasted for a year or two. Our drive takes us upstream along the yellow-brown Clear Fork River. A thousand feet below me lies a small, green valley, partly shrouded by the morning mist. The decision caused unrest in the county among the miners. In "Bloody Harlan" in the 1930s, miners and union organizers faced bayonets and many died fighting the coal bosses, helping to fuel a national wave of organizing. And, all around, there are the rolling mountains, covered with second-growth timber. This law was enacted to try to reverse the hardships to those who were out of a job because of the economic collapse of the Great Depression. The county became nationally famous in 1931 and 1932 when it was the site of one of the earliest and bloodiest labor battles of the decade. The miners express extreme dissatisfaction with Eastover's medical and retirement benefits. Hennen attributes this abandonment to the increasingly conservative John L. Lewis, the longtime and powerful president of the UMWA, who feared . The transcript will be published as a book. We come into Harlan County at dusk. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. Si Kahn says that Eastover tried for a time to operate the mine with "scabs," but that the mine was shut down when the coal miners' wives and other women joined the men on the picket line. The Brookside mine is capable of producing only about a half-million tons of the 15 million tons of coal Duke uses each year. I currently live in Tennessee but my hope is to one day come back home to live in the beautiful mountains once more. Yellow-dog contracts (Contracts where the employees agreed to never organize into a union before they were employed with a coal company), company unions, blacklists, all tactics that were employed by the companies to bust up unions, and discrimination-based on union activity were all outlawed under this act. We hope that you have enjoyed our stop in Bloody Harlan and the history of the longest and still ongoing coal struggles of the United States. On May 5, 1931, the Battle of Evarts began. We stop for fish and chips at a chain-operated Long John Silver's Sea Food Shoppe, as out of place in the Cumberlands as a clam in a spruce tree. With the opening left by the United Mine Workers union the openly Communist (NMU) National Miners Union tried to help the miners to organize. Theoretically, even operators' and owners' children were . He is a sturdily built, self-assured man of about fifty, with a strong, square jaw and a rough, weathered face. It will be a two-hour, winding drive through the Cumberland Mountains to the town of Harlan. (Fifty million tons of union coal are mined in western Kentucky; only 6.5 million tons of union coal are mined in eastern Kentucky.) I glance at the new Piedmont magazine, Pace. (Brookside) were the only two mines of the Harlan County owner/operators association who rejected a 10% pay increase in 1933. The Citizens Inquiry meets in the attractive, river-rock Evarts Community Center, directly across the Clear Fork from the site of the 1931 "Battle of Evarts." It was [and still is] used to signify that what happened in the realm of politics, a field largely controlled by men, affect women's everyday lives. That year, annual wages dropped from $1,235 to $749. Harry Simms, who was a Young Communist League organizer was killed in Harlan. Sudie Crusenberg, a plain woman in a cotton dress, gives us some idea of what life is like for a coal-mining family. In response, the coal owners and operators decided to sell their fuel at below cost to increase the national dependency on coal. They were convicted on charges of conspiracy to murder. He fined the UMW $20,000. Some of the women cut switches and joined the picketers. Arnold Miller, who was an active coal miner until three years ago and is now the reform-minded president of the United Mine Workers, has asked me to serve as a member of a "Citizens Public Inquiry into the Brookside Strike.". Si says Harlan is a dry countyno legal liquor and no beer. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. Nonunion workers were attempting to leave the mine. . by Ron Soodalter. Duke went into the coal business directly in 1970 when it organized Eastover Mining Company as a wholly owned subsidiary and, through it, bought several mines in eastern Kentucky, including the one at Brookside. James Willard Pope officiating. October 31, 2016. She talks about hiding behind cars on the picket line for protection from the "gun thugs." She talks about a standoff against Basil Collins and the scabs and gun thugs. J. D. Skidmore says, "I have no chance of getting a job in Harlan County if this strike is not settled." These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. They lobby in Frankfort and Washington and sponsor an annual "Coal Miners Day" to try to get more high school students interested in mining engineering. We soon get into a discussion about Dreiser's 1931 inquiry. Willard Wirtz asks how it will all come out, how the strike will end. Exist Dates. Soon enough, most miners had gone on strike out of solidarity. A Brief History of Harlan County, USA. It was two o'clock on a Monday morning when the accident occurred, and he'd been in the mine., more than twelve hours. He says that he will not agree to the Brookside contract applying to "all" of Eastover's operations. He says that they do not need the UMW to look after them; he will do that. If for example, they did not behave in the way the companies wanted them to, they could lose all their benefits up to and including their jobs. Trailer parks called Walnut Grove, Mobile Manor, and Mesa Village Mobile Manor. At Washington's National Airport, I board Piedmont Airline's fat little silver jet on a Sunday afternoon in early March. The women furnish the panel with a copy of a report from the Harlan County Health Department, dated October 12, 1973, which states that the drinking water in the Eastover mining camp, where approximately thirty of the striking Brookside families live, is "highly contaminated" with fecal bacteria. It doesn't seem like enough. (There is such a provision in the standard UMW contract.). They're trapped. Harlan County sits in the sweet spot of coal mining in southeastern Kentucky. But is it really hurting? Harlan, district mine inspector of the State Department of Mines and Minerals, and James Bryson, safety director, Harlan County Coal Operators Association. Rev. These interviews with major coal operators document their personal histories and the history of the coal industry in eastern Kentucky during the twentieth century. This was not just a flashy slogan, and the truth of it is . If you protested this safety violation, he says, "the boss would just say, 'Run it.'" Bobby's wife, Becky, who died in 2013, was a lifelong advocate for the people of Harlan County. Apparently, this is one of Eastover's major objections. Miners also wanted the right to organize and have a union. Established in 1916, its membership consisted of nearly all the large mining companies, and it represented the major political force in the county. She doesn't know where she will go when the camp is closed. We hope that our hearings will help hold down violence. It reports that "Piedmont" is an adjective derived.from Italian words that literally mean "formed at the foot of the mountains." It was Miller who defeated W. A. Midway in the trial, Judge Hogg dismissed the jury and directed a verdict of guilty. "The way I figured it, they done that because it was just a faster, way of getting coal." Kentucky communities discussed include Artemus, Burdine, Jenkins, Jellico, Van Lear, and Wheelwright; and Kentucky counties include Bell, Clay, Floyd, Harlan . Only 23 percent of those in the county over the age of twenty-five have completed high school. Nevertheless, as the county seat, the city of Harlan has resources much of the county lacks. (This . The Federal Government, with the Commissioner of Labor in a fact finding role, acted as a 'neutral' for the first time in contributing to settlement of the bitter coal strike. The group publishes policy papers on the benefits of coal for Kentucky and sponsors the "Friends of Coal" initiative. Yarborough tells us that the company does not now object to paying the miners for portal-to-portal time for inside mine work, but that the union wants comparability for outside workers too, in effect requiring the company to pay outside workers overtime for all work in excess of a seven and-a-quarter-hour regular day. One of the towns that were a refuge was Evarts, Kentucky. Make your practice more effective and efficient with Casetext's legal research suite. "We want safety all the time, not just when the inspector comes," Jerry Johnson says. Yarborough comes out of a staff meeting and ushers us hack to a large, paneled meeting room with folding tables and chairs. Three of our Inquiry members plan to talk with the president of Duke Power Company. It took forty-five minutes for someone to come and help get him out, Deaton says. Some seventy-five state policemen were on hand as the crowd gathered. There were only three cars in the motorcade each of which contained a sheriffs deputy. The women say they then organized a "sunrise worship service" to begin at 4:30 on the morning of October 23, on the railroad tracks across the highway from the picket line. . knee-deep in water, he has experienced many electrical shocks. Interviews with residents of Hazard who discuss the coal miners' union, the harassment union miners faced from large mining companies, and the unofficial strikes that are being organized in Hazard County. Neither will Dr. Robert Coles, psychiatrist and author of Children of Crisis. When they went to jail, they say, some of the women took their children with them. The decrease in wages, unemployment, and irregular employment caused "poverty, hunger, and disease.". HARLAN COUNTYHarlan County, Kentucky, is a rural county located in a major coal-mining region in the Appalachian Mountains. In Harlan County on July 7, 1935, during a celebration of the Wagner Act, a group of disgruntled deputies severely beat up several miners and dispersed the crowd. (That is a tough point.) No. Miners laid in an ambush on the day of May 5, 1931, near the Evarts railroad crossing. Interview Summary. There are very few vacant houses in the county. There are still ongoing strikes today and the violence in Harlan County Continues. Bright yellow forsythia has begun to bloom in the yards of Harlan and Brookside and Evarts. This caused the clergy to denounce the union. Three Harlan County incorporated towns were not owned by the coal mines, they became a sanctuary for the evicted and starving miners. CBS is represented by a camera crew, and there are a number of national reporters. A reporter asks us again how we can expect to make an unbiased report when we've heard only one side. Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. Abstract. Altogether, it is a heavy financial burden for the UMW. Copy with citation. "It's one of 'em," Yarborough says. She talks about the women being armed with sticks, mace . One of the better houses is already being demolished. As part of his New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented and had passed the National Industrial Act. The women are nervous about testifying, afraid of retaliation. Based on this new Act, from October 27, 1933, to March 31, 1935, the mines ran as open shops. Enforcing the operators' political will, both within and outside the law, was the Harlan County Coal Operators Association. Here, too, are some of the richest natural resources in the countryand some of the poorest people. "Try walking out of there, carrying a man with a broken back," one of the miners says. Someone had planted dynamite in his automobile and when he started it up the car blew up. Lois Scott says that the women organized the Brookside Women's Club and got involved in the strike "because we knew that if the women didn't come in there would be violence." Under this Act, the right to organize in ones workplace was granted as well as it outlawed any discrimination whether employed or seeking employment based on union membership. These disputes were still brewing when on December 8, 1934, the United Mine Workers Union was threatened by deputies and mine bosses. Done. "Why couldn't the original thirteen colonies live with the same British policy that applied to all other British colonies?" Dan Pollitt reads a letter from Carl Horn, Jr., president of Duke Power Company, respectfully declining our invitation. The AFSC fed almost 1500 children in Harlan by the end of the 1931-2 schoolyear, as well as about a hundred nursing and expectant mothers. Figure 2: Harlan County Coal Mine Employment, 2000-2016, (KYEEC, 2017) In 1942, shortly after Harlan County experienced record high coal mine employment, the county experienced is highest production levels with 15.6 million tons of coal being produced in this year (KYEEC, 2017). Coal employment in Harlan county dropped 53.7% in the second quarter of this year compared with last year, driven by Blackjewel's bankruptcy. He run all the way down the stairs and out of the jail." It is home to lawyers, doctors and coal operators; it has a hospital, several banks and a few fast-food . "We run because we wanted to testify, and if we hadn't run, he woulda had us in jail." Did she find the stick on the ground? What did the foremen say on those occasions?

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