HARLAN COUNTY
Harlan County, Kentucky, is a rural county located in a major coal-mining
region in the Appalachian Mountains. 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 desperation and the courage of the miners of Harlan
County, and the violent repression visited upon them by the coal operators of
the region when they attempted to organize a union, attracted national
attention.
Most of the miners in Harlan County were local people, with deep roots in
the Appalachian countryside. By contrast, the coal operators were primarily
absentee owners. There was virtually no other industry in the region. The
result was that the coal operators tightly controlled the Appalachian
communities. They owned the houses in which the miners lived, the stores from
which they bought food, and even the funeral homes that would bury them when
they died. The miners, however, shared an intense local culture, giving them a
measure of political independence from the coal operators.
When the Great Depression hit the coal fields, the paternalism that had
characterized coal town life vanished. Coal operators slashed wages and fired
thousands of miners. Workers contacted the United Mine Workers (UMW), which was
at that time a fragile organization with low membership, and started to
organize. The first mass meetings were held in February and March of 1931. The
companies responded harshly, immediately evicting thousands of miners from
their homes. In April, 2,800 men, women, and children from Harlan County
marched into town and demanded money and food from the company. Strikes spread
through the coal fields. On May 5, one hundred armed miners engaged in open
warfare with company deputies in a skirmish that left one miner and three
company men dead. Hundreds of state troopers arrived to quell the conflict, and
the UMW, overwhelmed, declared that the miners were on their own. Even though
over 11,000 miners joined the union in the spring organizing drive, the UMW did
not have the institutional resources to provide strike relief.
Still seeking to organize, the miners turned to the National Miners'
Union, a group that was supported by the Communist Party. The National Miners'
Union attempted to organize a strike beginning in the first days of January
1932. On the eve of the strike, two miners were shot and killed, and in the
days that followed, organizers were arrested and more people were killed. One
19-year-old organizer who had come from New York was murdered; his body was
sent back to New York and thousands of people marched in a funeral procession
from Penn Station to Union Square. But under the repression of the coal
operators and their deputies, the strike fell apart.
Unionism finally came to Harlan County in May 1933, when section 7(a) of
the National Industrial Recovery Act recognized the legal right of workers to
organize unions. The UMW organized the coal mines in a matter of months. By
autumn of 1933, the workers signed their first collective bargaining agreement
with the coal operators.
One of the most important things about Harlan County is that it attracted
national attention to the plight of the coal miners, much as the civil rights
demonstrations of the early 1960s brought the injustice of segregation to the
awareness of the nation. In late 1931, novelist Theodore Dreiser and a team of
writers came down to report on (as Dreiser put it) "terrorism in the Kentucky
coalfields." And during the strike, writer Waldo Frank organized an
"Independent Miners Relief Committee" to bring food to the miners. Busloads of
northern college students came South to support the miners, handing out food
and copies of the Bill of Rights. Florence Reece's song, "Which Side Are You
On?" also served to spread the word about the conflict, and became a lasting
favorite of labor and civil rights activists.
For people around the country, the Harlan County uprising of the early
1930s demonstrated the limits of the company paternalism and welfare capitalism
of the 1920s. In this way, it helped pave the way for the Wagner Act of 1935,
which guaranteed workers the right to organize and created a legal process for
attaining union recognition. The northern writers and organizers who told the
story of Harlan County to the rest of the country helped to cast union
organization as American and democratic, and the actions of the companies as
tyrannical, violent, and arbitrary. Finally, the ultimate victory of the miners
showed that even under the most difficult conditions, in the most rural
communities, workers could organize and win union representation. The
mineworkers' union, with its stronghold in Harlan County and Appalachia, would
remain a powerful force in the United States throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and
the entire postwar era.
See Also: APPALACHIA, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; UNITED MINE
WORKERS OF AMERICA (UMWA); "WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?"
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dreiser, Theodore, et al. Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the
Kentucky Coal Fields. 1932.
Gaventa, John. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an
Appalachian Valley. 1980.
Hevener, John W. Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners,
1931-39. 1978.
Kopple, Barbara, director and producer. Harlan County, U.S.A. 1976.
Taylor, Paul F. Bloody Harlan: The United Mine Workers of America in
Harlan County, Kentucky, 1931-1941. 1990.
KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN
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Harlan County
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