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%. In Harlan County, Kentucky, are some of our country's richest natural resourcesand some of its poorest people. It was two o'clock on a Monday morning when the accident occurred, and he'd been in the mine., more than twelve hours. Kentucky communities discussed include Artemus, Burdine, Jenkins, Jellico, Van Lear, and Wheelwright; and Kentucky counties include Bell, Clay, Floyd, Harlan . We gather back in Evarts and announce that our report will be ready in two or three weeks. In response, the coal owners and operators decided to sell their fuel at below cost to increase the national dependency on coal. A young woman from the Associated Press asks me, aren't we getting only one side of the story? "They sent me to 'Waterhole No. I say that the issue is whether or not the men will be allowed to have their own union to protect their safety and secure and maintain decent wages and benefits, that if enough pressure is put on Duke Power Company, maybe something will give. 9:03 PM. Harlan County, KY, coal miners win affiliation with UMWA union, United No Neutrals: The Harlan County Miner's Strike of 1931 Only 23 percent of those in the county over the age of twenty-five have completed high school. It has assets worth $2.5 billion. Si says Harlan is a dry countyno legal liquor and no beer. Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet. Copy as parenthetical citation. Two more Inquiry panel members join us, Willard Wirtz, who was Secretary of Labor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and the Reverend Max Glenn, executive director of the Commission on Religion in Appalachia. Copy with citation. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. Early accounts of the Harlan County mine wars place the inability of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to establish a permanent foothold in the county, first at the feet of the Harlan County Coal Operators Association (HCCOA) and secondly at the worn work boots of miners who, when work was plentiful, saw little or no need for a union. I look at the government statistics once more. Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors. They made several attempts at holding strikes against the coal companies, but these failed in Harlan County. Poffitt, Jacqueline Brophy, and I meet the other members of the Citizens Inquiry in a private dining room in the Mount Aire: James David Barber, chairman of the Political Science Department at Duke University and author of The Presidential Character; Monsignor Geno Baroni, president of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, a Catholic priest whose father is a retired Pennsylvania miner with black lung; Barbara Bode, president of the Children's Foundation in Washington; and Dr. Raymond Wheeler of Charlotte, North Carolina, president of the Southern Regional Council. Killed - 12. Yarborough is tough and unyielding. safety director for the Harlan County Coal Operators Association; Moss Paterson, chief of the State Bureau of Mines and Minerals, and State and Federal mine inspectors. New subdivisions named Tall Oaks and Colonial Heights. In 1973 the 13-month Brookside Strike brought almost 200 workers to battle Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant, a company owned by Duke Power. June 17th of that same year, the first strike was over as the last miner had returned to work. I've read that in its heyday, the Blackjoe coal camp consisted of 60 or so houses. He decided to make Harlan County a test case in the UMW's new, more aggressive organizing efforts. This was thirteen percent of the workers showing up for their scheduled work times. Don Dalton, UMW Safety Director for Region Six, explains this. Harry Caudill, attorney and author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, will not be able to join us in Harlan because of legal business. Typical of counties with low income, counties where the mine companies own everything and pay low taxes, our UMW driver says. After nearly 40 years of working in coalmines, David . An investigation was conducted on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields. 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. In the throes of the Great Depression, Harlan County coal owners and operators, in an effort to expand national dependency on their fuel, chose to sell below cost. It is not all Duke's fault by any means. There is a suit still in litigation. [citation needed] On February 16, 1931, in order to prevent operating at a loss, the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association cut miners' wages by 10%. Three Harlan County incorporated towns were not owned by the coal mines, they became a sanctuary for the evicted and starving miners. Willard Wirtz says he senses that the Harlan County Coal Operators Association is a major factor in the dispute, that it doesn't want a settlement with higher wages and benefits and tough safety provisions to be made by Eastover, because it fears the domino effect of such a settlement on the rest of the companies in the county. But, I say, even without further investigation of each of the complaints, it is possible to conclude that fear is an everyday part of the miners' lives. The Harlan County coal miners campaigned and fought to organize their workplaces and better their wages and working conditions. Domesticity and Depression: Kentucky Coal Mining, Song, and Organizing Daniels was one of the most hated deputies in the county due to his anti-union views. 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. (There is such a provision in the standard UMW contract.). They say no action has been taken on this report. These disputes were still brewing when on December 8, 1934, the United Mine Workers Union was threatened by deputies and mine bosses. It is home to lawyers, doctors and coal operators; it has a hospital, several banks and a few fast-food . More than twenty-four babies out of a thousand die before they are one year old, and the expenditure per child in the public schools is one-half the national average. When they went to jail, they say, some of the women took their children with them. Inside the Harlan County Coal Miner Protest - Rolling Stone The miners, impoverished due to their already low pay (this coming in the form of company scrip, room, and board), decided enough was enough, and some of them . Harlan County to unionize miners. Mr. On May 24, 1931, Sheriff Blair rescinded the miners right to assemble and tear-gassed a union rally. The UMW union called in the National Guard to help them. Several folk singers and other artists toured the United States to raise money during the strikes. We agree that most of us lean toward the miners, but we think we can be fair in trying to learn the facts. What a marvelous view! On February 16, 1931, the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association reduced wages for miners in that part of eastern Kentucky by 10 percent. Movie Review: Harlan County, USA (1976) - organizing.work (Brookside) were the only two mines of the Harlan County owner/operators association who rejected a 10% pay increase in 1933. When Barbara finishes her answer, Wirtz raises a clenched fist and says, "Right on!" 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. However, the battle continues to this day. Listen to "Harlan County Coal" from Pistol Annies' album, 'Hell of a Holiday,' out now: https://pa.lnk.to/HOAHAY Chorus:Making decorations out of shotgun she. Louis Stacy that he has several times been running a defective roofbolting machine when word came that inspector was on his way. The accident was investigated by Rufus Bailey, Harlan, district mine inspector of the State Department of Mines and Minerals, and James Bryson, safety director, Harlan County Coal Operators Association. 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. Soon after the "Battle of Evarts," novelist Theodore Dreiser led a citizens' group to Harlan County to find and publicize the bloody facts. Harlan Fuel Co, 8 N.L.R.B. 25 | Casetext Each of us makes a statement. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. During the big coal boom in the early 1900s, Harlan County was amongst the largest contributors. Over one thousand shots were exchanged during those fifteen minutes. CBS is represented by a camera crew, and there are a number of national reporters. No wonder R C Cola has so many signs everywhere. The magazine presents a different picture of the people and conditions in the Piedmont region than the one I am to see in Harlan County, Kentucky. When the smoke had cleared, the bodies of three guards and one miner were found, and an undetermined number of other dead and dying had been carried away into the mountains. Harlan County Coal Miners Deaths 1940-1949 1940 1940 Hayes, Petry - Harlan Central Coal Company Totz No. A rural county of 27,000, Harlan County's average household income is about $29,000. The Wagner Act of 1935 (National Labor Relations Act or NLRA) guaranteed the rights of workers to choose to organize. 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. They file with us copies of specific federal safety violation reports, and they say that nothing was ever done to correct these violations. At first, there were little battles with gunshots being exchanged between the strikers and the private guards, and the local law enforcement agents. Here, too, are some of the richest natural resources in the countryand some of the poorest people. October 31, 2016. "We want safety all the time, not just when the inspector comes," Jerry Johnson says. Harlan County War | Military Wiki | Fandom We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. One night, they saw a secretary for the Dreiser group enter Dreiser's hotel room, and they placed toothpicks against the door to determine whether she ever came back out during the night. 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. The group included John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and a number of other writers and artists. 2012: $1,552,717. the meeting room. The miners say that they want their own safety committee, elected by the miners, as the standard UMW contract provides, with the right to walk out, losing their pay, when there is eminent danger in the mine.