Drift mines back into the mountains follow the seam of coal wherever it goes." We never would find out what happened. Other clippings detail the earlier bloodshed and misery in Harlan County. In response, the coal owners and operators decided to sell their fuel at below cost to increase the national dependency on coal. No. 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. Rev. 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 Harlan County Coal Wars lasted from 1931-1939. It is a warm night and at every bend in the asphalt road we hear a chorus of croaking frogs. There was a scuffle when a state police captain tried to remove one of the women, she says, adding, "Captain Cromer did get hit several times; I hit him with a stick myself." Special Judge F. Byrd Hogg, a neighboring county judge who has been assigned to the case, entered an early order limiting the strikers to three pickets at each of two entrances to the Eastover Mining Company property. And lastly, the Harlan Fox Mining Co - presumably derived from the Harlan Fox Coal Co - was in operation from 1925-1932. Carl Horn of Duke Power and Arnold Miller of the UMW had talked, and negotiations had been resumed. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. Violence erupted that would periodically repeat itself for the next eight years. 1938) Copy Citation . Documents the 1973 Kentucky coal miners' strike against the operators of the Brookside mine and the Duke Power Company, which resulted from the company's refusal to honor the . When they went to jail, they say, some of the women took their children with them. There were only nine hundred miners working and 5,800 miners were idle and striking during the first strike. Throughout 1931, violence sprouted between miners 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. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. We agree that most of us lean toward the miners, but we think we can be fair in trying to learn the facts. those in the Harlan County Coal Operators . He fined the UMW $20,000. It is not all Duke's fault by any means. To prevent operating at a loss, on February 16, 1931, the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association decided to cut all wages by ten . (There is such a provision in the standard UMW contract.). Burger Chef. They want portal-to-portal pay from the time they enter the mine until they leave it. Sheriff Blair was voted out of his office in 1933 and died just a year later. Exist Dates. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners' sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. ", We break for lunch, prepared by the women of the Evarts Community Center. Source for information on Harlan County: Encyclopedia of the Great Depression dictionary. James Sizemore says that frequently float dust, which is dangerously explosive, would get too heavy in the mine, and he would complain, but that. [6] Nearly four thousand miners working and living in Harlan County, Kentucky lost their jobs in the Great Depression. KCA's constitution and by-laws were adopted on April 28, 1947, "to promote the best interest of the coal mining industry in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and all those engaged therein". Word precedes him. With the added protection for workers and the addition of collective bargaining between the workers and their employers. Forty percent of the county's dwellings lack some or all of plumbing, water, or toilet facilities. Partial Transcript: August 27, '86. 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 . After nearly 40 years of working in coalmines, David . On May 5, 1931, the Battle of Evarts began. This was not just a flashy slogan, and the truth of it is . The miners charge that Eastover has hired what they call "gun thugs." Pay ranged from $17 to $32 day, the average being $25. New subdivisions named Tall Oaks and Colonial Heights. "Roof falls are a constant hazard, but the bosses just keep on rushin'.". Some seventy-five state policemen were on hand as the crowd gathered. Isolated trailer houses. Leroy Helton says he still owes a lot of bills that should have been paid by SLU. 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. Yarborough says that he will not agree to the contract applying to Eastover's subcontractors. "It's one of 'em," Yarborough says. Others claim that his death was caused by an election concerning slot machines into the county. Along the way, we pass through the community of Brookside, its mine-camp houses dominated by the brooding tin presence of the Eastover mine building on the hill. The group included John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and a number of other writers and artists. She's been picketing with the other women. The Kentucky mining camps still had the paternalism idea in their mists and the ever-independent Appalachian people were not having it. The Three Point disaster was the worst suffered in the county since December 9, 1932, when 23 men were killed in an explosion in "Zero" Mine of Harlan Fuel Company, Yancey. He decided to make Harlan County a test case in the UMW's new, more aggressive organizing efforts. For a time after the hearing, he says, it appeared that Duke had softened. KCA traces its origin to a statewide association of coal operators who united their efforts in 1942. 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.". No help came to those that were in starving situations due to no money to spend on food and no admittance to the company store unless they were gainfully employed by the coal mine. During the rest of the afternoon, the miners talk about what has happened on the picket line and in the local court. After this, the first strike occurred, in which only about 13% of strikers showed up to work. 25 (N.L.R.B. Unemployment in 2017 was 9.4 percent, far above the national average. Now, Tony Boyle is among those who have been convicted of complicity in the murders, and Arnold Miller is the head of the revamped union. Jacqueline Brophy asks why public services have broken down. 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. I've talked to Norman Yarborough, and you ain't bringing no union down here. Lois Scott, a woman of about forty-five, begins to speak first. Many of the houses have no running water, and these families have to carry all their water from a common outdoor spigot. 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. We huddle before breaking up. Big Boy. There were constant beatings of the miners by the Sheriffs deputies. My brother died at the age of forty. Brophy's was the last reform insurgency against UMW leadership until Joseph Yablonski's fatal try. Whitfield recalls working in his father's coal mines during the first years of commercial mining in Harlan County, and he describes the conditions. 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%. These interviews with major coal operators document their personal histories and the history of the coal industry in eastern Kentucky during the twentieth century. The Harlan County Wars took on its own epic spin on the ongoing fight between labor disputes and the coal operators and owners lasting almost ten years. "We could lay down, fight the police, or let them scabs go to work. Documentary of mining practices in Hazard County, Kentucky. 5355, atEvarts . Miners die, and last year was the deadliest in American coal mines in more than a decade. . On the plane with me, it turns out, is another member of the Citizens Inquiry, Jacqueline Brophy, who is the director of the Labor-Liberal Arts Program of Cornell University's School of Industrial Labor Relations in New York. We are picked up at the airport by Si (for Simon) Kahn, a Pennsylvania rabbi's son who graduated from Harvard, came to the Southern mountains as a Vista worker, and remained here, working for local community groups. by Ron Soodalter. The company also agreed to abide by any agreement reached between the . corporateBody associatedWith : Heyl & Patterson, Inc . And always there is a murky roadside stream, beech and sycamore trees lining its banks. The Act was an attempt to restructure the industrial sector of the economy and to alleviate unemployment with a public works program. There are very few vacant houses in Harlan County and virtually no available land to build on. (Fifty million tons of union coal are mined in western Kentucky; only 6.5 million tons of union coal are mined in eastern Kentucky.) In 1970, Joseph Yablonski had led a rank-and-file revolt against Boyle, and Yablonski and his wife and daughter had been brutally murdered by killers hired with union funds. Fifty miners and their wives have at one time or another been held in contempt of this order. Its initial land holdings were in the Irwin gas coal basin in Westmoreland County, but as these were exhausted the company purchased 14,000 acres of undeveloped coal land along the border of Boone and Logan Counties in West Virginia in 1923-28. . And, even so, it usually takes forty-five minutes to an hour for the inspector to get from mine entrance to the face of the coal. had them make me go in and pin it because it wasn't done right the first time. 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. J. D. Skidmore says, "I have no chance of getting a job in Harlan County if this strike is not settled." 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. There is no water in the house. Miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, have drawn national attention with their direct action occupying a railroad track to halt a coal train . Bill Doan says that the roof bolts often didn't have enough torque on them, sometimes causing roof falls as high as thirty-five feet above the regular ceiling, and that once he complained about this to the visiting inspector in the presence of his foreman. ", Bill McQueen says that when the shuttle's lights and brakes were not working and the inspector was coming, the foreman would say, "Park it." Garbage along the roadside. They also plan to join with a North Carolina group in protesting Duke's requested rate increase, and they are going to attend the meeting of Duke's stockholders on May 30. In Harlan County, Kentucky, are some of our country's richest natural resourcesand some of its poorest people. Conflict broke out again the 1970s in what was known as the Brookside strike. Harlan County sits in the sweet spot of coal mining in southeastern Kentucky. They relate federal mine-safety figures which show that in 1971 the accident rate in the Brookside mine was three times the national average, and in 1972 was twice the national average. The Great Depression of 1929 through the late 1930s hit Harlan County Kentucky. It took forty-five minutes for someone to come and help get him out, Deaton says. They are neatly and attractively dressed. They have probably helped keep their own men from exploding too. 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. 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. "Try walking out of there, carrying a man with a broken back," one of the miners says. "They don't want miners havin' any say in safety." But what of the people of Harlan County? In response, the coal owners and operators decided to sell their fuel at below cost to increase the national dependency on coal. 5355 after Local Union 4495 at Black Mountain folded up. 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. By clicking Accept, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. The women spent the night. "You could hunt for one, but there just weren't one there," he says. 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. Bill Doan says, "When I got hurt, I couldn't find Jim Miller, the man who had charge of the sick fund." To prevent operating at a loss, on February 16, 1931, the Harlan County Coal Operators Association decided to cut all wages by ten percent. But is it really hurting? 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. If you protested this safety violation, he says, "the boss would just say, 'Run it.'" These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. As the motorcade approached a single shot rang out in the air. And we're burning up people to make electricity. "This whole country is like a layer cake," Si Kahn says, "a layer cake of shale, coal, and sandstone. We hope that our hearings will help hold down violence. He hopes the other side will do the same. Where will the families go? Dateline Newport News, Virginia, November 12, 1931: Dreiser denies the charge and says he wants people to concentrate on the facts of the labor dispute and "get the American mind off sex for a moment." The warrant was never served. She pays $10 a month for rent and $10 a month for electricity. Why couldn't Eastover live with the same national UMW contract that so many other companies have accepted? Source Citation [ }] Descriptive Note Contributors from initial SNAC EAC-CPF ingest. Available for both RF and RM licensing. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. From July 30, 2019, through September 28, 2019, coal miners and their families have blocked roads and railways demanding their payment. Leroy Helton says miners often have to splice electrical cable, even though they're not qualified to do so. Midway in the trial, Judge Hogg dismissed the jury and directed a verdict of guilty. We drive through the streets of the town of Harlan, past the stores and houses, past the Harlan Baptist Church with a sign out front which reads: "If you are unkind, you are the wrong kind." There was no functioning safety committee Medical and retirement benefits were minimal and unreliable. Office files covering topics such as "accounts receivable," "baseball club," "coal production," "garnishment orders," "Harlan Coal Operator's Association," "labor conditions," "medical conditions . It is also women's day before the Citizens In-quiry. I can see twenty-five miles to the southeast, five ridges. They range in age from about twenty-one to seventy. 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. Herndon J. Evans, the editor of the Pineville Sun, argued, The troubles of the coal industry had their inception in war times. McDonald's. "The way I figured it, they done that because it was just a faster, way of getting coal." Past that, the other undulating ridges are blue and hazy. A thousand feet below me lies a small, green valley, partly shrouded by the morning mist. Our drive takes us upstream along the yellow-brown Clear Fork River. I have two children and four grandchildren from a previous marriage. In Harlan County, Kentucky, the 1931 Battle of Evarts ended in four deaths. 2011: $1,161,330. I look at the government statistics once more. I have been married to David W. Sergent since May 4, 2013. These guards were legally able to protect these men during their off duty time. Wanted to be able to spend their money at a store of their choice besides the Black Mountain Coal Company store. 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. Almost immediately after the explosion became known rescue teams, under the direction of J. F. Bryson, safety director of the Harlan County Coal Operators association, started into the entry. Evarts welcomed the miners because it was filled with spurned politicians and business owners who wished to see the company stores and company men in political positions vanish. How does the Harlan County Coal Operators Association fit into the picture? 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. 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. Now and then, there is a neat, new frame house or a Pic and Pay market between scattered tarpaper shacks. The mining company had ordered a motorcade to deliver food and supplies to the strikebreakers known as Scabs. They're trapped. Some of the miners also claim that the state police have tried to intimidate them. The National Industrial Recovery Act only partially succeeded in accomplishing its stated goals when it was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on May 27, 1935, which was three weeks before the Act was set to expire. The women are nervous about testifying, afraid of retaliation. 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. 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. "They didn't say nothin'; all they want's coal.' We first hear from a number of the striking miners about safety conditions in the Brookside mine. Eastover agreed to sign the 1971 wage pact of the Bituminous Coal Operators Association which is in force at 1,200 mines. Barbara says that she was reacting spontaneously to the spirit and determination exhibited by the women, that their testimony was the highlight of our hearings. (The union has told us that they are quite willing to limit the contract to the Brookside mine.) As in Germany, the AFSC used need alone to determine who got fed. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. I'm standing at 2800 feet above sea level. The records show that Beach was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 1954 and sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary, that he was later charged with carrying a concealed pistol (no disposition shown), and that in 1966 he was tried and acquitted on a murder charge. On September 4, 1935, Harlan County Attorney Elmon Clay Middleton, age 31, was assassinated by a car bomb containing eighteen sticks of dynamite. Why are people allowed to dump raw sewage in the streams? Get a Demo. California labor activist Caroline Decker also raised money for the relief of the striking miner efforts. The miners say that, somehow, management always knows when the government inspectors are coming. Dateline New York City, November 13, 1931: Dreiser again denies the charge and adds, "Even if it were true, I wouldn't give a damn. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". One of the towns that were a refuge was Evarts, Kentucky. Even though things were doing better for the unions in Harlan County, there was still civil unrest. They want the terms of the standard UMW contract or better. those in the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association, were run as open shops from October 27, 1933 - March 31, 1935. 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. Capitalizing on the general . "Why couldn't the original thirteen colonies live with the same British policy that applied to all other British colonies?" 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. He said that when the coal industry was at its height in 1928, the peak of . At first, there were little battles with gunshots being exchanged between the strikers and the private guards, and the local law enforcement agents. 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. If you wouldn't do it, they'd just say, 'Get your bucket.' The Seco Train Accident September 20, 1917, New Bank in the Coal Country Installed in 1911, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Evarts, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/new-deal/national-industrial-recovery-act-of-1933/, https://pipiwiki.com/wiki/Battle_of_Evarts, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County_War, https://labornotes.org/blogs/2019/08/brief-history-harlan-county-usa, https://www.thebalancecareers.com/the-wagner-act-of-1935-national-labor-relations-act-2060509#:~:text=%20The%20Wagner%20Act%20defines%20and%20prohibits%20five,or%20administration%20of%20a%20labor%20organization.%20More%20, https://www.nytimes.com/1935/09/05/archives/bomb-in-auto-kills-kentucky-official-harlan-county-attorney.html#:~:text=HARLAN%2C%20Ky.%2C%20Sept.%204%20%28AP%29.%20%20The%20death,his%20automobile.%20View%20Full%20Article%20in%20Timesmachine%20%C2%BB, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/70804679/elmon-clay-middleton, https://www.nytimes.com/1935/09/06/archives/kentucky-holds-four-in-auto-bomb-killing-harlan-prosecutors-death.html, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/?fbclid=IwAR21nYphw4Dul-_EwuAmSWgzsvPLNwsMM0FtV75j0y-mGUHq-lCZjJxZot8, The Flatwoods Monster: Weird Appalachia Cases, Rotherwood Mansion: Weird Appalachia Cases, The Brown Mountain Ghostly Lights: Weird Appalachia Cases.