Harlan County War | |||
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Part of the Coal Wars | |||
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Date | 1931–1939 | ||
Location | Harlan County, Kentucky, United States | ||
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Lead figures | |||
Sheriff J. H. Blair | |||
Casualties and losses | |||
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The Harlan County War, or Bloody Harlan, was a series of coal industry skirmishes, executions, bombings and strikes (both attempted and realized) that took place in Harlan County, Kentucky, during the 1930s. The incidents involved coal miners and union organizers on one side and coal firms and law enforcement officials on the other. [1] The Harlan County coal miners campaigned and fought to organize their workplaces and better their wages and working conditions. It was a nearly decade-long conflict, lasting from 1931 to 1939. Before its conclusion, an unknown number of miners, deputies and bosses would be killed, state and federal troops would occupy the county more than half a dozen times, two acclaimed folk singers would emerge, union membership would oscillate wildly and workers in the nation's most anti-labor coal county would ultimately be represented by a union.
On February 16, 1931, to maximize profits, the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association cut miners' wages by 10%. Reacting to the unrest created within Harlan's impoverished labor force, the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) attempted to organize the county's miners. [2] [3] Employees who were known by their bosses to be union members were fired and evicted from their company-owned homes. Before long, most of the remaining workforce had gone on strike in solidarity. [4] : 32 Only three of Harlan's incorporated towns were not owned by mines, hungry and evicted workers and their families sought refuge in them, primarily in the town of Evarts. They found sympathy there with spurned politicians and business owners who wished to see the company stores vanish. [4] : 32 At the peak of the first strike, 5,800 miners were idle and only 900 working. [4] : 46 The strikebreakers were protected by private mine guards with full county deputy privileges, who were legally able to exercise their powers with impunity outside the walls of their employers. [4] : 46 They operated under Sheriff J. H. Blair, a man who made his allegiance to the mine owners clear, "I did all in my power to aid the operators ... there was no compromise when labor troubles swept the county and the 'Reds' came to Harlan County". [4] : 39 The citizens of Harlan, for their part, lost any illusions they may have held about impartiality in law enforcement. Songwriter Florence Reece reported,
Sheriff J. H. Blair and his men came to our house in search of Sam – that's my husband – he was one of the union leaders. I was home alone with our seven children. They ransacked the whole house and then kept watch outside, waiting to shoot Sam down when he came back. But he didn't come home that night. Afterward I tore a sheet from a calendar on the wall and wrote the words to 'Which Side Are You On?' to an old Baptist hymn, 'Lay the Lily Low'. My songs always goes to the underdog – to the worker. I'm one of them and I feel like I've got to be with them. There's no such thing as neutral. You have to be on one side or the other. Some people say, 'I don't take sides – I'm neutral.' There's no such thing. In your mind you're on one side or the other. In Harlan County there wasn't no neutral. If you wasn't a gun thug, you was a union man. You had to be. [5]
Strikers exchanged gunfire with private guards and local law enforcement; strikebreakers were set upon and beaten. [6] [7] [8] The most violent attack by mine workers occurred on May 5, 1931, and became known as the Battle of Evarts. The miners lay in ambush for cars delivering materials to strikebreakers and shot at them. Three company men and one striker were killed in the exchange.
The Kentucky National Guard was called in. The strikers expected protection but upon replacing deputized mine guards, the National Guard broke the picket lines instead. [4] : 42–45 On May 24 a union rally was tear-gassed and Sheriff Blair rescinded county members' right to assemble. By June 17, the last mine had returned to work. No concessions were given by the mine operators and UMW membership plummeted. [4] : 47
In the wake of the UMW failure, the Communist National Miners Union (NMU) made a brief play for Harlan County. Though most workers felt disillusioned with organized labor, the NMU's radical ideology gained some support, ten local lodges sprang up before the Harlan County NMU was officially chartered. The smaller but more passionate NMU made greater relief efforts than the UMW, opening several soup kitchens in the county. [4] : 56–88 Their attempts at strikes, while weak in surrounding counties, were utter failures in Harlan, where only a fraction of the workforce walked out in 1931 and 1932. [9] Several events broke the NMU's foothold, local labor organizers, many of them clergy, learned of the Communist leadership's animosity toward religion and denounced the organization, Young Communist League organizer Harry Simms was killed in Harlan and the American Red Cross and local charities, who had been unwilling to take sides in a labor dispute, began giving aid to blacklisted miners who were unemployable as the NMU's financial troubles necessitated the closing of its soup kitchens. [4] : 79
Under the auspices of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which promoted the right to organize one's workplace and outlawed discrimination and firing based on union membership, approximately half of Harlan's coal mines, those in the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association, were run as open shops from October 27, 1933 – March 31, 1935. An open shop allows union membership but does not mandate it. Wages at these mines came into step with the rest of the nation. Despite headway by the unions, the battle for Harlan County between labor and capital continued. Sheriff Blair was voted out of office in 1933 and died in 1934, replaced by T. R. Middleton, a candidate who ran on a pro-union platform. [10] The Kentucky National Guard was once again called in on December 8, 1934, requested by UMW organizers who had been threatened by bosses and deputies. The troops promptly escorted the union men to the county line. [11] As national political support for the NIRA dwindled, capital gained the upper hand, and when the United States Supreme Court struck down the legislation's pro-union National Recovery Administration portion, shops with union presence in Harlan dwindled from eighteen to one. [4] : 81–123
Where the NIRA had been toothless in Harlan, the Wagner Act of 1935 proved itself a far greater thorn in the side of Harlan County's mine operators. It outlawed yellow-dog contracts, company unions, blacklists and discrimination on basis of union activity, all tactics employed by coal companies. [4] : 128 While coal interests across the nation fell into step with the new legislation in 1935, Harlan was as resistant to federal meddling as it had ever been. On July 7, a group of deputies, enraged at a public celebration of the Wagner Act, dispersed the crowd by beating several miners. [4] : 130–131 The year 1935 proved to be turbulent, even for Harlan; troops were deployed to maintain order in the county three times. On September 29, troops were dispatched on behalf of the miners for the first time in the Harlan County War, the governor referring to the beatings and harassment at the hands of the mine guards as "the worst reign of terror in the history of the county." [12] [13] He protected the miners despite the fact that a bomb had killed Harlan County Attorney Elmon Middleton several weeks earlier. [14]
Author and activist Theodore Dreiser conducted an investigation under the auspices of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP) of the American Communist Party. With contributions by John dos Passos, Samuel Ornitz and others, Dreiser produced a report called Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields. The Dreiser Committee also discovered the labor folk singer Aunt Molly Jackson and her younger half-brother Jim Garland, putting them on a tour of 38 states to raise funds for the strikers. [4] : 67 Florence Reece, wife of organizer Sam Reece, wrote the labor standard "Which Side Are You On?".
California labor activist Caroline Decker first became involved in union activities during the Harlan County War, when she and her sister participated in relief activities for striking miners. [15] The 1976 documentary film Harlan County, USA , winner of the 1977 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, focuses on similar labor violence of the 1970s but refers to the 1930s violence as context. (Florence Reece appears in the film.) The 2000 television movie Harlan County War starred Holly Hunter.
The United Mine Workers of America is a North American labor union best known for representing coal miners. Today, the Union also represents health care workers, truck drivers, manufacturing workers and public employees in the United States and Canada. Although its main focus has always been on workers and their rights, the UMW of today also advocates for better roads, schools, and universal health care. By 2014, coal mining had largely shifted to open pit mines in Wyoming, and there were only 60,000 active coal miners. The UMW was left with 35,000 members, of whom 20,000 were coal miners, chiefly in underground mines in Kentucky and West Virginia. However it was responsible for pensions and medical benefits for 40,000 retired miners, and for 50,000 spouses and dependents.
The Communist Party USA and its allies played an important role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but wasn't successful either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda of fighting for socialism and full workers' control over industry, or in converting their influence in any particular union into membership gains for the Party. The CP has had only negligible influence in labor since its supporters' defeat in internal union political battles in the aftermath of World War II and the CIO's expulsion of the unions in which they held the most influence in 1950. After the expulsion of the Communists, organized labor in the United States began a steady decline.
Harlan County, USA is a 1976 American documentary film covering the "Brookside Strike", a 1973 effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, southeast Kentucky. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 49th Academy Awards.
The Coal strike of 1902 was a strike by the United Mine Workers of America in the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. Miners struck for higher wages, shorter workdays, and the recognition of their union. The strike threatened to shut down the winter fuel supply to major American cities. At that time, residences were typically heated with anthracite or "hard" coal, which produces higher heat value and less smoke than "soft" or bituminous coal.
The Lattimer massacre refers to a Luzerne County sheriff's posse killing at least 19 unarmed striking immigrant anthracite miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania on September 10, 1897. The miners were mostly of Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German ethnicities. Scores more miners were wounded in the attack by the posse. The massacre was a turning point in the history of the United Mine Workers (UMW).
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The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest labor uprising in United States history and is the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. The conflict occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, as part of the Coal Wars, a series of early-20th-century labor disputes in Appalachia.
The Battle of Evarts occurred in Harlan, Kentucky during the Harlan County Wars. The coal miners desired improved working conditions, higher wages, and more housing options for their families. These reasons, along with other factors, led the miners to go on strike. It ended when the Kentucky National Guard was called in to break the strike. This battle lasted approximately 15 minutes.
The Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike, or the Paint Creek Mine War, was a confrontation between striking coal miners and coal operators in Kanawha County, West Virginia, centered on the area enclosed by two streams, Paint Creek and Cabin Creek.
The West Virginia coal wars (1912–1921), also known as the mine wars, arose out of a dispute between coal companies and miners.
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Aunt Molly Jackson was an influential American folk singer and a union activist. Her full name was Mary Magdalene Garland Stewart Jackson Stamos.
Florence Reece was an American social activist, poet, and folksong writer. She is best known for the song "Which Side Are You On?" which she originally wrote at the age of twelve while her father was out on strike with other coal miners, according to The Penguin Book of American Folk Song by Alan Lomax.
"Which Side Are You On?" is a song written in 1931 by activist Florence Reece, who was the wife of Sam Reece, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky.
The 1920 Alabama coal strike, or the Alabama miners' strike, was a statewide strike of the United Mine Workers of America against coal mine operators. The strike was marked by racial violence, and ended in significant defeat for the union and organized labor in Alabama.
The Illinois coal wars, also known as the Illinois mine wars and several other names, were a series of labor disputes between 1898 and 1900 in central and southern Illinois.
The Coal Wars were a series of armed labor conflicts in the United States, roughly between 1890 and 1930. Although they occurred mainly in the East, particularly in Appalachia, there was a significant amount of violence in Colorado after the turn of the century.
The 1959 United Mine Workers strike was a labor action by union miners in Eastern Kentucky. Originally over a pay increase, it grew into a conflict between union and non-union mines that resulted in three deaths. It was the first instance of labor violence in the area since the Harlan County War and was the prelude to the Roving Picket Movement.
The National Miners' Union (NMU) was a dual workers' association established in 1928 in the United States of America under the aegis of the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern), the international trade union authority of the Communist International (Comintern). The union was affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League, American counterpart of the Profintern.
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