In one of these, the septic tank has been out of order for several months. In response, the coal owners and operators decided to sell their fuel at below cost to increase the national dependency on coal. The Harlan County Coal Wars 1931-1939 - Kentucky Tennessee Living California labor activist Caroline Decker also raised money for the relief of the striking miner efforts. Harry Caudill, attorney and author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, will not be able to join us in Harlan because of legal business. Yarborough is tough and unyielding. Perched atop Inspiration Mountain is the modern Mount Aire Motel. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience. Zero Mine Explosion In Harlan County, Kentucky, are some of our country's richest natural resourcesand some of its poorest people. 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. The final straw was when the Harlan County Coal Operators Association cut miners' wages by 10%. Attempts to organize led to the dismissal of employees who were suspected of having leanings toward the organization and having them evicted from their family homes. It seems to me that for a great many people in Harlan County-for poor people and a lot of coal miners the whole county is a jail. The unemployment rate in the county is 7 percent; that doesn't count those who have long since given up looking for the scarce or nonexistent jobs. Duke Power Company of North Carolina, he says, is the sixth largest utility company in the world. Why are people allowed to dump raw sewage in the streams? June 17th of that same year, the first strike was over as the last miner had returned to work. To prevent operating at a loss, on February 16, 1931, the Harlan County Coal Operators Association decided to cut all wages by ten percent. Harlan County War History, Impact, The Free Encyclopedia Nevertheless, as the county seat, the city of Harlan has resources much of the county lacks. Interview with B. W. Whitfield, Jr., February 9, 1989 SPOKEdb The next morning the toothpicks were still in place, it was said. [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%. If those under them behave in an approved manner then they receive housing, work, food, and other perks of their position. 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. 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. Domesticity and Depression: Kentucky Coal Mining, Song, and Organizing During the day, a man came and said that if their children weren't out of the jail by night, the welfare people would take them. They are demanding the standard UMW provision requiring the company to pay a royalty of seventy-five cents a ton on mined coal into the UMW Welfare & Retirement Fund. With the opening left by the United Mine Workers union the openly Communist (NMU) National Miners Union tried to help the miners to organize. 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. The Harlan County Coal Operators Association, still functioning today, spent nearly a half million dollars from 1927 to 1938 to combat unionism, most of it going to pay strongarm men to terrorize the miners and their families. "We took the sticks with us," she says. Paternalism is the practice of people who have a business or other authority to restrict the freedoms of those who are subordinate to them. Jacqueline Brophy asks why public services have broken down. But mostly the scenery is depressingly bleak. Blair. Overturned car bodies everywhere. The men's life depended on my job, but I knowed if I protested I'd a got fired. You come out of there lookin' like a hog that's been rootin' in the mud.' The roof is approximately forty-eight inches high in the mine. However, after the dust was clear, the anti-labor coal country would end up being represented by unions. She's been picketing with the other women. 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. They file with us copies of specific federal safety violation reports, and they say that nothing was ever done to correct these violations. No more union coal mines remain in Kentucky, home of the deadly battles The Harlan Daily Enterprise story of September 16, 1943 is serious and straightforward: 17 miners are trapped a mile underground and help is on the way.. Much of the story is about help. They fed strikers' children as well as the employed, blacks as well as whites. Expand. . Harlan County U.S.A. by Felicia Elliott, August 2, 2016. Four men were arrested in connection with this murder. Name Entry; Harlan County Coal Operators' Association. The Sheriff reportedly got rich on payoffs from the companies, and he used 181 mine company gunmen as special deputies. The union abandoned its efforts after less than a year. Featuring a haunting soundtrack-with legendary country . Ky., told the Senate Civil Liberties Committee as it resumed its investigation of alleged terrorism in connection with Harlan County Coal Operators' efforts to resist union organization drives. Pay ranged from $17 to $32 day, the average being $25. The miners say that they often have to stand knee-deep in water while handling 440-volt electrical cables. 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 . After the railroad arrived in 1911 . They have done this only since the Brookside strike. Sudie Crusenberg, a plain woman in a cotton dress, gives us some idea of what life is like for a coal-mining family. Those with running water rent for around $20 a month, plus electricity. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". (Fifty million tons of union coal are mined in western Kentucky; only 6.5 million tons of union coal are mined in eastern Kentucky.) Mostly, the miners were fighting for improved working conditions, higher wages, and better housing options for their families. When drafting these articles, I found that many things have not been taught to the future generations about the struggles for coal miner rights have been in the Appalachian Mountains. Pic from Harlan County USA of a Coal Camp. He tells me that the miners plan to picket on Wall Street, hoping to give Duke problems with its stock. The local grand jury returned an indictment against Dreiser for adultery, but by that time Dreiser had finished his work and had left the county on the train. Soon after the "Battle of Evarts," novelist Theodore Dreiser led a citizens' group to Harlan County to find and publicize the bloody facts. And lastly, the Harlan Fox Mining Co - presumably derived from the Harlan Fox Coal Co - was in operation from 1925-1932. In the bloody 1930s coal wars, miners known to be union members were fired and evicted from company-owned homes. Home - Harlan County But you must remember I am an immoral man. A thousand feet below me lies a small, green valley, partly shrouded by the morning mist. Forty percent of the county's dwellings lack some or all of plumbing, water, or toilet facilities. (Eastover, to repeat, now pays portal-to-portal wages for inside workers in its other mines and has raised the wages of nonstrikers to the UMW level.) 1940-49 Harlan Co Miners Deaths - USGenWeb sites The accident was the second worst mine fatality in the history of Harlan County coal mining, the worst being Harlan Fuel Company . Bill McQueen says that the shuttle car into the mine usually has no brakes, and that it can only be stopped by putting it in reverse. While it succeeded in organizing thousands of miners, it failed to complete a bargaining agreement with Harlan County's coal operators. Harlan County War | Military Wiki | Fandom Why is garbage left on the roadway? Capitalizing on the general . We drive to the Evarts Community Center and report to the other members of the Citizens Inquiry. [Verse 2] I got 27 peopl coming over to this house. Harlan County. 2011: $1,161,330. ", What about federal inspection? 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. Yarborough says that he will not agree to the contract applying to Eastover's subcontractors. 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. 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. The UMW union called in the National Guard to help them. Darrell Deaton says there is a direct telephone line to Washington for safety complaints, "but if you identify yourself; you're gonna be out of a job.". Westmoreland Coal Company - Social Networks and Archival Context - SNAC The name comes from a series of United Mine Workers strikes and labor-management battles which ended in a gunfight between deputized mine guards and miners on May 4, 1931, in the tiny community of Evarts. We are handed copies of court records concerning a certain Claude Beach, who has been hired by Eastover during the strike as a "security guard." "Try walking out of there, carrying a man with a broken back," one of the miners says. I glance at the new Piedmont magazine, Pace. The three houses with baths rent for $24 a month, plus $14 a month for electricity. 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. Toilets are built out over the river, and the water has obviously been much higher in the recent past. Mine operators viciously opposed miners' efforts to unionize, particularly in Harlan County. It is not all Duke's fault by any means. Here and there, we also see white-blossoming pear and dogwood trees. Louis Stacy that he has several times been running a defective roofbolting machine when word came that inspector was on his way. Harlan County Coal Miners Deaths 1940-1949 1940 1940 Hayes, Petry - Harlan Central Coal Company Totz No. I remind her of what Bill Doan has said: "You work with one eye on the roof, one eye on your job, and your mind's outside.". Jacqueline Brophy is the daughter of Pat Brophy, who went into the mines when he was twelve, and who, in 1926, ran against John L. Lewis and lost. The miners could be fired if they refused to spend their paychecks only in the store. But what of the people of Harlan County? Harlan, Kentucky coal miner killed - World Socialist Web Site - wsws.org Does the Association hire for all the mines in the county? Big Boy. "I've had the foreman to tell me to set timbers or something until the inspector got gone. After nearly 40 years of working in coalmines, David . 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. Harlan County Coal Operators' Association. No concessions or deals were made between the two factions and the membership of the United Mine Workers union plummeted. The Harlan County Coal War - YouTube He hopes the other side will do the same. The Brookside Women's Club of Harlan County - New York Women in Film It was Miller who defeated W. A. Dixon and union leaders worry that the union's disappearance in Kentucky has opened the door for coal operators to . But, Aaronson says, Norman Yarborough had then called back to say, simply, that there was nothing of further interest to them in the negotiations More public pressure on Duke is needed, he says. This was thirteen percent of the workers showing up for their scheduled work times. 9:03 PM. Biographical History . Printing - Angelfire Harlan | Kentucky, United States | Britannica Cite. Details for: Harlan County. Marywood University catalog 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. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. To prevent operating at a loss, on February 16, 1931, the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association decided to cut all wages by ten . Documentary of mining practices in Hazard County, Kentucky.