Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-39

250 Pages·1978·7.681 MB·English

by  John W. Hevener

Which Side Are You On?

Which Side Are You On?
The Harlan County Coal Miners,
1931-39
JOHN W. HEVENER
Foreword by Robert Gipe
University of Illinois Press
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
First paperback edition, 2002
© 1978, 2002 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
Reprinted by arrangement with Mary Hevener Kahal
All rights reserved
8 This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hevener, John W., 1933-1993
Which side are you on?: the Harlan County coal miners, 1931-39 /
John W. Hevener; foreword by Robert Gipe
p. cm.
Includes bibliography and index.
ISBN 0-252-07077-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Trade-unions-Coal-miners-Kentucky-Harlan Co.-History.
2. United Mine Workers of America-History.
3. Strikes and lockouts-Coal mining-Kentucky-Harlan Co.-History.
4. Labor policy-United States-History-Case studies.
I. Title.
HD6515.M616H373 2002
331.88'12'23309769154 78-16417
To Mary

Contents
Foreword by Robert Gipe ix
Preface xvii
Acknowledgments xxi
1 Harlan's Industrial Revolution: 1911-31 1
2 Unsettled People 14
3 Strike! February-July, 1931 33
4 Union of the Damned: June, 1931-July, 1932 55
5 Failure of Reform: 1933-35 94
6 Operators at the Bar: 1935-38 128
7 Striking a New Balance of Power: 1939 158
8 From Golden Age to Exodus: 1939-78 175
Bibliography 187
Index 199
Ust of Illustrations
following page 150
Harlan County Coal Field in 1937
Crummies Creek Coal Company, 1937
Miner riding on coal car
following page 164
Miners listening to UMW speakers, May 14, 1939
National Guardsmen at Crummies Creek mine
Working miners being escorted by National Guardsmen
Miner arguing about returning to work
Picket being taken into custody
Picket line and troops
Nonstriking miners going to work
National Guard checkpoint
following page 170
Troops blockading road
Arrested strikers
Truckload of arrested miners arriving at jail
Troops marching miners to jail
Union and operator representatives signing 1939 contract
Foreword
Back to Harlan
ROBERT GIPE
One can't forget everything, however great one's wish to do so ....
-Albert Camus, The Plague
Here in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first
century, factory farms play supermarket to the world while
farming families scramble for work. In New York City, Times
Square has become a bewildering maze of towering neon cor
porate logos, leaving the homeless and the hustler blinking and
bustled beyond the gaze of the tourist class. National elections
are won and lost on television by parties whose commercials are
bankrolled by the corporations that profit from the factory
farms and light the signs of Broadway and 42nd.
And the fuel for the electricity that lights the celebration of
corporate bounty comes in no small measure from the hills of
central Appalachia. Some of it still comes from Harlan County,
Kentucky, the subject of the book you hold in your hands.
As we globalize, how timely that this book, John Hevener's
Which Side Are You On?: The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-
39, is before us again. Which Side Are You On? is a lucid, blow
by-blow description of a critical moment in the ongoing American
struggle to reconcile the behavior of multinational corporations
with the expectations of a civil and democratic society. Which Side
Are You On? chronicles the fits and starts of the effort to bring to
an end civil rights violations and violence against working people
ix