THE NATIONAL MINERS’ UNION, SOUTHEASTERN KENTUCKY THE NATIONAL MINERS’ UNION, SOUTHEASTERN KENTUCKYThe miners lost because they had only the Constitution. The other side had bayonets and in the end bayonets always win.
—Mother Jones, speech at the Battle of Blair Mountain, August 1921
In February 1931, district 17 sent Angelo Herndon to Wilcox County, Alabama, to assist sharecroppers in Alberta organize a sharecroppers’ union chapter. Raised outside Cincinnati, Ohio, Herndon knew a great deal about miners and mining but virtually nothing about sharecropping.
At first things went well. He was warmly welcomed by a black preacher known as Rev. Hamilton who offered his church as a meeting place. The gatherings were well attended, but unfortunately, most of the young men were only interested in hearing about job opportunities in Birmingham. Herndon told them honestly that there weren’t any. Still, he forced himself to stay positive. Finally when some white croppers began to attend he believed that he was finally making progress. Years later when he reflected on this he would describe himself as becoming so elated that he “flung all caution to the wind and spoke [my] mind . . . I assured them that the only possible solution to their problem was complete unity between black and white sharecroppers, in short, a militant union which would fight for the improvement of their lot.”1
Herndon kept meeting with croppers in small groups across Wilcox County and planning for a mass meeting on March 10. A few days before the big event, however, and without warning, Rev. Hamilton, who’d so warmly welcomed him, betrayed him to the landlords. The preacher had either gotten cold feet or was a pawn of the planters all along. One panicked white cropper warned Herndon that a lynch mob was forming and drove him into Camden as fast as his broken-down truck would take them so he could board a train to Selma. Herndon barely made it.2 A few days later, a banner headline in the Selma Times Journal screamed, “Mulatto Negro Stirs Up Trouble Between Whites and Blacks in Governor Miller’s Hometown.”3 Herndon seemed fated to live on the edge.
Because district 17 couldn’t afford the luxury of specialists, every comrade had to be ready to become an organizer, protest leader, mass meeting speaker, or Southern Worker reporter on short notice. In his memoir, Organizing in the Depression South, James Allen recalled that “it was not unusual then for young and inexperienced Party members to undertake tasks that appeared beyond their reach.”4 One could expect to be sent, like Herndon, wherever the need was greatest. Jesse Wakefield, for example, left Chattanooga in May 1931 for an assignment in Harlan County, Kentucky, to assist striking miners and their families.
The Great Depression counted some of its paramount achievements in the southeastern Kentucky coal fields. After World War I, a surplus of coal, like the steel surplus in Birmingham and the cotton surplus in the Black Belt, glutted a once-robust market. Miners in Harlan, Bell, Knox, Breathitt, and Perry Counties all suffered wage and hours cutbacks. On February 16, 1931, after the Black Star Mountain Coal Company announced yet another reduction, miners took home less than a dollar a day. In May, the miners of Bell and Harlan Counties walked off the job and shut the mines down. Even when the United Mine Workers (UMW) refused to support their wildcat strike or to provide financial relief, the men would not return to work.
When three deputy sheriffs and a miner were killed in a clash over a mine shutdown in Evarts, Kentucky, thirty-four miners, four of them black, were charged with murder. At that point, the UMW abandoned the Evarts local. A month later that strike failed. The miners who’d struck were blacklisted and would likely never work again. The Battle of Evarts marked the beginning of the Kentucky Coal Wars that raged for another six years.5
Unemployed and blacklisted miners and their families were starving by the summer of 1931. Many were homeless. On June 15, a delegation of Harlan County miners led by Jim Garland and Jim Grace drove to Pittsburgh to attend a National Miners’ Union (NMU) conference there. They’d heard that this Red union was organizing in West Virginia, eastern Ohio, and western Pennsylvania. When Garland and Grace were invited to speak, they voiced their grievances, requested assistance, and apparently pledged their unreserved support for the NMU. “The name of Reds,” Garland said, “doesn’t scare us at all.”6
The NMU sent white organizer Dan Brooks (Dan Slinger) to Harlan on June 19, and district 17 dispatched Jesse Wakefield a week later. The North Carolina Workers International Relief sent supplies and volunteers.
Wakefield arranged bail for thirty-four miners, provided defense counsel for those awaiting trial, and distributed food and supplies to their families. Brooks spent that summer recruiting and training organizers, and Workers International Relief volunteers opened five soup kitchens. The local Red Cross had declared its neutrality and offered no assistance whatsoever. By the end of July, a Harlan chapter of the NMU was up and running with twenty trained organizers.
Finley Donaldson, a Holiness preacher who was also a miner, emerged as a leader. At a meeting in Wallins Creek, he assured his fellow workers: “The NMU stands for the principles that our forefathers fought for at Bunker Hill. . . . I love America, but I hate the men running the country and working hardships on the workers. The men who made the laws against us are corrupt. The coal operators call us ‘Red Russians,’ but when you take away the means of furnishing food and raiment for this body of mine then you certainly are injecting red blood into my system.”7
All summer long Jesse Wakefield was followed wherever she went. On July 23, 1931, the car she used to bring supplies to the miners’ families was dynamited, and on August 1 she was finally arrested and charged with criminal syndicalism. She was released the following day but rearrested before the week ended. Wakefield would spend a total of five weeks in the Harlan County jail.
Despite these setbacks, union membership steadily increased. No other union—not the UMW nor even the IWW—had cared for the miners and their families like the NMU. The ILD released a national publicity campaign exposing the coal operators’ reign of terror; Wakefield’s situation was featured so prominently that Sheriff Blair threatened to move her to a jail in the remote community of Hyden. He later changed his mind and released her on her sworn promise to leave the community and not return.8
Since the soup kitchens functioned as union organizing centers, they became special targets of the Harlan County Coal Operators security force. Miners and other volunteers who kept the kitchens running were routinely arrested and food delivery trucks were sabotaged. The Evarts kitchen, which fed four hundred people every day, was dynamited, and on August 30, two Clover Fork volunteers, Joe Moore and Julius Baldwin, were murdered. Baldwin had recently been elected president of the Evarts local.
That same night, Deputy Lee Fleenor, second in command to Harlan’s high sheriff John Henry Blair, drove to the Evarts kitchen, saw Baldwin and Moore standing in the doorway, and opened fire. Mrs. Moore maintained that her husband was killed simply “because he was the relief chairman.”9
Although Fleenor claimed self-defense, he’d shot Baldwin through the back of his head. Neither were Baldwin’s wife nor his brother, who’d witnessed the shooting, called by the grand jury. Judge D. C. Jones, whose wife was a member of the Harlan County Coal Operators’ Association, told the jurors how it was going to be: “I’m anxious to protect the miners and to prevent the preaching in these mountains of the Soviet doctrine that seeks to destroy the Government and the Church. . . . If you don’t have enough backbone to enforce the law, I’ll get [people] who will.”10 Two hours later, they acquitted Fleenor.
A year later, when members of Senator Bob LaFollette’s Senate Education Subcommittee held hearings in Harlan and Bell Counties, they would discover Lee Fleenor’s name on the Harlan County Coal Operators’ Association payroll.11
In August, Blaine Owen (Boris Israel), a white twenty-one-year-old district 17 organizer and journalist for the Federated Press, came to Harlan to cover the trials. He was in the courtroom when Judge Jones called the NMU organizers and the ILD Reds “radicals who have no right to look to this court or to any other court in this country for justice.” By that time the NMU had four thousand members and the Harlan Coal Operators’ Association had posted a $2,000 reward for the capture of chief organizer Dan Brooks, dead or alive.12
As Owen left the courthouse, two men grabbed him from behind and pushed him into a car, where two of their friends were waiting. One of them was Deputy Sheriff Marion Allen. They “took him for a ride” to the top of Pine Mountain, where they beat him unconscious. Left for dead, Owen woke up hours later and crawled and stumbled his way down the mountain. He passed out several times and was ultimately found and cared for by a couple who took him into their small cabin at the bottom of the mountain.13 When he was able to travel, they drove him back to Harlan.
In September, the Federated Press replaced Owen with Helen O’Connor, who found a special delivery letter waiting for her. “Madam,” it read, “You have been here long enough already. Remember, the other Red reporter got what was coming to him, so don’t let the sun go down on you here.” It was signed “Hundred percent Americans.” O’Connor didn’t even unpack. Two weeks later, Jim Grace, leader of the delegation that brought the NMU to Harlan, was arrested, released, ambushed, kidnapped, and nearly beaten to death. By the end of October, all the soup kitchens had closed.14
In November, the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, an ILD affiliate of journalists, came to Harlan, scheduled public hearings, took depositions from the miners, and published their findings. Sensational reporting by Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos, among others, kept the bloody coalfield struggle alive in the national press.15
Despite this public exposure, attacks by the coal operators’ security forces continued. The local police ignored them. Subsequently the NMU moved its headquarters from Harlan to Pineville, the Bell County seat. On December 13, 263 delegates attended a district meeting there and voted to strike on January 1, 1932.16 Three days later, the new headquarters was raided and nine reps—five women and four men—were arrested for criminal syndicalism. White ILD attorney Allan Taub, who’d been working on the Scottsboro appeals, traveled to Pineville to represent them.
On January 10, 1932, Taub met novelist Waldo Frank, who’d led an independent group of volunteers to distribute food and clothing. Both Frank and Taub were arrested at the Pineville Hotel that evening, driven to Cumberland Gap, and severely beaten. Frank was released, but Taub was arrested for “plotting to overthrow the Government of the United States of America and the State of Kentucky.” When the judge suspended his clients’ trials, the ILD threatened to send the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners to Bell County to investigate. In addition, five thousand NMU miners were already protesting in nearby Pineville. The trial dates were subsequently (and quietly) returned to the docket.17 Taub and all nine of his clients were released on bail on January 14.
The day Taub and Waldo Frank met, Harry Simms (Harry Hersch) a white organizer who’d been working with Mack Coad and the Camp Hill sharecroppers, arrived in Bell County. A nineteen-year-old native of Springfield, Massachusetts, Simms had learned organizing in New England’s textile mills and he’d volunteered to come to Kentucky.
On February 10, at a Workers International Relief rally in Pineville, Simms spoke to the crowd. The following day, Green Lawson, a young section strike organizer who’d attended the rally, offered to take him to meet with miners in nearby Bush Creek. As they walked along the Louisville and Nashville railroad tracks, two deputized mine guards, Arlie Miller and Red Davis, came up behind them on a hand truck. Coal fields were private property, and owners often hired guards to keep strangers out. When the young men stepped aside to let them pass, Miller, according to Lawson, recognized Simms from the rally, shot him in the stomach, and kept going.
As Simms lay bleeding, Lawson ran for help. A local farmer took Simms to the Knox County Hospital in Barbourville. When Deputy Red Davis told his father what had happened, the elder Davis rushed to the hospital to guarantee Simms’s expenses so that he would be admitted. Simms died the following day.18
Malcolm Cowley, who’d been working with Waldo Frank, reported Simms’s death in the New Republic. He included one Pineville coal operator’s response to the young man’s death: “They shot one of those Bolsheviks up in Knox County this morning. . . . Harry Simms his name was. . . . That deputy knew his business. He didn’t give the Red a chance to talk, he just plugged him in the stomach. We need some shooting like that down here in Pineville.”19
Thomas Bethell, formerly an official of the UMW, described Simms as
the kind of outsider that the mine owners particularly and especially despised. They didn’t have any reason to be afraid of him, exactly . . . but there was something unspeakably arrogant about him. It wasn’t his personality—he was remembered as cheerful, quiet, good humored, patient and a good listener. . . . He was good at organizing meetings even when people were tired of meetings, or afraid to go to them. When he talked to miners about political theory and economics, he did not condescend. . . . He believed in what he was doing, there was no bravado about it, and miners who had never before had any help at all from outsiders admired him greatly.20
Deputy Arlie Miller apparently recognized in Simms several things that he despised: an outside agitating meddler—a self-righteous, smooth-talking, rich atheist Jew.
A memorial service for Simms was scheduled for February 14, 1932, in Barbourville, but the local police with the aid of fifty volunteer deputies and thirty-five national guardsmen prevented the miners from attending.
Later that week, Deputy Arlie Miller testified to a grand jury that Simms had pulled a gun on him, but eyewitness Green Lawson swore that Simms was unarmed. After considering all the testimony, Judge Frank Baker dismissed the murder charge and ruled that the available evidence pointed to Miller either acting in his own defense or protecting Deputy Davis.
In March 1932, Rob Hall, white president of Columbia University’s National Students League, brought three busloads of student volunteers to Harlan County, Kentucky, to distribute food, clothing, and supplies. They were sponsored by the IWO.
The Kentucky State Police stopped their caravan at the Bell County line and refused them entry. When Hall objected, one officer called him a “Russian born Jewish communist.” Hall was actually a native Alabamian and a Presbyterian.21 When he returned to Columbia, he joined the Communist Party and after graduation accepted an assignment with the Nebraska farm movement. In 1935, Rob Hall would be appointed director of district 17.
Despite the determination of the NMU and the ILD’s exposure of the collusion between the coal operators, law enforcement, and the judicial system, the strike in Bell and Harlan Counties ended after three months. The coal operators were successful in shifting the focus from the miners’ grievances to their “atheistic subversive Red leadership.”
Mistrust bore its way into the heart of the NMU around the time that Harry Simms died. Several of the organizers returned from a training course at the Chicago Workers’ School later that week and were horrified by what they’d seen and heard there. They wondered aloud if they’d really understood what the Reds were promising when they’d offered help. In Chicago the miners heard lots of praise for Russia, contempt for Christianity and patriotism, and endorsement of adultery, atheism, and interracial marriage—the very things that the coal operators, the sheriff, the judges, and the preachers had warned them about. The arrogance of a few Chicago Reds who’d never worked among religious fundamentalists would deal the death blow to one solid year of union building.
Rev. Finley Donaldson, now president of the Harlan County local, advised his union comrades to withdraw their membership. He’d learned, he said, that the Reds were bent on “destruction of government, religion and family life.”22
Christianity was front and center in coal country. Section crews often began their shifts with prayer. The Holiness sect, the largest denomination in the Appalachian Mountains, was led by preachers like Donaldson who’d been called by the Holy Spirit. They preached a literal interpretation of the Scriptures and maintained that every idea, action, or reaction in life was either right or wrong, true or false, black or white. The devil hid in shades of meaning, in compromise, in subtlety, and in all half measures.
Religion for these independent people was an individual affair. If one did not agree with a particular preacher, it was perfectly acceptable to move on until they found a more compatible one. They were not “church people”—not “joiners.” UMW president John L. Lewis had found them to be too independent and too undisciplined to work with, and he’d given up on them in 1931.
Mountain people acknowledged the soul-saving power of Jesus and the gifts of the Holy Spirit: healing, wisdom, prophecy, and speaking in tongues—but they did not see how religion had any claim to social responsibility. Jack Weller, a minister with the United Presbyterian Church in eastern Kentucky in the 1960s, observed that “the church in Appalachia is beyond doubt the most reactionary force in the Mountains.”23
“The Holiness sect,” he wrote, “relies on sentiment, tradition, superstition and personal feelings, all reinforcing the patterns of the culture. It is self-centered . . . prayer [is] a tool to serve my needs and to help me. [Its] main purpose is to reiterate the accepted religious ideas and to satisfy personal ego needs and not to bear witness to or to do work for God.”24 Mountain religion tended to feed fatalism and passivity—the idea that it “ain’t no use” to try to change things.
It is not difficult, therefore, to understand how the miners’ disappointment with the Reds might dampen their fighting spirit. When Finley Donaldson could no longer reconcile the NMU’s philosophy with his religious beliefs, he resigned the union presidency. In mid-February 1932, he assured his fellow union members: “The teachings of the Communist Party [will] destroy our religious beliefs, our government, and our homes. In teachings they demand their members there is no God (sic); no Jesus; no Hereafter; no resurrection of the dead; all there is for anybody is what they got in this world. I heard them in a mass meeting and in a big demonstration in Chicago denounce our government and our flag and our religion.” And then he slammed the door on all of it: “I feel at this time that the great capitalists and officials of this great nation of ours in some way will give relief and assistance to our poor starving humanity which is now suffering in America.”25
On February 28, two hundred Knox County, Kentucky, ministers, teachers, and private citizens, many of them miners, attended a mass meeting in Barbourville to pledge to “fight communism and create more respect for laws.” They called themselves the Christian Patriotic League. Former Kentucky governor Flem Sampson agreed to serve as president.26
At the end of March 1932, the coal operators declared victory, the miners of Bell and Knox Counties returned to work, and the NMU left the mountains. The following year saw passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the UMW returned to southeastern Kentucky to try again. The Kentucky Coal Wars continued.
On September 12, 1932, a banner headline in the Kentucky Advocate screamed “Acquitted Mine Guard Shot through the Heart.” Seven months after he’d been cleared of the murder of Harry Simms, twenty-five-year-old Arlie Miller was found in rural Flat Lick in Knox County shot through the heart and his throat cut. Four men who’d allegedly gone there with him were questioned and released. His murder was never solved.