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publicize their plight and strive to arouse demands for justice and lawful procedures.
The failure of Dreiser's first effort confirms the distrust of conventional liberals by today's New Left. He telegraphed a plea for assistance to Senators La Follette, Norris, Shipstead and Couzins, Harvard Law School Dean Felix Frankfurter, college presidents, editors and clergymen.   Fach had impressive credentials as spokesmen for liberal causes.   Fach was invited to accompany Dreiser to Harlan to investigate the disorders and determine what, if anything, could be done to protect American citizens from hunger, disease, unlawful imprisonment and murder.   All who replied were sick or had prior engagements.
But a few courageous souls did join him:  John Dos Passos, Charles Rumford Walker, Bruce Crawford, Samuel Ornitz, Lester Cohen and Melvin Levy.   In the hills they talked to coal operators, public officials, merchants, miners, wives of miners, newsmen and some personages who defy categorization.   Their "testimony" was preserved in shorthand and from it emerge the tales od corruption, suffering and brutality that were published in the "Report" under review.   They are without parallel in US history,
The NMU had enrolled 8, 000 of the county's miners. Some gunmen recruited from the Coal and Iron Police of Pennsylvania had killed as many as five "union sympathizers, " generally by shooting them in the back. Scores of miners had been indicted for criminal syndicalism, but only one deputy had been charged.   He was accused of the murder of an organizer by shooting him between the shoulders, but a jury of company executives and their clerical employees acquitted him.
Twenty-eight gunmen were brought in on a single day, July 25, 1931.   Most came from "bloody" Breathitt County and were callous killers.   The standard payoff for a killing was $50. 00.   Sixty -five uniformed deputies roamed the county and 200 others worked as undercover agents spying for hints of discontent.   Some of these spies infiltrated locals, were elected to office in them and turned their records over to the police.
Arrests occurred in wholesale batches. Commonwealth Attorney Brock asserted that the mere possession of an NMU membership application form or a copy of the Daily Worker were per se criminal syndicalism. Arrests "for literature" were made routinely, as were searches of houses and persons.   Individuals who were found with "unpatriotic literature" or who were charged with speaking favorably of the NMU were seized, beaten and imprisoned.
Judge Jones ruled that to advocate or join a labor union was a syndicalist act and a felony. Hand-picked grand juries ground out stacks of indictments against labor organizers, NMU members, reporters who wrote articles criticizing "constituted authorities" or supporting the miners and persons "aiding and abetting" such offenders.   The indefatigable Judge Jones declared it treasonous to operate a soup kitchen for striking miners and their families and three of these humble facilities were dynamited by deputies who also shot d6wn two men who had "banded and confederated" to cook the food.
But the judge, sheriff and commonwealth attorney were men of mercy.   After a miner had cooled 20 or 30 days in the filthy jail on a diet of gravy, cornbread and beans, he was generally offered his freedom on a pledge to go straight, work hard and forget about union membership.   Some, though, were compelled to leave the county or became informers under threat of rearrest.
Two investigating reporters were, shot by snipers. A lawyer who came to defend incarcerated miners was met by the mayor and a carload of lawmen who informed him he could not enter the town.   When he slipped in after darkness he was arrested, taken to a mountain top and beaten.   The lawyer, Taub, testifies in the "Report" that the lawmen were accompanied by a coal company lawyer and by Herndon Evans, a local newspaperman. After he had been beaten into semiconsciousness, he recalled that Evans demanded, "Well, Taub, why don't
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you make us a speech on constitutional rights?   It is the last chance you will ever get to make a speech in Kentucky. . . "
And what happened when punishment of these outrages was sought in the state capital?   The governor refused to see Taub and the attorney general murmured, "There is nothing I can do. "
Others did much, however, in the years that followed the publication of Dreiser's compilation. The NMU, off to such a promising start in 1931, withered and died.   Its demise was due in part to the establishment's rigorous countermeasures, but another circumstance contributed even more.   In 1932, the NMU took a delegation of miners to New York to a labor convention.   There they were horrified to discover that communism is atheistic.   They rushed home to denounce the NMU and switched their allegiance to the United Mine Workers.   Lewis became a folk hero in a struggle that lasted through the agony of a bloodstained decade and saw the last mine in Harlan sign a contract in 1941.
Three decades have passed since the thugs were disarmed and Judge Jones and Sheriff Blair passed from the scene.   For two years during World War II Harlan had Kentucky's highest per capita income.   Then in a new postwar depression scores of mines folded. The union dropped its members by the thousands.   With a hundred million dollars in its coffers and as much in its welfare fund, it abandoned the hospital it had built for its crippled and sick.   It never loaned a cent to jobless miners but bought a bank and made funds available to some of a hew generation of nonunion, labor-hating operators.
The New Deal and the Great Society have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into central Appalachia to combat its poverty, but the old ills persist. Headlines proclaim that the Nixon administration fails to enforce the new mine safety law.   Disabled miners picket pits in protest against UMW pensioning policies.   A federal judge enjoins such action and dynamite blasts mining machinery.   A watchman guarding a coal auger is shot from ambush.   The hunt for persons implicated in the murder of UMW rebel "Jock" Yablonski continues and it still centers in Harlan County and in Tennessee.
The number of persons on relief has increased by 35 percent in the last year.   Coal prices have doubled in eight months, but wages are up only slightly. Outmi-gration has reduced the population of Harlan from 76, 000 to 30, 000 since 1950.
"Criminal syndicalism" no longer sends miners to jail.  In 1967 a couple of young antipoverty workers were indicted under the statute after a nocturnal raid on their home turned up a book by Mao Tse Tung.   In due time, a federal court declared the law unconstitutional.
Dreiser's report and Harlan's turbulent history illustrate how merciless and successful power can be, the tenacity with which the poor can struggle for escape and betterment -- and how success in the fight for freedom can lead to new failures and disappointments.
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JLhat the callous unconcern for human welfare that brought horror to eastern Kentucky in the 1930s still haunts Appalachia in what John Kenneth Galbraith has called the "affluent society, " is illustrated by J. Davitt McAteer's monumental Coal Mining Health and Safety in West Virginia. This carefully researched study is not history from a painful, bygone decade, but deals with the present-day suffering of the dust-blackened, battered men whose exertions give us the basic raw resource of hundreds of products ranging from electricity to synthetic fabrics to aspirin.   In spite of innumerable Congressional hearings and reports, periodic editorial trumpetings, Presidential proclamations and, from time to time, the enactment of highly touted safety laws, the grim carnage continues in the coal pits.
McAteer's work outlines the methods by which coal companies are permitted to treat coal lands as practically valueless until the coal is actually mined. This tax cheating keeps the tax base at rock bottom, depriving mining communities of schools, so that the average Ten