LABOR: Peace in Harlan County?

One of the toughest anti-labor spots in the whole U.S. last week signed a union-shop agreement. So ended a war which had lasted for almost a quarter of a century between United Mine Workers and the coal operators of Harlan County, Ky.

The man who had the right to rejoice loudest was William G. Turnblazer, chunky, round-faced president of District 19, who had led the union’s fight for 22 years.

When Turnblazer first moved into the town of Jellico, Tenn., on the Kentucky border (where Songstress Grace Moore once sang in a church choir), miners were fighting for subsistence wages. Operators, who included subsidiaries of U.S. Steel Corp., Ford, International Harvester, fought to keep wages down, keep Turnblazer’s union from trespassing. The shock troops of the Harlan County Coal Operators’ Association were “special guards,” sheriffs and deputies.

Investigating that battalion of goons and gorillas, the Senate Civil Liberties Committee in 1937 discovered that 37 of them had served time in the State reform atory; four had been sentenced for murder, 14 for manslaughter, three for malicious shooting with intent to kill; three had served in the Federal pen and 64 had been indicted locally, mostly for crimes of violence, ranging from robbery to murder.

Typical of the operators’ bullyboys was Bill (“Thug”) Johnson, who explained to the committee that he was employed to go out “thugging.” The term, Mr. Johnson explained, meant to go “hunting for union men, organizers and so forth in Harlan County.”

Bill Turnblazer recalls how mine guards and deputies had machine-gunned pickets, dynamited strikers’ homes and meeting places, shot up and terrorized organizers. He remembers how deputies, firing rifles into the home of Organizer Marshall

Musick, had killed Musick’s 19-year-old son, asleep in bed. He remembers how Elmon Middleton, a Harlan County prosecuting attorney who vowed he was going to crusade for miners’ rights, stepped on his automobile starter one day and went up in a horrendous splash of steel, flesh and dynamite. He remembers how he himself had been besieged in a Harlan hotel by deputy sheriffs who were determined to run him out of town.

The union’s first real chance came with the passage of the Wagner Act. Last summer John Lewis, head of U.M.W., got Harlan County operators to go along with the rest of the operators in the Southern Appalachian Association in agreeing to U.M.W. terms. Last week, with the signing of a contract which not only permitted but required some 12,000 miners in the district to join Bill Turnblazer’s and John Lewis’ union, victory was sealed. Observers hoped that peace, not just a truce, had come to Harlan County.