KENTUCKY: Never a Time So Bad

This mining town I live in is a sad and lonely place

Where pity and starvation are pictured on every face.

—Harlan County Ballad

The pine-backed Cumberland Mountains walling off Kentucky's Harlan County from the rest of the world breed into the Harlan-born a primitive defiance. In years past, Harlan moonshiners disdained to dodge revenuers; safe on impenetrable hilltops, they patted rifles and taunted federal agents with doggerel. Harlan justice was rudimentary; seldom was a killer hanged, but often one murder was avenged with another. And when the United Mine Workers set out 30 years ago to organize Harlan's prosperous coal mines, pitched battles between "Bloody Harlan's" miners and company police brought out the National Guard so often that guardsmen were on first-name terms with miners they tossed into jail by the scores.

But Bloody Harlan's defiance has long since given in to chilling despair. As the U.S. puts recession behind it, most cities and towns are speeding up production lines or hunting up new industry. Harlan County's one industry—mining—is dying; because of geography the county is unlikely to find others. Hundreds of unemployed coal miners are in privation's clutch, haunted by the specter of expired unemployment compensation and dwindling food supplies. Kentucky's Governor A. B. ("Happy") Chandler has declared Harlan an emergency area. President Eisenhower was informed of the distress last week by Kentucky's two Senators, John Sherman Cooper and Thruston Morton. Private agencies make the rounds regularly with minimum food and clothes.

Prosperity's Victims. Harlan's crisis has a combination of sources. For one, demand for its rich bituminous coal will never again match the good old days of the '20s, when production zoomed to 14.5 million tons a year. For another, Harlan's miners, members of the U.M.W. for the past 18 years, are in a sense victims of other miners' prosperity. Rising labor costs (Harlan operators have so far refused to sign a new U.M.W. contract under which miners would get $14.25 a day to enter a mine, 76¢ more per ton to load coal) have spurred mine owners to mechanize. But Harlan's shallow (32 in. to 48 in.) seams make mechanization impractical. A third reason: rail costs from the heart of the Appalachian soft coal field have soared.

Ten years ago, 32 big mines were operating; today there are nine. The number of working miners has dipped from 12,500 in 1950 to 5,000. Few other jobs are available. Harlan is all hill and hollow, and the hollows are too narrow for farming or factories.