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

by John W. Hevener

Depression-era Harlan County, Kentucky, was the site of one of the most bitter and protracted labor disputes in American history. The decade-long conflict between miners and the coal operators who adamantly resisted unionization has been immortalized in folksong by Florence Reece and Aunt Molly Jackson, contemplated in prose by Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, and long been obscured by popular myths and legends.   John W. Hevener separates the fact from the legend in his Weatherford Award-winning investigation of Harlan's civil strife, now available for the first time in paperback. In Which Side Are You On? Hevener attributes the violence–-including the deaths of thirteen union miners–-to more than just labor conflict, viewing Harlan's troubles as sectional economic conflict stemming from the county's rapid industrialization and social disorganization in the preceding decade.   Detailing the dimensions of unionization and the balance of power spawned by New Deal labor policy after government intervention, Which Side Are You On? is the definitive analysis of Harlan's bloody decade and a seminal contribution to American labor history.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Labor

256 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1978

Reviews

[Dave]

Very informative, but not easy or engaging. If i wasn't already interested in history and unions in general and Harlan County, specifically, I probably would not have been able to finish the book.

For those who are interested, however, it's stellar. Read it.

[Daniel Gaddy]

This book is written in a really academic tone and provides a hell of a lot of minute details (like all the names of the gun thugs who busted a particular picket line). But the material is so insane that it definitely kept my interest the whole way through.

[Nate Hendrix]

It is horrific what business gets away with with the support of the federal government and the judicial system. Big business, in this case coal mine operators, were able to steal their employees wages, evict them from their homes and kill the with impunity. They hired corrupt sheriffs and gun thugs that intimidated, beat and murdered miners and union organizers. I worked for ambulance companies that were union shops and non-union shops. In the non-union shops I was asked to do things that would have put my paramedic cert in jeopardy, if not put me in legal jeopardy. It was a non-union shop that delayed out paychecks for days and sometimes weeks and then would give us checks that would bounce. There was even a period of several months where health insurance was taken out of our paychecks and the premiums were not paid. There are plenty of people that have union horror stories, but as a teacher and a paramedic I could not be more thankful for my unions.

[Bridgette]

This is a very dense book. The chapters are chronological, but sometimes the the information in the chapters wasn't. There are a lot of names, and as this isn't narrative non-fiction, it was a little hard to keep track of everyone.