Kentucky Feudalism

"Why don't you kill those union men?" said an unknown questioner.

"My God, we can't do that," replied the company-hired police chief of Lynch, a company-owned coal town in Harlan County, Ky. "It would mean a Senate investigation and we can't stand that."

A United Mine Workers organizer testified at a Senate investigation last week that he had overheard this conversation in a hotel two years ago, during a U. M. W. drive to organize Harlan County's miners. That drive failed, as union attempts to get a foothold in "Bloody Harlan" have always failed. But last week there was a new tide in Harlan history, and the feudal sway of Capital over one of the world's richest bituminous coal fields seemed about to end. U. M. W. had put 20 organizers in the field on the heels of the Supreme Court's validation of the Wagner Act. And for the first time full light was falling on dark Harlan County as, before the Senate's Civil Liberties Committee, witnesses pieced together a picture of antiunionism at its exceptional worst.

Alarming even to tourist-hardened Capitol police looked the men from Harlan's hills--tall, muscular, hip-swinging deputy sheriffs in broad-brimmed black hats and uncomfortable store clothes, scrawny miners in patches. A search revealed several with empty pistol holsters slung under their armpits. But the real bosses of Harlan County were not in evidence. Only about one-third of its coal is mined by local owners. The rest, including "captive" mines whose corporate owners consume their entire output, belongs to outside capital. Biggest captive-mine owner is U. S. Steel Corp., others include Ford (whose mines are worked out and currently idle) and International Harvester.

Free to set their own wage scale, Harlan operators claim to follow approximately the standard set by U. M. W. and the Appalachian Conference of operators (TIME, April 12). But Marshall Musick, a frail, sad-eyed union organizer whose .home was riddled with bullets one night last February, killing his son and seriously wounding his wife, told the Committee about the strings to that. Harlan miners, said he, average about $75 per month. Of this, 15% is deducted for rent on company-owned houses, fees to company-hired physicians, contributions to company burial funds. After an additional sum has been deducted to settle his accounts at high-priced company stores, the miner gets the balance in scrip good only at those stores. If he wants cash, his scrip is discounted 20% to 30%.

To keep their employes from organizing to better themselves, Harlan operators have organized a County Association. Conveniently hazy about details, the Association's Secretary George B. Ward blandly informed his Senate inquisitors: "I haven't kept records because I've been expecting an investigation like this for three or four years." One of the biggest expenditures last year was $8,000 for "expenses" paid to a deputy sheriff named Ben Unthank, regularly on the Association payroll at $150 per month. Secretary Ward professed total ignorance of what Deputy Unthank did with the money.

Deputy Unthank could not be questioned, having disappeared some weeks ago, but many a witness was ready & eager to tell where his "expense money" went.

After a peg-legged, 73-year-old union organizer named Lawrence ("Peggy") Dwyer had told how his hotel room was dynamited in 1933, the Committee dramatically produced the men convicted of the dynamiting. Unthank, said swart Chris Patterson, had paid him $100 for the job, $50 per month salary during the ten months he served in prison for it. But, he protested, he had not actually touched off the explosion. He had paid one R. C. Tackett $50 to do that.

In the custody of a deputy U. S. marshal, up shuffled aging R. C. Tackett, clad in a homemade shirt and overalls. Jailed in Kentucky on a shooting charge, he had refused to venture up to Washington except under Federal protection. With his Adam's apple bobbing, Tackett kept glancing nervously back at the bosses and deputies in the audience as he told the Senate Committee how the dynamiting had been plotted among Unthank, himself, Patterson and the prosecuting attorney of adjoining Bell County. He had been too drunk to do the job, he twanged, but had been paid $30 to keep his mouth shut. He knew the money came from the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association because Unthank had told him so.

In the nightmare of shootings, beatings and dynamitings of union organizers described to the Committee. Ben Unthank was by no means the only law officer accused. Star witness was thick-necked, freely-sweating Thomas R. Middleton, who served five months for bootlegging before he was elected High Sheriff of Harlan County in 1934. Member of one of the section's largest families. Sheriff Middleton once had a distant cousin named Elman Middleton who was prosecuting attorney of Harlan County and started a crusade for miners' rights. Two years ago Cousin Elman stepped on his automobile starter, went up in a confetti of steel, flesh and dynamite. Since 1934, said the sheriff, he had appointed 379 deputies, of whom only a half-dozen or so were paid by the county. The rest were hired by the operators as "special guards." Senator La Follette produced an investigators' report which showed that of Sheriff Middleton's 163 current deputies, 14 had served time in State prisons, two in Federal prisons. 34 had been indicted locally, all for crimes of violence. The sheriff's prize deputy was his brother Slemp, ordered removed from office by a Circuit Court in 1934 as "one of the'most dangerous men in Harlan County." As soon as things had quieted down, Sheriff Middleton put Brother Slemp, back to work as a law officer.

Damping the hopes of horrified citizens, evidence appeared last week that Harlan operators and their henchmen were not to be regenerated by any such shadowboxing as a Supreme Court decision and a Senate investigation. A young grocery clerk who testified that Ben Unthank had offered him $100 to "shoot up" a union organizer, returned to tell the Committee that a Harlan deputy and three other men had followed him to a Capitol washroom and pushed him around, that he had later been warned by telephone to get out of Washington or be "buried in Arlington." Hapless R. C.

Tackett also returned, said that a thick-shouldered young mine superintendent named Ted Creech, son of a Harlan operator, had approached him outside the committee room, threatened to have him jailed for ten years when he got back to Harlan.

When Creech denied this before the Committee, he was promptly given the lie by Tackett's custodian marshal, arrested for perjury. Creech would be defended, it was announced, by Charles I. Dawson, Kentucky's onetime Federal judge who declared the NRA Coal Code unconstitutional (TIME, March 11, 1935, et seq.) and then resigned from the bench to return to private practice, including a job as attorney for the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association.

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