Detailing the dimensions of unionization and the balance of power spawned by New Deal labor policy after government intervention, this book is the definitive analysis of Harlan's bloody decade.

This book details the classic saga of conflict between labor and management occasioned by the many attempts of the United Mine Workers of America to organize Harlan's miners during the New Deal Era. Harlan County, Kentucky was the last major anti-union bastion in the Appalachian coalfield. The story of the organization of the county's coal mines by the United Mine Workers of America is largely confined to the decade of the 1930's. The most serious union campaigns occurred in 1931-32, after the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, and following the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. Finally, after almost a decade of labor strife, the Federal Government intervened following the Supreme Court decision in the case, N.L.R.B. v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation (301 U.S.1), on April 12, 1937 which upheld the National Labor Relations Act. After a year of federal inquiry, culminating in the Mary Helen conspiracy trial at London, Kentucky, Harlan's miners could join the UMWA openly and without fear of recrimination.

This book is a historical and cultural interpretation of a symbolic place in the United States, Harlan County, Kentucky, from pioneer times to the beginning of the third millennium, based on a painstaking and creative montage of more than 150 oral narratives and a wide array of secondary and archival matter.

In the 1960's, after graduation from Berea, Lee Pennington went to Harlan County to teach poetry to Kentucky Community College students. Under his tutelage, they published four books of poetry, Spirit Hollow, Thirteen, The Long Way Home and Tomorrow's People. It was this last book that got him in trouble, as the students were honest and frank about their locale, religion and relationships, and local authorities took offense. So much so that a price was put on Pennington's head and he had to leave with armed guards to protect him. This, of course, made national news and he was asked to speak all over the United States. It was not the students or the population of Harlan County who hated Pennington, but the establishment, the executives, the law-enforcers and managers who disapproved of his freedom and honesty. As Jean W. Ross writes in the DLB Yearbook, "the students' work was in part critical of strip-mining, traditional religious teaching, and the hypocrisy of authority." She writes of Lee's subsequent book on the subject, Songs of Bloody Harlan, , published first in North American Mentor (Summer 1971), and in book form in 1975, is Pennington's toughly realistic but ultimately loving tribute to the region that had driven him out in 1967. He wrote of the poetry's genesis, "For two years following my experience in Harlan County, I didn't say anything. But a poet doesn't have that choice either. . . . Songs of Bloody Harlan is my comment." (Jean W. Ross, Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1982, p. 335) Pennington's book, Songs of Bloody Harlan was one of his early publications, with a small edition of 100 printed, in 1975. Its popularity grew until it became very valuable, with a high price of $2,500 listed for one available on Amazon in 2018. This edition fulfills many people's desire to own a copy of this rare book, and it deserves reprinting so that all may partake of the experience Pennington lived, with all of it beauty, love and agony.

G.C. “Red” Jones’s classic memoir of growing up in rural eastern Kentucky during the Depression is a story of courage, persistence, and eventual triumph. His priceless and detailed recollections of hardscrabble farming, of the impact of Prohibition on an individualistic people, of the community-destroying mine wars of “Bloody Harlan,” and of the drastic dislocations brought by World War II are essential to understanding this seminal era in Appalachian history.

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