The Duke Power strike at Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky
Pollitt recalls in vivid detail the strike of Duke Power workers at the Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky. In noting that the strike was typically referred to as "Bloody Harlan," Pollitt describes the violent aspects of the strike. As a member of the Citizens' Inquiry into the Brookside Strike, Pollitt witnessed the events of the strike and the deplorable conditions under which Brookside Mine workers and their family lived and he offers his perspective on the outcome of the strike.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Daniel H. Pollitt, April 17, 1991. Interview L-0064-9. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- DANIEL POLLITT:
-
The Duke Power Company strike up in Harlan County, Brookside Mine. Duke
Power decided that it needed a source of coal to generate the
electricity so it bought two mines up in Harlan County.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
Is this is Kentucky?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
-
Yes. "Bloody Harlan" they call it because it was
bloody. They were non-union mines and the United Mine Workers went in
and tried to organize it and did organize it. Brookside, which is the
same as Duke Power Company, refused to bargain with them in good faith.
So they started to picket the place and Duke hired people to guard the
mines on work release. They got them out of the Kentucky prison.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
To guard it?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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Yes, to guard it. Prisoners on work release.
- ANN MCCOLL:
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Prisoners were guarding the mines?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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Yes, and they started to shoot and they were up on a hill where you go up
on the hill and you go down into the mine and there is a little curvy
road down below. We would picket there. There mine workers picketing
there and they'd have a fire going to keep warm.
They'd start shooting at them and they'd shoot
back. Then the governor didn't declare marshall law, but he
sent the State Troopers to control the place. Then the coal company got
an injuction against our picketing from a local judge by the name of
Hogg who owned a couple of mines as well. So they enjoined the mine
workers. Then the women went out and the women would go and picket and
then they'd get the strike breakers. They'd get
six patrol cars, cop cars, and then twenty scabs and then a couple of
patrol cars and they'd come up the road. Hell, that was
dangerous because some of our people would shoot at the tires and stuff.
Then they'd meet the women who'd be sitting there
blocking the highway.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
These would be local women?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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Yes, the wives. And then they would be arrested and they
wouldn't post bail. They wanted to fill the jails and
stuff.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
How many women are you talking about?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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I'm talking about fifty of them. They were carrying the
battle. Their daddy had been a mine worker and their granddaddy and
they'd killed this guy down in the holler and you know, the
animosities ran deep. There wasn't too much publicity to any
of this, so they thought if they could have a public hearing on what was
doing up there they could bring the press.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
Why do think it wasn't getting publicity with all that going
on?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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It was not so abnormal in Harlan County.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
That's because it was called "Bloody
Harlan?"
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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Yes. And so they created an ad hoc committee on the Brookside strike. I
was the chairman of it.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
This was an organization called "Citizens Inquiry into the
Brookside Strike"?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
-
Yes, this was the Inquiry into the Brookside Strike. We had Fred Harris
who had been the Senator from Oklahoma and ran for President and Willard
Wurtz who had been the Secretary of Labor under LBJ and W.W. Finlator
who is a minister, and the daughter of a guy named Mitchell who had run
against John L. Lewis for presidency of the mine workers.
She's currently at Cornell School on Labor Relations. I
don't know, there is somebody now in the
Children's Foundation. So we had men and women and there were
maybe eight or nine of us. We went up and we had three days of hearings.
It was open to everybody that wanted to come. And we had CBS and NBC and
the "Louisville Courier Journal" people. Fred Harris
wrote an article for "Harper's Magazine"
afterwards. Willard Wurtz wrote a series of articles for the
"Washington Post" afterwards. So it got a lot of
publicity. And Dave Barber at Duke who was then the head of Political
Science. All this is because of the Duke Power Company. So they wanted
some people from North Carolina and then famous outsiders who would draw
the press. There they were talking about the
machine gun which they'd mounted up there on the mine
property.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
Duke Power had?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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Duke Power Company had the machine gun up there and we asked the
President of Brookside, the subsidiary, to come and testify. He
wouldn't come. But the others talked about the machine gun,
so CBS took their camera up there to see the machine gun and they got
tossed down the hill by the guards who were lifers out of the Kentucky
penitentiary. We decided we would have it in the morning when
we'd break into small committees and go see people who
wouldn't come to see us. I had to go see the guy. He
wouldn't see us, thank God. I went with Willard Wurtz and
Fred Harris. So then we reported back and then we talked about other
things other than the strike. What to do in this community. Everybody
has bad teeth and the water is terrible because the water comes out of
the hillside where they've been mining and somehow
it's all poisoned. So nobody drinks the water. They all drink
Seven Up or something, so their teeth are gone by the time they are
sixteen or seventeen. Then there's the housing.
It's all hollows and hills and there's a stream
and you follow the stream. Every so often there's a wide
place and you have the company towns and they are all four room houses
on stilts and there is no water in them. There is a pump where you go
and take your bucket and you pump. And it's mud because
there's been water there.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
How old are these houses? I mean, are these the houses they were living
in in the seventies?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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Yes. This was not that long ago. Then they have outhouses. They
don't have indoor plumbing, so you have the outhouses. Then
the toilet paper goes down and they overhang the stream. Then the stream
in the springtime comes and overflows and carries the toilet paper. All
these trees on the side of the stream have toilet paper hanging from
them. It's just terrible. Then there's no health.
They are well-paid, but if you've got to work in the mine,
you have to live there. It's company owned and life if
miserable and dangerous. Very dangerous. Everybody has a broken back or
something. And the store was owned by the company as a convenience. You
could go into Harlan, which was maybe twenty miles from where Brookside
was. It was on the side of a brook, which is why the called it
Brookside. And black lung. This was before they had the Black Lung Bill
and everybody was coughing. Everybody over forty-five had black lung. So
we talked about all the community problems and we issued a report which
was all of these things and then we recommended a series. Why
doesn't Duke and the United Mine Workers take this
opportunity to make the desert road, you know, bloom like a garden and
stuff. Why can't they do something? Why don't they
get some dentists up there and some Medicare and some Peace Corps people
and some Teacher Corps people? Duke put in some money and the mine
workers put in some money, and get the Vista volunteers and just show
that in Appalachia there is a possibility of creating a very good life
and so on. So we went to see the President of the Duke Power Company in
his office with our proposal. First we saw the President of the mine
workers. Forget the wage per hour business and
look at something else, a great opportunity. The mine workers were
receptive but the Duke Power Company wasn't. They were going
to start to picket. The mine workers started to picket the Duke Power
annual stockholders meetings and they went to the banks and said,
"Don't loan any more money to Duke Power Company or
we'll withdraw our pension funds." So there was
pressure and they did sign the standard contract, but they
didn't do any of the other things that we could have
done.