1938: Harlan Trial

Between May 16 and Aug. 2, 1938, sixty coal operators and peace officers were tried before a Federal court for conspiring to prevent miners from unionizing. This prosecution was brought not under the Wagner Act, but under Section 19 of the United States Penal Code, which provides that if two or more persons conspire to deprive citizens of rights guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States or by Federal law, they are guilty of a crime punishable by a sentence of ten years' imprisonment and loss of civil rights.

This section was added to the Penal Code after the Civil War in order to protect Negroes in their newly-won right to vote, and was invoked, in this instance, in order to protect miners in their right to organize. Hitherto every attempt at unionization in the coal fields of Harlan County resulted in such a welter of violence that the county was given the name of 'Bloody Harlan.'

The trial, a long, drawn-out affair, was held in London, Ky. The case was tried before Federal Judge H. Church Ford. Assistant Attorney General Bryan McMahon presented the case for the prosecution. Charles Dawson was the chief counsel for the defense.

During the eleven weeks of the trial, 500 witnesses were examined. Evidence was presented as to the dismissal of workers for union activities, discrimination against union sympathizers, murders of union workers in their homes and in the streets by peace officers, dynamiting of union headquarters, kidnapping of union organizers, and the employment of men with serious criminal records as sheriffs' deputies.

The defense contended that the dismissals of union men were for inefficiency only; that violence was in cited by union organizers, and that deputies were killed in protecting workers in their right to work in defiance of a strike. Both sides charged perjury. Outside the courtroom a witness was killed, the home of another was dynamited, and an attempt to influence the jury was made so brazenly that the judge was compelled to denounce it. Two days of deliberation left the jury hopelessly deadlocked — some for conviction of all the defendants, some for conviction of some and some for acquittal of all.

In the end, a mistrial was declared, and none of the legal points at issue were settled. But, coincident with the trial and as a direct consequence, the Harlan County miners exercised their right to organize peaceably for the first time. The United Mine Workers of America succeeded in opening an office in Harlan and obtained signed agreements from ten operators while the trial was in progress. Before a new trial could begin, the Harlan Association of Coal Operators, representing some 42 companies all of which were involved in the trial, signed an agreement for a seven-month period on the condition, soon fulfilled, that criminal charges be dropped.