A Newspaper Born in the Fire of Bloody Harlan
In early May 1931 thousands of miners in Harlan and neighboring Bell County, Kentucky, walked off the job to protest brutal conditions and another round of wage cuts. Their walk-out erupted into gunfire at the Battle of Evarts on 5 May, a fifteen-minute exchange that left three company guards and one union miner dead and carried “Bloody Harlan” onto front pages nationwide. Within weeks, the mainstream United Mine Workers of America, fearful of draining its relief treasury, abandoned the strikers. Into the vacuum stepped the Communist‑led National Miners Union (founded in 1928 but only now arriving in Harlan in June 1931), which helped the Harlan strike committee buy a hand-cranked press and publish the first issue of The Voice of the Miner by early summer of 1931. The paper’s title was a promise that the rank-and-file would speak for themselves in a county where every commercial newspaper sided with the coal operators.
Radical Voice and Editorial Line
From its opening number Voice adopted an unapologetically militant tone. Editorials denounced “industrial feudalism,” branded sheriffs and mine guards as “gun thugs,” and condemned UMWA president John L. Lewis for “betraying the hills.” The rhetoric mirrored the Communist Party’s Third-Period strategy that rejected compromise with conservative unions and called Black and white miners alike to a united class war. Local elites took the cue: Pineville Sun editor Herndon J. Evans fanned a Red-Scare narrative on the Associated Press wire even while his personal papers—now in the University of Kentucky archives—show how closely he followed and feared the strike press.
Who Spoke Through the Pages
The paper’s on-the-ground founders included NMU organizers W. B. “Bill” Jones and William Hightower—both later eight defendants, including both men, drew life terms. for their role in Evarts, as well as veteran activist Sam Reece, who evaded arrest while deputies ransacked his home. His wife, Florence Reece, penned the ballad “Which Side Are You On?” in response. National cadre like William Z. Foster advised from afar, while youth organizer Harry Simms smuggled bundles of the paper until a deputy’s bullet killed him in February 1932. In November 1931, novelist Theodore Dreiser led a delegation that heard miners’ affidavits by lantern-light, then addressed mass meetings whose speeches Voice reproduced almost verbatim. Weeks later, a Bell County grand jury indicted Dreiser and his colleagues for “criminal syndicalism”—proof that the spoken and printed word now frightened coal operators as much as rifle fire.
Words on Paper, Power on the Ground
Each four-page issue blended front-line dispatches, relief notices, and sworn testimonies from miners’ wives describing night-time raids. Circulation rarely topped a few thousand, but copies were read aloud in tent colonies and mailed—often in plain envelopes—to allies in New York and Chicago, where excerpts appeared in the CP’s Daily Worker and the ILD’s Labor Defender. The printed affidavits supplied the raw material for the 1932 book Harlan Miners Speak, still the most visceral contemporary record of the conflict. A 1935 commission appointed by Governor Ruby Laffoon concluded that ‘there exists a virtual reign of terror…financed by coal operators’ echoed the newspaper’s language almost word for word, a tribute to how effectively the miners’ narrative had pierced the national conscience.
Legacy in Archives and Memory
The Voice of the Miner ceased publication in January 1932 as funds dried up and editors were jailed or forced into hiding, yet its nine-month run left a paper trail that scholars still mine. Surviving issues lie in the Herndon J. Evans Papers at the University of Kentucky and in the Kentucky Miners Defense files at NYU’s Tamiment Library, alongside the strike songs and photographs that traveled with them. The newspaper’s raw prose has become a touchstone in labor historiography; historians John W. Hevener and John C. Hennen both argue that without those mimeographed sheets the voice of Harlan’s rank-and-file would have been lost beneath corporate and governmental records.
Why It Matters
The Voice of the Miner demonstrated that even in the most isolated company towns workers could seize the means of narration if not yet the means of production. By printing affidavits, naming victims, and countering “official” dispatches in real time, the paper preserved an unvarnished chronicle of class struggle that continues to inform activism and scholarship. Every time modern picketers in the coalfields break into “Which Side Are You On?” they echo a question first pressed into cheap paper in 1931—a reminder that telling one’s own story can be as subversive, and as necessary, as any barricade.
Sources and Further Reading
“Criminal Syndicalism Comes to Harlan, KY,” Appalachian History (2017). Appalachian History
Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields (1932; reprint University Press of Kentucky, 2008). UKnowledge
“Archives and the Archival Exercise,” University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu
John W. Hevener, Which Side Are You On? (Illinois, 1973).
John C. Hennen, Harlan County War (Kentucky, 2004).
Trade Union Unity League Proceedings, 1930 (microfilm, Tamiment).
Author Note [Blank]