Appalachian History Series – The Harlan Torch: Anti‑Union Propaganda in “Bloody Harlan”
In the early 1930s, anyone walking into a Harlan County company store could find more than beans, flour, and scrip. On some Fridays there would be a small tabloid on the counter, shouting about “red terror” and “communist invaders.” Most copies of that paper, The Harlan Torch, vanished almost as soon as the coal wars ended. What survives today is scattered across archives, government reports, radical pamphlets, and fading memories.
This article follows those fragments and asks a simple question: if you want to actually see The Harlan Torch, where do you go and what can you learn from the trail it left behind?
Coal war, hunger, and the birth of a company paper
The Harlan Torch was born in one of the ugliest labor conflicts in American history. In February 1931 coal operators in Harlan and Bell counties imposed a ten percent wage cut on miners who were already barely surviving. When thousands walked off the job, owners answered with evictions, blacklists, and deputized mine guards. The standoff exploded on May 5, 1931, in the Battle of Evarts, where three company men and one miner were killed in a gunfight on the road.
In the months that followed, the conservative United Mine Workers of America struggled to hold onto its foothold while the Communist aligned National Miners Union tried to organize the camps that the UMW had abandoned. The strike drew national attention and brought outside writers such as Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos into the mountains.
Operators, sheriffs, and local elites did not just rely on guns and deputy badges. They also turned to print. As later historians like John Hevener have shown, company supporters used local newspapers, handbills, and special strike era sheets to frame every picket line as a “red” uprising and every raid on a miners’ camp as necessary law enforcement. The Harlan Torch grew out of that effort.
What we know about The Harlan Torch
No complete run of The Harlan Torch is known to survive. Most of what we know comes from clippings, facsimiles, and hostile witnesses on both sides of the conflict.
Earlier research has pulled together a basic outline. The paper appeared in mid 1931, backed by the Harlan County Coal Operators’ Association. It circulated as a small weekly tabloid, often handed out free at company stores, train depots, and courthouse steps. Its editorials praised Sheriff J. H. Blair and the deputies who patrolled picket lines. Its headline language insisted that unionization and communism were the same thing and treated outside investigators as agents of Moscow.
One recurring Torch series used the phrase “Red Terror in the Hills,” a slogan that took global fears of Bolshevism and pinned them onto Harlan County’s creeks and company towns. That slogan would later give its name to modern digital collections of anti union propaganda from the strike years.
The paper appears to have faded out by late 1933, after Roosevelt’s New Deal and Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act put federal weight behind collective bargaining and miners began signing union cards by the thousands. By then, any remaining Torch issues were already on their way into trunks, scrapbooks, or the trash.
Herndon J. Evans and the boxes in Lexington
If there is a single physical home for surviving pieces of The Harlan Torch, it is the Herndon J. Evans Papers at the University of Kentucky’s Special Collections Research Center in Lexington. Evans edited the Pineville Sun in neighboring Bell County and worked as an Associated Press correspondent. He opposed the strike and worried deeply about the arrival of the National Miners Union, but he was also a compulsive saver.
His papers include correspondence, clippings, broadsides, handbills, and full newspapers from all sides of the coal war. Special Collections staff and the Appalachian Center later built the teaching site “A Strike Against Starvation and Terror” out of that material. On that site, documents are grouped under headings such as “Local Elite,” “Miners,” “National Media,” and “National Miners Union and Other Radical Groups.” The “Local Elite” section in particular brings together the kind of anti union broadsides and strike era editorials that spoke with the same voice as The Harlan Torch, even when the masthead is missing or cropped away.
Researchers who work directly in Evans’s boxes find clippings and broadsides that match later descriptions of Torch content, including banner headlines about “red terror” and denunciations of strike leaders by name. The paper itself is elusive, but its words and layout live on inside a larger archive assembled by an enemy of the miners’ cause.
A Strike Against Starvation and Terror: The Torch online
For readers who cannot travel to Lexington, the “A Strike Against Starvation and Terror” site is the most approachable path into The Harlan Torch’s world. The project pairs Evans’s clippings with pages from Harlan Miners Speak, Senate hearing transcripts, and local newspaper stories. The result is an online mosaic of the coal war.
In the “Local Elite” section, company circulars and unsigned articles describe union organizers as foreign agitators and warn that “reds” are trying to overthrow local government. In the “National Media” section, big city papers relay the same talking points at a distance. Put together, these pieces show how the operators used every available outlet, from small county sheets to national magazines, to repeat the same core message that appeared in The Harlan Torch: the strike was not about wages or safety, it was about defending America from communism.
The site does not always label which clippings come directly from The Harlan Torch itself. Instead it invites students and researchers to treat the documents as a puzzle, comparing language, typography, and themes across items. In practice, that means you experience the Torch less as a neat bound run and more as one voice in a noisy chorus of employers, sheriffs, business allies, and friendly editors.
Harlan Miners Speak and the reprinted broadsides
Another place where the Torch flickers into view is the Dreiser Committee’s 1932 report, Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields. The committee, sponsored by the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, visited Harlan in 1931, took testimony, and issued a book that combined minutes, affidavits, speeches, and reproductions of strike era documents.
Modern reprints and digital previews of Harlan Miners Speak show that the committee treated the local press as part of the terror they were documenting. The book includes clippings and broadsides from employer controlled newspapers alongside miners’ statements and photographs of evictions. At least one reproduced broadside uses the same anti communist slogans that appear in surviving Torch material, promising to defend “Americanism” and warning of “red terror” in the hills.
The Dreiser Committee’s choice to reprint those pages matters. It turns a piece of disposable propaganda into part of the official record of the conflict. For historians trying to reconstruct The Harlan Torch, Harlan Miners Speak is both a source of direct images and a reminder that workers at the time recognized the company press as a weapon.
“A virtual reign of terror”: official investigations and propaganda
Even officials who were not sympathetic to communism ended up describing Harlan’s coal war in stark terms. In 1935 the Governor’s Commission to Investigate Conditions in Harlan County concluded that in Harlan there existed a “virtual reign of terror” financed by coal operators in collusion with certain public officials and aimed at miners and their families.
The commission’s report did not focus on any one newspaper, but it did highlight how sheriffs and deputies acted as private police for the companies and how public life in the county was saturated with threats. Later, the Kentucky Historical Society and popular writers would quote that “reign of terror” passage to explain why the 1930s Harlan struggle became a touchstone for labor historians.
Two years after the commission, the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Education and Labor, better known as the La Follette Committee, held hearings on violations of free speech and the rights of labor in Harlan County. Those hearings gathered testimony on blacklists, “criminal syndicalism” prosecutions, private police systems, and the ways employer propaganda shaped public opinion.
Witnesses described how strike leaders were vilified in local papers and how any preacher, teacher, or merchant who questioned the operators’ line risked losing their job. Even when The Harlan Torch was not named outright, the rhetorical patterns were familiar: union equals “red,” protest equals “riot,” outside investigation equals “interference from radicals.”
Taken together, the governor’s report and the Senate hearings confirm what the clippings suggest. The Torch was not just a fringe sheet. It was part of a broader campaign that used law, violence, and media to keep the county under tight control.
Pamphlets, radical press, and the “enemy paper”
While operators and their allies spoke through The Harlan Torch and friendly local papers, the miners’ side answered with its own print network. Communist aligned organizations such as Workers International Relief and the Trade Union Unity League produced pamphlets and leaflets that chronicled the coal war from below.
Harry Gannes’s Kentucky Miners Fight, published in 1932, framed the Harlan strike as a fight against starvation and terrorism in which the companies wielded newspapers as well as rifles. The pamphlet does not print full Torch issues, but it repeatedly attacks “company press” and “boss papers” that smeared miners as criminals and “reds.”
The Kentucky Miners’ Defense Committee, organized to support miners charged after the Battle of Evarts, took this further. Its records and photographs, now housed at New York University’s Tamiment Library, include posters, trial transcripts, press releases, and photo slides used in fundraising and public campaigns. One widely reproduced poster, “Free the Harlan Miners,” appeared in newspapers and on walls around the country and is now familiar from histories of the Harlan County War.
These radical publications often mocked the operators’ papers without always naming them individually. In doing so they remind us of how miners and their allies understood the media landscape at the time. To them, The Harlan Torch was part of a larger machinery of lies that stretched from company town print shops to big city editorial pages.
Local papers, memory, and the afterlife of the Torch
Mainstream local papers also help map out the Torch’s world. The Harlan Daily Enterprise, a long running county paper, routinely framed the strike as an invasion by agitators and treated employer violence as necessary order. Later scholars and journalists have used its coverage to contrast official reporting with miners’ testimony and with the Dreiser Committee’s findings.
The Pineville Sun, edited by Herndon J. Evans, played a similar role in neighboring Bell County. Evans’s editorials criticized the National Miners Union and backed the sheriffs and deputies who cracked down on picket lines. The fact that his personal papers became the core of the “A Strike Against Starvation and Terror” collection is an irony of history. His attempts to document and defend the local elite created one of the richest sources for studying the propaganda they used.
Decades later, oral histories have added another layer. In They Say in Harlan County, Alessandro Portelli draws on more than thirty years of interviews with miners, family members, and community leaders. Many interviewees do not remember exact titles, but they recall company newspapers, anonymous handbills, and “red scare” articles that circulated during the 1930s and again in the 1970s Brookside strike. Their memories echo the language seen in Torch clippings and remind us that for people on the ground, the precise masthead mattered less than the message and the threat behind it.
The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky holds many of these interviews, along with others that talk directly about evictions, picket lines, and the way newspapers divided communities.
Why The Harlan Torch still matters
At first glance, it might seem that a short lived strike era tabloid should matter less than famous works like Harlan Miners Speak or the ballad “Which Side Are You On?” But The Harlan Torch puts a different part of the story into focus. It shows how coal operators and their allies used media to turn a local wage struggle into a moral panic about foreign radicals and “lawless” miners.
State and federal investigations would later describe Harlan County in the early 1930s as a place of systematic terror backed by coal money and enforced through sheriffs’ offices and private guards. The Torch helped justify that system to readers who might never see a picket line themselves. It named names, framed marches as riots, and insisted that any criticism of the operators was an attack on patriotism itself.
Today, the paper survives only as brittle clippings, photographic slides, and scattered references in hearings and pamphlets. Thanks to digital projects like “A Strike Against Starvation and Terror,” the Kentucky Miners Defense collections, and teaching tools such as the Smithsonian Learning Lab’s “Harlan County War” set, those fragments are easier to reach than ever before.
For students, teachers, and local historians, tracing The Harlan Torch across these sources is more than a scavenger hunt. It is a way to see how control of the press fits into the broader history of coal, class, and power in Appalachia. In a time when media battles still shape how workers’ struggles are understood, the lost tabloid of “Bloody Harlan” has a great deal left to teach.
Sources & Further Reading
National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. Reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. https://archive.org/details/harlanminersspea0000nati
United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Manufactures. Conditions in Coal Fields in Harlan and Bell Counties, Kentucky: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Manufactures, United States Senate, Seventy-Second Congress, First Session, on S. Res. 178, May 11–13 and 19, 1932. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1932. https://books.google.com/books/about/Conditions_in_Coal_Fields_in_Harlan_and.html?id=62FPjDsYsS0C
United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Education and Labor. Subcommittee on Senate Resolution 266. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor: Harlan County. 74th Cong., 2d sess. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937. https://books.google.com/books?id=6-JOyjeA6P0C
United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Education and Labor. Subcommittee on Senate Resolution 266. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor: Private Police Systems. Harlan County, Ky. Republic Steel Corporation. 75th Cong., 1st sess. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938. https://books.google.com/books?id=3Cg3AQAAIAAJ
Governor’s Commission to Investigate Conditions in Harlan County. Report of the Governor’s Commission to Investigate Conditions in Harlan County. Frankfort, KY: Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1935. United Mine Workers of America Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries. https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/umwac
United States. National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Public Law 73–67, 48 Stat. 195 (June 16, 1933). U.S. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/national-industrial-recovery-act
Gannes, Harry. Kentucky Miners Fight. New York: Workers International Relief, 1932. https://revolutionsnewsstand.com/2023/05/04/kentucky-miners-fight-by-harry-gannes-published-by-workers-international-relief-new-york-1932/
American Civil Liberties Union. The Kentucky Miners’ Struggle. New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1932. Described in Kentucky Miners Defense Records finding aid, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/tam_032/all/
“Denounce Mich.” Daily Worker (New York), May 21, 1931. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n122-NY-may-21-1931-DW-LOC.pdf
The Harlan Enterprise (formerly The Harlan Daily Enterprise). Harlan, Kentucky, 1901– . Current site at http://harlandaily.com
Herndon J. Evans Papers, 1929–1982. M. I. King Library, Special Collections Research Center, University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington. https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/archiveComponent/967777591
Kentucky Miners Defense Records, 1931–1939. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York. https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/tam_032/all/
“Harlan County Coal Strike Photographic Collection, 1939.” M. I. King Library, Special Collections Research Center, University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington. Described in “Bloody Harlan: The Coal Strikes of 1931–1932 – Primary Sources.” https://601pathfinder.weebly.com/
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington. General catalog of projects and interviews. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/items/search
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Interview with Lois Scott, August 26, 1986.” Women and Collective Protest Oral History Project. https://nunncenter.net/ohms-spokedb/render.php?cachefile=2018oh525_ws148_ohm.xml
Terry, Kopana. “Fifty Years of Appalachia at the Nunn Center for Oral History.” Appalachian Curator (2023). https://libjournals.unca.edu/appalachiancurator/articles/fifty-years-of-appalachia-at-the-nunn-center-for-oral-history/
University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. “‘A Strike Against Starvation and Terror’: An Archival Exercise Exploring a Coal Miners’ Strike.” FWRD Appalachian Center, University of Kentucky. https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/libraries-appalachian-collection-strike-against-starvation-and-terror-archival-exercise-exploring-0
“Bloody Harlan: The Coal Strikes of 1931–1932 – Primary Sources.” Pathfinder on the Harlan coal wars. https://601pathfinder.weebly.com/
Smithsonian Learning Lab. “The Harlan County War.” https://learninglab.si.edu/collections/the-harlan-county-war/j5Ip9oOqDgwU6xYV
Hevener, John W. Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. https://archive.org/details/whichsideareyouo0000heve
Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/they-say-in-harlan-county-9780199735686
Kelly, Kim. Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor. New York: Atria/One Signal, 2022. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fight-Like-Hell/Kim-Kelly/9781982171056
Kopple, Barbara, director. Harlan County U.S.A. Documentary film. Cabin Creek Films, 1976. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074605/
“Why Is Harlan, Kentucky, Known as Bloody Harlan?” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/question/Why-is-Harlan-Kentucky-known-as-Bloody-Harlan
“What Were the Working Conditions Like for Miners in Harlan During the 1930s?” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/question/What-were-the-working-conditions-like-for-miners-in-Harlan-during-the-1930s
“Harlan County War.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County_War
“The Harlan Daily Enterprise.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harlan_Daily_Enterprise
Allender, Erik. “The Rise and Fall of Unions in the Coal Industry.” Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, and Natural Resources Law 4, no. 2 (2012). https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1236&context=kjeanrl
Lile, Brandon. “Poverty, Flooding & Grassroots Organizing: The Tug Valley Recovery Shelter and the Floods of 1977.” M.A. thesis, Western Kentucky University, 2023. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4653&context=theses
Moran, Joshua C. “Gender, Class, and Folk Music in the Harlan County War.” M.A. thesis, Western Carolina University, 2021. https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/wcu/f/Moran2021.pdf
Author Note: This piece grew out of my search for a lost newspaper that helped coal operators sell “law and order” and “red terror” to Harlan County during the worst of the 1930s coal wars. By following scattered clippings, court records, and oral histories, I wanted to show how company press like The Harlan Torch worked hand in hand with deputies, courts, and private guards to keep miners afraid and divided. Remembering that story today matters because it reminds us that who owns the paper, the mic, or the feed can shape whose side of history survives.