Appalachian History Series – The Voice of the Miner: Underground Newspaper of “Bloody Harlan”
In the spring of 1931, the coal camps of Harlan and Bell Counties turned into one of the most closely watched battlegrounds in American labor history. Sheriff’s cars rolled through dark hollows with machine guns propped in the back seats. Deputies and mine guards evicted families from company houses and cut off credit at the store. Miners who tried to organize faced arrest, firing, or worse. Reporters arrived from New York and Chicago. Investigators came from Washington.
The loudest voices in print, though, belonged to the coal operators and the county’s business elite. Papers like the Harlan Daily Enterprise and the Pineville Sun framed the strike as an invasion by outside agitators and “Reds,” not as a desperate fight by hungry miners. The Harlan Torch, a weekly funded by the operators, filled its pages with headlines about “Red Terror in the Hills” and sermons on law and order.
Somewhere in that landscape a different newspaper began to circulate in secret. It was called The Voice of the Miner. Printed in small runs and passed hand to hand, it tried to speak for evicted families and jailed organizers at a time when public speech in Harlan County could get a person beaten, fired, or killed.
This is the story of that underground paper, the people who made it, and how historians can still find its scattered fragments in archives from Lexington to New York.
“Bloody Harlan” And The Need For Another Press
The Harlan County War, as historians now call the conflict, grew from the larger coal crisis of the Great Depression. When prices fell and rail rates rose at the end of the 1920s, Harlan operators cut wages, shortened hours, and shut down weaker mines.
Miners turned first to the United Mine Workers of America, then, when that effort collapsed, to the National Miners Union, a Communist-led rival affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League. Organizers from the NMU promised interracial solidarity, relief for the unemployed, and an aggressive push for union contracts. To coal companies, local elites, and sheriffs, they looked like a political invasion.
By May 1931, tension boiled over into the Battle of Evarts, a gunfight between armed strikers and deputies that left four men dead and pushed Harlan into the national headlines. In the months that followed, miners struck, courts handed down harsh sentences, and state and federal troops occupied the county more than once.
In that world the local press mattered. The Pineville Sun’s editor, Herndon J. Evans, reported to the Associated Press and helped national papers frame the conflict as a story of communist agitation rather than wage cuts and evictions. The Harlan Torch went even further, presenting itself as a patriotic watchdog against “red” conspiracies in the camps.
For striking miners, there was little room in those pages for their own voices. That gap, and the experience of radical labor movements elsewhere, pushed organizers to try something different.
Printing A Counter-Story: How The Voice Of The Miner Emerged
The exact origin of The Voice of the Miner is hard to reconstruct, because so few issues survive. What can be pieced together from archival finding aids, radical press, and later memoirs suggests that the paper grew from the same circle that sustained the National Miners Union and the Kentucky Miners Defense Committee.
In New York, Communists and sympathetic liberals organized the Kentucky Miners Defense Committee to raise money, pay lawyers, and publicize the cases of indicted miners. Its files, now preserved in the Kentucky Miners Defense Records at New York University’s Tamiment Library, include strike newspapers, pamphlets, and circulars used to mobilize support.
In Harlan and Bell Counties, NMU organizers and local rank and file miners needed a way to bypass company newspapers and get their own version of events into camp houses, union halls, and relief kitchens. Radical labor culture already had a template. Publications like the Daily Worker, Labor Age, and small strike papers in other coalfields mixed reportage, fiery editorials, and appeals for solidarity. In June 1931, Labor Age ran Tess Huff’s article “Coal War in Kentucky,” a detailed narrative of evictions, beatings, and hunger that echoed what Voice would print.
By late 1931 or early 1932, The Voice of the Miner was part of this ecosystem. The University of Kentucky’s “Bloody Harlan” pathfinder notes that editor Herndon Evans collected “communist newspapers of the time” in his personal papers, including NMU material, and later scholars have identified surviving Voice issues or reprints in those boxes and in Tamiment’s Kentucky Miners Defense holdings.
If the Harlan Torch was the paid mouthpiece of the Coal Operators’ Association, The Voice of the Miner was the underground mouthpiece of hungry families and radical organizers.
Inside The Pages: Starvation, Terror, And A Different Language Of Law
The surviving fragments of Voice, along with parallel documents in Harlan Miners Speak and NMU publications, show a distinctive style. Reports from tent colonies and back roads used plain language about starvation, coal camp justice, and what miners called “gun men” and “gun thugs.”
Harlan Miners Speak, the 1932 report produced by the Dreiser Committee, was not itself a newspaper, but it preserved affidavits, letters, and testimony from many of the same NMU circles that wrote for Voice. It painted the coalfields as a place where coal operators and deputies had created a “terroristic dictatorship” that silenced dissent and wrecked families.
Voice appears to have echoed and amplified those themes. Editorials condemned “company sheriffs” and described Harlan County as a kind of industrial feudalism in which mine guards controlled the roads and the courthouse. Strike reports named deputies, company towns, and specific mines where beatings, arrests, and evictions had taken place. Relief notices called on supporters to send money, food, and clothing through the Kentucky Miners Defense Committee. Photographs now preserved in the Kentucky Miners Defense Photographs collection show poster campaigns demanding freedom for jailed miners and protesting anti-union terrorism, the same world in which Voice circulated.
The Voice of the Miner also tried to make sense of law. It denounced local courts that charged miners with “banding and confederating” or criminal syndicalism for holding meetings, and it pointed readers to outside investigators who might offer some protection. That theme turns up again in the 1932 Senate hearings on conditions in the coal fields of Harlan and Bell Counties, where witnesses testified about beatings, evictions, and the suppression of union activity.
In its pages, legal technicalities and local names became part of a larger story about class power and civil liberties in the coalfields.
Criminalizing Speech: What The Investigations Reveal
The world that produced The Voice of the Miner did not last long, but state and federal investigations left a rich paper trail about how authorities treated radical press and speech.
The 1932 Senate hearings on conditions in Harlan and Bell Counties gathered testimony from miners, operators, clergy, and public officials. Witnesses described deputies smashing union halls, arresting relief workers, and harassing anyone suspected of supporting the NMU. The report is now accessible through the University of Kentucky’s collections and linked in the Digital Distillery “coal strike” teaching module.
In 1935 the Governor’s Commission to Investigate Conditions in Harlan County delivered an official state verdict. Later summaries of the report, echoed in Kentucky legislative “Bloody Harlan” educational materials, quote the Commission’s description of a “virtual reign of terror” financed by coal interests and implemented through pliant sheriffs and deputies.
Two years later the La Follette Committee, a Senate subcommittee on education and labor, focused directly on violations of free speech and labor rights. Its 1937 Harlan County hearings documented blacklists, threats against teachers and preachers, and systematic efforts to crush pro-union publications and speakers.
Read alongside surviving Voice issues, these investigations confirm that the paper was not indulging in hyperbole. The underground press was operating in a county where even handing out leaflets could land someone in jail or worse.
A Wider Radical Network: Songs, Newspapers, And Defense Committees
The Voice of the Miner was never just a local project. It drew strength from a wider Communist and left-wing network that connected coal camps in eastern Kentucky to union halls in New York and Chicago.
The Trade Union Unity League’s proceedings and National Miners Union pamphlets laid out a strategy for organizing in “open shop” coalfields and building a parallel labor press when mainstream papers were hostile. The Kentucky Miners Defense Committee used posters, broadsides, and news releases to reach sympathetic unions across the country, some of which are preserved today in Tamiment’s poster and broadside collection.
Cultural figures moved in the same orbit. Aunt Molly Jackson and her half-brother Jim Garland, later celebrated in Shelly Romalis’s Pistol Packin’ Mama and Garland’s own memoir Welcome the Traveler Home, toured northern cities to raise money for Kentucky strikers. Florence Reece, wife of a union organizer, wrote the song “Which Side Are You On?” in this climate of repression, a piece that George Ella Lyon later turned into a children’s book.
Popular histories like Kim Kelly’s Fight Like Hell and teaching collections such as the Smithsonian Learning Lab’s “Harlan County War” set The Voice of the Miner within this broader world of radical music, mutual aid, and legal defense.
The paper spoke with the same militant language as these efforts. It framed the strike as a fight between “miners and bosses,” praised interracial solidarity, and insisted that free speech and union rights were inseparable.
Memory From Below: How People Remember The World Of Voice
The 1931 to 1932 strike and the short life of The Voice of the Miner left deep marks on Harlan’s memory. Later memoirs and oral histories capture how ordinary people remembered that underground press, even when they had no copies left.
G. C. “Red” Jones’s Growing Up Hard in Harlan County recalls Depression-era life, hardscrabble farms, and the way mine wars reshaped communities. While he writes more about everyday survival than about specific newspapers, his account reinforces the picture of a county where violence and fear made open organizing nearly impossible.
Jim Garland’s Welcome the Traveler Home describes organizing in the Harlan and Bell County camps, writing topical songs, and traveling with Aunt Molly Jackson to raise funds for the Kentucky Miners Defense Committee. Even when Garland does not name Voice directly, his stories of passing news by word of mouth and circulating leaflets fit the world that paper served.
Alessandro Portelli’s They Say in Harlan County, built from more than thirty years of interviews, records how later generations talked about “Bloody Harlan,” blacklists, and the Battle of Evarts. Some narrators grew up hearing about radical leaflets and “communist papers” that circulated briefly, enraging sheriffs and company officials. Portelli uses those memories to show how people understood class, law, and violence long after the strike ended.
In these stories The Voice of the Miner is not just a title in an archive. It is part of a larger folk memory of speaking up in a place where speaking could be deadly.
Finding The Voice Of The Miner Today
For historians, the hardest part of writing about The Voice of the Miner is the simple fact that so few physical copies survived. The fragile newsprint has to be reconstructed from scattered archives and later references.
The Herndon J. Evans Papers at the University of Kentucky’s M. I. King Library are the starting point. Evans, the Pineville Sun editor who opposed the strike, saved not only his own correspondence and clippings but also pamphlets and newspapers from the National Miners Union and its allies. The “Bloody Harlan” pathfinder, built around his collection, directs researchers to Communist press from the time, including the strike paper that miners produced.
The Kentucky Miners Defense Records and Kentucky Miners Defense Photographs at Tamiment Library in New York round out that picture. Their finding aids list statements, briefs, Senate subcommittee reports, news releases, and images from the defense network that sponsored Voice and helped distribute it.
Digital projects make some of this material easier to approach from afar. The University of Kentucky’s Digital Distillery site, “A Strike Against Starvation and Terror,” gathers documents from Evans’s papers, Harlan Miners Speak, Senate hearings, and local newspapers under headings like “Local Elite,” “Miners,” and “National Miners Union and Other Radical Groups.” The 601 “Bloody Harlan” pathfinder offers a road map of primary and secondary sources for anyone planning a serious research trip.
Your own earlier article, “The Voice of the Miner (1931 – 1932): The underground press of Bloody Harlan,” pulls these threads together and situates the paper alongside its nemesis, The Harlan Torch, which is explored in the companion piece “The Harlan Torch: Anti-Union Propaganda in ‘Bloody Harlan’.”
All of these resources point back to a simple fact. For a brief time, under conditions that state and federal investigators later called a reign of terror, coal miners in Harlan County managed to put their own words on paper and send them through a landscape of company guards and hostile sheriffs. The Voice of the Miner did not last, but the surviving traces remind us that even in the darkest parts of the coalfields, people worked to create a counter-history in real time.
Sources & Further Reading
Evans, Herndon J. Herndon J. Evans Papers, 1929–1982. University of Kentucky Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, Lexington, KY. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://exploreuk.uky.edu
Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Kentucky Miners Defense Records, 1931–1939. TAM 032. New York University, New York. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/tam_032/all/
Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Kentucky Miners Defense Photographs. PHOTOS 016. New York University, New York. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. Oral History Collections on Harlan County, Kentucky. University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington, KY. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://libraries.uky.edu
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. Accessed December 28, 2025. 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. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://books.google.com/books/about/Conditions_in_Coal_Fields_in_Harlan_and.html?id=62FPjDsYsS0C
Governor’s Commission to Investigate Conditions in Harlan County. Final Report. Frankfort, KY: Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1935. Related digitized commission material accessed December 28, 2025. https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/umwac/id/170404/
United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Education and Labor. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor: Harlan County. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://books.google.com/books/about/Violations_of_Free_Speech_and_Rights_of.html?id=7W3DnbQJ070C
Huff, Tess. “Coal War in Kentucky.” Labor Age 20, no. 6 (June 1931). Contemporary radical-press account of the 1931–32 strike, available in reprint through online labor-history archives. Accessed December 28, 2025. (Representative entry) https://revolutionsnewsstand.wordpress.com
Trade Union Unity League. Proceedings of the National Convention of the Trade Union Unity League. New York: Trade Union Unity League, 1930. Microfilm and print copies held at Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. Access information accessed December 28, 2025. https://library.nyu.edu
Internet Scout Research Group. “‘A Strike Against Starvation and Terror’: Coal Miners’ Strike, Harlan County, KY, 1932.” Archives: Internet Scout Project, March 22, 2013. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://archives.internetscout.org/b43742/coal_miners_strike_harlan_county_ky_1932
University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. “‘A Strike Against Starvation and Terror’: An Archival Exercise Exploring a Coal Miners’ Strike – Background to the 1931–32 Strike.” Accessed December 28, 2025. https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/coal-strike/background-coal-strike
University of Kentucky, Digital Distillery Project. “Miners.” In “‘A Strike Against Starvation and Terror’: An Archival Exercise Exploring a Coal Miners’ Strike.” Accessed December 28, 2025. https://digitaldistillery.as.uky.edu/coal-strike/miners
University of Kentucky, Digital Distillery Project. “Further Reading.” In “‘A Strike Against Starvation and Terror’: An Archival Exercise Exploring a Coal Miners’ Strike.” Accessed December 28, 2025. https://digitaldistillery.as.uky.edu/coal-strike/further-reading
University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. “Appalachian UK Special Collections: A Strike Against Starvation and Terror.” Overview page on the 1931–32 strike and associated archival materials. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/appalachian-uk-special-collections
University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. “‘Red Terror in the Hills’ Digital Document Collection.” Anti-union propaganda and related clippings from the Harlan County coal wars. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu
Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. Social Welfare History Project. “Harlan Miners and the Red Scare.” Online archive of documents and images relating to the Kentucky Miners Defense Committee and Communist-affiliated relief networks. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu
The Online Books Page. “Coal Miners’ Strike, Harlan County, Ky., 1932.” Subject index aggregating open-access books and pamphlets on the Harlan County War. University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?key=Coal+Miners%27+Strike%2C+Harlan+County%2C+Ky.%2C+1932&type=lcsubc
Smithsonian Learning Lab. “The Harlan County War.” Curated digital collection of images and documents relating to the Harlan County coal wars. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://learninglab.si.edu/collections/the-harlan-county-war/j5Ip9oOqDgwU6xYV
Garland, Jim. Welcome the Traveler Home: Jim Garland’s Story of the Kentucky Mountains. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://archive.org/details/welcometravelerh0000garl
Hevener, John W. Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://archive.org/details/whichsideareyouo0000heve
Jones, G. C. Growing Up Hard in Harlan County. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813190808/growing-up-hard-in-harlan-county/
Kelly, Kim. Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor. New York: Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2022. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fight-Like-Hell/Kim-Kelly/9781982171063
Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://books.google.com/books?id=fJAVDAAAQBAJ
Romalis, Shelly. Pistol Packin’ Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://books.google.ws/books?id=giPeOVLk_r4C
Taylor, Paul F. Bloody Harlan: The United Mine Workers of America in Harlan County, Kentucky, 1931–1941. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://archive.org/details/bloodyharlanunit0000tayl
Titler, George J. Hell in Harlan. Harlan, KY: BJW Printers, 1972. Reprint ed. Louisville: Commonwealth Book Company, 2015. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://books.google.com/books/about/Hell_in_Harlan.html?id=8u_AsgEACAAJ
Lyon, George Ella. Which Side Are You On? The Story of a Song. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/which-side-are-you-on/
“Which Side Are You On?” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed December 28, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which_Side_Are_You_On
Author Note: The Voice of the Miner may seem like a small, fragile newspaper, but it sat right in the middle of what people later called “Bloody Harlan.” By giving miners and their families a way to speak back to company papers and sheriff’s offices, it turned private suffering into public testimony and drew national eyes to the coal camps. If we want to understand why Harlan’s clash over wages and control became a full blown war over law, speech, and power, we have to listen to what was printed in its underground press.