HARLAN CASE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 November 1938, Page 6

HARLAN CASE

CLASSICAL AMERICAN ISSUE SOME EXTRAORDINARY 'EVIDENCE The great Harlan case, which will be one of the classical cases in the history of American Labour, has ended for the moment in a “mistrial,” says the “Manchester Guardian’ editorially. It lasted from May 16 until August 1, and in the end the jury was unable to agree. It was a “mass trial,” with 69 defendants —22 coal mining companies, 23 of their officials and 24 of their hired deputy sheriffs. In other words, the whole of the employing interests of this Kentucky coalfields were put on their trial. Harlan is one of those isolater mountain communities that exhibit at their worst the American hostility to trade unionism and the violence with which it is repressed. Out of a total population of 65,000 nearly 50,000 are miners and their families living on company property. The coal owners have ruled for a generation in their own interest, and the law has been administered for them by their own paid deputy sheriffs. The Wagner Act, establishing 'freedom of organisation, came to the coal mining oligarchy as a bitter blow. For years they had waged bitter war on union organisers, and the place had become known as “Bloody Harlan.” AUTHORISED BY STATUTE. Now the union had received statutory authorisation. When it tried to organise it found so tight a cordon drawn round that it could only get in its literature by dropping it from an aeroplane. In January last year two organisers arrived “after being chased round for days,” within a few days their hotel was attacked by tear gas and their cars were dynamited. A few days later an organiser was shot at while driving down a street. Four days later two of their cars were ambushed in broad daylight, and one man was wounded; on the same day the son of an organiser was shot by bullets intended for his father. Two months later another organiser was killed. The broad facts are not in question and have already been exposed in a Senatorial inquiry. The Wagner Act has no penal sanction and the Government proceeded against the Harlan coal miners by invoking an old statute against the Ku-Klux-Klan which makes it a criminal offence to conspire to defraud citizens of constitutional or statutory rights. The evidence has been incredible, at least by standards of English labour relations; the worst episodes in the early struggles between owners and miners in South Wales are tame by comparison. OF GREAT IMPORTANCE Some of it, however, has not been without its humour, as in the descrip- * tions of how one coal company put on “strip tease” shows as a rival attraction, to union meetings. In the end, after 11 weeks, in the course of which 14 of the defendants were dropped, the jury disagreed. Five were for conviction of the lot, three were for acquittal and four felt that some should be convicted and some acquitted. The prosecution is moving for a new trial. There is every political reason why it should, because a conviction in the Harlan case would have immense importance in fortifying the Federal Government against the many industrialists who, though less crude in their methods than the coal owners of Harlan, are prepared to fight trade unionism to the bitter end.. But a mass trial of this sort seems an extremely unsatisfactory method of procedure if justice is to be done. Neither in Russia nor in our own South Wales coalfields cases can the results of “mass trials” be said to have been the best means of getting at the truth and fitting the punishment.