And how employers collaborated with the authorities to use violence to suppress the unions and frighten the workers . . .

 

And their families.

 

 

 

 

 

Come all you good workers,

Good news to you I'll tell

Of how the good old union

Has come in here to dwell

 

Which side are you on?

Which side are you on?

 

Oh, workers can you stand it?

Oh, tell me how you can?

Will you be a lousy scab?

Or will you be a man?

 

Which side are you on?

Which side are you on?

 

Don’t scab for the bosses

Don’t listen to their lies

Cause poor folks haven’t got a chance

Unless we organise

 

— From Which Side Are You On? As performed by Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers, released on the 1941 album, Talking Union.

 

 

In December 1931, the union organiser and songwriter, Jim Garland, performed a series of concerts in New York City with his cousin Aunt Molly Jackson to raise funds for the striking miners in Harlan County, Kentucky. The miners had taken a stand against the mine’s owners and operators and their struggle would become known as The Harlan County War, or more appropriately, Bloody Harlan.

 

Aunt Molly Jackson

 

During these concerts, Garland and Jackson performed a new song called Which Side Are You On? The song would later find the ear of Pete Seeger, the relentlessly pro-union, communist, civil rights activist, and songwriter. And while Seeger’s version would make it one of the most enduring anthems of the labour movement, Garland had already recognised the song’s potential for protest:

 

“In the course of such fights, songs expressed people’s feelings in a manner that allowed them to stand together. Rather than walking up to a gun thug and saying, ‘You’re a bastard,’ which might have resulted in a shooting, we could express our anger much more easily in unison with song lyrics.”

 

Florence Reece

 

Florence Reece had written the song earlier in 1931 after a harrowing encounter with the notorious Harlan County sheriff, JH Blair.

 

“Sheriff J.H. Blair and his men came to our house in search of Sam — that's my husband — he was one of the union leaders. I was home alone with our seven children. They ransacked the whole house and then kept watch outside, waiting to shoot Sam down when he came back. But he didn't come home that night. Afterward I tore a sheet from a calendar on the wall and wrote the words to Which Side Are You On? to an old Baptist hymn, Lay the Lily Low. My songs always goes to the underdog — to the worker. I'm one of them and I feel like I've got to be with them. There's no such thing as neutral. You have to be on one side or the other. Some people say, 'I don't take sides — I'm neutral.' There's no such thing. In your mind you're on one side or the other. In Harlan County there wasn't no neutral. If you wasn't a gun thug, you was a union man. You had to be.”

 

 

On 16 February 1931, the mine owners and operators in Harlan County inflicted a 10% pay cut on the county’s already impoverished labour force. The United Mine Workers of America tried to organise the county’s miners, leading to the operators firing any employees suspected of union membership and evicting them from company owned homes. In solidarity, the remaining workers went on strike.

 

 

My daddy was a miner,

And I'm a miner's son,

I'll stick with the union

Till every battle's won.

 

Which side are you on?

Which side are you on?

 

They say in Harlan County

There are no neutrals there.

You'll either be a union man

Or a thug for J. H. Blair.

 

 

At the peak of this strike, 5800 miners were out of work with 900 scabs working. J.H. Blair and private guards employed by the mining company protected those who crossed the picket. The private guards, no better than mercenaries, operated with impunity outside the walls of the mines.

 

The sheriff, J.H. Blair stated: “I did all in my power to aid the operators . . . there was no compromise when labor troubles swept the county and the ‘Reds’ came to Harlan County.”

 

J.H. Blair

 

“There exists a virtual reign of terror (in Harlan County), financed in general by a group of coal mine operators in collusion with certain public officials: the victims of this reign of terror are the coal miners and their families . . . a monster-like reign of oppression whose tentacles reached into the very foundation of the social structure and even into the Church of god . . . the homes of union miners and organizers were dynamited and fired into . . . It appears that the principal cause of existing conditions is the desire of the mine owners to amass for themselves fortunes through the oppression of their laborers, which they do through the sheriff’s office.”

 

— Kentucky governor, admitting under pressure to the collusion of the mine companies and local law enforcement, and the harassment of miners and their families.

 

 

The number of miners killed remains unknown.

 

Bloody Harlan ended with the Kentucky National Guard arriving to replace the mercenary mine guards in May 1931. The strikers expected protection, instead the guard broke the picket line. Blair denied the people of Harlan County their right to assemble, and by June the last miners had returned to work. The strikers won no concessions from the mine operators.

 

But Florence Reece’s message persevered.

 

Pete Seeger

 

Which Side Are You On? could not have found a better vessel in Pete Seeger to reach a broad audience. Seeger took Reece’s intensely local song and made it universal. Later Billy Bragg, the socially aware English songwriter, would transport the song to England in support of the striking miners in 1984.

 

 

Reece’s haunting original is a call to arms, demanding her own people stand in solidarity against the mine owners and operators and their gun thugs and collaborators. Seeger’s version with the hugely influential Almanac Singers is also a call to arms: The choral response pleads with us all to export Florence Reece and her people’s struggle beyond the borders of Harlan County.

 

 

 

“We took some cement and walled that cave up,

Where you killed these thirteen children inside,

I said, ‘God bless the Mine Workers’ Union,’

And then I hung my head and cried.”

 

— The final verse of Ludlow Massacre by Woody Guthrie.

 

 

Prior to the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt likened the system whereby management could determine “the hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor” to a dictatorship. The New Deal, along with other pro-union legislation such as Senator Robert Wagner’s National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which secured the right to unionise, allowed workers to share in America’s prosperity.

 

 

Today, some have already written the unions’ epitaph. Between 1954 and 2018 union membership dropped from 35% to 10.5%. Similarly, between 1920 and 1930 membership dropped from 12.2% to 7.5%. Peculiar to both periods is the growth of corporate power and the stagnation of wages. However, at any time in the last 100 years when the unions have operated from a position of strength the top 1% share of the national income has declined.

 

America’s workers need another call to arms.

 

A reminder that in any struggle there are no neutrals here . . . 

 

The Kentuckian agitator to come again, demanding to know: “Which side are you on?”