Harlan Miners Speak ─ Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields

The Dreiser Committee, including writers Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson, investigated the desperate situation of striking Kentucky miners in November 1931. When the Communist-led National Miners Union competed against the more conservative United Mine Workers of America for greater union membership, class resentment turned to warfare.
Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields, originally published in 1932, is an invaluable record that illustrates the living and working conditions of the miners during the 1930s. Mine safety, an aspect of the coal industry which has longstanding social and environmental implications, is as vital an issue as when the book was first published. This edition of Harlan Miners Speak, with a new introduction by noted historian John C. Hennen, offers an in-depth look at a pivotal crisis in the history of this controversial form of energy production.