Word: coal
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sometimes it came deep in the earth where Borinage miners scratch out coal from overworked shafts in constant expectation of cave-ins, poison gas, flooding, fire and explosion. More often it came on the grey, slag-heaped surface as miners coughed out their lives. Emile Zola saw the Borinage in the 1880s and poured its horror into his powerful classic, Germinal. A few aged miners still remember the emaciated, stubble-bearded Dutch preacher named Vincent Van Gogh, who lived in one of their hovels, held services and sketched their bowed bodies with fever-palsied hands...
...since given in to chilling despair. As the U.S. puts recession behind it, most cities and towns are speeding up production lines or hunting up new industry. Harlan County's one industry-mining-is dying; because of geography the county is unlikely to find others. Hundreds of unemployed coal miners are in privation's clutch, haunted by the specter of expired unemployment compensation and dwindling food supplies. Kentucky's Governor A. B. ("Happy") Chandler has declared Harlan an emergency area. President Eisenhower was informed of the distress last week by Kentucky's two Senators, John Sherman...
...dodge revenuers; safe on impenetrable hilltops, they patted rifles and taunted federal agents with doggerel. Harlan justice was rudimentary; seldom was a killer hanged, but often one murder was avenged with another. And when the United Mine Workers set out 30 years ago to organize Harlan's prosperous coal mines, pitched battles between "Bloody Harlan's" miners and company police brought out the National Guard so often that guardsmen were on first-name terms with miners they tossed into jail by the scores...
Prosperity's Victims. Harlan's crisis has a combination of sources. For one, demand for its rich bituminous coal will never again match the good old days of the '20s, when production zoomed to 14.5 million tons a year. For another, Harlan's miners, members of the U.M.W. for the past 18 years, are in a sense victims of other miners' prosperity. Rising labor costs (Harlan operators have so far refused to sign a new U.M.W. contract under which miners would get $14.25 a day to enter a mine, 76? more per ton to load...
Rusty Red Dog. Despite the billion tons of rich bituminous coal still underground, conveyors and tipples are being sold for scrap metal; white-frame company towns such as Red Bud, Golden Ash and Kenvir are boarded up and rotting; in Closplint and Punkin Center, streets rust-colored from a half century of "red dog"-slate and clinker dust-are quiet and deserted. Miners who could afford to have gone off to Paducah, Louisville, Cincinnati or even Chicago. Others, who could not, are in worse trouble than in the Depression '30s. In Kenvir (pop. 800), where the Peabody Coal...