Harlan County, USA

I dallied past my usual TV appointment today. After Homicide: Life on the Streets, I flipped channels and landed on the Independent Film Channel, usually neglected, which was running Harlan County, USA (trailer below), a 1976 Oscar-winning documentary of a thirteen month coal strike in 1973 and 1974 by Barbara Kopple.
Kopple has directed numerous other documentaries including the 1991 American Dream about the 1985-1986 strike at Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota and Shut Up and Sing, the 2006 documentary on the attempt to supress the Dixie Chicks after lead singer Natalie Maine’s comment that the Chicks were “ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” Her style is straightforward. She attends the event and shoots what happens. When interviewing, she stays off camera, and the focus stays on her subject.

Harlan County, USA is gritty. It’s theme is one that gets forgotten in these days of the universal entrepreneurship: solidarity. The miners are folks who have been tied to the mines for generations. Many people refer to their daddies and granddaddies who labored in the mines, a good many of whom died there or, worse, spent a premature and withering old age dying from Black Lung Disease. Kopple includes telling clips of congressional hearings in which representatives of the Bituminous Coal Producers Association deny that such a disease results from breathing coal dust.I was reminded of a trip to Zacatecas, Mexico during which we toured the mines cut into the mountain on which the city sits. At some points you traverse shafts seven and eight stories tall and hundreds of feet across, dug by natives enslaved by the Spanish. many generations never left the mines, our guide told us, until the mines were tapped out after two hundred years of production.Florence Reese appears at one point and sings the song she composed during the first Harlan County coal war in the 1930’s, “Which Side Are You On?” As she says before she she sings, she is old and her voice will crack, but she will sing anyway because she lived through the blood of the thirties and she doesn’t want to see it come again. Solidarity is the key, standing together. It’s a stirring moment when the crowded union hall rings out with a hundred voices on the repeated chorus, and Reese’s cracked and fading voice carries an authorityIt’s a tough row to hoe. The strikers are beset by scabs, non-union workers, and “gun thugs,” and the sheriff. The company set up a machine gun nest at its main gate to keep the strikers back. The picket line is attacked by gunfire before dawn more than once, and one man, Lawrence Jones, is shot to death by one of the replacement workers, Bill Brunner, who never served time for the murder.Jones’ death is a pivotal moment. The miners meet in the night after the evening shooting and argue whether they will fight back or not. They are swayed by the argument that the contract was what Jones had wanted and had died for, and they hold. Solidarity wins. His funeral is wrenching, his mother collapsing on his coffin and his sixteen-year-old wife crying over her baby.The national coverage, though, forces the mine owners to the negotiation table and produces a contract that, at last, the miners can live with.

Now that I’ve throughly exposed the plot, I’m going to recommend that my readers watch this thoroughly moving film and consider the idea of solidarity. Perhaps, in this moment when our leaders at all levels are distancing themselves from their actual consituents, it is time for that idea the be reborn among us and for us to begin to remember that we are free people and have the right and the power to act in our own interest. Harlen County, USA airs again on IFC Wednesday, April 16th, at 6:25 AM and 1:05 PM and again on April 22 and May 11.