xt7zcr5n9b4c https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7zcr5n9b4c/data/mets.xml Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969-   newspapers 2008ua008_1_10 English Lexington, Ky. : Blue-Tail Fly, Inc., 1969- : Lexington, Kentucky. Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Blue-Tail Fly Blue-Tail Fly, No. 10 text Blue-Tail Fly, No. 10  2010 true xt7zcr5n9b4c section xt7zcr5n9b4c 
These drills are used in a form of surfaoe-mining known as augering...


 
The Appalachian Tragedy, page 5 Harry Caudill; photos by Arthur Tress
photographs:  Dicran Derderian, pages 8-9
Yossarian is 47 years old now, page 10 Darrell Rice
And the black lung fight continues, page 13 David Holwerk
A fizzadelic report on the Governor's drug conference, page 14 Chuck the Trucker
verse:  Short Takes, by Anselm Hollo
covers, front and back: photographs by Arthur Tress
The blue-tail fly is published monthly by blue-tail fly, inc., P.O. Box 7304, Lexington, Ky. 40502.   We still like to think of ourselves as a cross between the Sons of the Pioneers and the newsboys in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. "
Conspiracy, vol. II
By Jon Hillson
SEATTLE (CPS)-Perhaps you've heard the new saying: "spread the word about Seattle," and wondered exactly what that word is. It rymes with Chicago.
The Seattle conspiracy trial began on November 23 in Tacoma.
On April IS, 1970, eight people were indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with conspiring, combining, confederating and agreeing together to commit offenses against the United States in violation of 18 USC 371, 2101, and 1361.
The charges stem from a demonstration-riot held on February 16 in protest of the Chicago 7 convictions. Federal indictments"issued at the behest of the Justice Department"came over the protests of Seattle's local prosecuting apparatus.
Since they were handed down, there has been a virtual news black-out of indictments, the trial, pre-trial defense and the history of the local movement upon which such heavy repression has fallen. To recapitulate, then, we go back to late January, 1970, on the campus of the University of Washington, in Seattle.
WHAT WAS THE SEATTLE LIBERATION FRONT?
Michael Lerner, at that time an assistant professor of philosophy at UW, soon to become one of the Seattle 8"at 27 a teacher and a veteran of the Bay Area radical movement"began reformulating the "new form" of radical organization. The autonomous collective, as it was called, was to serve as the arena for individual grcwth as well as the vehicle for socialist action. Lerner"since "not rehired" by his departmental colleagues"found early success in his classes.
Action centered around » tax-incentive program in the general Seattle area, which has an unemployment that spans both
blue collar and white collar working class and is estimated to be about 15 percent.
Work on the tax incentive program centered on door-to-door campaigns, leafletting unemployment offices armed with coffee and donuts and talking to students, as well as pushing the program. Leadership emerged in the Sundance collective"each collective took names"a group composed of Lerner and a bulk of the others indicted for conspiracy. Among them"Chip Marshall, Joe Kelly, Jeff Dowd and Mike Abels"were cited for crossing state lines and using interstate commerce for the intent of inciting riot.
The four"and several others"had migrated from Ithaca, New York, in December of 1969 to live and do political work in Seattle. Many of the "Ithaca people" had backgrounds in SDS" some in Weathermen"but left the group because of sharp political disagreements.
The fledgling organization called demonstrations in protest of the conviction of the Chicago 7 on February 16.
Reports on crowd size vary"the Seattle commercial papers, both arch-conservative, guessed 2,000, others cite 3,000. The crowd erupted as it neared the federal building as rocks broke government windows. Police, appearing from a nearby building, put on, according to many on the scene, an uncommonly brutal show, beating nonviolent demonstrators with vigor.
Nona* of the eight conspiracy defendants were arrested at the demonstration. Eighty participants were, and the Seattle investigating grand jury reported that "at least half" or about 1,000 in their estimate, topk an "active" part in the melee.
The massive demonstrations around the country varried in the amount of property damage exacted. While over 20,000 peaceful demonstrators marched in Boston, the Associated Press chose only to report the street-fight engagement
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staff:  Bucky Young, Guy Mendes, Darrell Rice, David Holwerk, Sue Anne Salmon, Julie Mendes, Irving Washington, Chuck the Trucker, Helen Roach, Rick Bell, Jonathan Greene, Don Pratt, Gretchen Mar cum Brown, Harold Gage, Diana Ryan, Phil Patton, Tony Urie, Larry Keilkopf, Eddie Smith, Margie Singler, Jim Stacey, Anne Deeley and many, many more.
between 5,000 militants and Boston police. In spite of the report, the Boston demonstration gave Harvard Square its Baptism of fire. Demonstrations in numerous cities were larger than Seattle's, and in Berkeley and Boston at least, the intensity of combat and the amount of damage was higher than Seattle.
Frantic SLF activity-inwardly and outwardly"followed. The Day After (TDA) demonstration Collectives developed rapidly, gushing young people"numerous UW students"into radical   politics  for   the   first time.
The freneticism of events, the rapidity of action and growth manifest weaknesses and faults in the SLF. The most cutting aspect was male supremacy. Leadership soon took the familiar male dominated flavor; the swaggering, hip lifestyle of the Sundance collective veneered what many women began to see as an oppressive, machismo form. This contradiction would fester internally for months as women sought to personnally confront and work out the problem.
In early April, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a private press conference with the Seattle commercial media. More like a battle briefing, its ramifications perhaps will only be decided by the jury.
Replete with international-conspiracy paranoia, the Seattle media began a hysterical campaign against the SLF"particularly through attacks on its self-proclaimed leadership, Lerner, Marshall, Dowd and Kelley.
WHY A SEATTLE CONSPIRACY?
Knowing that Seattle's TDA was by no means unique, why federal conspiracy indictments, over the protests of local prosecuting authorities?
To begin with, Seattle, an isolated city, has been a testing ground for repression.
Seattle's general strike during which workers shut down the city precipitated mass detention, deportation and busting of scores of militant socialist, communist
and anarchist workers at the end of post-World War I recessions.
Raids on trade unions, harassment and repression"minimized by the media"paved the way for then Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to institute, shortly thereafter, similar escapades on a national level; the infamous Palmer Raids. Thousands of militant workers were deported and jailed"no knocks, of course-W a 24-hour period and broke the back of the trade-union's revolutionary wing.
Seattle workers, expecting their general strike to move nationally, retreated in militant action: then-isolation set the pace for a dryrun, and Palmer took the experiment's results nationally.
Three decades later, before few people outside of Wisconsin knew then"Senator Joseph McCarthy, local witch-hunt hearings went on in Seattle, as the red-scare was tested in the isolated Northwest. More than possibly, McCarthy had an eye not only to the Puget Sounds, but to reaction around the country. With "reds" scared in Seattle, and with a nation una wakened to the coming of its saddest days, McCarthy mounted a podium whose base had the mark of Seattle lumber.
Thus, the Seattle Conspiracy trial not only fits into a general strategy of repression" from busting student body president moderates at Kent State to Black Panthers in Detroit"but into an historical pattern.
State abortion law challenged
Kentucky's abortion law, similar to those already struck down in four states, is being challenged as unconstitutional.
Three federal judges were to rule on the constitutionality of K.R.S. 436.020 at a Dec. 10 hearing in Covington.
Challenging the law is Dr. Yasuo
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Sasaki, a northern Kentucky physician. On Nov. 17 he was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000 for violation of the abortion act. He is appealing that decision.
The charge was filed by Kathleen Iatrides, whom Dr. Sasaki examined twice in August for pregnacy. Both tests proved negative. Later that month, he was called to the patient's home by her mother. Mrs. Iatrides was seriously ill, and an examination led Dr. Sasaki to believe she may have tried a self-induced abortion She was later admitted to a hospital and the charges against Dr. Sasaki were filed.
This case led to the constitutional challenge. In a brief Dr. Sasaki's attorney, William Allison, argues that the law is unconstitutionally vague and indefinite and that it deprives patient and physician of first, fourth, fifth, ninth and fourteenth amendment rights.
The law forbids abortion unless necessary to preserve the life of the mother. The brief argues that this provides insufficient warning to physician and court which conditions justify abortion.
According to the brief, the law invades the privacy of the physician-patient relationship, places a legal liability on medical opinion and imposes a cruel and unjust punishment on the physician.
It further argues that the law impinges on the right of women to choose whether to have children, as guaranteed by the ninth amendment.
Four states"Maryland, the District of Columbia, Texas and Wisconsin"have already had abortion laws struck down as unconstitutional.
Whatever the decision of the three federal judges, Allison believes the case will be appealed to the Supreme Court by one side or the other.
It's treaty time
BERKELEY (CPS)-Using the method of initiative, a group in Berkeley is planning to circulate petitions to place on next April's city ballot a proposal for a peace treaty between the people of Berkeley and the National Liberation Front of Vietnam
The petition, which if passed by the Berkeley citizenry would become a city ordinance, first needs enough signatures to equal five percent of the entire vote cast in the last municipal election to make it on the ballot.
At this time, that means approximately 1,800 signatures, which
can easily be collected from the registered voters attending the University of California at Berkeley.
The petition, in addition to authorizing five representatives of the city to become delegates to the NLF and Vietnamese people, demands that the United States withdraw its troops from Southeast Asia and cease to support the present South Vietnamese government. It also declares that no Berkeley citizen will serve in the war.
If the proposal were to pass, Berkeley would have to secede from the Union. The U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibits the signing of treaties by any local government.
On Charger! On Firebird! On Pinto!
Liberation News Service
In America, car is King. More people have jobs related to the auto industry than any other industry in the American economy.
Thirty per cent of the nation's consumption of sheet, bar and strip steel goes for the manufacture of automobiles; the auto industry consumes 70% of the rubber, 50% of the lead, 45% of the malleable iron, 35% of the zinc, 12% of the nickel, 11% of thealuminum and 9% of the copper used in this country. The major share of oil and gas consumption also goes to automobiles.
Auto production is woven into the entire fabric of this country. Many of the resources for production and use of autos must be obtained from Third World countries; 80% of the rubber used in the U.S. comes straight from Southeast Asia, where the U.S. is fighting largely to defend and expand its access to such resources as rubber and oil
There is an interlocking directorship of corporations in the various sections of the auto industry and in nearly all other important sectors of the economy. The directors of GM, for example, sit on the boards of three major oil companies and four major steel companies.
The auto giants also have enormous defense contracts. GM alone has a yearly business of more than $580 million in government military contracts. They make everything from fighter planes to diesel parts. GM turns out 230,000 M-16 rifles yearly, rifles that are used to kill Vietnamese and to fight other of America's wars.
General Motors, the largest of the big three auto makers (the other two are Ford and Chrysler) produces one out of every three vehicles made in the non-socialist world. GM is an international giant who need pay no attention to national or continental boundaries. GM has assembly plants in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
In South Africa, where GM has been since 1926, wage slavery is developed to a high degree. In a country with 11 million blacks and 3 million whites, cheap non white labor makes up the foundation of the South African economy. Blacks have no political or trade-union rights, they are forbidden by law to strike for better wages or working conditions, even though their pay averages less than one-eighth that of whites.
Not only do the auto giants exploit labor abroad, they rob you at home. In 1966, GM took materials worth an average of $1400 and used factory labor to turn it into a vehicle that it could sell to a dealer for $2500. Of this $1100 difference, only $247 went to the workers in wages! The remainder goes to GM, to the yearly salary of GM's president, who makes $750,000 a year, and into advertising, the packaged sex appeal that get consumers to discard their old cars and go into debt to buy the latest model.
When the dealer sells the car to you for about $3,000, that's a lot of money to pay out at once. So you borrow the money and pay it back in installments. Right now there is more than $35 billion out on loan to American consumers for car purchases, a full 40% of all consumer credit.
And the cost of auto repairs has soared. Between 1955 and 1965 prices increased a good 60%. Insurance claims have nearly tripled, and the cost of parts have increased as much as 400%.
The giants say in their P.R. that they care about pollution. But GM has put more smog, dirt and poison into the air than any other industry or corporation in the country. (By tonnage, GM contributes 35% to all pollutants in the air.)
The auto companies spent $9 million over the period of 1953-1963 to control pollution. At the same time, the damage to the environment from pollution was exceeding $11 billion each year. (The 22 highest paid executives in the auto industry get a combined salary of more than $9 million a year, 10 times what was spent in that decade on pollution control.)
Today GM claims to be spending $20 million a year on new methods of pollution control That's less than 10% of what they spend on advertising, and less than 2% of what they spend on model changes. The amount GM spends on controlling pollution is an amount equal to their gross sales for only eight hours on one day! (GM grosses $2.5 r.iiilion an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.)
On a national scale, auto pollution contributes 60% of the waste in the air; in urban centers, auto pollution makes up as much as 90%.
American cars are not designed for our safety. How can any product with planned obsolescence built in be safe? You take a chance when you buy a car-35-40% leave the factory full of defects, according to Consumer Reports. Once the car is taken into the shop, from 30 to 90% of the repairs requested are not made correctly.
Ninety per cent of the cars on the road have faulty headlight aim; 50% have suspension and alignment problems, 25% have brake deficiencies. Each year, 50,000 of us die in car accidents.
But our deaths do not cost the auto industry a cent.
More heads at Morehead
By Sue Anne Salmon
The Student Mobilization Committee at Morehead State University during the week before Thanksgiving led students in a protest against restrictive women's dormitory hours. "Not many students at Morehead think about the war, but everybody has an opinion on women's hours," SMC president Bill Read said.
At the paternalistically-governed campus of about 6,000 students, current dorm hours range from 11 p.m. for freshmen, sophomores and juniors on week nights to 2 a.m. for seniors on Fridays and Saturdays. Men students have no hours.
Women in the SMC at Morehead circulated leaflets Wednesday night, Nov. 18, to all women living in the compulsory University housing units for undergraduates. The leaflets contained articles written by SMC women concerning discrimination against women, especially in regard to imposed curfews.
Counter-dissent leaflets reportedly also were distributed to the women students. The leaflets, signed by the Student Council president and vice president and
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the student representative to the board of regents, urged women not to take action into their own hands. A walk-out might hinder efforts to "work through the system" in changing curfew policy, Student Council president Dudley Hawkey said.
Thursday night, Nov. 19, at a campus concert given by the Association, members of the band, prompted by the SMC, urged students to protest the women's restrictive curfews. Panty raids had followed the two previous concerts this fall at Morehead and the SMC- 30 of whose 60 members are women"enlisted wide support from former panty-raiders and others to urge women to walk out of the dorms after the 11 p.m. curfew that night.
Shortly before midnight about 400 male students made the rounds of the nine women's dormitories.
As the men gathered outside, dorm mothers warned girls: "Close your windows, lock your doors, turn off the lights, stay down on the floors in the hallways!"
Doors of the dormitories were guarded by campus police and members of a local fraternity.
Yet approximately 50 women escaped.
A main boulevard through the campus was barricaded by some men students who used construction materials from a campus building site. Rocks were thrown, breaking glass in windows and doors in
three dorms. Police were not called Thursday night, but one high school student from Morehead was arrested by campus police.
About 100 students gathered in front of the residence of Morehead's president Adron Doran, and yelled for him to come out. Student Council president Dudley Hawkey commented that the protestors "didn't even make enough noise to wake him (Doran) up."
(The last time Morehead students marched to Dorans house was after the Kent State killings in May. Then Doran came out and led the students in a 40-minute prayer).
Doran announced Monday night at a freshman basketball game that Thanksgiving break would begin at noon Tuesday rather than Wednesday afternoon The reason for the day and a half extra vacation, he explained, was because of the Morehead victory over Eastern State University in a football game Saturday.
The last such recess at Morehead was a half-day break from classes two years ago when Morehead won the Ohio Valley Conference.
After Doran's announcement Monday night, about 10 state police cars were dispatched from the Morehead post to the campus because the police "suspected trouble." The state police patrolled the campus and checked students for identification.
CHANGES
THINGS FOR HE AND SHE
151 S. LIME
A rumor was circulated that state police were looking for a Weatherman trying to deliver explosives to someone at Morehead, according to the Courier-Journal.
Two Morehead students, Charles Talbert Lovell and William Andre Farley, were arrested about 2:30 a.m. Tuesday as they were walking across the campus to get cokes at a nearby gas station, an SMC member said. They were arrested by the state police for "failure to disperse" and were not released from jail until 6 p.m. Tuesday.
Although Morehead President Doran and Student Council President Hawkey pretended that the dissent was "merely a panty raid that got out of hand," Dean of Students Buford Crager said disciplinary action will be taken against an unspecified number of students.
Acid's children
SEATTLE (CPS)-Not chromosome damage and deformities but girl babies are the end result of LSD-taking pregnant women, according to a pediatrics professor.
Dr. David W. Smith discussed his theories during a recent symposium sponsored by the University's School of Social Work. His findings came about as a result of a study completed by himself and Dr. John Aase (formely of Washington, now living in Alaska).
In their research the two doctors studied 10 babies born to mothers who had taken LSD during pregnancy. As a control they also examined a group of 10 babies from mothers who had never taken LSD. Their findings showed that none of the 20 infants displayed birth defects, nor was there any discernible chromosome damage. The only outstanding difference between the two groups was that the "LSD babies" were all girls.
'The mathematical probabilities of that occurring by chance are rather slim," said Dr. Smith. "But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen."
The first research which concluded that LSD might cause chromosome damage in human beings was done with white blood cells in a "test tube" situation. Pure LSD was placed directly upon the lymphocytes and the result was "chromosome breakage" in some of the cells. However, Dr. Smith explained that the same effect can be achieved with aspirin, caffeine and many other substances,
Soon after this study a doctor in New York published findings which showed that, out of five babies whose mothers had taken LSD during pregnancy, two had signs of chromosome damage. "About two percent of all babies are born With some type of malformation anyway, Dr. Smith said. "Without a baseline (comparison between LSD babies and total number of babies observed) it is difficult to make use of this type of information."
Dr. Smith said he became more interested in the results of his own study after he read an unrelated report on the
offspring of schizophrenic parents. He said that in this study, all mothers who showed psychotic symptoms within one month after conception had girl babies.
Because there are similarities between schizophrenia and the symptoms of having taken LSD, Dr. Smith said he thinks there may be a connection as to why they both cause the rejection of the XY (male) fetus.
$$$ to the people ?
Perhaps it's struck you as strange that the conservative and capitalist-oriented Wildcat is distributed free of charge on the UK campus while the radical blue-tail fly costs a quarter an issue.
"How come?" you may have thought at some moment or another.
The answer to this seemingly paradoxical situation lies in the murky area of advertising support and other forms of financial backing. Because the Wildcat caters to the interests of business owners (at least as they see it), they are being supported by them in the form of large advertising revenues. In addition, UK's student newspaper, the Kernel, hinted in a story appearing last month that the Wildcat may also be receiving substantial backing from powerful political elements in the state.
The fly, on the other hand, is mainlyi able to sell advertising only to the relatively few businesses which are related to the youth culture. The money this brings in is insufficient to pay the costs of producing the paper. Some subscribers do make extra donations, but this still doesn't cover expenses. Thus, the quarter-an-issue price.
Even this does not allow the fly to pay any salaries. The only people who do make money do it by selling papers. The Wildcat, though, has enough financial suppport to pay its staff more than the daily Kernel, which is no mean feat because the Kernel's advertising revenues are supplemented generously by the university. It's apparent that the Wildcat has access to funds. Just exactly whose hasn't been determined yet.
An interesting corollary point to this arose at a Nov. 20 forum on "First Amendment Rights" sponsored by the Kentucky Intercollegiate Press Association at UK. Among the panel participants was Terrence Fox, leader of the Student Coalition"the campus political organization the Wildcat speaks for.
Because of Fox, the panel discussion somehow degenerated into the question of which was more popular"the Wildcat or the blue-tail fly. Fox boggled the mind of btf staffer David Holwerk, who was also on the panel, by saying the Wildcat Was more popular than the fly because it has more money.
Holwerk asked what that had to do with it.
Fox responded by saying that "the people" had the money and the fact that they gave more of it to the Wildcat than to the fly was proof that the Wildcat was more popular with the people.
BELLS & FLARES $6.39 -- $6.99
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M-W-F 1-9; T-Th 12-9; Sat. 10-7
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The Appalachian Tragedy
Harlan Miners Speak
Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields by Members of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners.   Reprinted by da Capo Press, 348 pp. , $12.50.
Coal Mining Health and Safety in West Virginia By J. Davitt McAteer.
West Virginia University Press, 689 pp. » $20. 00.
H
warlan Miners Speak, first published in the hunger-ridden November of 1931, is important for two reasons. It reminds a now affluent middle age of the horror of the Great Depression and preaches to the rebels of the Woodstock generation a powerful sermon on this country's capacity to punish and repress dissent.   An American saga emerges from its pages.
Harlan County, Kentucky, is the geographical heart of troubled Appalachia.   Its name has passed into legend for the cruelties of its overlords and the bloody and protracted struggle of its underclass to free themselves
This article originally appeared as a book review in The New York Review of Books. Reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books/ copyright © 1970 The New York Review.
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and to secure at least a tolerable standard of living. To this day newspaper references to the county generally designate it as "bloody Harlan. " Harlan Miners Speak tells us how it acquired that somber sobriquet.
There is probably no lovelier place than the Appalachian heartland, a wrinkled maze of steep, rock-capped, timbered hills.   Harlan is different from the huge territory north of it because an unusual terrain feature, the Big Black Mountain, shoulders boldly across it. The Big Black, like the lesser Smokies, rises to 4,400 feet and looms in dark majesty above the hills nearby.
The Big Black is significant for more than its beauty. Three thick veins of superb metallurgical coal run through it and with the beginning of the twentieth century the hill beckoned to industrialists and their hungry furnaces and power plants.
The county--and the region around it--stumbled into tragedy by processes conventional American history has all but glorified.   The territory was the home of scattered bands of Cherokees, Shawnees, and Choctaws who warred against ever-encroaching white settlers from the Fast.   The first cabin builder was Elisha Wallins, and he and those who followed him brought the simplistic, Calvinistic, and ferocious backwoods mores and culture into the shadows of the Big Black.   They cleared patches for corn, tobacco, beans, and squash, set up their whis-
by Harry Caudill


 
key stills, and preached the old-time fundamentalist religion.
The hill people saw little need for schools and built practically none.   When land agents from Philadelphia and New York began buying Appalachian minerals in the late 1800s they dealt with an illiterate people who virtually gave away the riches of the Big Black and its foothills. On Jone's Fork some tracts were "sold" for ten cents per acre.   A mountaineer thought he had driven a shrewd bargain when he deeded 1, 000 acres of Black Mountain land to a Mellon for $500.
There was little for the mountaineer to buy with his little hoard, but this soon changed as railroads were driven up the valleys in the twentieth century.   Half a hundred "coal camps" sprang up in Harlan alone and in each of them the company store occupied the most prominent place.   Its displays of enticing wares soon separated the mountaineers from their "coal money. " When the money was gone, men and boys of counties in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama, and West Virginia came thousands of other highlanders to join them, and Harlan's mining era began.
For a brief while during and after the First World War, wages reached a decent level, but by the mid-Twenties, Harlan faced serious trouble.   There were too many miners and orders declined as hydroelectric plants and the oil industry attracted coal's customers.   Coal had long been sick when the stock market crashed in 1929.
Coal prices commenced a relentless erosion. Miners had never been much for joining, and unionism had taken little hold.   The United Mine Workers of America, the principal "brotherhood, " was--as it still is--unimagin-ative and ultraconservative.   Its fumbling organizing efforts were undercut by the miners' knowledge that a UMW representative seldom talked to a miner before he had seen the boss.   The Great Depression found the miners divided and leaderless, while the operators were tightly united in the Harlan County Coal Operators Association.
jLn the coal glut of the 1930s mining companies fought desperately to stave off bankruptcy, and always they resorted to the same weapon--cost cutting. Economies
could be effected in only three areas:  reduce electric power consumed by machinery, lower prices for the machinery, and lower wages.   They were helpless to enforce either of the first two, so they embraced ever-diminishing wages as their salvation.   From $5.00 a day in the middle Twenties, pay scales were systematically slashed to about $1.25 in 1931-32.
Both the "Report" and McAteer document the madness which engulfed the hapless county.   Though the market was awash with steadily cheapening coal, the companies could survive only by selling more; so they slashed wages and ordered their half-starved miners to the pits. The workday rose from eight hours to ten, twelve, and even fourteen.   The men were put on "piece work, " in which they were paid 30 cents or 35 cents per ton produced, reimbursing the company out of that pitiable sum for all the costs they incurred in the process.   They were hired on condition that they do all their buying in company stores, where prices were routinely double those in the nearby towns.   Desperate miners entered the pits before daylight and emerged after dark, bone weary and gaunt with hunger.   In their deteriorating shacks they found wives nearly always pregnant, and swarms of hungry children.   The appalling "grub" on which they subsisted was potatoes, pinto beans, cornbread, and "bulldog gravy" made with flour, salt, water, and a little grease. Milk, butter, and fresh meat and vegetables became receding memories.
The towns fell into squalor as painters and trash collectors stopped making their rounds.   Hospital staffs were pared, and the captive population wallowed in poverty and disorder.
In their indigence and disunity the miners and their families slipped into abject peonage.   Not since the Middle Ages has a population been so dependent on its barons.   Babies were born in company hospitals run by company doctors and nurses.   As they grew up they attended company schools taught by teachers chosen by company managers.   The only employment was in company mines. They traded in company stores, walked on company streets, and carried "scrip" (a form of company money) in their pockets.   When they died a company undertaker carried their bodies to a company graveyard and the company supplied a modest tombstone, ir Ten


 
photographs by ARTHUR TRESS
As their homes deteriorated, their clothes turned to shreds, and their faces became pinched with'famine, and reddened with scurvy, the camp people became objects of detestation rather than pity.   The operators scorned them as trash--as contemptible as the black strikebreakers they sometimes imported from Alabama and Mississippi.   As starvation and outrage drove the miners to mutiny, the companies recruited an army of "thugs" to "preserve law and order."
T
JLhere was little hesitation in choosing between penniless coal diggers and their ragged women and children on the one hand and a huge industrial complex marshaled by Fords, Mellons, Insulls, Rockefellers, and lesser barons