Whose side are you on?: Harlan County, U.S.A. reviewed in 1978

The powerful first sequence of Barbara Kopple’s film, establishing the hazard and hardship of life in the Kentucky coal mines, begins with a view of men riding a conveyor belt into the bowels of the earth and ends with another such belt bringing out the cut coal: an image of implacable continuity in which the unmistakable overtone is of human beings sacrificed on the altar of a free economy. In its subsequent picture of the miners’ history in general and their experience of the 1973-4 strike in particular, the film reflects both the continuity of their situation and the unbridgeable division between their interpretation of it and that of the mine bosses. 

Early in the film, we hear old-timers’ recollections of bygone sufferings (children working ten hours a day for six cents an hour), of political and union collusion with the bosses, of the first fruits of solidarity in a successful strike. Later, newsreel footage of what one veteran terms “guerrilla war” in the “Bloody Harlan” strike of the 1930s – pickets confronting company police – is matched with shots of similar, if apparently more quiescent, confrontations in the 1973 dispute. 

As the movie proceeds, the sense of heritage is reinforced when, for instance, a Duke Power spokesman concedes at a press conference that some company dwellings still have no indoor sanitation. Simultaneously, the history of conflict is underlined: the same spokesman’s overtly paternalistic references to “our people” are immediately succeeded – and placed by the film-makers – by an interview with a union organiser in which he characterises the Harlan County regime as “feudal”. Similarly, footage of an attorney representing the mine owners blandly asserting that no hard evidence exists to link mining with industrial disease is immediately followed by a doctor retailing a catalogue of established data on this point. 

This irreconcilable opposition of viewpoints – “Whose side are you on, boys?” asks one of the folksongs which punctuate the soundtrack – finds its logical extension in the declaration at a strikers’ meeting: “They’re organised [i.e. armed] – so we’ve got to get organised”. 

By analogy, the film devotes some time to the power struggle within the UMWA, the indictment (contemporaneously with the Harlan County strike) of former president Boyle on charges connected with the murder of reform activist Yablonski, and his replacement as president by the reformists’ candidate Miller. The implication here seems to be that even if the consequences of facing up to the bosses’ ruthlessness is an equal ruthlessness of union politicking, this will still not prevent the rank and file from asserting its solidarity in action. 

“I can get shot but they can’t shoot the union out of me”, announces one striker’s wife: the import of “the union” becomes mystical, and the looseness of the film’s structure – in particular, its indeterminate ending – reflects this. Many of the facts about the strike and its chronology, and about the wider framework of labour relations in the American mining industry, are left out of account by the film. 

But Barbara Kopple and her associates might retort that they are primarily concerned with feelings, with the pickets’ vigil on the early morning road as they await the company “gun thugs”, with the raw grief at the wake for the murdered Lawrence Jones. Harlan County, U.S.A. declines analysis, but its imagery provides a basis on which one might be begun.