DARK AND BLOODY GROUND

Drama in the coal fields of Harlan County, Kentucky, assumes the proportions of American tragedy when Theodore Dreiser waves the crusader's flag. Sheriff deputies are paid by the mine owners; houses of strikers are dynamited and burned. Children die, seven or eight per week; nobody is indicted for the killing of twelve miners while forty to fifty miners are indicted for the killing of three deputy sheriffs. Miner's pay is forced down to eighty cents a week; three thousands out of the eighteen thousand miners are blacklisted. Local officials regard themselves as the agents of the mine owners; local clergy uphold the violence and the starving-out tactics of the operators, and only bloodshed could come out of this starvation. The Press has proved "traitor" to the working class, while "under the pretext of combating communism, the mine-owners are giving Communism every support and justification."

When Mr. Dreiser's account, together with the report of his committee yet to be published, is divested of prejudice and examined against the background of history, the incident will remain one of the year's outstanding examples of the wrong way to meet an extreme business emergency. Enlightened business will probably view it as one of the results of the lack of organized planning in a period of over-expansion. Economists may view it as another symptom of the passing of Old King Coal. Sociologists may attribute its extremity to the lack of education in the district in which it occurred. In the meantime the Press will be diffident, the miners will die, and Mr. Dreiser will live in the hearts of his countrymen. In the meantime one section of the population will go hungry for food which another section of the population is starving to sell.