History
In early 1931 some 18,000 non-union workers struck more or less spontaneously in response to a 10% wage cut, amid living and working conditions that had already deteriorated from miserable to "impossibly bad". As tensions mounted the single most violent event may have been the Battle of Evarts on May 5, 1931, which drew national attention. Three guards and one miner were killed. Two days later, Kentucky Governor Flem D. Sampson called in the Kentucky National Guard to disarm both the mine guards and the union miners, bringing that phase of the strike to a close.
The basic causes of the conflict remained, though, and isolated casualties continued to mount, for instance the shooting death of Young Communist League activist Harry Simms in February 1932. As of May 1932, eleven people had been killed: five deputies, four miners, Simms, and a local storekeeper sympathetic to the strikers.
Harlan County coal miners continued their struggle to organize all through the 1930s, and the violence continued. Among other victims, Lloyd Clouse was shot and killed on April 24, 1937 specifically to prevent his testimony in front of the La Follette Committee. Union organizers finally succeeded after another strike in 1939.
Read more about this topic: Harlan County War
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“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)