Barbara Kopple (pictured above) hadn't yet made a feature length documentary movie when she started work on a movie that would explore the United Mine Workers of America's election between reform candidate Arnold Miller and longtime incumbent Tony Boyle. When a strike at the Brookside, KY coal mine broke out in 1972, Kopple and crew moved to Brookside and "Harlan County, USA" resulted.
It's a harsh, sobering, and, inspiring movie. The strike is its main focus, particularly as it documents the role of the miners' wives in support of their husbands and as it looks at Basil Collins, an infamous strike breaker, and his men who were scabs and gun thugs.
As compelling as the main story of the strike is, the genius of the movie lies in its detours. The UMWA election story gets told in "Harlan County, USA". On New Year's Eve, 1969, Tony Boyle's leadership opponent Joseph "Jock" Yablonski, along with his wife and twenty-five year old daughter were murder in their home.
The movie takes a brief look at this murder, at the ascension of Arnold Miller as the reform candidate, and at Tony Boyle's being tried and convicted for having hired two men to murder his opponent. It also covers Miller's successful campaign to unseat Boyle, before Boyle was convicted.
This detour into the corrupt practices of Boyle and the divisions within the United Mine Workers of America keeps the movie from being an uncritical view of the United Mine Workers of America.
Yes, on the local level, the union is the coal miners' only hope for better pay and benefits and for an increased focus on safety. But, at the national level, the union organization is in the same league of corruption and greed as the mine operators it purports to be in conflict with.
The movie's other detour is its examination of blank lung. The coal operator's are as callous toward the miners' pulmonary health as they are to the miners' living conditions (no running water or indoor toilets). The pictures of older miners at pulmonary capacity machines and others being treated with respiratory therapy deepens the movie's overall story of the terrible plight of these miners.
In fact, the miners are being crushed underneath layers of power weighing down on them. The Brookside mine is an Eastover mine which is run by Duke Power of North Carolina which is under the sway of the nation's petroleum companies and all of these entities have the government regulatory agencies, particularly the Bureau of Mines, on their side.
The government wants the mines to operate so steel production continues unabated and so the nation's electrical demands are met. Then, as today, mines are given safety extensions, are subject to less than rigorous inspection. Miners' wages are kept low. Benefits are lousy. Lower company overhead means cheaper steel and electricity.
It's a dictatorship. The miners have next to no real control over their work and their lives. In fact, the strike the movie covers happens because Duke Power refuses to recognize the miners' vote to join the United Mine Workers of American.
The movie, released in 1976, is not titled "Harlan County, KY". It's "Harlan County USA". It's a microcosmic look at the USA, labor conditions, power, health, corruption, disregard for miners and other workers, and indifference in the USA for anything much beyond production and inexpensive products.
The movie always makes me think of the Silver Valley and my hometown of Kellogg, Idaho.
What I experienced and witnessed in the world of hard rock mining and smelting could have been made into a movie called "Silver Valley USA".
I lived in a place where the environmental indifference and disregard for workers was also a microcosm of the USA itself.
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