Abstract

An Unquenchable Spirit

The article presents information on the book "The Strike for Union," by Heber Blankenhorn. The story of the strike, which lasted a year and more before it was broken, its sidelights on labor politics, on the stake of the public in the coal industry, on waste and mismanagement and overdevelopment, on the status of the Constitution in the remoter sections of the Appalachians--are important, and admirably set forth by Blankenhorn. But more important still is the fact that even generations in the mines cannot quench the human spirit; that, living under a feudalism black as any to be found in the tenth century, men could still come laughing from the pits, still hold up their right hands and swear allegiance to the union, still close their ranks through a winter of privation and suffering, still faint and starve, aye, and die, as a protest and a sign against the intolerable degradation of modern industrialism.