NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO AID STRIKING MINERS FIGHTING STARVATION 799 BROADWAY • NEW YORK CITY • TELEPHONE GRAMERCY 5-5443

January, 1932 JOHN DOSPASSOS, Chairman

HUGO GELLERT, Dear Friends Secretary Having Just come back from a trip with L E O N K A H N , the Dreiser Committee around Harllin County, Kentucky, Treasurer and spoken to the miners and seen how they live, I can assume you that the name of this committee is no exaggeration. Sherwood Anderson Roger Baldwin The miners, their wives and children live Bishop Wm. M. Brown in crumbling shacks, many of them:clapboard, through Horace B. Davis whose cracks pour the laShing mountain winds, rain and Agnes Do Lima 'Floyd Dell snow. "We’re not afraid of the wind", said a mother of Babette Deutsch five, "it's the loose boards in ,t£e walls". H. W. L. Dana Robert W. Dunn A few crumbs of cornbread usually — a piece Clifton P. Faidiman of salt pork ocoasionaly— a few pinto beans for the Sarah-Bard Field more* fortunate — this is their fpod. "Last summer we Waldo Frank Lydia Gibson ate ^rass — this winter, I guessj, we'll eat snow", sa^.d Eugene Gordon another mother. Michael Gold William Gropper Wages? Aunt Molly Jabkson, wife of a Charles Yale Harrison Straight Creek, Kentucky miner, said, "Better starve Harold Hibkerson Sidney Hook striking than starve working in tfiei muck of a mine" • Graces Hutchins If the men go on strike against these intolerable Horace M. Kallen conditions, the slight local and Red Cross Relief being (Carol Weiss King offered is entirely cut off and they are evicted from Cor-Uss Lament their houses. Then they face the'entire armed force of ‘Margaret Larkin Melvin P. Levy the law, which in Kentucky, means vicious courts. Jails, Jessie Lloyd tear-gas-bombs, guns — manned by ‘thugs known to have Robert Morss Lovett been,"imported" especially for the miners. Louis Lozowick Paul Luttinger, M.D. Schools? Shoeless children are school-less Lewis Mumford children. Many lack even underwear. Thru the gray of Liston M, Oak Harvey O'Connor any morning one can see a group of mourners behind a Samuel Omitz shack — a gash in the mountain-side, a little pine- Frank Palmer coffin lowered into the earth, and the earth close Webster Powell around the remains of a child that did not have a chance Harry Alan Potamkin to live. John Cowper Powys Anna Rochester Upton Sinclair Can you give something to help bring food Lincoln Steffens to the mouths of these freezing, starving children? Bernhard J. Stem . Marguerite .Tucker Gratefully, Genevieve Taggard Mary Heaton Verse Alfred Wagenknecht Charles R. Walker Rev. Eliot White Anita Whithey Walter Wilson Charles Erskine Scott Wood "Carl Zigrosser A

Please make all checks payable to Chairman,