Biography
Celia Kuhn was named among those indicted for criminal syndicalism after the November 1931 Dreiser committee investigation of hunger and repression in the Harlan and Bell County coalfields of Kentucky. The November 17 Daily Worker says prosecutor W. A. Brock planned to seek extradition. It lists Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Charles Rumford Walker, Adelaide Walker, Marie Pergain, Samuel Ornitz, Celia Kuhn, George Maurer, M. P. Levy and Harry Gannes; the introductory counts do not agree neatly with that ten-name roster. The first six are described as committee visitors to the mines; Gannes is identified with the Daily Worker. The indictment and extradition plan do not establish an actual arrest, jail admission, conviction or term served. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n276-NY-nov-17-1931-DW-LOC.pdf#page=1
Hevener identifies Julia Parker as having used the name Celia Kuhn with the Dreiser committee. His January 1932 narrative places Parker in the Pineville headquarters arrests and actual jail. This explicitly links the two names; the 1931 unserved indictment does not establish a November imprisonment.
John Watts Hevener, A New Deal for Harlan: The Roosevelt Labor Policies in a Kentucky Coal Field, 1931–1939 (Ohio State University PhD dissertation, 1971), printed pages 148, 153 (PDF pages 157, 162). Source 805 SHA256 03766c260a4cf06629fb296358baf9e49448a191f9d290929ecd947963b0e125.
