December 7, 2007
Mining Disasters Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:10 AM EST A piece in The New York Times states that at least 70 miners are dead in a coal mine in Shanxi Province, with another 29 miners missing. The Times is cautious about the relative magnitude of the tragedy, remarking that this toll represents “one of the country’s worst mining accidents this year,” an unsubtle reminder that coal mining remains a peculiarly deadly trade. In China, around five thousand miners are killed each year. By a coincidence, another story in the Times reports a strike in South Africa, tens of thousands of workers protesting the death rate in that country’s mines. Around two hundred miners die each year in South Africa. By a more macabre coincidence, today is the centenary of the Fairmont Coal Company mining disaster, the worst such event in American history. One hundred years ago in Monagh, West Virginia, at 10:20 a.m., what is thought to have been a methane explosion ignited coal dust and killed 362 miners, some of them boys, injuring around twice as many more. The earth shook eight miles away; the force of the explosion knocked street cars off their rails, toppled horses, and smashed buildings and pavements. It was a bad week for American coal miners: six days later another 239 were killed in a coal mine in Jacobs Creek, Pennsylvania. In fact, it was a bad decade. Less than two years later, 259 miners would die when a coal mine in Cherry, Illinois, caught fire. A few years before, 179 had died on January 25, 1904, when the Harwick Mine exploded, in Springdale Township, Pennsylvania. British and American miners, who suffered a truly staggering number of deaths and crippling industrial accidents, had a deserved reputation for militancy, and when I was a young graduate student they were the heroes of the then-growing field of labor history. In those days you could still very easily buy records of their songs. Some were startlingly grim, some harshly witty, others eerily if understandably mournful. Somewhat perversely, in those days people also mourned the closing of coal mines, and when Margaret Thatcher helped kill off the industry in Great Britain, she was loathed with an intensity unparalleled in the very considerable annals of Thatcher hatred. It was, in truth, hard not to be moved by the miners, but it seemed worth remembering that their deeply impressive solidarity had been bred by a couple of centuries of suffering no one should have had to endure. It was not wise to take that solidarity as the natural consciousness of working people, as a number of labor historians then seemed to do.
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