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 I N T R O D U C T I O N Robert B. Reich WHEN I heard Davitt McAteer was working on a book detailing the unparalleled disaster at the Monongah mines, I thought it promising news. I knew that when Davitt applied his considerable intelligence and insight to researching the true story, the results would take readers far beyond the official accounts to accurately convey the import and enormity of the worst industrial disaster in the history of the United States. In 1993, Davitt McAteer began working for me at the Department of Labor, first as a consultant for about a year before he became the only assistant secretary of labor for Mine Safety and Health during the Clinton administration. In that capacity, Davitt served from 1994 to 2000, and I was much impressed with his knowledge of mining, as well as his energy and integrity during those seven years. Sometime last year, I discovered that Davitt was extensively investigating the Monongah disaster and, in fact, had been for more than 20 years. He has combed through local, national, and international newspapers from the decades before and after the 1907 accident; read transcripts of the legal proceedings relating to the accident and the resulting legislation; and tracked down personal papers from company owners, charitable aid workers, and others who had a principal role in the events. Detailed inquiries like Davitt’s are seldom purely professional undertakings; Davitt’s search for the truth was a labor of 2 introduction love motivated by an intense will to reveal the unvarnished reality experienced in 1907 by the mining industry and the public. In 1994, I swore Davitt into his new position with the Department of Labor in the town of Fairmont in Marion County, West Virginia, very near the site of the 1907 Monongah disaster. Nearly 300 people attended and, as I joked at the time and Davitt agreed, more than half of them were relatives of his. The hills of north-central West Virginia had well nourished the McAteer clan, which had grown from four or five immigrant McAteers in 1847 to well over 200 relatives living in the area 150 years later. Just prior to the swearing in, I visited an underground coal mine with Davitt and learned first hand the risks and dangers that miners continue to face today. Indeed, the courtroom where the swearing-in took place is the very same courtroom where the coroner’s inquest had been held barely a month after the massive 1907 explosions in the Monongah mines. That very room was where the first investigation of the disaster was presented and its possible causes were explored. The official death toll was variously cited by the Monongah Mining Company at the time as nearly 362 miners; in Monongah, readers learn from Davitt’s research that the final toll was more probably well over 500 dead. The mining industry has been a central force in the history and sociology of West Virginia for over a century, and West Virginia University Press, as the state’s flagship university press, has the resources and connections to give the tragic events the treatment they so richly deserve. And no one is positioned better than Davitt McAteer to examine the Monongah mining disaster of 1907 from all the perspectives required: historical, sociological, legal, and economic. Monongah is an important book, long overdue. Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He is the author of thirteen books, including Aftershock, The Work of Nations, and Beyond Outrage. ...

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