Monongah: The Tragic Story of the Worst Industrial Accident in US History (review)

The Monongah mine disaster is the worst calamity in the deadliest month in the bloodiest year of American mining history. In December 1907, both Pennsylvania and West Virginia experienced their worst coal mine explosions, with at least 269 killed in an explosion at the Darr mine near Jacob’s Creek, Pennsylvania, followed by the Monongah, West Virginia, explosion with an official death count of 358. Consolidation Coal’s Monongah mine, developed by powerful West Virginia entrepreneurs and politicians, was financed by some of the wealthiest men in the nation, including John D. Rockefeller. The company was resolutely and aggressively anti-union and had defeated several union organizing attempts.

McAteer skillfully analyzes the tragedy, examining players on the company side from the upper levels of the rich and powerful to the mine supervision and operations level, while giving equal weight and voice to the immigrant groups that provided the vast majority of the victims. He provides vivid descriptions of the mining community’s environment: a near permanent smoke-laden haze, created by 320 coke furnaces, filled the valley, destroying vegetation and shortening the lives of miners and their families; open sewers and a scarcity of good water; children as young as eight years old working in the mines; and the debt-induced servitude reinforced by company stores and housing.

A strength of McAteer’s account is that it is not simply a tale of the corruption of power and greed in high places. Research gives victims a face, and provides a sympathetic account of the various ethnic groups that labored as miners to feed the growing energy needs of American industry at the turn of the twentieth century. The diverse workforce included immigrants from the economically destitute boot of Italy, Poles escaping conscription by the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, smaller numbers of Greeks, Turks, Serbs, Carpatho-Rusyns, and Ukrainians, along with first- and second-generation Irish who frequently served as lower- and mid-level management.

From the very beginning, the Monongah mine was subject to labor unrest, as the company used mechanization plus ethnic and racial divisions to assert near total control. Despite organizing visits by Eugene Debs and Mother Jones, a series of strikes were broken by court injunctions and brute force. Mother Jones, who took over the leadership of the 1902 strike, was admonished by the local judge, John Jay Jackson, “to follow the lines and paths which the Allwise being intended her sex should pursue,” activities such as charity work, “the true sphere of womanhood” (112).

McAteer draws on his own extensive mining experience as the head of safety and health programs for the United Mine Workers of America and head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration under President Clinton to analyze the circumstances, causes, and cover-up associated with the Monongah disaster. Breakaway mine cars racing down a sloping mine entry, disrupting the ventilation system, sending coal dust swirling, and forcing methane gas into the mine, almost certainly caused the explosion. The author recounts the horror and terror of the miners’ families who lived immediately above the mines, the inadequacy of a mine rescue effort that proceeded without plan or protective equipment, the crushed and mangled bodies of the workers, and the system of labor sub-contracting in the mines that made any accurate fatality count impossible. After a meticulous examination of all the available evidence, McAteer estimates that the real death toll exceeded five hundred miners, significantly more than the 358 reckoned in the official count.

It is difficult to determine whether the most outrageous aspect of the entire affair was the attempt to blame the immigrant miner for the blast, or the blocking by powerful mining interests of any significant reform of mining procedures through regulation and enforcement. It is fortunate that a man of David McAteer’s caliber undertook to tell the tragic story. Presently vice president of Wheeling Jesuit University, he has produced a major...