13
A Historical Gap
Since Zephaniah’s death in 1943, no Thomas has spent a day’s labor underground, but after moving back to Utah to work at BYU, Robert Thomas maintained his relationship with coal mining by taking weekend trips out to Sunnyside and Castle Gate with his family, driving past the five-hundred foot rock wall that divided his past from his present. This gate is impressed on my father’s young memory and has become an emblem of my family’s return to our roots.
Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot was one of my grandpa’s favorite poems to teach his English classes at BYU, such that two of his former students quoted it at his funeral. In the last stanza of “Little Gidding” there is a reference to a gate: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time / Through the unknown, unremembered gate / When the last of earth left to discover / Is that which was the beginning.” My father believes that for my grandfather, this gate symbolized the Castle Gate, and my father referenced the poem in his acceptance speech at the College of Eastern Utah.
During these visits to the coal camps, my father witnessed the gritty details of a miner’s life. He noticed the smallness and squareness of the homes, the piles of black coal, and the grime on the faces and working uniforms of the miners. In the stories my grandfather told his sons, he focused less on the accidents and day-to-day drudgery and more on the mischievousness of the mules and the idiosyncrasies of his coworkers. While visiting Castle Gate and Sunnyside, my dad was disturbed by the discrepancy between his own observations and the magic of his father’s stories—only when he moved back to Price and came into regular contact with working miners did the magic come back.
The history between when Zephaniah and Robert left mining and the Sago accident that I saw on television in 2006 is difficult to bridge. Curiously, my family’s shift from coal mining to education corresponds with a lapse in historical interest. Most coal mining histories end from 1910 to the 1930s; there is little contained in library volumes about the almost seventy years of its history since then. Only recently has an interest coal mining reemerged as it has come under attack by journalists who focus on its deleterious impacts on the land and the populace. There could be many reasons for this hiatus in record keeping.
After World War II, coal was no longer the fuel of choice; interestingly, the recent surge in writing about coal mining corresponds with a surge in coal production. Another factor could be the influence of family history on historians. Because mechanization has continued to reduce the need for manual labor, many have coal mining grandfathers, but few mine coal. Often authors refer to the coal mining experiences of their fathers and grandfathers who labored underground in the first half of the twentieth century and sparked their own interest in the industry. Additionally, some of the romantic appeal of the coal miner is lost with modernity and machines. Mechanization improved working conditions, and the nostalgic image of a miner catching a ride on a mantrip with pick in hand is no longer accurate. Today miners drive into the tunnels with trucks and manage equipment that digs the coal for them. Part of preserving the historical image of the coal miner may lie in disregarding his contemporary counterpart. Regardless of national attention, there has been much earth moved below ground during these seventy years, and after 1950, much earth moved above.
After the Depression slump, during which Zeph mined his last years, the World War II boom doubled coal production to fuel the factories supplying the military arsenal. Women joined the workforce, entering mines for the first time. In Carbon County, the population increased by a third between 1940 and 1950, and mining towns were hard pressed to provide housing for the newly arrived immigrant families. Only a decade later, the burgeoning market for solid fuel dropped off abruptly. The railroad engines that had been steam driven since their inception shifted to diesel, and natural gas and oil increasingly fueled the broilers of power plants. The company towns that burgeoned during the war, emptied. Maud had called them coal camps because she hoped mining would be a temporary occupation for her husband and sons, but this slight pejorative became prophetic as, one by one, the coal towns died off during the late fifties to sixties in Carbon County. In Price, the economy was in such decline that Governor J. Bracken Lee tried to close Carbon College, the predecessor of the College of Eastern Utah. Locals gathered fifty-six thousand signatures in sixty days, a number that exceeded the total population of Emery and Carbon counties by at least twenty-three thousand, to keep it open. With the introduction of coal-fired power plants in Emery and Millard counties in 1978 and 1986, respectively, coal production in Utah increased over the midcentury decline. It now provides 83 percent of the energy used in electrical utilities.
Oil and natural gas beat out coal after the Second World War because they were abundant, cheap, and cleaner burning. Another advantage was the greater ease in transporting them over long distances. In 1956, uranium was first used peacefully to fuel the first nuclear power plant, and energy industrialists touted nuclear as the fuel of the future. But nuclear power enjoyed only a brief popularity until 1970 when concerns began to arise about the negative impacts of radiation on nearby communities and the difficulty of disposing nuclear waste—environmental concerns that were also voiced by the coal lobby. Economic viability posed another obstacle: building nuclear plants is prohibitively expensive. Finally, the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in 1978 halted further development of nuclear power plants. Oil also began to wane in popularity because prices were subject to political turmoil in the Middle East. During the 1973 oil crisis, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) declared an oil embargo because the United States had supplied arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and oil prices per barrel skyrocketed. The second oil crisis in 1979 resulted from the Iranian Revolution, when the Ayatollah Khomeini assumed power after the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
During the heyday of oil and nuclear power, coal leveled out at an annual growth rate of 1 percent, which had not changed since 1914, except for the World War II boom. During this time, the average energy needs of each American citizen increased dramatically, and coal fell from 56 percent of total energy consumption to 24 percent. Economists believed that coal was in an irreversible decline and would become obsolete as an energy source by 2050. The seventies signaled a turn of the tide. With the market failures of oil and nuclear, the yearly growth of coal doubled, rising to 2.2 percent between 1974 and 2005, a phenomenon dubbed the coal rush. Few coal plants have been built since the fifties, but the turn of the twenty-first century marked a return to investment in the coal-fired power plant.
Mining became more and more mechanized based on two inventions. The first was developed around the beginning of the twentieth century. The continuous miner is a massive tunneling and cutting machine that looks like a tractor with a giant drill bit on the front—the first was put to use digging the tunnel under the English Channel, a project started in 1870. In 1912, the Hoadley Knight Machine operated by cutting coal into nut-size pieces with an electric rotor. Improvements on these initial models emerged every few years, with greater horsepower and innovations to the cutting head.
Harold F. Silver, a Mormon from Salt Lake City, designed the first modern continuous miner in 1943. Learning of Silver’s reputation for ingenious inventions in the dry cleaning and sugar beet industries, Carson W. Smith, the head of the Consolidated Coal and Coke Company of Denver, approached him about creating a device for safer, more efficient mining. Silver developed a machine, later improved on by the Joy Manufacturing Company, that removed coal from an entire face vertically using a cutting head, consisting of six revolving belts fitted with tungsten steel teeth, moving at five hundred feet per minute. As the head tore the coal from the face, caterpillar treads propelled the machine forward. A pan caught the coal, sending it along a conveyor belt to the bed of a shuttle car. Newsweek dubbed it a mechanical dragon; the Chicago Tribune, a giant red lobster; Life, a gargantuan mole. Fortune wrote:
The machine in action is a wonder to behold; the ripping head sinks into the working face, rears and swings and bites again. The caterpillar treads crawl, the chain conveyor fills to overflowing, and a mountain of coal builds up behind the flexible tail.
In 1949, when the model appeared in the open market, it required a crew of four to five men to extract 250 tons of coal a day, rendering it 90 percent more productive than traditional drilling and blasting.
Continuous miners are used in both room and pillar mining and longwall mining, the two underground mining styles that persist to this day. In the room and pillar method, continuous miners are the primary excavating machines, but in longwall mining they are only used to cut the face before the longwall is installed. An invention first introduced to American miners after World Word II, the German developed “longwall” consisted of a plow of oscillating disks that ran along the surface of face, slivering a layer of coal onto a conveyor belt running below. This technique caught on slowly in American mines due to two major impediments: the cost of equipment (a longwall is a much larger piece of machinery than a continuous miner) and the laborious process of shoring up the roof. In the longwall method, miners initially used wooden props; around the beginning of the twentieth century, steel jacks kept the roof from caving in as the plow advanced. In 1961, at the Sunnyside mine in Utah, in the town where my grandfather Bob was born, Kaiser Steel Corporation developed a shearing machine that could remove harder coal from the face in a wider strip than the European plow. However, the technology wasn’t used extensively in US mines until the 1980s, when self-advancing hydraulic roof supports were developed, reducing both the need for manpower and the safety risks associated with roof collapse.
As technology has progressed, the need for miners has continually decreased. For example, in Utah in 1996, 2,077 miners produced twenty-seven million tons of coal, a tonnage that was equaled in 2000 by just 1,672 miners. Mining technology companies are currently exploring Remote Ore Extraction Systems, where all underground operations are conducted by autonomous vehicles, drilling and cutting equipment, and sensors. Miners in control rooms would merely observe and manage the equipment. Already in working mines in Australia, load haul dump vehicles navigate themselves through underground tunnels with laser-scanning technology. Even if the United States continues to use coal, the underground coal miner may become obsolete.
During the period between 1940 and 2005, technology also improved mine safety, but only after three major accidents took the lives of over three hundred American miners. The Centralia disaster in 1947 is hauntingly similar to the Winter Quarters explosion of 1900. Built-up coal dust was ignited by a misfired shot, killing sixty-five in the blast and forty-six with “afterdamp.” Miners had been complaining for years that the coal dust was not adequately controlled. Their claims were backed by a state inspector who had been reporting violations for five years, warning the repercussions could be deadly. An investigation after the fact revealed that the explosion had stopped when it reached the area where the mine was properly rock dusted, a process that uses pulverized limestone and other inert material to reduce the combustibility of coal dust.
Hearings convened in both the US House and the Senate to discuss mining safety. In 1910, the Bureau of Mines of the Department of the Interior was created to investigate mining equipment to prevent accidents and improve safety conditions. Inspectors did not have the authority to enter mines except when invited by the owners, and when they did make recommendations, they had no means to enforce them. John L. Lewis, president of the UMWA and known for his political clout and eloquence, lambasted the owners for their “criminal negligence,” pointing to the statistic that mining deaths had superseded deaths in the armed forces during 1942. He continued: “If we must grind up human flesh and bone in the industrial machine we call modern America, then before God I assert that those who consume coal and you and I who benefit from that service because we live in comfort, we owe protection to those men first, and we owe security to their families if they die.”
A man with heavy eyebrows and large jowls, Lewis ruled the union and bullied the government with a dictatorial hand. Like my grandfather, he was the son of Welsh immigrants and had worked in the coal mines as a boy, trying his hand at farming and construction as a young man until joining the labor movement in 1907. He led the UMWA from 1920 until 1960, becoming one of the most renowned labor figures in history, still beloved by miners across the United States. He also ranked as one of the most hated men of his time. Based on inches of paper, 5 percent of the New York Times in 1937 was devoted to John L. Lewis. His notoriousness grew during World War II, when Lewis disregarded presidential orders from Roosevelt and led half a million coal miners on strikes in 1941 and 1943, raising wages despite wartime freezes, so coal miners were the best-paid workingmen in America.
In response to Roosevelt’s 1941 plea to “come to the aid of your country,” Lewis retorted: “There is no question of patriotism or national security. If you would use the power of the state to restrain me as an agent of labor, then, sir, I submit, that you should use that same power to restrain my adversary in this issue, who is an agent of capital. My Adversary is a rich man named Morgan, who lives in New York.”
In 1946, when the Truman administration had seized the mines in response to another strike, Lewis bargained with Secretary of the Interior Julius A. Krug to establish the Mine Workers Welfare and Retirement Fund, supported by a five cent royalty paid by the companies on every ton of coal mined; Lewis increased it to thirty cents by 1950. Lewis also pushed for a set of safety guidelines. The Federal Mine Safety Code for the Bureau of Mine Inspectors took shape in 1947, but like the 1910 law, compliance on the part of the operator was optional, and after a year of implementation this was estimated to be only around 33 percent.
It took yet another devastating mine accident to convince Congress that inspectors needed the power to enforce their citations. In West Frankfort, Illinois, 119 men died on Christmas Eve in 1951 after a pillar of gas ignited. Equipped with gas masks, fellow miners and the brothers and fathers of the deceased crawled through the debris in dust filled tunnels to recover the bodies of the dead. The corpses were laid out for identification in the local junior high school, awaiting their funerals, which were held on the 25th and 26th of December. A year later, with forceful urging from John L. Lewis, the Federal Coal Mine Safety Act passed under President Truman, allowing inspectors to close down mines they deemed unsafe. This law was still far from adequate; between 1952 and 1960, 3,179 miners were killed—approximately one each day.
In 1950, wearied by his frequent showdowns with the government and fearful of financial repercussions (Lewis was personally fined thirty thousand dollars between 1946 and 1948 by federal courts for ordering strikes), “labor’s avenging angel” muted his strong rhetoric and adopted a gloved hand approach. With the demand for coal on the wane, Lewis could no longer threaten to shut down national manufacturing by ordering his union men to stay home from work.
By 1958, through closed door negotiations with major coal mining companies, Lewis had secured concessions of twenty-three to twenty-seven dollars a day in wages, forty cents a ton for the Welfare and Retirement Fund, and vacation benefits for members of the UMWA. In exchange, he worked relentlessly to put smaller mines (not incidentally, nonunion) out of business, assigning his vice president, Tony Boyle, to manage the strongarm tactics perpetrated by union coal miners against nonunion ones.
As mechanization and market pressures continued to reduce the number of union members, Lewis developed financial power to replace his loss of manpower. He used monies collected in the multimillion dollar Welfare and Retirement Fund to purchase a share in the National Bank of Washington, and through transferring funds and buying out other banks, made this the second largest bank in D.C. In order to secure his bargaining power, he made secret loans to coal operators and railroads. To promote the use of coal, he bought into the electrical and bituminous mining industries. When forced to disclose its assets in 1959, the UMWA was assessed at $110 million. To his credit, Lewis doled out the Welfare and Retirement fund generously; in 1956, it provided seventy-five thousand miners’ pensions, forty thousand widows and orphans’ payments, and medical care for six hundred thousand patients.
When the depressed coal industry reduced payments into his fund, Lewis cut costs, reducing pensions and health care benefits. But when the market rebounded, Lewis used the excess funds to fight nonunion mines, rather than increasing payments to his retired and ailing members. For John L. Lewis, son of a Welsh coal miner, life had come full circle. The distance between him and his nemesis J. P. Morgan had narrowed, while the distance between Lewis and the men he represented had widened. In 1960, just as coal miners began to feel disenchanted with their champion, Lewis retired and nominated a more unscrupulous man to fill his shoes.
Tony Boyle is so demonized by the historical record that I’ve always imagined him stout and swarthy, with scars from youthful acne on a face that would redden with temper. Instead, Boyle was clean-cut and handsome—a very different look from Lewis’s, who is often pictured with his thick white hair bristling above a scowl. Boyle also considered himself good looking; his first great “service” to the UMWA was commissioning large portraits of union leaders, the majority of himself. He hired his brother and his daughter, and set up his own pension fund. The UMWA’s relationship with the coal companies continued under Boyle.
When the Consol No. 9 mine near Farmington, West Virginia, blew up in 1968, Boyle responded by conceding that “as long as we mine coal, there is always this inherent danger.” He also claimed that Consol was “one of the best companies to work with as far as health and safety are concerned,” although the mine had failed sixteen inspections. The cause of the accident that rocked West Virginians on November 20 was never determined. In a mine with 151 natural gas wells, the flames raged on for a week after the explosion. Twenty-one men had escaped, but hope of recovering the seventy-eight men still inside was abandoned, and the mine was sealed with cement to extinguish the fire. Almost a year later the mine was unsealed, so the bereaved could give their dead a proper burial. Recovery of the corpses spanned more than ten years. The bodies of nineteen men were never found.
The Farmington explosion was the first major mining disaster broadcast on national television, and people across America witnessed relatives of the trapped men express their hope of rescue and then deal with their grief throughout the ten days before the mine was cemented closed. The public outrage that arose from the incident had its effect, and a month after the accident, the Department of the Interior convened to discuss mining safety. The legislation that emerged in the aftermath, the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, mandated standards on safety as well as compensation for black lung. Callous to the needs of the men he represented, Tony Boyle teamed up with coal operators to oppose the law. The National Coal Association warned that its passage would force the closure of mines and cause a nationwide power shortage. In response, Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia, one of the few politicians in all of history to back coal miners, did not mince words before Congress:
The coal operators are shedding tears that this bill might force the closing of mines. They threaten power blackouts … We have heard this cry, the threat, this form of insensitive and implacable opposition for a long time. When are we going to place the priority where it belongs, on the cause of human life? When are we going to declare that the threat to close down a mine is not nearly as serious as the threat of closing down a man? The coal industry has fought every step of the way against measures to protect health and safety, and I am sorry to say that the union leadership has been insensitive to the needs of the men. There is no profit incentive in health, and there is plenty of profit incentive in high production, high wages, high coal dust levels, which produce a high rate of industrial murder.
High coal dust levels result in black lung, or coal miner’s pneumoconiosis, a disease documented in the mining record since my Welsh ancestors first wielded a miner’s pick. As early as 1837, miners in the United Kingdom had complained to the union that inhaling coal dust produced miner’s asthma. Black lung finally became compensable in 1943, based on the findings of British physicians. American doctors rejected their research, claiming that their conclusions lacked evidence. This was despite the fact that 30 percent of all coal miners contracted the disease after working in the mines.
Three physicians In West Virginia, courageously opposed the opinion of the US medical community and traveled around the state, enlisting miners to support the proposed legislation. I. E. Buff, Donald Rasmussen, and Howley A. Wells would inflame the passions of their audiences by holding up a blackened lung in a Ziploc bag and saying, “Here is the lung of one of your comrades!” Wells would also take a dried piece of lung tissue and crush it to black powder in his hand. West Virginian miners formed the Black Lung Association (BLA), under local UMWA leaders Charles Brooks and Arnold Miller to advocate for their cause. Tony Boyle demanded that they disband; in response, the BLA introduced black lung legislation into the West Virginian Congress, and forty thousand miners went on strike to push it through. Despite Boyle and the coal lobby’s opposition, on a national level the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act passed, increasing aid to miners who had been suffering from black lung for years.
After six years of leadership, Boyle ran for reelection against Jeff Yoblanski, a dedicated union man who had supported the BLA. Exploiting his control over the union and the United Mine Workers’ Journal, Boyle succeeded in throwing the election in his favor. When a federal judge called the legality of the results into question, Yoblanski and his family were murdered in their beds. The 1969 election results were ultimately thrown out, and in 1974 Boyle was convicted of ordering the murder of Yoblanski. Arnold Miller took over leadership of the UMWA, running on a reform ticket with the heavy charge of restoring the faith of the miners in the union while negotiating an upcoming challenge: coal industry meets environmental movement.
As the twentieth century progressed, the idea of the interconnectedness of man and nature gained ground, pricking the nation’s environmental conscience. A poem printed in the United Mine Workers’ Journal in 1950 demonstrates that the union was beginning to anticipate the effect that this would have on the industry: “We should practice conservation / We know we should not waste / the national resources of the nation / yet the greatest treasure wasted / is that of human life / more have death’s sting tasted / while at work than in war and strife.” The poem echoes John L. Lewis’s indictment of the number deaths in the coal mines versus those in World War II, but this poem also pits conservation against the work of the miner, who had sacrificed much for the energy needs of the nation.
Surface mining began in 1950; to compete with oil and natural gas, the steam shovels and drilling equipment for coal increased in size and efficiency. By 1963, one-third of the coal mined in America was surface mined, producing twice as much coal per man-hour as coal mined underground. West Virginia was the first state to regulate surface mining in 1939 because locals had noticed that it caused soil erosion, increased the hazards of floods, polluted streams, ruined the possibility of agriculture, and destroyed other natural resources. Under this law, companies were required to obtain a permit for their strip mine operations and post a bond for reclamation of the land afterward. The actual repercussions of this legislation were questionable. Bessie Smith, an Appalachian woman from Kentucky, asserted: “Reclamation is a laugh. It’s left up to the people to protect the land, help others retain their property and protect the beauty of the land.” Accordingly, people in Appalachian towns began to assemble and fight strip mining through acts of nonviolent civil disobedience and sabotage of mining equipment. The Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (AGLSP) was formed in 1965, and its members staged stunts, such as blocking bulldozers with their bodies or shooting at them with their hunting rifles. AGSLP was followed by Citizens to Defend the Environment (CODE) and several other grassroots societies. Although their primary concern in fighting against strip mining was protecting their homes and surroundings, some fought for their jobs. Among those in opposition were unemployed deep miners, a fact that caused Arnold Miller to take a nuanced position on the issue.
Strip mining employed miners in the UMWA, but it offered fewer jobs than deep mining. Reclamation, which was rarely enforced, also provided jobs, as the techniques that were more environmentally friendly tended to be more complicated and required more man-hours. Although the UMWA did not support the abolition of strip mining, it did support its regulation. By 1970, 50 percent of American coal came from strip mines, and 25 percent of America’s mines were strip mines. Ken Hechler, who had fought to pass the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, also took a leading role in pushing legislation to abolish strip mining. In 1974, a law that would put strict environmental restrictions on strip mining passed in both the US House and Senate, but President Ford vetoed it on the grounds that it would cause hardship to the coal industry and raise energy prices. In order to show their opposition to the law, coal trucks from Wise, Virginia, made a forty mile caravan to D.C. with mottos such as “Strip Coal or Welfare Line?” hung from their sides. In 1978, Ken Hechler was voted out of office through efforts by the strip mining industry, and no Appalachian politicians have raised their voices to oppose the practice since, despite widespread opposition to the practice among the citizenry.
The passage of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 was followed by the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 and the formation of the Mine Health and Safety Association (MSHA) in 1978 to routinely inspect mines. Mining deaths have decreased, but injuries have not. In 1980, there were nineteen thousand recorded injuries, compared with twelve thousand in 1970. Mining safety’s primary obstacle is enforcement: companies typically pay only 30 percent of the fines levied. Coal dust samples collected to determine the levels in the mine are tampered with by vacuums, leaving a legacy of one thousand miners per year still dying from black lung. Although the reduced number of miners working in mines combined with new safety laws have decreased the destructiveness of major mining accidents (in 1970, thirty-eight died at Hurricane Creek in Kentucky; in 1982, twenty seven died at the Wilberg mine in Utah), the numbers add up. In 1987, J. David McAteer, the Assistant Secretary of Mine Safety at that time, revealed that since the enactment of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, 2,029 fatal accidents had occurred in coal mines. Adding the number of deaths through 2010, this totals 2,959. The all-time low of 18 deaths in 2009 was followed by forty-six in 2010. Perhaps the coal miner with black dust rubbed into the knob of his nose, navigating the dark tunnels of a mine with an open flame lamp, is not as far behind us as we would like to think.