Coal-Mining Safety in the Progressive Period
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Coal-Mining Safety in the Progressive Period

The Political Economy of Reform

William Graebner

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eBook - ePub

Coal-Mining Safety in the Progressive Period

The Political Economy of Reform

William Graebner

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About This Book

Through the first decade of the twentieth century, Americans looked upon industrial accidents with callous disregard; they were accepted as an unfortunate but necessary adjunct to industrial society. A series of mine disasters in December 1907 (including one in Monongah, West Virginia, which took a toll of 361 lives) shook the public, at least temporarily, out of its lethargy.

In this award-winning study, author William Graebner traces the development of mine safety reform in the years immediately following these tragic events. Reform activities during the Progressive period centered on the Bureau of Mines and an effort to obtain uniform state legislation; the effect of each was minimal. Mr. Graebner concludes that these idealistic solutions of the time were at once the great hope and the great failure of the Progressive coal-mining safety movement.

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CHAPTER

1

Business, Bureaucracy, and National Reform

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CONCERN FOR the hazards of coal mining far antedates the Progressive period, but reform interest in coal-mining safety before 1900 was limited almost entirely to the states, finding an outlet in state (and occasionally county) mine-safety legislation. The states continued to legislate on the subject after 1900, but the new context of the legislation and some procedural innovation did not mask the fundamentally traditional quality of state politics and political alignments. What was new from 1900 to 1920 was the involvement of the federal government in coal-mining safety through the United States Geological Survey and the United States Bureau of Mines. This admittedly circumscribed and limited federal interest was the product of several historical factors, usually operating concurrently but to some extent chronologically separable. Before December 1907 only a few persons in the federal bureaucracy showed interest in mine safety outside of the federal territories, but that bureaucratic interest was sufficient to validate the claim that the reform movement began within the bureaucracy.1 A series of explosions of monumental proportions occurring in December 1907 brought the problem of coal-mining safety national attention, producing an urgent demand for solutions to the scientific problems basic to coal-mining hazards. At this point the nation’s press—newspapers and magazines—demanded national action, and the issue very rapidly became politically popular, making it difficult for politicians to oppose rigidly new legislation. At the same time, groups with vested interests in mine safety or in the political accoutrements of national mine safety (i.e., a bureau, research facilities) added their support to the movement. Miners, coal and metal mine operators, inspectors, conservationists, scientists—each group contributed something to the political compromise which finally produced the Bureau of Mines. Of these groups, the mine operators exerted the most influence within the political process, and the bureau, in spite of its origins and nurture in the federal bureaucracy, can properly be considered a business reform.
Federal lawmakers were aware of mine-safety problems as early as 1885, when Henry George, testifying before the Senate, said of coal miners, “They are constantly in danger; never out of danger; they do not know at what time a piece of ‘horse flag’ may fall and crush them to death.” In general, however, this investigation of the relationships between capital and labor, insofar as it dealt with coal mining, emphasized the methods by which the miners were paid and their living conditions.2 Another investigation into capital and labor in the mining industry, made in 1900 by the United States Industrial Commission, solicited testimony from operators and miners on all aspects of the industry, but references to safety were not many and tended to de-emphasize the need for legislation. One operator, for example, testified that he did not know “any class of labor that is better protected than that engaged in the mining industry, so far as legislation is concerned.”3 The most consistent call of those testifying was for uniform mine-safety legislation—similar laws in all major coal-mining states. David Ross, secretary of the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, said operators and mine workers alike would benefit from uniform mine legislation. George W. Schluederberg, an operator from Pittsburgh, supported uniform legislation on the grounds that it would place all operators on a competitive basis. John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers, favored uniform legislation as a way of strengthening laws in states where he saw them as inadequate. This general demand for uniform mine legislation was noted in the review of evidence by the commission, but the commissioners’ report also stated that the safety laws of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were said to be good and inspection thorough.4
There were nineteenth-century precedents for national safety legislation. After 1852 the federal government operated a steamboat-inspection service at an annual cost by 1900 of almost $500,000; Congress appropriated funds for lighthouse stations and for rescue work incident to these stations; and after 1908, federal law required safety appliances on common carriers.5 The national government became directly involved in legislating for mines in 1891 with the enactment of safety legislation for mines in the territories.6 In 1900 the 1891 act was amended to include sections requiring, when practicable, the watering down of coal dust or the removal of the dust if water were not available and shot-firing by designated miners with the men out of the mine. The law as it was signed by the president on June 30, 1902, applied only to mines in the Indian Territory employing twenty or more miners. The legislative process here and the reports appended to the bill show that at least some members of the national legislature had knowledge not only of the general safety problem in coal mines but also of specific safety problems—ventilation and coal dust.7
These federal reports and legislation were obvious precedents for federal involvement in the mining-safety area, but the years from 1900 to 1907 witnessed no public outcry for safer mines. Indicative of press indifference toward mining deaths is a telephone conversation between a reporter and a coroner’s deputy overheard by Crystal Eastman while she was doing research for the Pittsburgh Survey in 1907:
Reporter: [ ].
Coroner’s Deputy: “No, we haven’t got anything for you today, Jim.
—Well,—hold on.—There’s a man killed by a fall of slate out at Thom’s Run. You don’t want that, do you?”
Reporter: [ ].
Coroner’s Deputy: “That’s what I thought. No, there ain’t anything else. So long.”8
The United Mine Workers Journal commented on the problem of public apathy in 1900:
One astounding and alarming feature in connection with the increased number of mine catastrophes in this country is the apparent indifference upon the part of those directly affected and the public in general, their apathy seeming resignation and tendency to look upon such terrible cyclones of death as coming in the regular course of human events, being purely accidental, and, therefore, not preventable. The daily press simply records the event in a matter-of-fact manner, and, after expressing the usual formal sympathy, dismisses the subject entirely without any appeal for better conditions, an investigation or other manifestation of interest, and the public . . . are disposed to look upon this as a visitation from God upon those whose lot it is to enter the dark and gloomy caverns of the earth in search of her treasures, and the whole affair is dropped from view.9
Writing in the Century Magazine, Jay Hambridge commented that even in the mining communities, “A death by violence is noted to-day, but to-morrow it is a fact remote, and is recalled by association of idea with some other incident.”10
The Journal, the official organ of the United Mine Workers of America, was an exception to the general apathy toward mine accidents, but even the Journal’s interest in the question was subdued until 1905, when a large Alabama disaster early in the year brought to its pages an increased sense of urgency and a flood of suggestions, letters, studies, editorials, and legislative news dealing with coal-mining safety. Although the daily press reported coal-mining accidents, before 1907 neither it nor the national magazines took an editorial position on the subject or suggested federal action as a solution to the problem. There were several possible reasons for this inaction. First and most important was the nature of death in the industry, with most deaths occurring from causes other than explosions, and about half resulting from unnewsworthy falls of roof and coal which killed one or two miners at a time. In 1906, for example, the year before coal-mining accidents became a national political issue, there were 1,504 underground fatalities in bituminous coal and lignite mines, but only 219 of these were attributable to explosions. And of the seventeen official disasters (five or more deaths) in that year, none resulted in more than thirty-five deaths.11 In 1906 a coal-mine explosion resulting in thirty-five deaths was news, but its shock value was rapidly diminishing and it could hardly be expected to produce a call for action on the national political scene.
Second, coal mining was not easily recognizable as the most dangerous of occupations, and other accident-prone occupations vied with coal mining for attention. Interstate railroading was a natural subject for national safety legislation. Railroad accidents were common, visually spectacular, and they directly affected the middle class which traveled by train. Hence, railroad rather than mine accidents received most of the national publicity. Collier’s, for example, ran a two-page picture spread dealing with twenty-four railroad accidents which had killed 188 persons in a thirty-day period in 1907.12 Of all the muckraking magazines, B. O. Flower’s Arena may have been the most effective in dealing with railroads and the issue of regulation, but in all of 1907 and 1908, the Arena ran only one article on industrial accidents of any kind, and that one was on railroads. Other national magazines, such as World’s Work, the Republican Outlook, and Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, dealt with the railroad issue, attempting to find the element responsible for industrial accidents. Review of Reviews, Scientific Monthly, and Nation, none of which were muckraking journals, also looked at the problem.13 In general, this magazine coverage of industrial accidents contributed to an accident-prevention climate and put the problem of industrial accidents squarely before the public.
On December 6, 1907, a blown-out shot touched off the most disastrous mine explosion in the history of mining in the Western Hemisphere. Three hundred and sixty-one men lost their lives that day in Monongah mines 6 and 8 of the Fairmont Coal Company, Fairmont, West Virginia. Thirteen days later, 239 died at the Darr mine in Jacobs Creek, Pennsylvania.
One opinion of the cause of the Monongah explosion was voiced by James Sinnot of Chatham, Illinois, in a song entitled “The Monongah Disaster”:
Oh, Monongah! Oh, Monongah!
Where 400 lives were sacrificed
By your gassy mines blown up.
Someone has been neglectful
Or in their duty sure did fail
And thus we read of neglect, indeed,
At those mines of Monongah.
Let us ask of West Virginia,
Is it right to kill wholesale?
And if she has got mining laws,
If so, why did they fail?
If your laws are not good,
Have them repealed, you should.
Make ones that will not fail;
Don’t encore, we do implore,
Such scenes as Monongah.
To read of such a horror,
Forget we never will.
You have got no right from God or man
Thus human beings to kill.
It shows you’ve been neglectful
For your miners’ lives to care,
And thus we read of graft and greed
At those mines of Monongah.
A committee of the West Virginia legislature, established earlier in the year in response to previous explosions, disagreed with Sinnot, concluding from its testimony that the Monongah mines were well equipped and modern, and that the company controlling the Monongah mines had an almost unsurpassed reputation for safety.15 R. D. Nuzum wrote to A. B. Fleming, former governor of West Virginia and owner of the Fairmont Coal Company: “I can hardly believe that such a disaster could come upon a mine so well looked after as are the mines of the Fairmont Coal Company, but am forced at the last to credit the account.”16 The United Mine Workers Journal challenged this opinion, charging that faulty mine inspection was responsible for the explosion. The Monongah mines, said the Journal, were operated without two openings, contrary to West Virginia law, and neither in those mines nor in the Naomi mine was ventilation consistent with state requirements. “Chief Mine Inspector (J. W.) Paul of West Virginia,” continued the Journal, “has held the office for nearly two decades. . . . His administration of his office is marked by one long bloody trail of human slaughter, caused by negligence, inefficiency, by wanton nullification of every mining law in the state.”17
This opinion of the Journal aside, many thought the Monongah mines to be well equipped for safety and concluded that if the Monongah mines blew up, so could any mine. Moreover, explosions had occurred and were to occur in other mines with reputations for safety, with a cumulative effect significant for mine-safety reform. If the safest mines could explode, then the normal channels of accident prevention, state legislation and inspection, were simply insufficient. The West Virginia committee report said this explosion of a reputedly safe mine was illustrative of the limits of scientific knowledge: “It was conceded that this explosion was a dust explosion, yet no one has been able to give all the elements that may be present to create a dust explosion. This reference to the Monongah mines and to the conditions that were thought to exist there at that time are especially made for the purpose of impressing upon the legislature the fact that the legislature cannot reach the cause or provide a remedy which will prevent future explosions, until that cause is known. This must be the result of future study and experiment.”18 The Monongah disaster and others, because they occurred in mining properties considered safe, cast doubt on the safety of all coal mines and therefore were a direct stimulus to federal scientific research in coal-mining safety.
The national magazines were surprisingly slow to treat the mine explosions editorially. Leslie’s Weekly, which according to historian Louis Filler gave the “accident issue enough momentum and drama to make it national,” had nothing on its December 19, 1907, editorial page and carried only a picture story of the Monongah disaster in its December 26 issue. Again on January 2, 1908, Leslie’s carried a picture story on coal-mine explosions, but it had no suggestions for solving the problem. Collier’s reported the “wholesale slaughters in coal mines” but launched no campaign for reform and did not mention coal-mining safety again for some time. It remained for Edgar Allen Forbes of World’s Work to begin suggesting in the national press some answers to the coal-mining safety problem. In the February 1908 issue in an article entitled “The Human Toll of the Coal Pit,” Forbes presented his thesis that the causes of accidents were similar worldwide and thus what had worked in Europe to prevent coal-mining accidents would work here. Forbes listed eight specific techniques designed to reduce accidents (including, for example, the use of shot-firers); in the process he attacked miner ignorance and inefficient inspection, “the weakest link in the chain.” Forbes concluded that the best solution was the proposed national bureau of mines, which would function as a clearinghouse for information.19
In contrast to the national magazines, the nation’s newspapers responded immediately with demands for federal investigative action. The Pittsburgh Chronicle, in a December 23, 1907, editorial, called for investigation by government commission. The Washington (D.C.) Star, while noting that the federal government had no direct jurisdiction over the matter, s...

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