King Coal and Me
Coal Country’s Hidden Hand
Pennsylvania and the Roots of American Empire
I was born and raised in coal country, around Pittsburgh. My father was a miner, and where I lived as a youth many kids I knew also had fathers, uncles, brothers, even grandfathers, in the mines. For the most part, we took coal and everything associated with it for granted. We were used to seeing dump trucks loaded with coal, running up and down the narrow roads.
And on the tracks that ran along every river, we were used to seeing trains, hauling longs strings of coal cars loaded to the brim. In fact, we depended on those train cars — I remember as a very small child walking with my older sister along the tracks, picking up coal that had spilled out of too-full cars, picking buckets of coal to burn in our coal furnace which heated our home. Every bucket of scavenged coal was an hour or so of heat.
On the other side of those tracks was the Monongahela River, which defined and dominated the little river ‘patch’ called Gallatin where we lived. The Mon was almost always swarming with huge, monstrous, coal barges, heading downriver, filled with coal and coke to be burned in mills and power plants. There were also plenty of empties, returning back to the mines and coke ovens, to be filled again.
What I didn’t realize then — none of us really did — was that an empire, an imperium, was being built on our backs. The thing that we took for granted — coal — had brought about, was continuing to bring about, the rise of industrial America. We were too deep among the trees, so we couldn’t see the forest. If someone had told us then that we were doing something of great consequence, we wouldn’t have known what they were talking about. We would have laughed.
It turned out to be true. Some of us were later to learn that what was in fact an American Empire was, to a large extent, fueled by the USA’s access to that black shiny mineral that was all around us, that plentiful, cheap energy source — ubiquitous coal. Literally as common as dirt.
Global politics was the furtherest thing from our lives. We were too busy trying to survive. Sure, jobs were plentiful. But the pay was lousy, the conditions abusive, the work dangerous, even deadly. As a boy, the expectation was that my dad would take me into the mine. Or one of coal’s sister industries would hire me — the steel mills were always in need of cheap labor. Or if I couldn’t handle a life’s work in a factory or a mine, I’d find work on one of the neighboring farms that surrounded and supported the coal towns, the mill towns.
Nowadays we don’t think much about coal. Oil and gas rule the day, and the pipe dream of solar energy lurks just beyond the setting sun. But it is an undeniable fact that, in the beginning, from the first white European settlement on, it was coal that powered North America’s rise. It was this common, lustrous, black, combustible mineral that played a foundational role in the United States’s emergence as a dominant global power, and the coal industry was instrumental to the advance of American imperialism and hegemony.
And even though coal is no longer king in America, and the industry is a shadow of its former self, its economic, political and social impact is still felt, in the United States and abroad.
Origins of Coal in North America
Coal is the very definition of a non-renewable fossil fuel. It was formed from the remains of plants that thrived in the sunlight that bathed the vast swamps and forests of the Carboniferous Period, which lasted from about 360 to 300 million years ago, near the end of the Paleozoic Era. Coal, then, is a product of solar power, the metamorphic remains of vegetation buried deep in the earth and subject to incredible heat and pressure over eons of time.
In the early 1600s, French explorers, searching for furs and other tradable commodities, first discovered deposits of coal along the shores of Grand Lake, in what was to be Acadia, in central New Brunswick, Canada. Rivers feeding the lake exposed veins of coal, which was easily gathered. By 1643, the French were trading with the British colony at Boston, exporting coal and other supplies.
Amongst North America’s earliest white settlers, coming for religious and cultural reasons, were a number of Welsh who had a great deal of experience in underground mining. In the late 17th century, as early as 1681, a group of Welsh Quaker settlers secured a land grant from William Penn. By the early 1800s Welsh were plentiful in Pennsylvania, bringing with them their valuable and detailed knowledge of coal mining techniques and technology. They knew all about ventilating underground mines, best practices for efficient extraction, and most important, how to keep miners safe; but the job of mining was always fraught with danger.
Everyday Cultural Diversity
Though the Welsh were among the earliest, a number of later immigrant populations also played indispensable roles in the coal mining industry. Bringing a wide range of diverse skills, workers from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe played particularly vital roles in shaping the US’s nascent coal mining industry.
I can personally attest to the cultural diversity. As a child, most of the adults I came in contact with had an accent of some sort. Most were from Italy or eastern Europe — Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, Ukraine. Some Irish, too. Their influence on everyone and everything around me was profound and unmistakable. Old Country religions, social values and cultural morés made up the fabric of our lives. Nowhere was the evidence of cultural-cross-over more apparent than at the dinner table. We ate a minimally Americanized version of an Old Country diet — home-baked bread, cabbage rolls (halupki), pierogi, haluska, cannoli, paprikash, and fruit pies — not much that a modern American would recognize.
It was this vast inflow of foreign workers that made coal extraction possible on a huge scale, allowing American industry to expand to a scope and power previously unimaginable.
The contributions of immigrants from diverse backgrounds to the coal mining industry highlight the multicultural and multinational nature of early American industry and labor. Despite facing challenging working conditions and often enduring hardships, these immigrant workers played a vital role in meeting the increasing demand for coal, which powered factories, railways, and homes during the early stages of industrialization in the United States.
Hardscrabble Living
Again, I have personal knowledge of the hardships. When I was five years old, my dad got a job in a different mine, and we moved from the relative comfort of Gallatin to be closer to what he called the new ‘portal,’ where the mine company had driven a new opening, tapping into the ever present Pittsburgh Seam of rich bituminous coal that ran like a black, shiny, frozen river under our feet.
My dad bought us a run-down shack of a place in the middle of nowhere, a 4-acre homestead in rural Appalachian southwestern Pennsylvania, close to the new portal and tipple. Even though he worked every day, we were dirt poor. We had an outhouse, a hand-dug 18-foot-deep spring-fed well, lined with stones we carried from wherever we could get them in a rickety old metal-wheeled wheelbarrow. We had a hand pump in the kitchen for water. We had electricity in two rooms of our little old house. Each year we raised three pigs and butchered them every fall — smoked the meat in a smokehouse my dad built. We made sausage with a sausage press that was almost 100 years old. We had a goat to keep the vegetation manageable around the house and outbuildings. We had chickens for eggs and meat. We raised rabbits to eat. We didn’t raise beef — we had to feed cattle too long before we could eat them. We didn’t drink milk — it’s really not for humans anyhow.
We had an acre-and-a-half garden and we canned everything for the winter. Everything we could get our hands on. We picked blackberries and raspberries along the road, and made jelly. We picked up windfall apples and made applesauce and apple butter. We bought salt, and flour, and sugar, yeast for bread. Theoretically, we could have ground our own flour; many of our neighbors grew wheat.
No TV. One radio with poor reception. No incessant weather forecasts, no concerts and no football games. No streaming.
We had a few books.
And all the while we were scraping out a living, my dad worked in the mine, five, sometimes six, occasionally seven days a week, from before the sun came up till dinner time. When he came home at suppertime, still in his pit clothes, my mother fed him, and he went out and worked in the garden or tended the livestock, doing any number of absolutely necessary jobs that my mother and we kids couldn’t do.
When it got dark he came in, washed up, and went to bed, getting ready to do it all over again the next day.
In spite of all this I was happy as hell. We all were, for the most part. Except for my dad. We laughed all the time. but, my dad didn’t laugh much. He was always too tired and aching. Life was hard, but, for me, it was nonetheless fulfilling. We slept like logs and woke up early.
Coal As a Tradition
Our lives weren’t all that unusual. Most of the people we knew lived the same way. The country was built by people who lived that way, and had lived that way for a long time. From the very earliest days.
Relying on an increasingly large and diverse army of immigrant workers, coal mining began in Pennsylvania in the mid-1700s to support the colonial iron industry. By the 1800s, Pennsylvania coal was fueling the industrial growth of the entire country and was the primary fuel source for western Pennsylvania’s growing steel industry.
By the time my dad went into the mines in 1913, at the age of fourteen, anthracite (in the eastern part of Pennsylvania) and bituminous coal production (in the southwestern part of the state) was about to peak, which it did in 1918, with a combined annual production of 276 million tons.
During my dad’s prime working years, well into the mid-twentieth century, and my early childhood, coal dominated the energy arena, providing the power to fight two World Wars, a ‘police action’ in Korea, a ‘conflict’ in Viet Nam, and many other empire-building excursions and military and political interventions too numerous to name here.
The American steel industry began its slow decline in the late 1940s, and by the late 1970s, was pretty much dead. Ever-adaptable, coal was redirected from steel-making to electricity generation. At one point, coal provided nearly all of the nation’s electricity. Today, coal-fueled power plants still supply more than a fifth of the US’s electric power; more in some localities.
The Power of Coal
Serendipity has always played a role in shaping history. When we consider the trajectory of the United States and its rise to global preeminence, the role played by luck and good fortune is apparent. Along with a propitious geographic location which isolated it from the hurly burly of the Old World, and a favorable global political environment at the time of its founding, the young nation was blessed with a wealth of natural resources, among which was an easily accessed and abundant supply of coal.
Coal had a number of properties that made it ideal for fueling the emergent American Industrial Revolution.
First was its abundance: in some places it literally lay on the ground, waiting to be picked up and used. And when it needed to be mined, it was still relatively near the surface, and didn’t require more than a miner’s strong back to bring it up to the daylight.
Second, coal is easily transportable, requiring nothing more than a wagon or train car to carry it far and wide. And it is neither subject to rot nor spoilage; nor is it affected by weather extremes during shipping or storage.
Third, coal has a high energy density and provides a great deal of heat when burned.
Though other energy sources were available in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, coal offered several advantages over them.
Wood was widely available, and for millennia was the primary fuel source for heating homes and cooking. But when it came to industrial uses, wood was much less energy dense, requiring a far greater volume of wood to produce the same amount of energy as coal. Wood was also bulkier, and not as easily transported as coal. And if wood got wet, it rotted, rendering it useless.
Water power, driving waterwheels and mills, was widely used by early industry, especially for grain milling and textile production, but its use was limited by geography, and varied substantially by season, making it far less reliable than coal.
Wind mills were also common, used mostly to pump agricultural water from deep wells; but, like water power, wind power was not universally available and, like water, it was much more inconsistent and erratic than coal.
Finally, animal power was available, and had been for centuries. But it required significant resources — animals had to be bred and fed and required constant care and maintenance, rendering animal-power far more labor intensive and less efficient than mechanized systems powered by coal.
The Relationship Between Coal, Iron and Steel.
As America’s industrial might grew, the demand for steel surged. The switchover from iron to steel production quickly made it clear that coal was an almost ideal industrial fuel. It was especially indispensable to steel-making. There is a fundamental difference between iron and steel. Iron is an element, number 26 on the Periodic Table. On the other hand, steel, in its most basic form, is an alloy of iron and carbon.
In the early days of ironworking, refining iron from ore was a crude process, resulting in a cast material that was full of defects and inclusions. Raw iron ore, dug from the earth, was ‘smelted,’ a process by which iron-bearing ore was heated to extract the elemental iron and melt it. Once separated and molten, liquid iron was poured into brick-shaped molds called ingots. A blacksmith heated small ingots at the forge and hammered them, crushing the voids and dispersing the impurities. This process does not remove the impurities, but it does redistribute the large contaminant clusters, making them smaller and more evenly distributed, with less propensity to weaken the structure of the elemental metal. This form of iron, forged by a blacksmith, is called ‘wrought iron,’ created by a thermo-mechanical process, thus making it more useful as a structural material. (The term, ‘wrought,’ means ‘forged,’ and hearkens back to the origins of ironwork, well before it was done on an industrial scale.)
The alloy known as steel is made by the addition of very small amounts of carbon to the molten iron, usually less than half-a-percent by weight. This addition of what amounts to a handful of dispersed carbon atoms disrupts and distorts iron’s crystal lattice and increases its mechanical properties. As with iron, the steel alloy is thermomechanically forged or rolled; hot work which further recrystallizes the alloy, producing a ‘fine grain’ microstructure which maximizes steel’s toughness and fatigue properties.
Carbon — vital to the conversion of iron into steel — is provided by coal. In fact, coal performs three indispensible functions in steel making. First, it is burned (in the form of coke) to supply the huge amounts of heat required. Second, it supplies gases which strip oxygen from the iron ore, chemically ‘reducing’ it, making it purer. Third, a small percentage of the coal ends up as carbon in the steel. In the steel making process, coal is used in a purified form known as coke, which acts both as a fuel and a chemical reducing agent. Coke is produced by baking coal until it becomes carbon, burning off impurities without burning up the coal itself. When coke is consumed it generates intense heat but little smoke, making it ideal for smelting iron and making steel. When either coke or non-coked coal is used, the quality of the coal affects the quality of the steel. Pennsylvania coal is of very high quality, and produced excellent steel.
Early Use and Expansion
By the mid 18th century, Pennsylvania was the emergent nation’s foremost iron producer. In 1716, the then-colony had two forge operations, producing crude wrought iron for local markets in southeastern Pennsylvania. At the time of the American Revolution, the iron-making industry in the Colonies was 150 years old. By then, in Pennsylvania alone, iron making had expanded, with 30 furnaces and more than 50 forges busily at work, all located in the southeastern part of the soon-to-be state. Using wood-based charcoal as fuel, these furnaces and forges were at the center of what were called iron plantations, essentially rural industrial communities, which grew their own food and other commodities to support the ironworkers who lived on-site.
Between 1784 and 1830 the American economy grew as settlement spread westward into the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, displacing and eliminating the indigenous peoples who had lived there for millennia, an undeniable and shameful example of American ethnic cleansing, preparing millions of square miles for white settlement in the name of Progress, Civilization, and Manifest Destiny.
During this time iron manufacturing spread rapidly across much of Pennsylvania, and was especially strong in the Pittsburgh region. Most of these iron furnaces continued to use wood charcoal for fuel, relying on older technology. The state’s iron industry changed greatly during the period 1831 to 1866. American expansion was roaring westward, and the demand for iron, especially in the form of iron rails for the railroads, was very great. During this time, Pennsylvania produced half of all iron manufactured in the United States.
Of course, my dad knew nothing of any of this. From his perspective coal mining was a job, something he could do to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. He couldn’t have cared less about its relationship to iron and steel, and the fact that coal was almost single handedly shaping, transforming, America’s industrial landscape.
And that transformation had begun taking place thirty years before he was born. In 1867 the iron industry underwent a seismic shock when the nation’s first commercially successful production of steel took place in Steelton, Pennsylvania. Creating better technology, moving away from wood-based charcoal and turning instead to coked coal, the state’s industry adopted the use of the air blast, which forced preheated air into the furnace, increasing its efficiency. Other improvements of this time included better rolling and forging techniques, especially in the manufacture of rails for the railroad.
In the 1800s, making a ton of steel required a greater weight of coal than iron ore. Ever on the lookout to increase profits and efficiency, managers had quickly realized that it was more economical to locate close to the coal mines. Pittsburgh quickly emerged as the center of the nation’s developing steel industry. It was the happy circumstance that iron ore and coal were both available that made the Steel City a manufacturing center. Surrounded by large coal deposits and at the junction of three navigable rivers, it was an ideal location for steelmaking. Iron ore, mined in the Gogebic Range in western Michigan and northern Wisconsin and the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota, and transported by ship across the Great Lakes, was delivered to Erie, Pennsylvania.
From there, iron ore travelled on the Erie Extension Canal, a manmade water route that connected Lake Erie to the Ohio River and Pittsburgh. A one-way canal-boat trip from Erie to Pittsburgh took 36 hours. This monumental project stretching 136 miles, was dug by hand, mainly by Irish immigrants using shovels, wheelbarrows, picks, and teams of horses. The Erie Extension Canal opened for use in December 1844 and played a major role in the development of America’s industrial might.
But even this modern wonder soon fell into disuse, supplanted by a made-to-order railroad which ran from Lake Erie’s ports to Pittsburgh’s mills.
What’s more, since the Ohio River is navigable all the way from Pittsburgh to St Louis, where it joins the Mississippi River, Pittsburgh’s manufactured products had water transport to the Gulf of Mexico, and from there, global access.
The Emergence of the Robber Barons
Changing fuel sources also added to Pittsburgh’s desirability as a steel manufacturing center. Early furnaces had used anthracite hard coal, which was readily available in the eastern part of the state. But coke could be made from the bituminous soft coal that was very plentiful near Pittsburgh. And coke, made from soft coal, was even better at producing steel than anthracite. Therefore coke, by virtue of its being more cost-effective to fire blast furnaces (since it could produce higher and more efficient operating temperatures), quickly became steel making’s fuel of choice. The growing reliance on coke resulted in an enormous expansion of the coke industries in southwestern Pennsylvania during the 1870s to 1890s.
It was in fact this reliance on coke that allowed Gilded Age robber baron, Henry Clay Frick, to make his fortune. The Connellsville Coke region, located very near Pittsburgh, had the best coke and coal available in the northern United States. Frick was a local, born in West Overton, Westmoreland County. His grandfather was Abraham Overholt (Oberholzer), the owner of the prosperous Overholt Whiskey distillery. (You can still buy Old Overholt whiskey. When I was a teenager, my friends and I called it ‘Old Underwear!’)
So young Henry was well acquainted with the region and its mineral wealth. An astute young man (that’s being generous: he was ruthless), he cornered the market, buying up the rights to much of the region’s coal production. With a high-quality coal supply assured, Frick built hundreds of ‘beehive ovens’ close by the mines, and these ovens made coke. Railroad companies, notably the Pennsylvania Railroad, were quick to stretch rail lines from the coke region to the mills in Pittsburgh.
An acquaintance of Frick’s, and fellow robber baron, Andrew Carnegie, had similarly made moves to insure a steady and cheap supply of iron ore. To help ensure an abundant supply of this crucial raw material, in 1892 the wily Scott bought controlling interest of the Norrie and Pabst mines in Ironwood, the westernmost city in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, located only 18 miles from Lake Superior and smack in the middle of one of the continent’s richest iron ore deposits. He also invested in Great Lake freighters and railroads to secure the complete transportation of this iron ore to his steel factories around Pittsburgh. His first shipments went to Braddock, Pennsylvania (a few miles from where I grew up), on the Monongahela River, in the Mon Valley, south of Pittsburgh, where he had constructed his first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, in 1872.
Frick and Carnegie soon made an unholy alliance. Signaling the enormous importance of the H. C. Frick & Company’s coke production power, Henry Frick was made chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company. It didn’t take long for their company to build many more mammoth steel making plants, and form the giant US Steel Company.
When I was a teenager in the 1960s, US Steel’s plants, and many more owned by others, stretched solidly, one after another, for seventeen miles, from Pittsburgh southward, on both sides of the Monongahela River. Today, in 2024, there are none. Zero.
These Gilded Age exploiters, along with Charles Schwab, Andrew Mellon, Henry Oliver, H. H. Rogers, Henry Phipps, J. P. Morgan, and many others formed the nucleus of the Pittsburgh region’s wealth and power, which ultimately derived from coal. At one point, Andrew Carnegie alone, by virtue of his near absolute ownership of US Steel, was responsible for one-quarter of the entire world’s steel production.
And while technological innovation raced forward, transforming industry, it also brought about revolutionary changes in business operations and structures, ushering in a new phase of industrial evolution.
Keeping pace with the advancing technology, businesses and managers developed innovative methods of organizing and running large scale enterprises, creating the first modern corporate structures. A new business practice, the merger, reached its height with the creation in 1901 of the United States Steel Corporation. John Pierpoint Morgan and his investment banking house in New York created this gigantic corporation by joining the Carnegie Company, the Illinois Steel Corporation, the American Steel and Wire Company of New Jersey, the National Tube Company, the American Sheet Steel Company, and numerous other iron and steel companies. As the largest firm in the nation, the United States Steel Corporation controlled almost 60% of the country’s iron and steel output.
Dirty Coal — Child Labor
The human and societal cost of coal and coal mining in Pennsylvania and throughout Appalachia has been devastatingly profound.
From the very beginning, unscrupulous coal operators and companies made vicious use of child labor, notably boys. By the late nineteenth century, the use of young ‘breaker boys,’ was common. These children, frequently as young as seven or eight years old, first worked in anthracite coal mines in eastern Pennsylvania, removing impurities such as slate from the coal before it was shipped out. The coal was broken into smaller pieces in the mechanical coal breakers and the young workers, hunched over conveyor belts, picked through it to remove contaminants.
In an early instance of the power of visual media, in 1908, the National Child Labor Committee hired the photographer Lewis Hine to photograph children at work. Hine’s photos of the breaker boys and other child miners helped build public support for legislation barring child labor.
The very first federal child labor law, the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, was signed by President Woodrow Wilson on September 1, 1916. But the bill only banned the sale of products from factories that employed children under fourteen. It was ruled unconstitutional in 1918. The first minimum age requirement of a minor, part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, was not federally mandated until 1938, only 86 years ago.
As I said earlier, my father went into the mines of southwestern Pennsylvania when he was fourteen, in 1913. He started out as a ‘spragger,’ one of the most deadly jobs in the mine.
What is a spragger? The rail cars that carried the coal out of the mines had no braking systems. If a car went down an incline too quickly, it was likely to derail and spill its valuable coal. Miners were paid by the weight of cars, so accidents like this cost time and money. To keep it from occurring, boys, often as young as six years of age, were hired to help the cars come to a stop. They were called spraggers.
A sprag was a stick of wood, a little shorter than a baseball bat. Spraggers — young boys — carried several sprags and lined up in places where the cars, sometimes eight in a row, rolled down a slope. The boys ran alongside and jabbed the sprags into the spokes of the wheels. The sprags acted as brakes, slowing down the car until it stopped.
Dangerous? You bet. Sprags frequently got caught in the spokes while the boys were still holding them. Some spragger boys lost fingers, hands, or even arms.
My dad survived this job, his introduction to mining. Since he was big for his age, he soon advanced to working with the stubborn mules that were harnessed to the coal cars, bringing them up and out of the mine. My dad was tall, and strong, and proved himself up to the task of managing the often mean and uncooperative animals.
Like most miners, over his career he worked at many jobs in the mine, from digging and loading coal, to shoring up the roofs — timbering — to help keep them from collapsing. In his youth, he often found work in what he called ‘four-foot mines,’ shafts that were only four feet high, requiring the miners to literally crawl in and work long, dangerous days bent down, on their knees, unable to stand up.
He eventually settled down to working ‘heavy iron,’ laying the tracks on which the coal cars ran, carrying out the coal. This job was no picnic either. My dad and his ‘buddy,’ usually a miner-in-training, would physically manhandle 1,100 pound rails into place with crow bars, bending them by hand with jacks to negotiate the curves, spiking them in place with sledge hammers. He was particularly adept at laying switches (called ‘frogs’ in miners’ lingo), which were necessary to divert coal cars off the main track and into the many side entries leading to ‘rooms’ where mining took place.
Early coal mining was done using a ‘room and pillar’ system, learned from the Welsh. Miners dug the coal in ‘rooms,’ leaving large ‘pillars’ of coal to hold up the roof. The pillars were removed last, allowing the roof to collapse as the miners retreated. These pillars of coal were called ‘butts,’ and two men usually worked in each ‘room.’ Each of the two co-workers was called a ‘butty,’ and from this term comes our modern word, ‘buddy.’
Also like most miners, the job broke him down, physically. Silicosis, ‘Black Lung Disease,’ caused by breathing air thick with coal dust, was common, and my dad had it, along with a ruined back, and perpetual aches and pains brought on by broken bones and sprained, overworked muscles.
The sheer brute physicality of the job beggars the imagination. Like I said earlier, my dad didn’t laugh or smile much. No wonder.
The Company Store — Making Sure We Stayed Poor
For a man, at least in southwestern Pennsylvania, working in the mines was always an option. To be sure, it was gainful employment. But the pay scale was miserable. In the earliest days, miners were paid by weight of the coal they dug, by the carload, which was usually about 16 tons of coal. A wage of $1.60 for a ten-hour shift was common. By the 1920s, miners could make anywhere from $5 to $8 a day, depending on how fast you shoveled, or how dangerous the job.
But there were often strings attached. Many miners weren’t paid in US dollars, but in company scrip — privately issued currency, usually in the form of metal tokens, but also in paper bills. This scrip was redeemable only at the company store, which was also owned and operated by the coal company. My dad was paid this way at several of the mines where he worked. I still have a few of his scrip bills from the H.C. Frick Coal Company, with Henry Frick’s picture on them.
I have personal memories from when I was a very young child in the late 1950s, of the company store where we dealt. It was located in the small town of Library, Pennsylvania, not far from the mine. The building is still there: I can take you to it. Miners and their families could buy almost everything there, from clothes and shoes, picks and shovels, to food.
I can recall our shopping excursions as though they were yesterday. Once, I made the childish comment that, ‘everything here is free.’ I still remember the look on my father’s face, how he grimaced and shook his head. The costs of our purchases were deducted from my dad’s paycheck. Many weeks his net pay, after the company store bill was paid, was less than a dollar.
When I was growing up, a song by singer Ernie Ford was popular. Here’s the song’s chorus, which we all knew by heart:
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
This was art imitating life, in spades.
I remember very well a day in the early 1960s. It was a few years after the mine company had shut down its company store. My dad came home from the mine and told us that the miners’ union had finally secured a new contract that guaranteed mineworkers $25 a day.
We thought we were millionaires.
Unions and Strikebreakers
It seems that coal miners were more prone to unionize than workers in other industries. Or at least, to try. The coal operators fought them tooth and nail. Any man caught trying to bring in the union was immediately fired and kicked out of his company-owned house, his possessions unceremoniously dumped on the dirt road in front. In Pennsylvania, the coal operators made frequent use of the Coal and Iron Police, a private army of violent goons that existed between 1865 and 1931. This oppressive ‘police force’ was established by law, by the Pennsylvania General Assembly, at the direction of the state’s elected governor; but they were employed and paid for by the various coal companies to do their dirty work, mostly union busting.
The Coal and Iron Police were definitely not above beating a union organizer to within an inch of his life. Many deaths were attributed to them. In the early years, my dad, a staunch union man, and his fellow miners fought many a pitched battle with them. If the Coal and Iron Police beat a miner, the miners would find those responsible, usually late at night, on a lonely road, and retribution was swift. Lex talionis. There is no way to justify the brutality on both sides.
The union finally prevailed, under the often contentious leadership of the iconic John L. Lewis, self avowed socialist and communist sympathizer. Conditions in the mines gradually improved, wages got better. After centuries of abuse, American mineworkers finally had healthcare and pensions, a living wage, safety protocols underground. We were all grateful to, as we called him, ‘John L.’ Every night, in her prayers, my mother always remembered him: “Thank you, God, for John L.” My middle name is Lewis.
King Coal’s Harsh Revenge
Animists say that spirits inhabit everything. I suppose that goes back 300 million years to all those plants and animals that gave up their lives and became coal. And how do we honor those ancient spirits? We burn them into oblivion. I guess they’re getting their revenge now, since their remains are filling the skies, polluting the air and water, blocking the sun, creating a blanket, heating the earth.
Several principal emissions result from burning coal: Sulfur dioxide, which contributes to acid rain and respiratory illnesses. Nitrogen oxides and particulates which contribute to smog, haze, respiratory illnesses, and lung disease. Health impacts can range from asthma and breathing difficulties, to brain damage, heart problems, cancer, neurological disorders, and premature death.
Coal fired power plants pour 100 million tons of ash into the air every year. More than half of that ends up in our streams, rivers, lakes and oceans. Other water impacts include acid mine drainage from coal mines, and the obliteration of mountain streams and valleys by mountain top removal mining.
But even this pales in comparison to coal’s deadly effect on global warming. It is indisputable that the burning of coal has been, and continues to be, a major contributor to the climate crisis that threatens to engulf us. In fact, climate change is coal’s most serious, long-term, global impact. In addition to all the other chemicals and particulates, when coal is burned it reacts with oxygen in the air to produce carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, which works like a blanket, warming the earth above normal limits. Drought, sea level rise, flooding, extreme weather, and species loss — these impacts are tied directly to the amount of carbon dioxide we release. Coal accounts for roughly one-quarter of all energy-related carbon emissions.
Epilogue
Writing this essay has been a very emotional experience for me. Looking back, it’s hard to believe how desperate my family’s, my community’s, existence was. The US became a dominant global power, and a very few got immensely wealthy; but all that accomplishment was propped up by a mountain of human misery and suffering. The lifestyles that most American’s enjoy today, the great victories and triumphs that the US celebrates, all these came about because millions of men and women, and even children, bore an immense burden, great beyond measure.
Coal has shaped me, just like it did the country and American culture. My seven decade relationship with King Coal isn’t over yet, but I can see the end of the road ahead. How should we react to this long, tragic story? Can we ever heal the wounds? Probably not. The scars will always remain. Perhaps my contemporary, late Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski, had the right idea when he wrote:
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Yes. No matter how difficult, we must try to praise this mutilated world.