Customer Reviews

Pennsylvania Mining Families: The Search for Dignity in the Coalfields

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read Barry P. Michrina's "Pennsylvania Mining Families" with great interest, since I am the son and grandson of a former coalminers and have some firsthand knowledge of the people and postindustrial-revolution landscapes of the geographical boundaries of the work, particularly Cambria, Indiana and Clearfield counties. I was very impressed with this work of anthropology that also functions secondarily as a not unimportant history of Central Pennsylvania, especially with regard to the Great Depression, the labor movement including the aftereffects of the Great Coal Strike of 1927, and the harscrabble lives of the coal-minging families of the time. Through his interviews with mostly old folks, including wives and also sons, who remember the dangers and vicissitudes of mining work -- unsafe shaft timbers, shooting coal with dynamite and the like -- Michrina sketches quite thoroughly a vanished and rough way of life. Moreover, by documenting the violence caused by strikebreakers and the quasiofficial Coal & Iron Police hired by uncaring and venal operators -- who ran roughshod over the locals in such small burgs as Carrolltown, Bakerton, Nanty Glo, Spangler and Mentcle -- Michrina explains how many immigrant and first-generation American families in the Alleghenies scraped by when food, money and employment were scarce. There's a melancholy that lingers in the witnesses' testimony. While the book affords you the chronology and methodology of coalmining in a specific time and place when Central Pennsylvania was vital to the industrial revolution, it also explains how disenfranchised many poor and immigrant families felt, how they were terrorized and how they had to fight all sides just to survive during a growth time in the proverbial land of the free and home of the brave. Today, the tipples have vanished, the driftmouths have bit closed up and the train tracks extracted, and the environmental degradation has been abated a bit from mining -- creeks don't run as orange as they used to into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. The book touches on this, too, again with verbatim memories. "Pennsylvania Mining Families" is a first-rate work of anthropology, a fascinating history and a significant contribution to the shelf on labor, particularly as it applies to coal operations. -- Jerry Roberts, author, "Rain Forest Bibliography" (McFarland & Company, 1999) "Mitchum: In His Own Words" (Limelight Editions, 2000)

Dr. Michrina is to be commended for producing an insightful, sympathetic, and evocative study of the mining folk primarily of the central Pennsylvania county of Cambria. He also strives to document the general period of depression in the coal-mining industry, 1922-1942, and especially the traumatic events of the great strike of 1927 and resulting period without union representation and protection, 1927-1933. Unfortunately, while Dr. Michrina's academic jargon enhances this as a scholarly anthropological study, it hinders it as a heritage work which would be treasured by its coal-mining subjects and their friends and family, not to mention local historians. In an ironic twist, the non-academic reader must mine through the earth and rock of academic constructs to extract the coal seams of human emotion and remembrance. Dr. Michrina expresses some awareness of this and is honest in admitting to some guilt in recording and publishing personal information given by his subjects, who were also his frends and neighbors during the years of his "field work." He is also honest about the surprising results of his investigations. For example, he found a general lack of militancy directed against the coal companies, their chief oppressors, though there are still deep negative emotions directed against both the strike breakers and the Coal and Iron Police. The latter, called 'Pussyfoots,' performed the coal companies' dirty work, with state and local authorities turning a blind eye. These acts, including rape and murder, were intended to humiliate and control the captive populations of the coal company towns, while cheating them at the company store and keeping them in abysmal poverty. Dr. Michrina also found that while the miners maintained a strong work ethic, they tended to define themselves and seek happiness not in the work place but within the home and family. Aged survivors of these times also retain a general sense of economic insecurity and continue to practice frugality in most of their endeavors. He also found a strong sense of appreciation for both United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933-1945, and United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) President John L. Lewis, 1920-1961, who are credited for restoring unionism, human rights, and some measure of dignity. This last element, the search for dignity, is the defining concept of the book and the chapter thereon is the finest and should be read above all else. This wonderful book, despite some flaws, is, along with Mildred Beik's THE MINERS OF WINDBER, a defining account of Cambria County's Roman Catholic coal miners of eastern and southern European ancestry. The Protestant coal miners of British and German descent still await their chronicler.