Memorials and the Mine Disaster in Monongah, West Virginia: From Trauma to an Italian Global Memoryscape

Abstract

Monongah, today a sleepy village of just over 1,100 people, is nestled in the rolling hills of North Central West Virginia (“Monongah, West Virginia Population 2021,” n.d.). On the morning of December 6, 1907, it was a bustling coal camp of about two thousand (US Bureau of the Census 1913) when the worst disaster in American coal-mining history occurred there. Explosions ripped through the mine shafts killing at least 361 men and boys. Italian immigrants among the dead numbered 170, almost half the total number of victims (Tropea 2017). Many who died left behind wives, children, and other family members in Italian hometowns, and later some Italian widows were repatriated.1 The tragedy's profound impact on both sides of the Atlantic demonstrated how the long arm of globalization could wreak personal misery in two distant places. Today in this area of West Virginia, Italian American identity is intertwined with the recollections and material traces of lives in the coal industry and the tragedies inherent in it.The descriptions of the disaster and its aftermath exist in official archival documents, newspaper accounts, and family memories. Many are stark and horrid, the stuff of song and legend.2 At 10:30 in the morning an explosion erupted in the depths of mines 6 and 8, and with shocks traveling in all directions, it was heard as far as Fairmont, a distance of five miles. A second explosion occurred immediately after the first with blasts shooting debris, fire, and smoke sixty feet into the air. The resulting human carnage meant that some of the bodies were blown apart while in other instances corpses were found whole (McAteer 2007, 116–117; Tropea 2013, 369).Word of the accident spread quickly, and assistance began arriving twenty-five minutes after the explosion; the site attracted a myriad of forces locally and then nationally to assist, wait, or just gawk. The families of the miners crowded at the mine entrance, distraught but hopeful; however, that hope was soon dashed. Verna Kincaid, whose father was a foreman at Monongah, related what he said about the women immigrants who lost men: “For 36 hours, they saved some women who were trying to commit suicide. One woman said, ‘Why would I want to go on living? My father, two brothers and two sons were in that mine.’ My Dad never forgot that. He said it was the most pitiful sight. They (the mine widows) were trying to throw themselves under the trains and streetcars. So they shut down the trains and streetcars so the women would go home. They were still concerned with them doing harm to themselves” (Veasey 2007).The Monongah disaster garnered national press and led to community outrage, inadequate local and national Progressive Era assistance, and government hearings that resulted in the first major mine safety law in 1910 (McAteer 2007, 258; Tropea 2013, 369). Both mines were reopened just over a year after the explosions (McAteer 2007, 250), and Monongah relegated the disaster to private memory and local lore. The first public commemoration was held fifty years after the fact, orchestrated by the local Catholic pastor. At that point, many people in the community were still living who had directly experienced the trauma of the event and its aftermath. In 1961, the coal seam exhausted, the mine was closed (McAteer 2007, 269). After that, the town became less of an industrial center.By the time the one hundredth anniversary approached in 2007, no one who recalled the explosion was still alive, and tragedy had become history. From August to December 6, 2007, the disaster was internationally recognized in a series of public commemorative events primarily orchestrated by Italian Americans and Italians. This article focuses on three physical memorials and the events surrounding them: the Heroine Statue; the bronze bell; and the granite slab. Monongah engaged in a “rememoration” (Nora 1989, 16; 1996, xxiv) of the tragedy through the creation of the three permanent memorials as well as ephemeral ones (performative events, spiritual experiences, and the rhetoric that accompanied them all). Together, these served to remap, reinscribe, and redefine a site of tragedy, establishing it for posterity as an Italian global memoryscape.3Kendall R. Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes (2011) examine memory and its relationship to the concept of globalization. Anthony Giddens (1999, 64) defines globalization as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.” Applying Arjun Appadurai's concepts of “global cultural flow” to memory practices, Phillips and Reyes (2011, 2) coin the term “global memoryscape” to explain the “intersection between memorial practices and global forces.” They see the term as a “useful concept for imagining the ways that global forces impact local memories, the ways that international encounters create and transform memories, and the ways that memories change and adapt as they move across the global landscape” (18).In the case of Monongah, the tragedy took place amid the dynamics of globalizing forces of industrialization that abruptly transformed lives on both sides of the Atlantic as well as transnational associations that continued over the subsequent decades. This article will explicate how, both through the staging of commemorative events and the erecting of physical memorials, a tragic site was transformed into a commemorative landscape both visually and experientially, creating an Italian-focused global memoryscape.How and why this occurred involves multifocal and multivocal interactions that make up the symbolic and rhetorical nature of creating public memory. At play were underlying issues of identity, sociocultural and political power, and affective practices, which I track as a hidden story of the contestable interplay—a jockeying for power among local committees, state officials, and Italian regional and national government parties.Transnational associations among local West Virginia committees and Italian political entities culminated in a new vibrancy during the planning of the centenary, which commenced as an act of remembering, thus ensuring the making of public memory for the future. The Monongah tragedy had become history in that it occurred in the distant past; yet history and memory always exist in relationship to one another.The scholarship on memory at this point is vast and crosses disciplinary boundaries. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (2010, 6) list six major points of consensus among memory scholars: “(1) memory is activated by present concerns, issues, or anxieties; (2) memory narrates shared identities, constructing senses of communal belonging; (3) memory is animated by affect; (4) memory is partial, partisan, and thus often contested; (5) memory relies on material and/or symbolic supports; (6) memory has a history.”John Bodnar (1992, 15) defines public memory as a “body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future . . . the major focus . . . is not the past, however, but serious matters in the present such as the nature of power and the question of loyalty to both official and vernacular cultures.” According to Edward Casey (2004, 30), a fundamental component of public memory is “its formation through ongoing interchange of ideas and thoughts, opinions, beliefs.” He also notes that its root emerges from a particular historical circumstance, in this case a tragedy of national significance.Pierre Nora (2002, 1) notes that we are in the midst of an international “age of commemoration” or “memorialism.” This movement is expressed in various ways, including by staging commemorative events. Nora's argument is complicated, but essentially the result worldwide has been to establish “close ties between respect for the past—whether real or imaginary—and the sense of belonging, collective consciousness and individual self-awareness, memory and identity” (1).Public memory is created and constituted in physical spaces. Much scholarship (Casey, 2004; Phillips 2004; Nora 1989, 1996, 2002; Levinson [1998] 2018; Gillis, 1994; Norkunas 1993; Bodnar 1992) focuses on the way particular places exist or spaces can be constructed to evoke memories. With regard to memory, nothing is fixed. The erection, however, of permanent memorials produces a sense of immutability.With the 1907 disaster, Monongah itself became a place of trauma, a profoundly wounded place. Monongah was a small village, and everyone living there was affected in some way. There was no escaping the emotional agony on the day it occurred and for long afterward. The workplace was destroyed only to be reopened the following year with men returning to the very site of anguish.In the aftermath of the explosions, the town of Monongah consisted of various places that were part of a traumatic landscape of memory. Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman (2008, 165) note that decades of established research concerning the politics of collective memory and urban space have shown that “landscape and memory are mutually constitutive of one another.” Memory links the past to the present, and memory given voice is narration or stories. “Stories . . . traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories” (de Certeau 1984, 115; de Certeau 2002, 72). Drawing on Michel de Certeau's idea of stories as spatial trails or paths, we see that what began as a site of tragedy with its own set of “narrations that organize spaces” (de Certeau 1984, 129) was transformed into one that emphasizes and reinforces Italian identity in remembrance. This article adds new discussion to the field of public memory and the concept of global memoryscapes by focusing on the centenary of this nearly forgotten catastrophe in American labor. It contributes to Italian studies in particular by investigating how and why what began as a traumatic site with a preponderance of immigrant deaths evolved into an Italian-centered international memory space.My interpretations relating to Monongah as such a memoryscape resulted from my use of ethnohistorical and ethnographic approaches. I used primary source documents from my own collection as well as some housed at the Italian consulate's office in Philadelphia and personal communication and correspondence. I conducted oral interviews during the summers of 2007 and 2020 with seven people who were either residents of Monongah and/or involved in the commemoration activities and with a colleague in San Giovanni in Fiore, Calabria. In 2007, I held them in the subjects’ homes; in 2020, I interviewed them over the telephone. I was a participant observer at the public ceremonies in Monongah and at the dinner afterward at Fairmont State University on December 6, 2007. This allowed me to observe the events as well as to interact with people there I knew and to meet out-of-town attendees.Let me explain my personal relationship to coal, West Virginia, and Calabria. As a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Fairmont, and as the granddaughter and niece of coal miners, the dual culture of mining and my Italianness bounced and reverberated linking my life to the coal industry just as sure as the call to work could be counted on every day on the radio. My mother grew up in the coal camp of Watson (now incorporated into the city of Fairmont); my father in Carolina, just up the road from Monongah, where he and his siblings went to high school. My spatial memories range from Watson to Monongah, Carolina, and Shinnston, as I traversed them to visit relatives and friends almost weekly. They include a sensory jumble of images of buildings, landmarks, people, odors, and sounds that were integral to a landscape of active mining. As a small child, from my Calabrian maternal grandmother Caterina's (known as Carrie) kitchen window in Watson, I watched the railroad tracks that ran along the West Fork River and listened for the coal train whistle so I could see the train's laden caboose. Often, driving the narrow, curvy two-lane roads on the way to Carolina to visit my father's Sicilian parents (Rosa and Giorgio) on Sundays, our car got stuck behind the overloaded coal trucks, the acrid smell of the diesel exhaust filling our noses as they lumbered along. As I gazed out the car window at night descending the hill from the Carolina camp, I could spot the red dog slag pile casting its eerie glow.4 If the daily radio called “number 93 will work,” I knew that my dear maternal great-uncle Tom Peluso would meet his ride to go to the Jordan mine that day. If I were visiting my great-grandmother Anna, with whom my bachelor uncle lived, I eagerly watched from her porch for him to appear at the end of the street in midafternoon. The sign that he had been to work was his face, black with coal dust. I ran to greet him and he would play a game of cat and mouse, teasing me with the threat of a hug that, if he succeeded in giving me, would get me dirty too.More ominously, coal dust filled his lungs and ultimately killed him less than a year after he retired: a victim of both black-lung disease and lung cancer from incessant cigarette smoking. One of my last visions of my uncle, who was always rail thin, is of him sitting on the couch, so wasted and weak that I had to help him put on his shoes because he could no longer do it himself.These human and environmental tragedies of the coal industry as well as the unionization efforts were not taught in school.5 The required junior high West Virginia history class focused solely on coal's benefits. Because members of my family were coal miners, however, I heard the stories of the industry's dangers and my own family's involvement in the union movement shared by my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. I was as unaware, however, of the Monongah disaster and its relationship to Italy and Italian migration as any other American schoolchild (Saverino 2016). My cousin told me that she had not learned about the disaster herself until she was an adult, even though their camp house stood on the hill where the portal of the number 6 shaft had been located. In the 1960s, unbeknownst to their mother, her brother would descend the hill at the back of their yard to engage in the dangerous endeavor of exploring the portal, which was not totally closed off (Linda Savereno Moorehead, personal communication, April 23, 2021).In Calabria, I have both familial and research ties. Since 1991, I have conducted research in my maternal great-grandparents’ hometown of San Giovanni in Fiore. This town is important to the Monongah commemoration events because the largest number of Italian miners who died were from there, and significant chain migration occurred between it and the tri-county region of North Central West Virginia (Gentile 2009, 2013; Klaus 2002).This exegesis reveals the emotive underpinnings of my interest in the Monongah disaster, coal mining, and Italian identity. These linked influences also underlie the affective nature of the commemorative centenary events. Laurajane Smith, Margaret Wetherell, and Gary Campbell (2018, 10), in discussing such practices, acknowledge the emotive aspects but point to the “flexible, contextual and contingent nature of affect and the way it is often actively managed and negotiated in social relations and collective practices of remembering.” The affective aspects of the history of trauma in Monongah engendered by the personal stories remembered and shared in the course of the planning of and the active participation in the commemoration are fundamental components of the formation of public memory enacted.To understand Italian Americans in West Virginia today one must understand their fundamental integration with the state's coal industry. There is a shared social memory of coal in Marion County.6 The mining of coal prevailed as the force of common engagement and power in the state from the late nineteenth century. The large labor force mining required could not be met by the local population so that southern and eastern European immigrants and African Americans from the South were recruited by the coal companies themselves and through chain migration networks (Shifflett 1991, 67, 71). Within fifteen years, West Virginia went from having the most native-born citizens in the United States in 1900 to having the largest foreign-born population working in the mines of any of the southern states. By 1915, nearly 50 percent of miners were new immigrants from southern Europe, primarily Italy (Barkey 2002, 161). To cater to the large number of Italians in the coalfields, the Italian government maintained a consular office in Fairmont for a decade prior to World War I (Barkey 2002, 161; Tropea 2017, 351).The Monongah mine, considered modern and one of the best equipped in the state at the time, was part of the Pittsburgh coal seam, the richest bituminous coal deposit in the United States. It was owned by Fairmont Coal Company of the Consolidation Coal empire (Green 2015, 18; Eavenson 1938, 1). In 1907, Monongah was a busy town bisected by the West Fork of its eponymous river, the Monongahela. The main business street and the coal operation offices were located on the east side of the river. A photograph from 1909 shows the street with shops, a hotel, a theater, and at least one restaurant. On the river's west side were other businesses, the camp houses, and churches. The two portals that blew on December 6 were on the west side, at the base of the hill that rose up from the riverbank.In 1907, Fairmont, which is the Marion County seat, and Monongah were five miles apart and were connected by a streetcar line built by the coal company. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ninety miles north, the eighth-largest city in the United States in 1910, was a world away (“Top 100 Biggest US Cities” 2021). Italian immigrants, dispersed in far-flung camps that were tucked in the hills and valleys, had to adjust not only to an unfamiliar industrial rhythm but to rural isolation. Camps that might consist of only a few houses were often miles away from one another. Roads were unpaved, and the most common mode of transportation was by foot. Few had cars until after World War II.The isolation of the camps was even more profound because they were controlled by the companies, which dictated the architecture and the layout. Camps were usually segregated along racial and ethnic lines, with the bosses living in better housing and separated from the pick-and-shovel workers. My own familial stories concur with those of Corbin (1981, 67–68), in that, even when segregated, the miners, regardless of racial or ethnic identities, worked in the mine together, and their families and children were neighborly. All miners were required to shop at the company store, live in company-owned housing, buy their own tools and blasting powder, and they were paid in scrip. All this was on top of most not being fluent or literate in English so that the few mining safety regulations that existed were not well understood. The rural isolation, the language issue, and the dictates of the industry made it difficult to develop the kind of tightly knit, infrastructure-rich communities that existed in large urban Little Italies (Klaus 2002, 209). The ethnic churches did provide an opportunity for development of in-group identity, although those too were often under company domination (Klaus 2002, 209; Wolfe 1977, 169).In a span of a little more than one hundred years, Italians changed from being regarded as hardworking yet often reviled (Bailey 1985, 120–124; Schmoll 2013; Tropea 2017, 347) to playing a major role in sociocultural life and state politics. For the Italian Americans in Marion County, the Monongah centenary events were deeply rooted in the social memory of the intertwining of coal mining, local and state politics, and immigration history.After the disaster, Monongah became a “haunted cultural landscape” (Stewart 1996, 146), filled with the stories, rumor, and gossip that organize places (de Certeau 1984, 115). In the fiftieth-anniversary booklet, the first public commemoration, are images of the devastation after the mine's blast that were still seared in the minds of the parishioners who lived through it: open coffins lining the main street, women waiting and wailing at the mine's mouth, the bitter cold and snow-covered ground, the graves and also the trenches of the unidentified dug for immediate interment at Mt. Calvary Cemetery. Everyone in town knew stories associated with these images and the places depicted.The landscape of traumatic memory that formulated the walkable spatial trajectory included the mine itself, the two portals, the churches, the cemeteries, and the site of Caterina Davia's pile of coal, about which I explain more below. There were four burial grounds. The Catholic Mt. Calvary was the largest, located near what is now Holy Spirit Catholic Church. There were three others. One was identified as Turkish, another as “Mohammedan,” and another as African American, which was located the furthest away on Tower Hill on the east side of the river.Caterina Davia, a northern Italian woman, who lost her husband, Vittorio, in the explosion, leaving her with five children, created the coal pile. Davia became a fixture of local lore and ridicule because of her daily ritual of walking twice a day for 29 years along a determinate path of one and a half miles to carry coal from the mine to her yard, where she piled it until the estimated weight was 300 tons and it virtually hid her house. Even after her death in 1936, when her children donated the coal, the story lived on. Many versions of this iconic and symbolic story have been told and retold and, as with all retellings, details are changed, embellished, and even fabricated. Suffice to say that her ritualized walk, the coal pile, and the many stories became integral to the Monongah disaster's spatial trajectory.Several members of the planning committee for the Heroine Statue had familial links to the disaster. Ann Eates related that her maternal grandfather, Michael DiAmico, and his brother Donato DiAmico from Santa Croce del Sannio, Campania, both died in the explosion (Michael was twenty-two when he died and Donato about nineteen). Michael's wife Filomena, age twenty and eight months pregnant, was then left as a new widow to care for her two-year-old (the mother of Ann Eates). Eates's father, Anthony DeMary,7 also from Santa Croce, arrived in Monongah only a day or two after the explosion: “He said it was so devastating. . . . We'd always say, Dad, tell us the story again. . . . He said it was so sad just being 16, no money, just the clothes on his back and to see all those coffins, and hear the mourning of the widows and grandparents and all the people who had people who died there. He said he was just ready to go back until they said things will get better. . . . We just admired them so much for sticking it out” (A. Eates, interview with author, August 26, 2007). This story conveys the emotions of a young arrival, a mere boy, to a totally foreign place, only to be faced with such devastation and the revelation that so many of his compatriots had died.Roman Prezioso, a Democratic state senator, related how his grandfather, Alexander Prezioso, survived the explosion by staying home from work, as did many others that day, to celebrate the St. Nicholas holiday. When the mine reopened, Alexander returned to work there, but Prezioso said: “And his life was spared, although I never heard him talk about that. He never talked about a lot of things, you know where he came from, or things of that sort. He was more concerned that we would be Americans and learn to be, you know, the American way and things of that sort” (R. Prezioso, interview with author, July 2, 2020). Prezioso's description emphasizes memory suppression or forgetting perhaps as a coping mechanism so that he could return to work in the mine.Ann Eates, who was a child in the 1930s, remembered the only time they went to the cemetery was on Memorial Day: Then, we didn't have a cemetery committee and the grass was quite high and—we would walk over to the cemetery because we didn't have a car—and Dad would get a sickle and he'd say we have to cut by—referring to my Mom—by Mom's Dad's grave and I'd say well where is it? And Dad says right here, right here. Of course, we were small. I mean we didn't know much about the explosion and all. All we knew, it was such a sad, sad thing. And Mom would say poor Grandma, she went through so much, you know. So anyway, we'd remember Dad always, always cutting Grandpa's around his tombstone and around [my] uncle's. (A. Eates, interview, August 26, 2007)In this story, Ann emphasizes how her elders’ overwhelming sorrow impressed her. The cemetery stood as an almost-forgotten site of remembrance. Perhaps its unkempt state illustrates the town's “public forgetting” by its neglect of the cemetery itself (Houdek and Phillips 2017, 11).One story illustrates the nature of language change and the transnational nature of locative narratives with the spatial trajectories they can encompass. The largest number of Italian victims, thirty-two, were from San Giovanni in Fiore, Calabria (Gentile 2013, 247). When I began research in San Giovanni in 1991, locals pointed me to elderly Tony Ventura who, when I told him where I was from, commented, “Ah, il fuoco di Minonga!” (Ah, the fire of Minonga; author fieldnotes, 1991). He had been born after that event but he knew the association. Language retains memory. A popular aphorism in the San Giovannese language was used by everyone before 1992: “te piensi ca’ vaiu a minonga [also pronounced mironga]” (you think you're going to Monongah) to indicate a faraway and dangerous place, yet the populace was unaware of the source of the actual reference. A further deformation of the name Monongah resulted in the word tironga. The phrase “vaiu a tironga” took on the contemptuous meaning of “go to hell” (Gentile 2013, 238; Oggi2006).On December 17, 1956, Father Everett Briggs began as pastor of Our Lady of Pompeii and St. Stanislaus in Monongah and St. Mary's Mission in Carolina (Ryan 2006). Originally from Boston, Briggs was surprised at the town's diversity, with the majority, however, being Italian. Briggs said (Ryan 2006): “I said to a man one day, How did you get into this situation? You are so diverse. . . . He still feels the emotion that hit him when he heard the reply: Father, he said. We are not diverse. We are united. We have a secret sorrow. The town blew up and killed all but five men. I asked, Where is the memorial? He said, We have no memorial. Not even a fence post. I told him, You will have your memorial.” Briggs remembered he felt a pervasive sadness in the community that he couldn't identify. He believed it was unexpressed grief from those who had survived the calamity, and that was what began his lifelong mission to honor the victims’ memory.Briggs was instrumental in staging the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration jointly with a belated jubilee of the two Catholic churches on September 14 and 15, 1957. He stated in the anniversary booklet that “some fitting commemoration of this tragedy should be made by the Catholic Churches of Monongah, especially in view of the fact that 80 percent of the victims were members of these two congregations (Briggs 1957).” Parishioners collected money for church renovations and identified and marked two hundred graves. That Sunday, the ceremonies began with a procession in which twenty-five religious and civic groups participated. The statue of St. Barbara, the miners’ patroness, was carried from the churches to the cemetery, where a Mass was held. The program included an introduction by Briggs of the surviving widows and family members, a representative of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), someone from Consolidation Coal Company, various mayors, and the archbishop, who addressed the assembly. There followed an afternoon of “traditional folk dances” representing the “immigrant groups,” accompanied by the fifty-five-piece Monongah Miners’ Band (Briggs 1957). Briggs also brought to the anniversary commemoration the idea of building a nursing home as a living memorial to the victims and to help the needy (Briggs 1957).Thus, fifty years after the disaster, the places and landmarks that had dominated families’ memories were remapped and memorialized. The main street, the mine remnants, the Catholic churches, the cemetery, Caterina Davia's coal pile, and her daily walking route were familiar places. The fiftieth-anniversary events contributed a new chapter to community memory, one that dignified people's experiences and reified their ethnic, labor, and family identities.In 1961, the same year the mine closed, the nursing home, St. Barbara's, opened, and a statue of the saint was erected at the entrance. On its base were bronze plaques engraved with the victims’ names, and a large block of coal dug from the mine was placed next to the statue (Ryan 2006). St. Barbara's presence high on the hill above Monongah was a new touchstone in the spatial trajectory, a positive addition to the sad sites of memory for the community; due to an outsider's initiatives, the arena of private and local memory was heightened and extended to a larger community of the aged. Briggs became indelibly associated with keeping the memory of the lost loved ones alive.The interrelationship of factions that were involved in the centenary planning included local Italian American planning committees and sometimes their individual members, state politicians, the UMWA, Italian regional governments, and the Italian national government