On March 8 this year, we observe the centenary of the Castle Gate Mine No.2 disaster—Utah’s second worst in history. Early in the morning of that day, 171 miners were killed while extracting coal. A high proportion were married, 114 in total. The youngest among the victims was 15 years old—child labour was not uncommon at the time—and the oldest was 73. One member of the rescue team died after inhaling carbon monoxide. The mining disaster devastated the families of the deceased workers. One grieving wife of a victim from the island of Crete bowed to despair and died three years later in 1927.
Historian Helen Papanikolas conveys the social drama connected with the burials of the Greek miners killed—overwhelming Cretan: “Fifty Greeks were killed. The Greek church in Price was not large enough to hold services for the men, and a public hall was used. The widows’ keening of the micrologic, eerie, high-pitched dirges recounting the life and hopes of the dead extemporaneously echoed through Greek Towns. Black-dressed widows, children, and friends followed the caskets to the graveyards. The priest in black robes of mourning chanted final prayers, and the caskets were lowered into rocky excavations.”
In this collective lamenting, we hear echoes of working-class people eye-witnessing the violent end of lives consumed in labour for a living. We sense the scale of the ordeal.
What do we owe to the Castle Gate deaths, but also to thousands of others who perished while labouring under grim conditions in the nation’s industry?
The labour of memorialising the names of those killed in Castle Gate has been done by regional civic organisations, ethnic communities, and other institutions—a “memory activism” which has resulted in at least four commemorative monuments: The Plaque listing the names of the dead at the entrance of Castle Gate Cemetery (1987), and the Mine Disaster Memorial in Helper, Carbon County (1987).
Utah’s Greek Americans have participated in these memorial “acts of remembering.”
A plaque listing the victims’ names has been placed at the Hellenic Historical Monument at the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Salt Lake City (1988). Local memory activism has resulted in the installation of a headstone for those Greek immigrants buried in unmarked graves at the Price City Cemetery (2005).
A National Herald article entitled “At Last! A Monument for the Forgotten Victims of Castle Gate,” published on November 2, 1987, documents the perspective of the founder of the Greek memorials. The descendants of the victims and citizens are invited to undertake a pilgrimage, to pay respect, to lay flowers, even to kneel and cry. Acts of remembering to call the bodies of the living to engage in honouring the bodies of the dead.
Greek American memory in Utah recognises the harsh experiences of Greek miners. Accounts by descendants do not fail to acknowledge the exploitation to which the miners were subjected by coal operators and the racism they experienced.
Utah’s official historiography incorporates these facts in the state’s educational curricula. A teaching resource for elementary and high school students and the broad public details, for example, the predicament of married coal miners. Unlike the single miners residing in privately-owned boarding houses, the married men rented company-owned houses, adding to corporate profits:
“These Greek, Yugoslavian, Serbian, and Italian miners [killed in the explosion] left more than 400 widows and children without income, many saddled with debt to the company for rent and food.”
“Companies provided the housing for their workers and then deducted rent from each paycheck. The cost of goods that a miner or his family bought at the company store was deducted directly from his paycheck. Some miners received their pay as store credit [known as scrip] instead of a paycheck. Miners often went into debt to their employers, which made it impossible for them to quit their jobs.”
Abuses, exploitation, and other injustices directed a significant number of Greek miners and workers in other industries toward “unionism as a legitimate remedy,” which connected with the emergence of class consciousness.
Although immigrant strikers were labelled un-American by the media and the reigning at the time Ku Klux Klan, their unionisation expressed the “labour’s version of Americanism”: demanding the right to organise for mutual protection and “an American standard of living, by which they meant higher wages, shorter working hours, and decent working conditions.”
What does Greek America owe to the Castle Gate deaths, but also to thousands of others who perished while labouring under grim conditions in the nation’s industry? The least we can do is to understand their historical experience.
For this purpose, I felt the obligation to publish a longer essay entitled “The Castle Gate Mine Disaster Centenary: A Tribute.” It is available online in the open-access journal Ergon: Greek American and Diaspora Arts and Letters.
My motivation to honour the Castle Gate Mine Disaster was enhanced by the knowledge that some ethnic institutions shy away from meaningfully exploring, even recognising, this past. It is common for identity narratives to mention the struggles of the early immigrant labourers for the sole purpose of celebrating the socioeconomic success of their descendants.
The Castle Gate Mine Disaster is not an exception in the nation’s history. Between 1870 and 1912, a total of 41,746 miners were killed while working underground. Among those, thousands of Greek migrants died while labouring in the nations’ industrial zones—railroads, smelters, lumber yards, hydroelectric plants, and textile manufacturing facilities.
The death count also links with those who languished prematurely because of work-related illnesses—consumption and black lung disease, complications following amputations, arthritis, or withering away due to incapacity. Young bodies were literally swallowed by the ground and the waters of the new land whose resources they were extracting and processing in the service of industrial growth and, in turn, the nation’s economic and military might. We will never know the precise number of those who perished due to the long-term consequences of haphazard work conditions.
This immigrant experience requires a long pause to reflect on the magnitude of its significance to render how to place it in our narrations of the past. Industrial disasters punctuate ethnic idealisations of migrants’ struggle and success as well as national mythologies of equal opportunity and fairness. Not only did thousands of workers labouring to reach the promised American Dream never make it, but they departed with bodies battered by injustices.
The disasters call for an investigation of the conditions that failed immigrants and citizens in specific locales and how this knowledge—often suppressed in some circles—matters today. They beckon institutions and communities to move away from grand narratives and toward historiography finely tuned to the social dramas of individual and family lives violently interrupted and disrupted.
Georgios Anagnostou is the The Miltiadis Marinakis Professor of Modern Greek Language and Culture at Ohio State University he is an expert in Modern Greek and Greek American culture and society, transnational Greek studies and cultural studies.