“Oh, damn it, dagos are cheaper than props.”
-Mother Jones quoting a mine manager.
Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday December 11, 1907
Monongah, West Virginia – Little Orphan Girls Beg for Work
Journalist Dorothy Dale reports from the devastated town:
Please letta me work, lady; gotta getta money…Please you get something for me, I can do.
A little hand touched my arm. The curl-framed face of a girl of 10 years looked into mine.
[She said pitifully:]
You know mans all dead. Boys all dead. Only girls left to work.
From The Pittsburgh Press of Dec 10, 1907:
Fairmont, W. Va., December 10.-“Please letta me work, lady; gotta getta money.”
It was the appeal on every side in Monongah on Tuesday and it came from little girls, many of them not 10 years old. It is the newest development in the mine horror. Girls-mind you-not boys!
The boys of Monongah lie sleeping under the coal-weighted hills. Early Tuesday the corpse of a slender child form was brought out of No. 6. It was identified as Johnny Yaconis, and taken to the tumble down shack up in Red Row, over the mine, where a stony faced little woman kissed it until her face was black from the charred flesh. Another body, that of the boy’s father, Franco Yaconis, is still concealed in one of those underground rooms.
Dominic, her boy of 15, lies in the company hospital, where his crushed leg was amputated. Only her Johnny had been brought to her. “Devil Johnny,” they called him, but there was nothing devilish about him. At the age of 12 years the stunted little overalled figure trudged every morning to the mines, where he was a trapper. At 13 years of age he died in those mines.
“MANS ALL DEAD.”
“My man ask for boy getta job. Company give it even to so little boy,” said the mother. The labor law of West Virginia requires a child to be 14 years old before he may work, and the white faced Monongah women say that Johnny’s case was that of many a boy. At any rate there are no boys of that age on the Monongah streets.
“Please you get something for me, I can do.”
A little hand touched my arm. The curl-framed face of a girl of 10 years looked into mine.
“You know mans all dead. Boys all dead. Only girls left to work,” she said pitifully.
Do you know the half-apologetic, half-appealing look of the trembling old man who has been shoved out of his life’s track by younger men-the man who begs you to buy matches or shoestrings? That was the expression in the old-young eyes of little 10-year-old Faustina Daria, the brightest Italian girl in the settlement.
Faustina was in the six grade the day before the explosion, but that is ages ago to her. She led the way to her three-room home. “See my ma, Resta, Kipling, Georga and Ogena to work for,” she said as she pointed at the group on the steps.
“My pa make $2 a day,” she explained. “And wasn’t it awful; three days he was home with a hurt on his back, and Friday he went in again and-and-”
LITTLE GIRLS AT WORK.
But even the brave lips of strong-hearted women of 10 sometimes give way. The little figure crouched against the wall and quivered with sobs.
“You know we paid $5 rent and had lard and cheese and bologna.” she said with pride. The child spoke as rich people speak of automobiles and theater parties. And there are little Faustinas in almost every house in Monongah.
This is the day of the “little mothers” in Monongah. The little girls tend the bodies, wait on the sick and get what bits of food there are. I tell you there is nothing that makes one’s heart go out more to that stricken people than the way the tiny girls put their little shoulders to this burden that their mothers cannot bear.
———-
[Details from front-page drawing added.]
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SOURCE & IMAGES
The Pittsburgh Press
(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
-Dec 10, 1907
https://www.newspapers.com/image/142132645
https://www.newspapers.com/image/142132736
See also:
Tag: Monongah Mine Disaster of 1907
https://weneverforget.org/tag/monongah-mine-disaster-of-1907/
History of the Monongah Mines Relief Fund:
In Aid of Sufferers from the Monongah Mine Explosion,
Monongah, West Virginia, December 6, 1907
Monongah mines relief committee, 1910
https://books.google.com/books?id=Ma1IAAAAMAAJ
Charities and the Commons:
A Weekly Journal of Philanthropy and Social Advance, Volume 19
Publication Committee of the
New York Charity Organization Society, 1908
https://books.google.com/books?id=oCYrAAAAYAAJ
C&C Jan 4, 1908
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=oCYrAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA1305
“Monongah” by Paul U. Kellogg
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=oCYrAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA1313
According to Kellogg “the company,” responsible for the deaths of 362 breadwinners, was “considered liberal” because:
It has never put a widow out of a house; if necessary it has sheltered her family as much as a year; has given her a chance to make a start at washings, or set her up in a boarding house, and required men to patronize her: or it has given her children employment.
The fact that those children would have to leave school in order to accept the kind offer to sacrifice childhood to become little breadwinners, is not mentioned by Kellogg.
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The Ballad Of Springhill by Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl
Re Mine Disasters of Springhill, Nova Scotia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springhill_mining_disaster
“Bone and blood is the price of coal.”