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Hellraisers Journal – Monday November 29, 1909
Cherry, Illinois – Heartbreaking Scenes Described by Luella Twining
From the Appeal to Reason of November 27, 1909:
From page 5:
MINERS MURDERED.
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Owners of St. Paul Mine Guilty of Manslaughter.
-Cherry Under Martial Law.
—–BY [LUELLA] TWINING
Special Correspondence to the Appeal.
Cherry, Ill., Nov. 17.-To stay in Cherry, Ill., one half an hour is to be convinced that the miners entombed there were murdered as surely as though the mine owners had taken them into the road and shot them down one by one.
“Why were the miners kept at work two hours after the fire had broken out in the mine?” is the question asked by the bereaved widows. It is not put in that form. I heard it asked in many different ways. A German woman looked at me wildly and asked, “What for they no tell my man? He work two hours by the fire. Now he die. They murder my man.” These poor women do not wait for the mine owners to answer. “They care for mine and no for man,” a Lithuanian said to me and indeed one is forced to believe it. They do not state the question as clearly as Karl Marx’s exposition of the profit system, but it is equally as illuminating. If the United Mine Workers should murder 500 mine owners would they not be punished?
The crime the mine owners have committed is manslaughter. Will they be found guilty? Ex-President Roosevelt said, “The malefactor of great wealth should be as amenable to the law as the person without wealth or influence.”
I came to Cherry thinking I might be of some little service here. I discovered, upon inquiry on the train coming out of Chicago, that seven firemen were aboard, bound for Cherry. I had been told that it is a difficult place to reach and I found the report to be true. The conductor said a special train would meet us at Mendota and take us to Cherry. The special proved to be an engine. I was determined to go on it, but they refused to take me, saying it would be such a cold trip it would make me sick. I finally managed to climb into a box car which took me as far as Ladd. There I was fortunate enough to get into a “caboose”-quiet luxurious after a freight car and thus reached Cherry. I was more lucky than many.
However for every way I looked, from Mendota on, the roads were black with people walking to Cherry. Many of them have a father or brothers, and all, friends in the mine, and were too anxious to wait for the train. At Ladd I took some of the women and children into the caboose with me, or rather, persuaded them to get in. They were too timid to withstand the harsh looks we received from a priest and some nuns for whom the caboose had been ordered. One of the women, a German, looked particularly forlorn and miserable. She had six children with her, all poorly clad, almost in rags. Their hands were bare and red from the bitter cold wind. I asked the woman, “Have you friends in Cherry?” she began to weep and said, My man, he is in the mine. He will be dead.” Looking down at the baby in her arms she said, “Baby says, I no papa now, I stay with mamma.” She lives in Streator and her husband worked in the mine at Cherry. “You go with me to shaft?” she pleadingly asked me.
Just as soon as the train stopped every one ran for the “shaft.” The wind was bitter cold and almost all were thinly and poorly clothed. When we reached the shaft all stopped and wept. The firemen were working there and some of the mine owners were standing around “superintending the job,” dressed in costly furs. The mine is sealed and two men were engaged in shoveling sand to securely cover it. A woman called out to him, “Why don’t you hit them on the head, why don’t you, I say?” All had the feeling that the men were being buried alive. The mine was sealed to save the mine. A young miner, John Martin, talking to a crowd of miners, said; “Why we would all go down and get the boys out. We’re not cowards, we’re not afraid. Just let them open the mine. It isn’t too hot for us.”
The women, with children pulling at their skirts or in their arms, stand around the shaft all day. The cold is intense.
It will certainly kill them. I asked a woman with a baby in her arms why she didn’t go home and rest herself. She only moaned, “I can’t, not till they get Henry out of that mine.” The women are crazed with grief. Property is more valuable than human lives. Plenty of men will take the places of those that are gone.
Cause of the Disaster.
Chief clerk of the mine, F. P. Buck, made the statement that the electric light facilities in shaft No. 2 were out of order and that, pending the arrival of a new electric supply cable, open torches were stuck in the walls of the shaft. The criminality of this is not apparent without knowing that the mine is filled with fire damp constantly and sufficient currents of air will cause an explosion and set the timber on fire. In this way a bale of hay was ignited and the terrific explosion of fire damp took place.
Dr. A. H. Malin, the coroner, State Attorney Eckert, President Earling of the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad, together with other officials, are in Cherry. The railroad company owns the mine.
State Militia in Cherry.
Governor Deneen, at the request of the mine owners called out the Illinois national guard. It would make your heart bleed to see the poor bereaved women and children surrounded by soldiers. The women are incensed against them, and also the railroad officials, clad in furs and comfortably ensconced in private cars. It maddens the women to see these persons walking about pretending to be doing something while the men are lying in the mines. Who knows how many may still live! It makes the women frantic to have the reporters turn the cameras on them. Even their grief is turned into profits, they feel the bitterness of it.
No Safety Appliances-Law Violated.
The mine owners say the mine cannot be unsealed till it cools. The miners say it is sufficiently cool for the rescuers to enter. Those who are not experts cannot judge of this, but we do know the mine owners are guilty of manslaughter because of their violation of the mining laws. We also know they have been guilty of criminal negligence.
Comrade Duncan MacDonald, president of the United Mine Workers of America for District No 12, made the following statement to prove a violation of the mining laws:
Structure around the mine shaft was built entirely of pine timber, which is highly inflamable. Had the structure at the shaft been built of steel, concrete and brick the disaster would never have occurred. No precautions had been taken by the company to safeguard men in time of fire.
The open torch kept flaming in the second vein of the mine was a constant menace.
The escape shaft was timbered, which was against the law. The stairs leading up to it were wooden and were useless because of the flames.
The main entries were timbered, which is against the law.
It did not have equipment for a sufficient water pressure for use in emergencies.
Lack of sufficient hose in the mine made the fire fighting ineffectual. No fire drill had ever been practice.
We can all appreciate Frank J. Hayes‘ telegram from Toronto. Comrade Hayes is secretary of the United Mine Workers of America. He wired:
Such negligence as that which has been shown at Cherry is murder. Mine disasters could be prevented if human life were not cheaper than safety appliances.
The mining commission, the state mining board, the mine inspectors, the mine owners, the president of the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad meet every day and do nothing. The heartstricken widows linger at the shaft, hoping against hope that the mine may be unsealed and the bodies of their loved ones rescued. The men are entombed, some say 400 and some say 700 of them. Their widows will struggle to support their children-some were left with eight-and there is no redress for them.
Mining disasters will occur so long as coal is mined for profits. You could form some idea of the pitiful aspect Cherry presents if you could imagine that in your home town, wherever that may be, a corpse lies in every home, and in some, three or four corpses, and that your loved ones would be alive and well had they not been brutally murdered by persons owning the industries of the place. It is useless to endeavor to conjure a picture to illustrate conditions in Cherry, for the same desolation, poverty and misery must be present such as exists in every mining camp. Is it not a crime that those who dig the coal to turn the wheels of industry should live in such squalor? No wonder the United Mine Workers have declared for Socialism!
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
From page 1:
“THE CHARNEL HOUSE AT CHERRY”
—–FORTY miners, blackened and begrimed and grasping for breath, came up-out of the fiery tomb at Cherry Saturday. These men refused to die although the mine had been sealed by orders of the owners five days previous. “sealing the mine” is just the same as taking a man and putting im a furnace and closing and locking the door. This “sealing order” was given after a conference between the mine owners and the state officials. The miners’ weeping wives were not consulted. Nor were the fatherless children. Nor were the brave souls that volunteered to risk their lives in an attempt to rescue their comrades in the mine permitted to go below to ascertain whether there were chances for escape for the 500 fathers and husbands and brothers. The mine was on fire-on fire because of criminal neglect of owners and state officials-and the evidence of this criminality must be covered up and the property, worth millions, preserved. Human lives did not count. And the mine was “sealed up” and the doom of the men and boys below likewise sealed.
Frantic mothers and sobbing children begged and pleaded with the representatives of Dives and Pluto, but the work of sealing and killing went relentlessly on. Then the sturdy manhood of the miners on top asserted itself. President McDonald of the miners’ union, backed by public sentiment and a half million miners, demanded that the fiery tomb be unsealed.
It was a fight between Life and Dollars. Life won, but at a terrible sacrifice, and only temporarily. It is now know that two hundred of the five hundred men who were declared dead by the mine owners were alive on Saturday and the work of rescue is progressing rapidly.
A few thousand dollars out of the $4,000,000 profits coined last year by the St. Paul railroad, the owner of the Cherry mine, would have made the mine reasonably safe. But dividends must be paid. And superintendents and foremen and bosses knew the unless the mine brought its dole of profits they would be displaced. Torches were used instead of electric lights, and from the flames of the torches, the fire started that caused the disaster. The world gasps with horror for a few days and then settles back into its usual state of lethargy to by horrified at the disaster that will occur next week from the same cause-PROFITS.
But the widows and orphans and the survivors at Cherry will not forget, nor will the Socialists forget. We will remember the heroes of Cherry who were murdered by the human ghouls in their mad scramble for dollars, and every comrade will press the battle on to the victory that will abolish the private ownership of coal mines. And then the nation will make them safe or abandon them for other means to light and heat the world.
Let us not forget Cherry and its living!
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Funds are needed for relief and for the prosecution of the men responsible for this disaster. Local unions should appropriate funds, and a canvass of the community should be made at once. Money may to sent to the Secretary-Treasurer United Mine Workers of America, Indianapolis, Ind., or to the National Secretary of the Socialist Party, J. Mahlon Barnes, 120 Washington S., Chicago. Ill.
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“They care for Mine and NO for Man.”—A Lithuanian Miner.
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[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones, Wake fr Slumber, AtR p2, Oct 23, 1909
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/091023-appealtoreason-w725.pdf
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Nov 27, 1909
https://www.newspapers.com/image/66982303/
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/091127-appealtoreason-w730.pdf
IMAGE
Cherry MnDs, Thanksgiving Day, Spk Prs p1, Nov 25, 1909
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88085947/1909-11-25/ed-1/seq-1/
See also:
Tag: Great Cherry Mine Disaster of 1909
https://weneverforget.org/tag/great-cherry-mine-disaster-of-1909/
“Eight days in a Burning Mine”
-as told by Thomas White to Louis Murphy
-illustrated by Steven Spurrier
From The Wide World Magazine of October 1911
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.319510028021560&view=2up&seq=592
https://web.archive.org/web/20150228072345/http://www.msha.gov/century/mag/magcvr.asp
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Kathy Mattea – West Virginia Mine Disaster