Abstract
In August 1919, deputy sheriffs shot and bludgeoned to death UMWA organizer Fannie Sellins outside of the Allegheny Coal and Coke Company in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. Even in death, Sellins defied the lords of coal and steel: almost ten thousand miners marched in her funeral. This was no extraordinary circumstance. As Michael K. Rosenow writes in Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865–1920, “The decades after the Civil War produced moments of ritual creation and consolidation where . . . workers had established a set of practices that became routine when they met death in any number of ways but especially mass tragedy and labor violence” (p. 143). Workers meeting grim ends at the hands of company guards and militias, and due to dangerous work processes, are common themes in Gilded Age and Progressive Era history; Rosenow renders familiar ground new by asking how the working class interpreted and acted on these modern ways of dying.
Hazards, catastrophic injuries, and fatalities abounded in the new industries of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Muckrakers and reformers wrote powerful, paternalistic exposés on behalf of workers who organized against the rigid calculus of labor discipline and efficiency. Chapter 1, “The Marks of Capital,” provides the conceptual framework for this book. Here, Rosenow explains how workers’ bodies became sites of conflict. For example, he writes that “Theories of contract and trends in corporate accounting encouraged employers to consider workers as labor power that was distinct from the person who performed the work” (p. 15). In other forums, middle-class writers applauded dangerous workplaces as a bulwark against the creeping effeminacy of the office. Workers, most of all, weighed into this debate by organizing labor unions and asserting counternarratives of “solidarity and mutualism over individualism” (p. 40).
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 feature case studies that round out Rosenow’s study, which readers of this journal will find valuable. No course in labor history is complete without a discussion of the Haymarket Affair or the disasters that entombed miners in their steps; Death and Dying in the Working Class examines the politics of death that developed in the aftermath of these incidents and uncovers new insights. Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, for example, did not become a burial ground for radicals by happenstance. Indeed, as Rosenow shows, the Haymarket Affair continued well after the executions of August Spies, Albert Parsons, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer (the fifth decedent, Louis Ling, committed suicide before his execution date). The five men were temporarily interred at the cemetery until its president, who had concerns about the consequences of such a decision, permitted the anarchists to be permanently buried more than one month after their deaths. For Rosenow, “Waldheim became a symbolic space that perpetuated a countermemory of the Haymarket tragedy and fostered a democratic sympathy with radicals of subsequent generations” (p. 66). The second case study takes readers to southern Illinois mining communities from 1883 to 1910, where “the revelry of death” was unending (p. 79). The 1883 Diamond Mine disaster, which claimed sixty-nine miners, “disrupted conventional rituals of dying and burial” (p. 71), as only twenty-eight bodies were recovered and the coal operator controlled the entire recovery process. “The officials of the Diamond mine carefully scripted the process of reclamation, identification, and burial . . . Here at Diamond, employer power trumped familial prerogative,” writes Rosenow (p. 76).
Rosenow turns his attention to Homestead, Pennsylvania for the final case study. The aftermath of the 1892 clash that claimed seven workers “reflected the nature of living in Homestead in the early 1890s, as the diverse population turned from the extraordinary events of the battle to the traditions of providing a respectable burial for the departed” (p. 103). Fraternal organizations, ethnic clubs, and churches served important roles in organizing services for the dead, but a new dynamic—class struggle—found its way into the funeral orations.
Death and Dying in the Working Class is an excellent contribution to labor and working-class historiography. Rosenow adeptly documents Mother Jones’s timeless injunction to “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”