The Responsibility of Remembering the Castle Gate Mine Disaster (1924)

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 labor 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 3 years later in 1927.

What do we owe to the Castle Gate deaths, but also to thousands of others who perished while laboring under grim conditions in the nation’s industry?

The social memory of lives lost in mass destruction involves acts of remembering. In ritual commemorations, it is a moral imperative to remember the proper names of those killed in wars or disasters.

The labor of memorializing the names of those killed in Castle Gate has been done by regional civic organizations, 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 Historic 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).

But we also have the obligation to understand and narrate their historical experience. Regional memory in Utah recognizes the harsh experiences of 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. Indeed, Utah’s official historiography incorporates these facts in the state’s educational curricula.

Abuses, exploitation, and other injustices directed a significant number of miners and workers in other industries toward unionism as a legitimate political activism. Although immigrant strikers were labeled un-American by the media and the reigning at the time Ku Klux Klan, their unionization expressed the “labor’s version of Americanism”: demanding the right to organize for mutual protection and “an American standard of living, by which they meant higher wages, shorter working hours, and decent working conditions.”

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 (https://ergon.scienzine.com/article/articles/castle-gate-mine-disaster-centenary).

My motivation to honor the Castle Gate Mine Disaster was enhanced by the knowledge that some ethnic institutions shy away from meaningfully exploring, even recognizing, this past. It is not rare for identity narratives to mention the struggles of the early immigrant laborers 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 immigrants died while laboring 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 idealizations of migrants’ struggle and success as well as national mythologies of equal opportunity and fairness. Not only did thousands of workers laboring 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.

Yiorgos Anagnostou
The Ohio State University