Mutilation and metaphor: managing the Monongah dead^*

* ‘What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!’ George Eliot.

ABSTRACT

This article documents the use of metaphor in coordinating ‘backstage’ responses to the greatest mine disaster in US history, which left hundreds dead, and many were mutilated beyond recognition. The use of metaphor is illustrated in the handling of the dead, from the point of discovery of carnage in the mines through to burial, including ‘identification’ of unrecognizable bodies and body parts – a system of actions that remained unintelligible for over a century. This research illustrates the importance of emergent, unprescribed, furtive, and coordinated actions in responding to an unexpected and catastrophic incident. Discussion suggests the general import of emergent order for systems of domination in history, command economies, and rational-legal administrations, including organized responses to mass death.

KEYWORDS:

• Body
• backstage
• disaster
• metaphor
• emergent order
• Monongah mines

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* ‘What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!’ George Eliot.

1 Research ranges from prehistoric placement of body with weapons and travel accouterments (Zahl 1949; Thomas 2000) to ancient Greek stelae (Leader 1997), Etruscan funerary art (Holliday 1990), Hmong funeral music (Falk 2003), Teotihuacan mortuary practices (Buikstra 1996), medieval funeral imagery, body, and gender (Bynum 1991; Stanford 2007), ‘social landscape’ of cemeteries (Warner 1959), ‘beautiful’ and ‘invisible’ deaths (Aries 1981; Tredennick 2010), twentieth-century funerary practices (Laderman 2003), and contemporary commodification of kin and body parts (Sharp 2001); knowledge gained ranges from diet and disease to belief systems and gender, art and music, living patterns and social status, commemoration, and commerce.

2 The literature on genocide and industrial accidents is informative (Cherniack 1986; Wyschogrod 1990; McEvoy 1995; Melson 1996; Oliver-Smith 1996; Wistrich 1997; Greenwald 2002; Kosicki 2007; Komar 2008; Todd 2009; Card 2011) but the research on war, particularly World War I, offers some of the best research and analysis on responses to the dead; see, for example, the work of Bourke (1996, 2004); Becker (1993) Sherman (1998); Heathorn (2005); and Lennard (2011).

3 The impact of World War I’s mass death and carnage should not be underestimated. Bourke provides illustrative examples for World War I, particularly in Chapter 5, ‘Re-membering,’ in Dismembering the Male. Giraudoux and Sergeant (1917) in ‘First Dead’ also provide aftermath descriptions that are echoed in many accounts. Websites offer numerous World War I photographic displays but not much narrative; see, for example: http://worldwartwozone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/9415-bloody-hell-warning-graphic-images-of-war-dead/ (accessed July 9, 2016). This ‘lust for the visuality of catastrophe’ in the aftermath of World War I attracted intellectuals, including Ernst Junger, who contributed ‘introductory essays to seven photo albums depicting contemporary catastrophic events’ (Gil 2010).

4 This problem is not unique to disasters, as this article will suggest. Emergent order poses a general problem to theory, as well as research (Rawls 1990).

5 There are factors implicated but not argued in these accounts: local contexts, cultures and contingencies, beliefs, traditions, and geography; notoriety of the event and access to its aftermath; prerogatives of proprietorship, including selection of rescue-and-recovery personnel; status, age, ethnicity, and gender of victims and witnesses, including proximity of kin and clan. For a book-length example, see Dilley (1900) and for an exhaustive list and brief descriptions of mine disasters in the UK, see The Coalmining History Research Center. For the place of these factors outside of US–European contexts, see Oliver-Smith (1996).

6 Changes and their social impact are not to be underestimated: cordoning and crowd control, professionally managed information, and specially trained personnel have become as much an expected part of the response to disaster and mass death as sorrow.

7 There are noted exceptions. For example, Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of the presentation of self, which recognizes the need ‘to switch back and forth between many complicated roles’, has been dichotomized in organizational studies into ‘front-stage-backstage’ distinctions. Still, there are interrelated conceptual and empirical problems when organizations are viewed at the level of role and interaction. The adaptation of an interactional level of analysis produced insight and interesting results when roles morphed into functions; for example, in recognizing organization as ‘negotiated order’. However, ‘negotiating science’ or ‘negotiating law’ or ‘negotiating facts’ are, too often, viewed as normative aberrancies rather than as integral parts of institutional order; also, the normative view of organizations is supported by the absence of historical understanding. For a discussion of Goffman and the problems with interaction, emergent order, and structure, see Rawls (1990); Collins (1996); and Hall (1997). For negotiated order in law, technology, science, pharmacy and accounting, see: Skolnick (1966); Johnston (1985); Mesler (1985); Wagner (1995); and Basu, Dirsmith, and Gupta (1999). For the absence of an historical perspective, see Schneider (1992). For a long-term, deep-seated, and comparative view of emergent and negotiated order, see Kozminski and Tropea (1982); Tropea and Sterniczuk (1988) Tropea (1991, 1987a, 1987b, 1989).

8 Since these observations, emergent networks have attracted interest; see, for example, Varda et al. (2009).

9 Such elements of organization are raised to the level of ‘principles’ or primary tasks, with information control of first importance; for example, the first of the ‘first principles’ in victim identification is ‘information management’ (Interpol 2009, 3), while a primary task is to ‘manage information’ (Morgan, Tidball-Binz, and van Alphen 2009, 4).

10 For a special volume of research articles dedicated to the use of metaphor, see Culture and Organization, Volume 17, Issue 5, 2011.

11 For flawed claims about the Monongah disaster, see: a folklorist’s claims about the death of 11-year-old, ‘Devil’ Johnny Keney’ (Korson 1943, 146); about the number of dead in a labour publication (Todd 1957; The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health); and about men who supposedly died but were not reported (McAteer 2007, Chapter 15; Tropea 2008). It should be noted that Reviewer 2, in response to an earlier draft of this article, using an example from the Sago mine disaster of 2 January 2006, reminded the author that the role of myth did not entirely die with contemporary rationality.

12 For examples of striking miners and company control in this period in the US, see: ‘A Study of Slavs, Strikes and Unions’ (Greene 1964) and ‘The Ludlow Massacre’ (Walker 2003). Variations in company responses and results in handling bodies in the aftermath of explosions are illustrated by: the Oaks Colliery in the UK in 1866, where 358 out of the 360 dead were identified, though 170 remained buried in the mines (The Coalmining History Research Center); Fraterville Mine in Tennessee in 1902 where over 30 of the 216 dead remained unidentified (Fowler 2012); and the Monongah Mines in West Virginia in 1907, where all of the dead were identified. For changing relationships among labor, record-keeping (accounting), and services in the transformation from paternalistic to alienated capitalist mining enterprises (see Michael and Nelson 1998).

13 See, for example: Korson (1943); Bonasso (2003); McAteer (2007); Wilson (2011); and Calabrese (2012).

14 Crucial questions that motivated the research are indicated by: What was the nature of rescue and recovery efforts administered by company agents when undisciplined by state mandates, organized labor, labor rights, liability laws, professional control, and identification technologies? In the absence of such factors, what shaped the response, beyond the need to resume production in the mines? How was the response influenced by the dead’s kin and clan – clamouring at the mine head? What commands and controls enabled coordinated actions amidst the chaos of the disaster? How did the organized response to the disaster affect the disaster’s history?

15 For research that addresses the sense of body integrity and contextualizes it in relationship to other factors, such as social class (see Richardson 1987; O’Connor 1997).

16 The West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University, holds the records of the Monongah Mines Relief Committee (MMRC 1910), which contains the MMRC final report (Box 1), files on the deceased miners (Boxes 2–13), correspondence, notes, and documentation related to the explosions (Boxes 14–15), and two storage boxes, which contain the company survey. The MMRC final report is listed separately in References.

17 The significance of the Italians for this research is more methodological than cultural. They constituted almost 50% of the Monongah dead and were largely buried in one cemetery, for which documentation provides the location of grave sites. (This is unlike the American dead who were buried in a number of locations, at some distance, as well as nearby.) There were other differences that enabled documentation. Unlike the other transnational migrants, from South and East Europe, who were subjects of empires, Italians immigrated with citizenship status. There was an Italian consulate office within eight miles of the site of the explosion, as well as an Italian church in Monongah, a mission of the Scalabrinians (Brown 1996). These institutions of state and church enabled more robust information in the files of the dead Italians; for example, communications to and from the MMRC and Italian village and church administrations. Additionally, the company’s special relationship to the Italian church (subsidized it through monies withdrawn from the miners’ pay) provided a registry of miners and additional information on the Italian priest’s involvement with parishioners, not available for the other miners. For these reasons, much of the data and most of the incidents provided in this article are related to the Italian cohort of the dead. For readers interested in the historical context of immigrants and the bituminous coal-mining region, see: US Immigration Commission (1911); for interest in the company town, see: Porteous (1970); for interest in West Virginia and Italians, from labor abuse and community-level study to folk lore, see, Wolfe (1979); Ward (1979); and Bailey (1991).

18 Many identifiable and, in some cases intact, human carcasses, as well as those unidentifiable were found:

When the faces of the rooms were reached, however bodies were found in all conceivable conditions and positions. Some, neither burned nor bruised, were found lying in the act of making an undercut, pick in hand; some in sitting posture with head bowed, resting in their hands … while in a small hole in the rib of this heading the body of a trapper boy was found in a sitting posture without a mark of any kind. (Haas 1908, 13–14)

19 It bears noting that description of procedures under the auspices of the coroner’s office is provided by Haas, a company engineer, not the coroner, E.S. Amos, a political appointee. The company, not the coroner, administered handling bodies from discovery to burial. The coroner’s normal responsibility was to hold inquests into violent, sudden, or suspicious deaths, which was done a month after the explosion. Coroners were generally ‘not competent to perform autopsies’, were politically elected or politically appointed without qualifications in medicine or law, were often identified with incompetence, such as leaving unrevealed ‘hidden murders’ or unethical behavior, such as diverting ‘business to the private undertaker’, and often did not conduct inquests when ‘wage-earners’ lost ‘their lives in factories, mills and mines’ (Mitchell 1911, 76; Turrentine 1941, 276–277; Leflar 1955, 268). There was little company motivation to delegate authority to the coroner other than to engage more medical personnel to assist in the described procedures.

20 This is indicated in MMRC miners’ files, where women chose not to view ‘body’.

21 This portends the political use of grief which finds some vindication in national legislation, though the expression of political ardor and intent was largely contained at the site of the disaster; see: Holst-Warhaft (2000); and Graebner (1976).

22 The cemetery diagram, lists Nicolo’s name for two Grave Sites, Row E, Grave Site 2 and Row L, Grave Site 3 (cemetery diagram, MMRS, Box 16).

23 There are many elements that produced this change, including recognitions of open systems, non-linearity, equifinality, multifinality, situational shaping of rules, roles, and actions, unprescribed networks, informal negotiations, emergent orders, and, as well with the influence of Gareth Morgan, metaphor, meaning, and ‘agentic understanding’.

24 Mechanism can be understood as a natural or established process by which something takes place or is brought about.

25 Many of these problems relate to conceptualizations of authority; see Onuf and Klink (1989), for an insightful discussion of this matter.

26 Kiefer and Montjoy point out that

only one thing disintegrated as fast as the earthen levees that were supposed to protect the city, and that was the intergovernmental relationship that is supposed to connect local, state and federal officials before, during and after such a catastrophe. (2006, 122)

For similar organizational observations on that disaster see Garnett and Kouzmin (2007).

27 In meetings with Ken Stottlemire, son of a West Virginia miner who worked on body recovery at the Farmington mine explosion in 1954, the author was informed that Ken’s father confirmed the piecing together of body parts for some form of presentation above ground, reminiscent of procedures in the 1907 Monongah disaster.

28 For relevant theoretical issues, see Hall’s (1997) discussion of ‘mesodomain analysis’.