At some point during the miners’ shift in Number 9 that November, one of the four gigantic fans that were meant to suck the methane out of the tunnels stopped running. There was supposed to be an alarm system tied to the fans rotation, but someone had disabled it. Unbeknownst to the workers, the tunnels started to fill with methane. This alone could have killed the entire crew, but at about five-thirty in the morning, there was an explosion so powerful that it rattled the windows of a house twelve miles away. Seventy-eight workers died.

This might not have been such a remarkable incident in the coal fields; deadly accidents happened all the time. But the public comments on the behalf of the officials suggested that no one cared. One public relations flack for Consolidation Coal said that the explosion was “something that we have to live with.” An assistant secretary from the Department of the Interior parroted the comments, and the governor of West Virginia, wringing his hands, conceded that “we must recognize that this is a hazardous business and what has occurred here is one of the hazards of being a miner.” Politely, the governor intoned, the miners could fuck off and die.

One of John L. Lewis’s successors at the head of the UMWA, Tony Boyle, didn’t feel much different. In a speech he gave just days afterward, Boyle praised “Consolidation Coal Company’s safety record and its history of cooperation with the union,” Bradley writes. “He reminded the families, as if they did not already know it, that coal mining was a very dangerous way to make a living.” There wasn’t any friction between the coal companies and the union’s leadership. “I hated him right then,” a twenty-one-year-old coal miner’s widow told the Washington Post.