After the disaster, Nader began looking into the finances of the UMWA with the sneaking suspicion that Tony Boyle was fleecing the union. It turned out he was right: Boyle was exceedingly corrupt. The union was, for Boyle, a surefire way for him and his family to get rich. When he was a union official in Montana, Boyle pressured inspectors to close mines owned by rivals to help those owned by his brother. As head of the UMWA, he installed family members in no-show jobs that paid high salaries. Boyle also used the members’ massive pension fund to enrich himself. He kept the money in a bank owned by the union, in an interest-free account, meaning that retirees were lending the bank millions of dollars for free. For this, Boyle sat on the board of the bank, received what in today’s dollars equates to a six-figure salary, and often slept through meetings. Boyle’s wealth, you might say, was contingent on having no problem with seventy-eight people dying in the dark of a West Virginia coal mine.

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.

A lot of workers responded to this tacit, cowardly pact with business as they did in the 1930s: they weren’t having it. Beginning in the 1960s, there was wave after wave of wildcat strikes across the industries of coal mining, automobile, trucking, education, railroad, construction, and transit. Workers were extraordinarily militant at the time, and to my contemporary eyes, fucking crazy. During one strike in New York City, workers shut down the metropolis by raising the drawbridges and taking fuses, keys, handles, and electrical parts with them as they walked off the job. And it wasn’t just about money. Workers wanted much more than just raises and guaranteed cost-of-living adjustments; they wanted racial equity, healthy communities, and responsive, politically active unions. And they were willing to fight for it.

It’s a simple process that recurs throughout history: workers see injustice, they organize each other, and they fight for change. Institutions and their leaders are often worthless, corrupt, intransigent, cowardly, moronic, or some delightful combination thereof. Bradley’s book, in grisly detail, shows what the basic project of democracy is up against, and how it might triumph again. We mourn Yablonski—and everyone else who died so the masses could see a better world—but it is never about one person. In fact, if we have any imagination at all, every leader will disappoint us. This isn’t a reason to give up on the process. In fact, this is yet another point that the taxi driver Joe hears from his wife Edna in Waiting for Lefty.

Edna: When in the hell will you get wise—

Joe: I’m not so dumb as you think! But you are talking like a red.

Edna: I don’t know what that means. But when a man knocks you down you get up and kiss his fist! You gutless piece of bologna.

Joe: One man can’t—

Edna (with great joy): I don’t say one man! I say a hundred, a thousand, a whole million, I say. But start in your own union. Get those hack boys together! Sweep out those racketeers like a pile of dirt! . . . Goddamnit! I’m tired of slavery and sleepless nights.