Where the Sun Never Shines:

...Given the increasingly narrow focus of most historians, it is refreshing to watch someone try to transcend the boundaries of any one of these approaches...

...Long is at her best in the passages that detail the struggles of coal miners and their families against the greedy coal companies...

...and the power of the state backing up the company...

...In her introduction, Long notes that "to do justice to the complexity of the real world," she must include "women's history, labor union history, business history, the history of work and of technology, and the history of working-class communities and cultures...

...Colorado Governor Elias Ammons demonstrated his sympathy for Rockefeller through both the pen and the sword...

...He had Ivy Lee, Rockefeller's publicist, compose his strike reports to President Woodrow Wilson, and at the same time he turned over the Colorado National Guard to reinforce company guards...

...She strongly criticizes the UMWA leadership for lacking the "visionary boldness" necessary to call a nationwide work stoppage in support of the Colorado strikers, but does not offer a serious discussion of how such a strike would have fared against the superior resources of the mine operators...

...stood out as a reminder of another era...

...The book ends with the rise of corporate liberalism as companies retreated from overt repression to more subtle anti-union tactics...

...But as the Pittston strike shows, the change was more of style than substance...

...Instead, coal operators made money by cheating workers in weighing coal (at one mine, a man who weighed 155 pounds found that on a company scale he weighed only 35 pounds) and in forcing workers to buy at overpriced company stores...

...Miners still die of black lung disease, and companies don't think twice before cutting off health insurance to ailing retirees...

...But Long is not content just to weave together various historiographical methods...

...rich, well-connected mine operators...

...Thus, according to Long, the miner developed "an oblique perception that taking militant (at times military) action to improve his condition presented less risk to his life than did going to work...

...Where the book falters is in trying to pack too much material into such a short space...

...When the miners and their supporters occupied buildings and blocked roads, they recalled the sit-down strikers of the 1930s, while the involvement of entire families and towns brought to mind the days when unions stood at the center of community life...

...While acts of intimidation by armed company guards were a constant, at Ludlow guards opened fire on the strikers' camp, killing two women and eleven small children...

...The company, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co., was controlled by John D. Rockefeller and railroad magnate George Gould...

...That strike, which lasted for fourteen months and involved thousands of workers, featured, in a somewhat exaggerated fashion, many of the elements that were typical of labor relations in the turn-of-the-century coal industry...

...strike of 1913-14...

...The Colorado strike is the central event of the book, with the rest of the tale reading as either prologue or epilogue...

...While the chapters on the strike feature considerably more detail than events covered elsewhere in the book, even here Long glosses over important issues...

...she also tries to cover events which start in eighteenth century Great Britain and transverse two generations of mining in two separate regions of the United States all in the space of 331 pages...

...armed company guards...

...Long elegantly conveys the strength of character miners exhibited in doing battle with the powerful coal companies, and their creative responses to the challenges of building communities and unions in the oppressive company towns...

...Moreover, the strikers' decision to dress in camouflage, motivated by a practical desire to make it difficult for company guards to identify individual miners, was also a grim reminder of the days when strikes often degenerated into armed conflict...

...The passages on life in the coal communities, which rely heavily on journals kept by miners and reports filed by state inspectors, make note of the important role that women played in mining communities...

...Despite the camouflage, and scattered outbreaks of violence, the Pittston strike was tame by historical standards...

...While confrontations with armed company guards could result in death, underground accidents were a much more constant danger...

...Since miners were paid not by the hour, but by the ton, there was little incentive for companies to improve productivity...

...Long has set out to write a history of coal mining in this country from its antecedents in England's Industrial Revolution until 1920, the year John L. Lewis became president of the UMWA...

...While we all know that mining is dirty work, Long forces the reader to consider the challenge of keeping clothes and house clean in the midst of the sooty coal mines...

...These elements included workers of many different ethnic backgrounds...

...For example, in the Ludlow Tent Colony, which was the largest of the strikers' camps, there were twelve hundred individuals who spoke twenty-four different languages...

...Companies treated workers as replaceable parts, failing to take even the simplest precautions to make the mines safer...

...Where the Sun Never Shines consists of two roughly equal parts: the first half offers a broad overview of coal mining in this country in the nineteenth century, while the second half focuses on the coal industry in the American West, climaxing with the great Colorado Fuel and Iron Co...

...Where the Sun Never Shines may not be the definitive history of the early years of coal mining in this country, but it does shed considerable light on life in mining communities...

...For example, in other countries one man would set off underground explosions at night while the mines were empty, but in the United States each miner fired his own explosive shots, so an errant explosion would kill dozens of men at once...

...Andrew Strom In a time when labor-management struggles are as likely to take place in a boardroom as on a picket line, the recent strike by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against the Pittston Coal Co...

...As Pittston fades from the headlines, this seems like an especially appropriate time for an account of the early struggles miners waged just to reach the point where the sun occasionally peeks into the mines.ks into the mines...

...The subtitle of Priscilla Long's new book, Where the Sun Never Shines, is A History of America's Bloody Coal Industry, and in it Long offers an explanation for the ability miners have so often displayed to stand up to powerful coal companies...