Week 3 assignment

Assignment 1 Reminder

Centralia No. 5 Based on the case study by Martin, The Blast in Centralia No. 5, in Stillman, PA, Chapter 1, write a 3-4  page paper in which you:

1. Identify and explain four (4) logistical alternatives Scanlan could have addressed.

2. Analyze and discuss Scanlan’s motivation toward the Constitution (the law), bureaucracy (as a public administrator responsible to the public), and obligation.

3. Take a position on two (2) possible paths of action for Scanlan and defend your choices.

4. Research and cite at least four (4) peer-reviewed academic sources.

Your assignment must:

· Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.

· Include a cover page containing the tile of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

· Analyze the changing nature and responsibilities for managing public and nonprofit organizations.

· Use technology and information resources to research issues in modern public administration.

· Write clearly and concisely about modern public administration using proper writing mechanics.

Case Study:

The Blast in Centralia No. 5: A Mine Disaster

No One Stopped

Already the crowd had gathered. Cars clogged the short, black rock road from the highway to the mine, cars bearing curious spectators and relatives and friends of the men entombed. State troopers and deputy sheriffs and the prosecuting attorney came, and officials from

the company, the Federal Bureau of Mines, the Illinois Department of Mines and Minerals. Ambulances ar-rived, and doctors and nurses and Red Cross workers and soldiers with stretchers from Scott Field. Mine res-cue teams came, and a federal rescue unit, experts bur-

dened with masks and oxygen tanks and other awkward paraphernalia of disaster. . . .One hundred and eleven men were killed in that explosion. Killed needlessly, for almost everybody

concerned had known for months, even years, that the mine was dangerous. Yet nobody had done any-thing effective about it. Why not? Let us examine the background of the explosion. Let us study the mine and the miners, Joe Bryant and Bill Rowekamp and some others, and also the numerous people who might have saved the miners’ lives but did not. The

miners had appealed in various directions for help but got none, not from their state government nor their federal government nor their employer northeir own union. (In threading the maze of official-dom we must bear in mind four agencies in author-ity: The State of Illinois, the United States Government, the Centralia Coal Company, and the United Mine Workers of America, that is, the UMWA of John L. Lewis.) Let us seek to fix responsibility for

the disaster. . . .The Centralia Mine No. 5 was opened two miles south of Centralia in 1907. Because of its age, its maze of underground workings is extensive, covering per-

haps six square miles, but it is regarded as a medium- small mine since it employs but 250 men and produces but 2,000 tons of coal daily. It was owned by the Cen-

tralia Coal Company, an appendage of the Bell & Zoller empire, one of the Big Six among Illinois coal opera-tors. . . . The Bell & Zoller home office was in Chicago

(most of the big coal operators’ home offices are in Chicago or St. Louis); no Bell & Zoller officers or di-rectors lived at Centralia. There are in coal mines two main explosion haz-ards—coal dust and gas. Coal dust is unhealthy to breathe and highly explosive. Some of the dust raised

by machines in cutting and loading coal stays in sus-pension in the air. Some subsides to the floor and walls of the tunnels, and a local explosion will kick it back into the air where it will explode and, in turn, throw more dust into the air, which will explode; and as this chain reaction continues the explosion will propagate throughout the mine or until it reaches something that

will stop it. The best method of stopping it, a method in use for some twenty-five years, is rock dusting. Rock dusting is simply applying pulverized stone to the walls and

roof of the passageways; when a local explosion oc-curs it will throw a cloud of rock dust into the air along with the coal dust, and since rock dust is incombustible the explosion will die. Rock dusting will not prevent an explosion but it will localize one. Illinois law re-

quires rock dusting in a dangerously dusty mine. Au-thorities disagreed as to whether the Centralia mine was gassy but everyone agreed it was exceedingly dry and dusty. The men who worked in it had been com-plaining about the dust for a long time—one recalls

“the dust was over your shoetops,” another that “I used to cough up chunks of coal dust like walnuts after work”—and indeed by 1944, more than two years be-

fore the disaster, so widespread had dissatisfaction be-come that William Rowekamp, as recording secretary of Local Union 52, prepared an official complaint. But

even earlier, both state and federal inspectors had rec-ognized the danger. Let us trace the history of these warnings of disaster to come. For in the end it was this dust which did ex-

plode and kill one hundred and eleven men, and sel-dom has a major catastrophe of any kind been blueprinted so accurately so far in advance. Driscoll O. Scanlan (who led the rescue work after the disaster) went to work in a mine near Centralia when he was 16, studied engineering at night school, and worked 13 years as a mine examiner for a coal com-pany until, in 1941, he was appointed one of 16 Illinois state mine inspectors by Governor Green upon recom-

mendation of the state representative from Scanlan’s district. Speaking broadly, the job of a state inspector is to police the mine operators—to see that they comply with the state mining law, including its numerous safety provisions. But an inspector’s job is a political patron-

age job. Coal has always been deeply enmeshed in Illi- nois politics. Dwight H. Green, running for Governor the pre-ceding fall, had promised the miners that he would en-force the mining laws “to the letter of the law,” and however far below this lofty aim his administration fell

(as we shall see), Scanlan apparently took the promise

literally. Scanlan is a stubborn, righteous, zealous man

of fierce integrity. Other inspectors, arriving to inspect

a mine, would go into the office and chat with the company officials. Not Scanlan; he waited outside, and

down in the mine he talked with the miners, not the

bosses. Other inspectors, emerging, would write their

reports in the company office at the company type-

writer. Not Scanlan; he wrote on a portable in his car.

Widespread rumor had it that some inspectors spent

most of their inspection visits drinking amiably with

company officials in the hotel in town. Not Scanlan.

Other inspectors wrote the briefest reports possible,

making few recommendations and enumerating only

major violations of the mining law. Scanlan’s reports

were longer than any others (owing in part to a prolix

prose style), he listed every violation however minor,

and he made numerous recommendations for im-

provements even though they were not explicitly re-

quired by law.

Scanlan came to consider the Centralia No. 5 mine

the worst in his district. In his first report on it he made

numerous recommendations, including these: “That

haulage roads be cleaned and sprinkled. . . . That tamp-

ing of shots with coal dust be discontinued and that

clay be used. . . .” Remember those criticisms, for they

were made February 7, 1942, more than five years

before the mine blew up as a result (at least in part)

of those very malpractices.

Every three months throughout 1942, 1943, and

1944 Scanlan inspected the mine and repeated his rec-

ommendations, adding new ones: “That the mine be

sufficiently rock dusted.” And what became of his re-

ports? He mailed them to the Department of Mines and

Minerals at Springfield, the agency which supervises

coal mines and miners. Springfield is dominated by the

Statehouse, an ancient structure of spires and towers

and balconies, of colonnades and domes; on its broad

front steps Lincoln stands in stone. Inside all is gloom and

shabby gilt. The Department of Mines and Minerals

occupies three high-ceilinged rooms in a back corner of

the second floor. The Director of the Department uses

the small, comfortable, innermost office, its windows

brushed by the leaves of trees on the Statehouse lawn,

and here too the Mining Board meets. In theory, the

Mining Board makes policy to implement the mining

law, the Director executes its dictates; in practice, the

Director possesses considerable discretionary power of

his own.

In 1941 Governor Green appointed as Director

Robert M. Medill, a genial, paunchy, red-faced man

of about sixty-five. Medill had gone to work in a mine

at sixteen; he rose rapidly in management. He had a

talent for making money and he enjoyed spending it.

He entered Republican politics in 1920, served a few

years as director of the Department of Mines and Min-

erals, then returned to business (mostly managing

mines); and then, after working for Green’s election in

1940, was rewarded once more with the directorship.

Green reappointed him in 1944 with, says Medill, the

approval of “a multitude of bankers and business men

all over the state. And miners. I had the endorsement

of all four factions.” By this he means the United Mine

Workers and its smaller rival, the Progressive Mine

Workers, and the two associations of big and little op-

erators; to obtain the endorsement of all four of these

jealous, power-seeking groups is no small feat. As Di-

rector, Medill received $6,000 a year (since raised to

$8,000) plus expenses of $300 or $400 a month. He

lived in a sizable country house at Lake Springfield,

with spacious grounds and a tree-lined driveway.

To Medill’s department, then, came Driscoll Scanlan’s

inspection reports on Centralia Mine No. 5. Medill, how-

ever, did not see the first thirteen reports (1942–44); they

were handled as “routine” by Robert Weir, an unimag-

inative, harassed little man who had come up through

the ranks of the miners’ union and on recommendation

of the union had been appointed Assistant Director of

the Department by Green (at $4,000 a year, now

$5,200). When the mail brought an inspector’s report,

it went first to Medill’s secretary who shared the office

next to Medill’s with Weir. She stamped the report [with

date of receipt] . . . and put it on Weir’s desk. Sometimes,

but by no means always, Weir read the report. He gave

it to one of a half-dozen girl typists in the large outer

office. She edited the inspector’s recommendations for

errors in grammar and spelling, and incorporated them

into a form letter to the owner of the mine, closing:

“The Department endorses the recommendations

made by Inspector Scanlan and requests that you com-

ply with same.

“Will you please advise the Department upon the

completion of the recommendations set forth above?

“Thanking you . . .”

When the typist placed this letter upon his desk, Weir

signed it and it was mailed to the mine operator.

But the Centralia company did not comply with the

major recommendations Scanlan made. In fact, it did

not even bother to answer Weir’s thirteen letters based

on Scanlan’s reports. And Weir did nothing about this.

Once, early in the game, Weir considered the dusty

condition of the mine so serious that he requested the

company to correct it within ten days; but there is no

evidence that the company even replied. This continued for nearly three years. And during the

same period the federal government entered the pic-

ture. In 1941 Congress authorized the U.S. Bureau of

Mines to make periodic inspections of coal mines. But

the federal government had no enforcement power

whatever; the inspections served only research. The first

federal inspection of Centralia Mine No. 5 was made in

September of 1942. In general, the federal recommen-

dations duplicated Scanlan’s—rock dusting, improving

ventilation, wetting the coal to reduce dust—and the

federal inspectors noted that “coal dust . . . at this mine

is highly explosive, and would readily propagate an

explosion.” In all, they made 106 recommendations,

including 33 “major” ones (a government official has

defined a “major” hazard as one that “could . . . re-

sult in a disaster”). Four months passed before a copy

of this report filtered through the administrative ma-

chinery at Washington and reached the Illinois De-

partment at Springfield, but this mattered little: the

Department did nothing anyway. Subsequent federal

reports in 1943 and 1944 showed that the “major” rec-

ommendations had not been complied with. The fed-

eral bureau lacked the power to force compliance;

the Illinois Department possessed the power but failed

to act.

What of the men working in the mine during these

three years? On November 4, 1944, on instructions

from Local 52 at Centralia, William Rowekamp, the

recording secretary, composed a letter to Medill: “At the

present the condition of those roadways are very dirty

and dusty . . . they are getting dangerous. . . . But the

Coal Co. has ignored [Scanlan’s recommendations].

And we beg your prompt action on this matter.”

The Department received this letter November 6,

and four days later Weir sent Inspector Scanlan to in-

vestigate. Scanlan reported immediately:

“The haulage roads in this mine are awful dusty, and

much dust is kept in suspension all day. . . . The miners

have complained to me . . . and I have wrote it up pretty

strong on my inspection reports. . . . But to date they

have not done any adequate sprinkling. . . . Today . . .

[Superintendent Norman] Prudent said he would fix the

water tank and sprinkle the roads within a week, said

that he would have had this work done sooner, but that

they have 20 to 30 men absent each day.” (This last is

a claim by the company that its cleanup efforts were

handicapped by a wartime manpower shortage. This is

controversial. Men of fifty-nine—the average wartime

age at the mine—do not feel like spending weekends

removing coal dust or rock dusting, a disagreeable task;

winter colds caused absenteeism and miners are al-

ways laying off anyway. On the other hand, the com-

pany was interested in production and profits: as Mine

Manager Brown has said, “In the winter you can sell all

the coal you can get out. So you want top production,

you don’t want to stop to rock dust.”)

At any rate, Rowekamp’s complaint got results. On

December 2, 1944, he wrote Scanlan: “Well I am proud

to tell you that they have sprinkled the 18th North Entry

& 21st So. Entry and the main haulage road. . . . Myself

and the Members of Local Union #52 appreciate it very

much what you have done for us.” It is apparent from

this first direct move by Local 52 that Scanlan was work-

ing pretty closely with the Local to get something done.

But by the end of that month, December 1944, the

mine once more had become so dirty that Scanlan

ended his regular inspection report, “. . . if necessary the

mine should discontinue hoisting coal for a few days

until the [cleanup] work can be done.” But all Weir said

to the company was the routine “The Department

endorses. . . .”

Early in 1945 it appeared that something might be

accomplished. Scanlan, emerging from his regular in-

spection, took the unusual step of telephoning Medill

at Springfield. Medill told him to write him a letter so

Scanlan did:

“The haulage roads in this mine are in a terrible con-

dition. If a person did not see it he would not believe. . . .

Two months ago . . . the local officers [of Local Union

52] told me that . . . if [the mine manager] did not clean

the mine up they were going to prefer charges against

him before the mining board and have his certificate

canceled. I talked them out of it and told them I thought

we could get them to clean up the mine. But on this in-

spection I find that practically nothing has been done.

. . . The mine should discontinue hoisting coal . . . until

the mine is placed in a safe condition. . . . The coal dust

in this mine is highly explosive. . . .”

This stiff letter was duly stamped “Received” at

Springfield on February 23, 1945. A few days earlier a

bad report had come in from Federal Inspector Perz.

And now at last Medill himself entered the picture.

What did he do? The Superintendent at Centralia had

told Scanlan that, in order to clean up the mine, he

would have to stop producing coal, a step he was not

empowered to take. So Medill bypassed him, forward-

ing Scanlan’s letter and report to William P. Young, Bell

& Zoller’s operating vice-president at Chicago: “Dear

Bill. . . . Please let me have any comments you wish to

make. . . . Very kindest personal regards.” From his quiet, well-furnished office near the top of the Bell

Building overlooking Michigan Avenue, Young replied

immediately to “Dear Bob” [Medill]: “As you know we

have been working under a very severe handicap for the

past months. The war demand for coal . . . we are short

of men. . . . I am hopeful that the urgent demand of coal

will ease up in another month so that we may have

available both the time and labor to give proper atten-

tion to the recommendations of Inspector Scanlan. With

kindest personal regards. . . .”

A week later, on March 7, 1945, Medill forwarded

copies of this correspondence to Scanlan, adding: “I

also talked with Mr. Young on the phone, and I feel quite

sure that he is ready and willing. . . . I would suggest

that you ask the mine committee [of Local 52] to be pa-

tient a little longer, inasmuch as the coal is badly needed

at this time.”

The miners told Scanlan they’d wait till the first of

April but no longer. On March 14 Medill was to attend

a safety meeting in Belleville. Scanlan went there to dis-

cuss Centralia No. 5 with him. According to Scanlan,

“When I went up to his room he was surrounded with

coal operators . . . all having whiskey, drinking, having

a good time, and I couldn’t talk to him then, and we at-

tended the safety meeting [then] went . . . down to Otis

Miller’s saloon, and I stayed in the background drink-

ing a few cokes and waited until the crowd thinned out,

and went back up to his hotel room with him. . . . I told

him that the mine was in such condition that if the dust

became ignited that it would sweep from one end of the

mine to the other and probably kill every man in the

mine, and his reply to me was, ‘We will just have to take

that chance.’” (Medill has denied these words but not

the meeting.)

On the first of April the president of Local Union

52 asked Scanlan to attend the Local’s meeting on

April 4. The miners complained that the company had

not cleaned up the mine and, further, that one of the

face bosses, or foreman, had fired explosive charges

while the entire shift of men was in the mine. There

can be little doubt that to fire explosives on-shift in a

mine so dusty was to invite trouble—in fact, this turned

out to be what later caused the disaster—and now in

April 1945 the union filed charges against Mine Man-

ager Brown, asking the State Mining Board to revoke

his certificate of competency (this would cost him his

job and prevent his getting another in Illinois as a

mine manager). Rowekamp wrote up the charges: “. . .

And being the Mine is so dry and dusty it could of

caused an explosion. . . .”

Weir went to Centralia on April 17, 1945, but only

to investigate the charges against Brown, not to in-

quire into the condition of the mine. He told the min-

ers they should have taken their charges to the state’s

attorney. Nearly a month passed before, on May 11,

Weir wrote a memorandum to the Mining Board say-

ing that the company’s superintendent had admitted

the shots had been fired on-shift but that this was

done “in an emergency” and it wouldn’t happen

again; and the Board refused to revoke Manager

Brown’s certificate.

Meanwhile, on April 12 and 13, Scanlan had made

his regular inspection and found conditions worse than

in February. He told the Superintendent: “Now, Norman,

you claim Chicago won’t give you the time to shut your

mine down and clean it up. Now, I am going to get you

some time,” and he gave him the choice of shutting the

mine down completely or spending three days a week

cleaning up. The Superintendent, he said, replied that

he didn’t know, he’d have to “contact Chicago,” but

Scanlan replied: “I can’t possibly wait for you to con-

tact Chicago. It is about time that you fellows who op-

erate the mines get big enough to operate your mines

without contacting Chicago.” So on Scanlan’s recom-

mendation the mine produced coal only four days a

week and spent the remaining days cleaning up. For a

time Scanlan was well satisfied with the results, but by

June 25 he was again reporting excessive dust and Fed-

eral Inspector Perz was concurring: “No means are used

to allay the dust.” Following his October inspection

Scanlan once more was moved to write a letter to

Medill; but the only result was another routine letter

from Weir to the company, unanswered.

Now, one must understand that, to be effective, both

rock dusting and cleanup work must be maintained con-

tinuously. They were not at Centralia No. 5. By Decem-

ber of 1945 matters again came to a head. Scanlan wrote

to Medill, saying that Local 52 wanted a sprinkling sys-

tem installed to wet the coal, that Mine Manager Brown

had said he could not order so “unusual” an expenditure,

and that Brown’s superior, Superintendent Prudent,

“would not talk to me about it, walked away and left me

standing.” And Local 52 again attempted to take matters

into its own hands. At a special meeting on December 12

the membership voted to prefer charges against both

Mine Manager Brown and Superintendent Prudent.

Rowekamp’s official charge, typed on stationery of the

Local, was followed next day by a letter, written in long-

hand on two sheets of dime-store notepaper, and signed

by 28 miners. . . . At Springfield this communication too was duly stamped “Received.” And another Scanlan

report arrived.

Confronted with so many documents, Medill called

a meeting of the Mining Board on December 21. More-

over, he called Scanlan to Springfield and told him to

go early to the Leland Hotel, the gathering place of Re-

publican politicians, and see Ben H. Schull, a coal op-

erator and one of the operators’ two men on the Mining

Board. In his hotel room, Schull (according to Scanlan)

said he wanted to discuss privately Scanlan’s report on

Centralia No. 5, tried to persuade him to withdraw his

recommendation of a sprinkling system, and, when

Scanlan refused, told him, “you can come before the

board.” But when the Mining Board met in Medill’s

inner office, Scanlan was not called before it though he

waited all day, and after the meeting he was told that

the Board was appointing a special commission to go

to Centralia and investigate.

On this commission were Weir, two state inspec-

tors, and two members of the Mining Board itself,

Schull and Murrell Reak. Reak, a miner himself, rep-

resented the United Mine Workers of America on the

Mining Board. And Weir, too, owed his job to the

UMWA but, oddly, he had worked for Bell & Zoller for

twenty years before joining the Department, the last

three as a boss, so his position was rather ambiguous.

In fact, so unanimous were the rulings of the Mining

Board that one cannot discern any management-labor

cleavage at all but only what would be called in party

politics bipartisan deals.

The commission had before it a letter from Superin-

tendent Prudent and Manager Brown setting forth in de-

tail the company’s “absentee experience” and concluding

with a veiled suggestion that the mine might be forced to

close for good (once before, according to an inspector,

the same company had abandoned a mine rather than

go to the expense entailed in an inspector’s safety rec-

ommendation). Weir wrote to Prudent, notifying him

that the commission would visit Centralia on Decem-

ber 28 to investigate the charges against him and

Brown; Medill wrote to the company’s vice-president,

Young, at Chicago (“You are being notified of this date

so that you will have an opportunity to be present or

designate some member of your staff to be present”);

but Medill only told Rowekamp, “The committee has

been appointed and after the investigation you will be

advised of their findings and the action of the board”—

he did not tell the Local when the commission would

visit Centralia nor offer it opportunity to prove its

charges.

Rowekamp, a motorman, recalls how he first learned

of the special commission’s visit. He was working in the

mine and “Prudent told me to set out an empty and I

did and they rode out.” Prudent—remember, the com-

mission was investigating charges against Prudent—led

the commission through the mine. Rowekamp says,

“They didn’t see nothing. They didn’t get back in the

buggy runs where the dust was the worst; they stayed

on the mainline.” Even there they rode, they did not

walk through the dust. Riding in a mine car, one must

keep one’s head down. In the washhouse that after-

noon the men were angry. They waited a week or two,

then wrote to Medill asking what had been done. On

January 22, 1946, Medill replied: the Mining Board,

adopting the views of the special commission, had

found “insufficient evidence” to revoke the certificates

of Prudent and Brown.

He did not elaborate. Next day, however, he sent to

Scanlan a copy of the commission’s report. It listed sev-

eral important violations of the mining law: inadequate

rock dusting, illegal practice in opening rooms, insuffi-

cient or improperly placed telephones, more than a

hundred men working on a single split, or current, of

air. In fact, the commission generally concurred with

Scanlan, except that it did not emphasize dust nor rec-

ommend a sprinkling system. Thus in effect it overruled

Scanlan on his sprinkling recommendation, a point to

remember. It did find that the law was being violated

yet it refused to revoke the certificates of the Superin-

tendent and the Mine Manager, another point to re-

member. Weir has explained that the board felt that

improvements requiring construction, such as splitting

the airstream, would be made and that anyway “con-

ditions there were no different than at most mines in the

state.” And this is a refrain that the company and the De-

partment repeated in extenuation after the disaster. But

actually could anything be more damning? The mine

was no worse than most others; the mine blew up;

therefore any might blow up!

The miners at Centralia were not satisfied. “It come

up at the meeting,” Rowekamp recalls. Local 52 met

two Wednesday nights a month in its bare upstairs

hall. The officers sat at a big heavy table up front; the

members faced them, sitting on folding chairs which

the Local had bought second-hand from an under-

taker. Attendance was heavier now than usual, the

men were aroused, some were even telling their wives

that the mine was dangerous. They wanted to do

something. But what? The state had rebuffed them.

Well, why did they not go now to the higher officials of their own union, the UMWA? Why not to John L.

Lewis himself?

One of them has said, “You have to go through the

real procedure to get to the right man, you got to start

at the bottom and start climbing up, you see? If we

write to Lewis, he’ll refer us right back to Spud White.”

Spud White is Hugh White, the thick-necked president

of the UMWA in Illinois (District 12), appointed by

Lewis. Now, Lewis had suspended District 12’s right

to elect its own officers during the bloody strife of the

early 1930s, when the members, disgusted with what

they called his “dictator” methods and complaining of

secret payrolls, expulsions, missing funds, stolen bal-

lots, and leaders who turned up on operators’ payrolls,

had rebelled; in the end the Progressive Mine Work-

ers was formed and Lewis retained tight control of the

UMWA. A decade later the Illinois officers of UMWA

demanded that he restore their self-government, but

Lewis managed to replace them with his own men, in-

cluding Spud White. By 1946 President White, a coal

miner from the South, was consulting at high levels

with Lewis; he was receiving $10,000 a year plus ex-

penses (which usually equal salary), and he was main-

taining a spacious house on a winding lane in the

finest residential suburb of Springfield, a white house

reached by a circular drive through weeping willows

and evergreens.

Evidently the perplexed miners at Centralia already

had appealed to District 12 for help, that is to White.

Certainly Murrell Reak, the UMWA’s man on the Min-

ing Board and a close associate of White’s, had asked

Weir to furnish him with a copy of the findings of the

special commission: “I want them so I may show the dis-

trict UMWA. So they in turn may write Local Union

down there, and show them that their charges are un-

founded or rather not of a nature as to warrant the rev-

ocation of mine mgr. Certificate. . . .” Jack Ripon, the

bulky vice-president of District 12 and White’s right-

hand man, said recently, “We heard there’d been com-

plaints but we couldn’t do a thing about it; it was up to

the Mining Department to take care of it.”

And yet in the past the UMWA has stepped in

when the state failed to act. One unionist has said,

“White could have closed that mine in twenty-four

hours. All he’d have had to do was call up Medill and

tell him he was going to pull every miner in the state

if they didn’t clean it up. It’s the union’s basic re-

sponsibility—if you don’t protect your own wife and

daughter, your neighbor down the street’s not going

to do it.”36 Chapter 1/ The Search for the Scope and Purpose of Public Administration

Perhaps the miners of Local 52 knew they must go it

alone. They continued to address their official com-

plaints to the State of Illinois. On February 26

Rowekamp wrote once more to Medill: “Dear Sir: At

our regular meeting of Local Union 52. Motion made

and second which carried for rec. secy. write you that

the members of local union 52 are dissatisfied with the

report of the special investigation commission. . . .”

No answer. And so the members of Local 52 instructed

Rowekamp to write to higher authority, to their Gov-

ernor, Dwight H. Green.

It took him a long time. Elmer Moss kept asking if

he’d finished it and Rowekamp recalls, “I’d tell him,

Elmer, I can’t do that fast, that’s a serious letter, that’ll

take me a while.” He wrote it out first in pencil and

showed it to a couple of the boys and they thought it

sounded fine. Then, sitting big and awkward at his

cluttered little oak desk in the living room of his home

outside town, he typed it, slowly and carefully—“any-

thing important as that I take my time so I don’t make

mistakes, it looks too sloppified.” He used the official

stationery of the Local, bearing in one corner the de-

vice of the union—crossed shovels and picks—and in

the other “Our Motto—Justice for One and All.” He

impressed upon it the official seal—“I can write a let-

ter on my own hook but I dassen’t use the seal with-

out it’s official”—and in the washhouse the Local

officers signed it. Rowekamp made a special trip to the

post office to mail it. It was a two-page letter saying,

in part:

Dear Governor Green:

We, the officers of Local Union No. 52, U. M.

W. of A., have been instructed by the members . . .

to write a letter to you in protest against the negli-

gence and unfair practices of your department of

mines and minerals . . . we want you to know that

this is not a protest against Mr. Driscoll Scanlan . . .

the best inspector that ever came to our mine. . . .

But your mining board will not let him enforce the

law or take the necessary action to protect our lives

and health. This protest is against the men above Mr.

Scanlan in your department of mines and minerals.

In fact, Governor Green this is a plea to you, to

please save our lives, to please make the depart-

ment of mines and minerals enforce the laws at the

No. 5 mine of the Centralia Coal Co. . . . before we

have a dust explosion at this mine like just hap-

pened in Kentucky and West Virginia. For the last

couple of years the policy of the department of mines and minerals toward us has been one of ig-

noring us. [The letter then recited the story of the

useless special commission.] We are writing you,

Governor Green, because we believe you want to

give the people an honest administration and that

you do not know how unfair your mining depart-

ment is toward the men in this mine. Several years

ago after a disaster at Gillespie we seen your pictures

in the papers going down in the mine to make a per-

sonal investigation of the accident. We are giving

you a chance to correct the conditions at this time

that may cause a much worse disaster. . . . We will

appreciate an early personal reply from you, stating

your position in regard to the above and the en-

forcement of the state mining laws.

The letter closed “Very respectfully yours” and was

signed by Jake Schmidt, president; Rowekamp, record-

ing secretary; and Thomas Bush and Elmer Moss, mine

committee. Today, of these, only Rowekamp is alive;

all the others were killed in the disaster they foretold.

And now let us trace the remarkable course of this

letter at Springfield. It was stamped in red ink “Re-

ceived March 9, 1946, Governor’s Office.” In his or-

nate thick-carpeted offices, Governor Green has three

male secretaries (each of whom in turn has a secretary)

and it was to one of these, John William Chapman, that

the “save our lives” letter, as it came to be called, was

routed. Two days later Chapman dictated a memoran-

dum to Medill: “. . . it is my opinion that the Governor

may be subjected to very severe criticism in the event

that the facts complained of are true and that as a re-

sult of this condition some serious accident occurs at

the mine. Will you kindly have this complaint carefully

investigated so I can call the report of the investigation

to the Governor’s attention at the same time I show him

this letter?” Chapman fastened this small yellow memo

to the miners’ letter and sent both to Medill. Although

Medill’s office is only about sixty yards from the Gov-

ernor’s, the message consumed two days in traversing

the distance.

The messenger arrived at the Department of Mines

and Minerals at 9:00 a.m. on March 13 and handed the

“save our lives” letter and Chapman’s memorandum to

Medill’s secretary. She duly stamped both “Received”

and handed them to Medill. He and Weir discussed the

matter, then Medill sent the original letter back to the

Governor’s office and dictated his reply to Chapman,

blaming the war, recounting the activities of the special

commission, saying: “The complaint sounds a good

deal worse than it really is. The present condition at the

mine is not any different than it has been during the past

ten or fifteen years. . . . I would suggest the Governor

advise Local Union No. 52, U. M. W. of A., that he is

calling the matter to the attention of the State Mining

Board with instructions that it be given full and com-

plete consideration at their next meeting.”

This apparently satisfied Chapman for, in the Gov-

ernor’s name, he dictated a letter to Rowekamp and

Schmidt: “I [i.e., Governor Green] am calling your let-

ter to the attention of the Director of the Department of

Mines and Minerals with the request that he see that

your complaint is taken up at the next meeting of the

State Mining Board. . . .” This was signed with Gover-

nor Green’s name but it is probable that Green himself

never saw the “save our lives” letter until after the dis-

aster more than a year later. Nor is there any evidence

that the Mining Board ever considered the letter. In fact,

nothing further came of it.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the whole

affair was this: An aggrieved party (the miners) ac-

cused a second party (Medill’s department) of acting

wrongfully, and the higher authority to which it ad-

dressed its grievance simply, in effect, asked the ac-

cused if he were guilty and, when he replied he was

not, dropped the matter. A logic, the logic of the ad-

ministrative mind, attaches to Chapman’s sending the

complaint to the Department—the administrative

mind has a pigeonhole for everything, matters which

relate to law go to the Attorney General, matters which

relate to mines go to the Department of Mines and

Minerals, and that is that—but it is scarcely a useful

logic when one of the agencies is itself accused of mal-

function. Apparently it did not occur to Chapman to

consult Inspector Scanlan or to make any other inde-

pendent investigation.

And Jack Ripon, Spud White’s second-in-command

at the District UMWA, said recently, “If I get a letter

here I turn it over to the department that’s supposed

to take care of it, and the same with Governor Green—

he got some damn bad publicity he shouldn’t have

had, he can’t know everything that’s going on.”

Ripon’s sympathy with Green is understandable—he

must have known how Green felt, for he and Spud

White received a copy of the same letter. Ripon says,

“Oh, we got a copy of it. But it wasn’t none of ours, it

didn’t tell us to do anything. So our hands was tied.

What’d we do with it? I think we gave it to Reak.” Per-

haps Murrell Reak, the UMWA’s man on the Mining

Board, felt he already had dealt with this matter (it was Reak who, to Scanlan’s astonishment, had joined the

other members of the special commission in uphold-

ing the Superintendent and Mine Manager in their vi-

olations of the law and then had been so anxious to

help White convince the members of Local 52 “that

their charges are unfounded”). At any rate, Reak ap-

parently did not call the Board’s attention to the “save

our lives” letter, even though it was a local of his own

union which felt itself aggrieved. And White took no

action either.

As for Medill, on the day he received the letter he

called Scanlan to Springfield and, says Scanlan, “se-

verely reprimanded” him. According to Scanlan,

Medill “ordered me to cut down the size of my in-

spection report,” because Medill thought that such

long reports might alarm the miners, “those damn

hunks” who couldn’t read English (Medill denied the

phrase); but Scanlan took this order to mean that

Medill wanted him to “go easy” on the operators—“it

is the same thing as ordering you to pass up certain

things.” And one day during this long controversy,

Medill buttonholed Scanlan’s political sponsor in a

corridor of the Statehouse and said he intended to fire

Scanlan; Scanlan’s sponsor refused to sanction it and

but for this, Scanlan was convinced, he would surely

have lost his job.

But now hundreds of miles away larger events were

occurring which were to affect the fate of the miners at

Centralia. In Washington, D.C., John L. Lewis and the

nation’s bituminous coal operators failed to reach an

agreement and the miners struck, and on May 21, 1946,

President Truman ordered the mines seized for govern-

ment operation. Eight days later Lewis and Julius A.

Krug, Secretary of the Interior, signed the famous Krug-

Lewis Agreement. Despite strenuous protests by the op-

erators, this agreement included a federal safety code.

It was drawn up by the Bureau of Mines (a part of the

U.S. Department of the Interior). And now for the first

time in history the federal government could exercise

police power over coal mine safety.

Thus far the efforts of the miners of Local 52 to thread

the administrative maze in their own state had pro-

duced nothing but a snowfall of memoranda, reports,

letters, and special findings. Let us now observe this new

federal machinery in action. We shall learn nothing

about how to prevent a disaster but we may learn a good

deal about the administrative process.

“Government operation of the mines” meant simply

that the operators bossed their own mines for their own

profit as usual but the UMWA had a work contract with38

the government, not the operators. To keep the 2,500

mines running, Secretary Krug created a new agency,

the Coal Mines Administration. CMA was staffed with

only 245 persons, nearly all naval personnel ignorant

of coal mining. Theirs was paper work. For technical ad-

vice they relied upon the Bureau of Mines plus a hand-

ful of outside experts. More than two months passed

before the code was put into effect, on July 29, 1946,

and not until November 4 did Federal Inspector Perz

reach Centralia to make his first enforceable inspection

of Centralia No. 5. Observe, now, the results.

After three days at the mine, Perz went home and

wrote out a “preliminary report” on a mimeographed

form, listing 13 “major violations” of the safety code. He

mailed this to the regional office of the Bureau of Mines

at Vincennes, Indiana. There it was corrected for gram-

mar, spelling, etc., and typed; copies then were mailed out

to the Superintendent of the mine (to be posted on the bul-

letin board), the CMA in Washington, the CMA’s regional

office at Chicago, the District 12 office of the UMWA at

Springfield, the UMWA international headquarters at

Washington, the Bureau of Mines in Washington, and the

Illinois Department at Springfield. While all this was

going on, Perz was at home, preparing his final report,

a lengthy document listing 57 violations of the safety

code, 21 of them major and 36 minor. This handwrit-

ten final report likewise went to the Bureau at Vincennes

where it was corrected, typed, and forwarded to the Bu-

reau’s office in College Park, Maryland. Here the report

was “reviewed,” then sent to the Director of the Bureau

at Washington. He made any changes he deemed nec-

essary, approved it, and ordered it processed. Copies

were then distributed to the same seven places that had

received the preliminary report, except that the UMWA

at Springfield received two copies so that it could for-

ward one to Local 52. (All this was so complicated that

the Bureau devised a “flow sheet” to keep track of the

report’s passage from hand to hand.)

We must not lose sight of the fact that in the end

everybody involved was apprised of Perz’s findings:

that the Centralia Company was violating the safety

code and that hazards resulted. The company, the state,

and the union had known this all along and done noth-

ing, but what action now did the new enforcing agency

take, the CMA?

Naval Captain N. H. Collison, the Coal Mines Ad-

ministrator, said that the copy of the inspector’s prelim-

inary report was received at his office in Washington “by

the head of the Production and Operations Department

of my headquarters staff . . . Lieutenant Commander Stull. . . . Lieutenant Commander Stull would review

such a report, discuss the matter with the Bureau of

Mines as to the importance of the findings, and then

. . . await the final report”—unless the preliminary re-

port showed that “imminent danger” existed, in which

case he would go immediately to Captain Collison and,

presumably, take “immediate action.” And during all

this activity in Washington, out in Chicago at the CMA’s

area office a Captain Yates also “would receive a copy

of the report. His duty would be to acquaint himself with

the findings there. If there was a red check mark indi-

cating it fell within one of the three categories which I

shall discuss later, he would detail a man immediately

to the mine. If it indicated imminent danger . . . he

would move immediately.” The three categories

deemed sufficiently important to be marked with “a red

check mark” were all major hazards but the one which

killed 111 men at Centralia No. 5 was not among them.

These, of course, were only CMA’s first moves as it

bestirred itself. But to encompass all its procedures is al-

most beyond the mind of man. Let us skip a few and see

what actually resulted. The CMA in Washington received

Perz’s preliminary report on November 14. Eleven days

later it wrote to the company ordering it to correct one

of the 13 major violations Perz found (why it said noth-

ing about the others is not clear). On November 26 the

CMA received Perz’s final report and on November 29

it again wrote to the company, ordering it to correct

promptly all violations and sending copies of the direc-

tive to the Bureau of Mines and the UMWA. Almost

simultaneously it received from Superintendent

Niermann a reply to its first order (Niermann had re-

placed Prudent, who had left the company’s employ):

“Dear Sir: In answer to your CMA8-gz of November 25,

1946, work has been started to correct the violation of

article 5, section 3c, of the Federal Mine Safety Code,

but has been discontinued, due to . . . a strike. . . .” This

of course did not answer the CMA’s second letter

ordering correction of all 57 violations, nor was any an-

swer forthcoming, but not until two months later, on

January 29, 1947, did the CMA repeat its order and tell

the company to report its progress by February 14.

This brought a reply from the company official who

had been designated “operating manager” during the

period of government operation, H. F. McDonald.

McDonald, whose office was in Chicago, had risen to

the presidency of the Centralia Coal Company and of

the Bell & Zoller Coal Company through the sales de-

partment; after the Centralia disaster he told a reporter,

“Hell, I don’t know anything about a coal mine.” Now

He r eported to CMA that “a substantial number of re-

ported violations have been corrected and others are

receiving our attention and should be corrected as ma-

terials and manpower become available.” For obvious

reasons, CMA considered this reply inadequate and on

February 21 told McDonald to supply detailed infor-

mation. Three days later McDonald replied (“Re file

CMA81-swr”): He submitted a detailed report—he got it

from Vice-President Young, who got it from the new Gen-

eral Superintendent, Walter J. Johnson—but McDonald

told the CMA that this report was a couple of weeks old

and he promised to furnish further details as soon as he

could get them. The CMA on March 7 acknowledged this

promise but before any other correspondence arrived to

enrich file CMA81-swr, the mine blew up.

Now, the Krug-Lewis Agreement set up two methods

of circumventing this cumbersome administrative ma-

chinery. If Inspector Perz had found what the legalese

of the Agreement called “imminent danger,” he could

have ordered the men removed from the mine imme-

diately (this power was weakened since it was also

vested in the Coal Mines Administrator, the same divi-

sion of authority that hobbled the state enforcers). But

Perz did not report “imminent danger.” And indeed

how could he? The same hazardous conditions had

obtained for perhaps twenty years and the mine hadn’t

blown up. The phrase is stultifying.

In addition, the Krug-Lewis Agreement provided for

a safety committee of miners, selected by each local

union and empowered to inspect the mine, to make

safety recommendations to the management, and, again

in case of “an immediate danger,” to order the men out

of the mine (subject to CMA review). But at Centralia

No. 5 several months elapsed before Local 52 so much

as appointed a safety committee, and even after the dis-

aster the only surviving member of the committee did-

n’t know what his powers were. The UMWA District

officers at Springfield had failed to instruct their Locals

in the rights which had been won for them. And con-

fusion was compounded because two separate sets of

safety rules were in use—the federal and the state—and

in some instances one was the more stringent, in other

instances, the other.

Meanwhile another faraway event laid another bur-

den upon the men in the mine. John L. Lewis’ combat

with Secretary Krug. It ended, as everyone knows, in a

federal injunction sought at President Truman’s order

and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, which forbade

Lewis to order his miners to strike while the government

was operating the mines. (Subsequently Lewis and the UMWA were fined heavily.) The members of Local 52

thought, correctly or not, that the injunction deprived

them of their last weapon in their fight to get the mine

cleaned up—a wildcat strike. A leader of Local 52 has

said, “Sure we could’ve wildcatted it—and we’d have

had the Supreme Court and the government and the

whole public down on our necks.”

The miners tried the state once more: Medill received

a letter December 10, 1946, from an individual miner

who charged that the company’s mine examiner (a safety

man) was not doing what the law required. Earlier Medill

had ignored Scanlan’s complaint about this but now he

sent a department investigator, who reported that the

charges were true and that Mine Manager Brown knew

it, that Superintendent Niermann promised to consult

Vice-President Young in Chicago, that other hazards ex-

isted, including dust. Weir wrote a routine letter and this

time Niermann replied: The examiner would do his job

properly. He said nothing about dust. This letter and one

other about the same time, plus Young’s earlier equivo-

cal response to Medill’s direct appeal, are the only com-

pany compliance letters on record.

There was yet time for the miners to make one more

try. On February 24, 1947, the safety committee, com-

posed of three miners, wrote a short letter to the Chicago

area office of the Coal Mines Administration: “The biggest

grievance is dust. . . .” It was written in longhand by Paul

Compers (or so it is believed: Compers and one of the two

other committee members were killed in the disaster a

month later) and Compers handed it to Mine Manager

Brown on February 27. But Brown did not forward it to

the CMA; in fact he did nothing at all about it.

And now almost at the last moment, only six days

before the mine blew up, some wholly new facts tran-

spired. Throughout this whole history one thing has

seemed inexplicable: the weakness of the pressure put

on the company by Medill’s Department of Mines and

Minerals. On March 19, 1947, the St. Louis Post-

Dispatchbroke a story that seemed to throw some light

upon it. An Illinois coal operator had been told by the

state inspector who inspected his mine that Medill had

instructed him to solicit money for the Republican

Chicago mayoralty campaign. And soon more facts

became known about this political shakedown.

Governor Dwight H. Green, a handsome, likeable

politician, had first made his reputation as the young

man who prosecuted Al Capone. By 1940 he looked

like the white hope of Illinois Republicans. Cam-

paigning for the governorship, Green promised to rid

the state of the Democratic machine (“there will never4

be a Green machine”). He polled more votes in Illi-

nois than Roosevelt; national Republican leaders

began to watch him. Forthwith he set about building

one of the most formidable machines in the nation.

This task, together with the concomitant plans of

Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune

and others to make him President or Vice-President,

has kept him occupied ever since. He has governed but

little, permitting subordinates to run things. Reelected

in 1944, he reached the peak of his power in 1946

when his machine succeeded in reducing the control

of the Democratic machine over Chicago. Jubilant,

Governor Green handpicked a ward leader to run for

mayor in April of 1947 and backed him hard.

And it was only natural that Green’s henchmen

helped. Among these was Medill. “Somebody,” says

Medill, told him he was expected to raise “$15,000 or

$20,000.” On January 31, 1947, he called all his mine

inspectors to the state mine rescue station in Springfield

(at state expense), and told them—according to Inspec-

tor Scanlan who was present—that the money must be

raised among the coal operators “and that he had called

up four operators the previous day and two of them had

already come through with a thousand dollars . . . and that

he was going to contact the major companies, and we was

to contact the independent companies and the small com-

panies.” Medill’s version varied slightly: he said he told

the inspectors that, as a Republican, he was interested in

defeating the Democrats in Washington and Chicago,

that if they found anybody of like mind it would be all right

to tell them where to send their money, that all contribu-

tions must be voluntary.

After the meeting Scanlan felt like resigning but he

thought perhaps Governor Green did not know about the

plan and he recalled that once he had received a letter

from Green (as did all state employees) asking his aid in

giving the people an honest administration: Scanlan had

replied to the Governor “that I had always been opposed

to corrupt, grafting politicians and that I wasn’t going to

be one myself; and I received a nice acknowledgement

. . . the Governor . . . told me that it was such letters as

mine that gave him courage to carry on. . . .” Scanlan

solicited no contributions from the coal operators.

But other inspectors did, and so did a party leader in

Chicago. So did Medill: he says that his old friend David

H. Devonald, operating vice-president of the huge

Peabody Coal Company, gave him $1,000 and John E.

Jones, a leading safety engineer, contributed $50 (Jones

works for another of the Big Six operators and of him

more later). No accounting ever has been made of the total collected. The shakedown did not last long. According to

Medill, another of Governor Green’s “close advisers” told

Medill that the coal operators were complaining that he

and his inspectors were putting pressure on them for do-

nations and if so he’d better stop it. He did, at another con-

ference of the inspectors on March 7.

Since no Illinois law forbids a company or an in-

dividual to contribute secretly to a political campaign,

we are dealing with a question of political morality,

not legality. The Department of Mines and Minerals

long has been a political agency. An inspector is a po-

litical appointee and during campaigns he is expected

to contribute personally, tack up candidates’ posters,

and haul voters to the polls. Should he refuse, his local

political boss would have him fired. (Soliciting money

from the coal operators, however, apparently was

something new for inspectors.) Today sympathetic

Springfield politicians say: “Medill was just doing what

every other department was doing and always has

done, but he got a tough break.” But one must point

out that Medill’s inspectors were charged with safe-

guarding lives, a more serious duty than that of most

state employees, and that in order to perform this duty

they had to police the coal operators, and that it was

from these very operators that Medill suggested they

might obtain money. A United States Senator who in-

vestigated the affair termed it “reprehensible.”

What bearing, now, did this have on the Centralia

disaster? Nobody, probably, collected from the Cen-

tralia Coal Company. But the shakedown is one more

proof—stronger than most—that Governor Green’s de-

partment had reason to stay on friendly terms with the

coal operators when, as their policemen, it should have

been aloof. As a miner at Centralia said recently: “If a

coal company gives you a thousand dollars, they’re

gonna expect something in return.”

Here lies Green’s responsibility—not that, through a

secretary’s fumble, he failed to act on the miners’ ap-

peal to “save our lives” but rather that, while the king-

makers were shunting him around the nation making

speeches, back home his loyal followers were busier

building a rich political machine for him than in ad-

ministering the state for him. Moreover, enriching the

Green machine dovetailed nicely with the personal am-

bitions of Medill and others, and Green did not restrain

them. By getting along with his old friends, the wealthy

operators, Medill enhanced his personal standing. Evi-

dence exists that Bell & Zoller had had a hand in get-

ting him appointed Director, and remember, Weir had

worked as a Bell & Zoller boss. By nature Medill was

no zealous enforcer of laws. As for the inspectors, few

of them went out of their way to look for trouble; some

inspectors after leaving the Department have obtained

good jobs as coal company executives. Anyway, as one

inspector has said, “If you tried to ride ’em, they’d laugh

at you and say, ‘Go ahead, I’ll just call up Springfield.’”

As one man has said, “It was a cozy combination that

worked for everybody’s benefit, everybody except the

miners.” And the miners’ man on the Board, Murrell

Reak of the UMWA, did not oppose the combination.

Nor did Green question it.

As the Chicago campaign ground to a close, down

at Centralia on March 18 Federal Inspector Perz was

making another routine inspection. General Superinten-

dent Johnson told him the company had ordered pipe for

a sprinkler system months earlier but it hadn’t arrived, “that

there would be a large expenditure involved there . . . they

had no definite arrangements just yet . . . but he would

take it up with the higher officials of the company” in

Chicago. Scanlan and Superintendent Niermann were

there too; they stayed in the bare little mine office,

with its rickety furniture and torn window shades, till

7:30 that night. No rock dusting had been done for

nearly a year but now the company had a carload of

rock dust underground and Scanlan got the impression

it would be applied over the next weekend. (It wasn’t.)

Perz, too, thought Johnson “very conscientious . . . very

competent.” Scanlan typed out his report—he had re-

sorted wearily to listing a few major recommendations

and adding that previous recommendations “should

be complied with”—and mailed it to Springfield. Perz

went home and wrote out his own report, acknowl-

edging that 17 hazards had been corrected but mak-

ing 52 recommendations most of which he had made

in November (the company and the CMA were still cor-

responding over that November report). Perz finished

writing on Saturday morning and mailed the report to

the Vincennes office, which presumably began pro-

cessing it on Monday.

The wheels had been turning at Springfield, too, and

on Tuesday, March 25, Weir signed a form letter to

Brown setting forth Scanlan’s latest recommendations:

“The Department endorses. . . .” But that day, at 3:26 p.m.,

before the outgoing-mail box in the Department was

emptied, Centralia Mine No. 5 blew up. . . .

The last of the bodies was recovered at 5:30 a.m.

on the fifth day after the explosion. On “Black Mon-

day” the flag on the new city hall flew at half staff and

all the businesses in town closed. Already the funerals

had begun, 111 of them. John L. Lewis cried that the 111 were “murdered by the criminal negligence” of Sec-

retary Krug and declared a national six-day “mourning

period” during this Holy Week, and though some said

he was only achieving by subterfuge what the courts

had forbidden him—a strike and defiance of Krug—

nonetheless he made the point that in the entire nation

only two soft coal mines had been complying with the

safety code; and so Krug closed the mines.

Six separate investigations began, two to determine

what had happened, and four to find out why. Federal

and state experts agreed, in general, that the ignition

probably had occurred at the extreme end, or face, of

the First West Entry, that it was strictly a coal-dust ex-

plosion, that the dust probably was ignited by an ex-

plosive charge which had been tamped and fired in a

dangerous manner—fired by an openflame fuse,

tamped with coal dust—and that the resulting local ex-

plosion was propagated by coal dust throughout four

working sections of the mine, subsiding when it reached

rock-dusted areas. . . .

And what resulted from all the investigations into the

Centralia disaster? The Washington County Grand Jury

returned no-bills—that is, refused to indict Inspector

Scanlan and five company officials ranging upward in

authority through Brown, Niermann, Johnson, Young,

and McDonald. The Grand Jury did indict the Centralia

Coal Company, as a corporation, on two counts of “will-

ful neglect” to comply with the mining law—failing to

rock dust and working more than 100 men on a single

split of air—and it also indicted Medill and Weir for

“palpable omission of duty.” The company pleaded

nolo contendere—it did not wish to dispute the

charge—and was fined the maximum: $300 on each

count, a total of $1,000 (or less than $10 per miner’s

life lost). The law also provides a jail sentence of up to

six months but of course you can’t put a corporation

in jail.

At this writing the indictments against Medill and

Weir are still pending, and amid interesting circum-

stances. Bail for Medill was provided by Charles E.

Jones, John W. Spence, G. C. Curtis, and H. B. Thomp-

son; and all of these men, oddly enough, are connected

with the oil and gas division of the Department from

which Medill was fired. And one of them is also one

of Medill’s defense attorneys. But this is not all. Medill

and Weir filed a petition for a change of venue, sup-

ported by numerous affidavits of Washington County

residents that prejudice existed. These affidavits were

collected by three inspectors for the oil and gas divi-

sion. They succeeded in getting the trial transferred to

Wayne County, which is dominated by a segment of

Governor Green’s political organization led locally

by one of these men, Spence. Not in recent memory

in Illinois has the conviction of a Department head on

a similar charge been sustained, and there is little rea-

son to suppose that Medill or Weir will be convicted.

Medill performed an act of great political loyalty

when he shouldered most of the blame at Centralia,

in effect stopping the investigation before it reached

others above him, and this may be his reward.

Why did nobody close the Centralia mine before

it exploded? A difficult question. Medill’s position

(and some investigators’) was that Inspector Scanlan

could have closed it. And, legally, this is true: The

mining law expressly provided that an inspector could

close a mine which persisted in violating the law. But

inspectors have done so very rarely, only in excep-

tional circumstances, and almost always in consulta-

tion with the Department. Scanlan felt that had he

closed the Centralia mine Medill simply would have

fired him and appointed a more tractable inspector.

Moreover, the power to close was not his exclusively:

it also belonged to the Mining Board. (And is not this

divided authority one of the chief factors that pro-

duced the disaster?) Robert Weir has said, “We hon-

estly didn’t think the mine was dangerous enough to

close.” This seems fantastic, yet one must credit it. For

if Scanlan really had thought so, surely he would have

closed it, even though a more pliable inspector re-

opened it. So would the federal authorities, Medill, or

the company itself. And surely the miners would not

have gone to work in it.

Governor Green’s own fact-finding committee

laid blame for the disaster upon the Department,

Scanlan, and the company. The Democrats in the

Illinois joint legislative committee submitted a mi-

nority report blaming the company, Medill, Weir, and

Green’s administration for “the industrial and politi-

cal crime . . .”; the Republican majority confessed it-

self unable to fix blame. After a tremendous pulling

and hauling by every special interest, some new state

legislation was passed as a result of the accident, but

nothing to put teeth into the laws: violations still are

misdemeanors (except campaign solicitation by in-

spectors, a felony); it is scarcely a serious blow to a

million-dollar corporation to be fined $1,000. Nor

does the law yet charge specific officers of the com-

panies—rather than the abstract corporations—with

legal responsibility, so it is still easy for a company

official to hide behind a nebulous chain of command reaching up to the stratosphere of corporate finance

in Chicago or St. Louis. It is hard to believe that com-

pliance with any law can be enforced unless violators

can be jailed.

As for the Congress of the United States, it did next to

nothing. The Senate subcommittee recommended that

Congress raise safety standards and give the federal gov-

ernment power to enforce that standard—“Immediate

and affirmative action is imperative.” But Congress only

ordered the Bureau of Mines to report next session on

whether mine operators were complying voluntarily

with federal inspectors’ recommendations. . . .

After the Centralia disaster each man responsible

had his private hell, and to escape it each found his

private scapegoat—the wartime manpower shortage,

the material shortage, another official, the miners, or,

in the most pitiable cases, “human frailty.” Surely a

strange destiny took Dwight Green from a federal

courtroom where, a young crusader, he overthrew

Capone to a hotel in Centralia where, fifteen years

older, he came face to face with William Rowekamp,

who wanted to know why Green had done nothing

about the miners’ plea to “save our lives.” But actu-

ally responsibility here transcends individuals. The

miners at Centralia, seeking somebody who would

heed their conviction that their lives were in danger,

found themselves confronted with officialdom, a huge

organism scarcely mortal. The State Inspector, the Fed-

eral Inspector, the State Board, the Federal CMA, the

company officials—all these forever invoked “higher

authority,” they forever passed from hand to hand a

stream of memoranda and letters, decisions and laws

and rulings, and they lost their own identities. As one

strives to fix responsibility for the disaster, again and

again one is confronted, as were the miners, not with

any individual but with a host of individuals fused

into a vast, unapproachable, insensate organism. Per-

haps this immovable juggernaut is the true villain in

the piece. Certainly all those in authority were too re-

mote from the persons whose lives they controlled.

And this is only to confess once more that in making

our society complex we have made it unmanageable.

Author’s Epilogue

Illinois Governor Dwight Green was ruined politically

by the Centralia disaster. He had been mentioned as a

possible Republican vice-presidential candidate in

1948 and had all the makings of a successful national

political figure, but in 1948 he even lost his bid for re-

election to the governorship. One of the issues that his

opponent, Adlai Stevenson, raised during the campaign

was mine safety. Governor Stevenson eventually be-

came a national political figure, running twice—

unsuccessfully—for U.S. president in 1952 and 1956.

Robert M. Medill, director of the Illinois Bureau of

Mines and Minerals, was asked to resign his post and

did so, April 1, 1947. His assistant, Robert Weir, though

indicted, remained in his post until his retirement.

The mine owners, Bell and Zoller Coal Company,

paid the fine of $1000, but none of the company’s of-

ficers were indicted or imprisoned.

Despite the six separate investigations of the disaster

that were undertaken by various state and federal au-

thorities, neither the state of Illinois nor the federal gov-

ernment changed its mine safety laws or enforcement

policies. Only after the 1952 West Frankfurt, Kentucky,

coal mine disaster was a stricter federal mine safety code

enacted and enforcement procedures improved. The Centralia blast created 99 widows and 76 fa-

therless children under the age of 18, which prompted

the United Mine Workers Union to change its welfare

death benefits from lump sum payouts to monthly

stipends. The union used the disaster to press for higher

wages and benefits for miners elsewhere.

The Centralia Mine was sold to the Peabody Coal

Company and reopened on July 21, 1947, with sixty

miners, including many of the survivors, but was closed

in two years due to the high costs of production. The

mine was abandoned and sealed with concrete. In 1980

a solid waste disposal company bought the property,

bulldozed the remaining buildings and plans someday

to grind up solid waste and deposit it in the mine shafts.

Today coal fragments and slate can be found around the

grounds, along with foundations of the old mine and

rusting equipment overgrown with weeds. In the nearby

Centralia Foundation Park and in the Village of Wamac,

plaques recently were dedicated to the miners who lost

their lives in Centralia.4