December 11, 2019 • 31 mins
The Italian Hall disaster happened during a strike in Michigan’s copper country, which lasted from the summer of 1913 to the early spring of 1914. On Christmas Eve, a tragic event played out that claimed the lives of dozens of people in Calumet, Michigan.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
If you've been listening to our show for a long time,
you might have noticed the uncanny number of just terrible
(00:22):
tragedies we've covered that have happened right around Christmas. There's
the Iroquois Theater fire, and the Richmond Theater fire, and
the Christmas tree ship that sank in like Michigan, and
the disappearance of the Solder children after their family home
caught fire. We would probably see a similar pattern of
tragedies if we picked just any random date and looked
(00:43):
at the stuff from right around it. But the proximity
to major holidays for all of these always just makes
them seem particularly sad. There are so many others of
these that we've never talked about on the show. But
while I was looking through our listeners suggestion list to
try to figure out what I wanted to talk about next,
one in particular struck me. It is the Italian Hall disaster,
(01:05):
which was suggested by listener Mark long enough ago at
this point that it's in the upper third of the list,
which means it was a long time ago. This disaster
happened in Michigan on December in a town that's now
known as Calumet, but was called Red Jacket at the
time for some reason. All of those prior tragedies that
(01:28):
I listed off a minute ago are all episodes that
I researched. So when I found this one, I told
Holly I didn't know if I had the stomach for
another Christmas tragedy, But even as I tried to move
on to other topics, I just couldn't stop thinking about
this one. So I decided to go ahead and do it,
just not to have the episode come out right around
(01:49):
the anniversary off when it had actually happened, which this
year is roughly at the same time as both Christmas
and Hanukah. You just keep picking the sad ones, Tracy.
I know, I know, I'm over here, like you'll go
out um. The Italian Hall disaster happened during a strike
in Michigan's Copper Country, which lasted from the summer of
nineteen thirteen to the early spring of nineteen fourteen. And
(02:12):
Copper Country is on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. That's the northernmost
part of the state, particularly concentrated on the Kiwana Peninsula.
Native people knew that there was copper in the area
long before this, but people of European descent learned about
it in the eighteen forties. That discovery, kind of in
quotation marks, is often credited to Samuel O Nap or
someone who worked for him. In eighteen forty seven, they
(02:35):
found pits that Native people had excavated for copper, possibly
going all the way back to the prehistoric mound building
peoples who lived in the area. These ancient pits became
the sites of many of Michigan's first underground copper mines.
As Michigan's copper mining industry grew, it had a lot
of the same issues as other mining industries in other
parts of the world. The industry operated on a system
(02:58):
of paternalism. Caller Country was remote, so mining companies built
entire towns to try to attract and retain workers. If
you worked in a copper mine, it was very likely
that your home, your children's school, the hospital, the stores,
and everything else was owned by the mind. Although the
mine companies usually framed this as a mark of their
(03:19):
generosity and care toward their workers. It was also a
way to keep people in line. If you got in
trouble at work, the mine could restrict the services and
facilities that you could access in your off hours. If
you got fired, the mind could evict you from your home,
and if you were killed on the job, it was
entirely possible that your family would be evicted immediately so
that your home could be used by your replacement. Mining
(03:41):
in general was also very dangerous, and copper mining was
particularly so. On average, every week someone died in Michigan's
copper mines, and at least ten other people were seriously injured.
Every year, roughly one out of every two hundred copper
mine workers died. Apart from these safe the issues, working
conditions in the mind were just difficult. The minds had
(04:04):
to be very deep in order to get to the copper,
and without electricity, the illumination was mostly from candles and lamps,
so workers were deep underground and almost total darkness for
ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week.
Pay was also very low, particularly in the jobs that
mostly involved physical labor, such as trammers who pushed loaded
(04:25):
carts of or through the mind generally along a track.
In addition to being low, the pay for these jobs
was often unfair. Trammers were paid by the pound for
how much material they moved, but most of the minds
did not have scales, so they're pay basically boiled down
to a manager's best guess at how much they had
hauled based on like a visual assessment. This combination of
(04:47):
factors meant that most of the people working Underground and
Michigan's Copper Minds were recent immigrants to the United States,
and they came from several parts of Europe, including England, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland,
Croatia and Slovenia. Coworkers often didn't speak the same language,
and job assignments were made by ethnicity, with some ethnicities
(05:07):
disproportionately getting the least prestigious jobs. For example, Cornish immigrants
often became managers, with Germans and Scandinavians also holding more
prestigious jobs. Meanwhile, Italians, Fins, and Croatians tended to work
in jobs that were primarily manual labors, such as being trammers.
The diversity presented a challenge when organizers started trying to
(05:29):
establish labor unions in copper country in the eighteen eighties,
it wasn't uncommon at all for workers in one mind
to speak at least five or six different languages among them.
The Western Federation of Miners, which was established in eighteen
ninety three, proved to be particularly adept at organizing people
from different ethnic groups who had different backgrounds and cultures
(05:50):
and spoke different languages. The w f M brought in
organizers who could speak to all of these different groups.
By the nineteen teens, membership in the West During Federation
of Miners was really growing. Among Michigan's copper miners, copper
was in high demand thanks to things like increasing use
of electric power, the growing automobile industry, and other industrialization,
(06:12):
but this increased demand was not trickling down to better
pay for the workers and the minds. On top of that,
mine managers were increasingly focused on the idea of scientific management,
or using scientific principles to improve workplace efficiency and reduce
the need for labor. One innovation that came out of
this and was widely criticized by mine workers was the
(06:34):
one man drill. Before this point, the drills used in
copper mining required two people to operate. Workers thought that
the one man drill was going to cause workers to
lose their jobs, because the idea was that the mining
companies could cut their workforce by half, not that they
could run twice as many drills. Yeah, it also seemed
inherently less safe to go from working as a team
(06:57):
of two people to working all by yourself. People like,
if something goes wrong, there won't even be anybody around.
He can come and help me. Drill operators were regarded
as skilled laborers in the minds, and before this point
they had more often aligned themselves with management when there
were labor disputes, But as the one man drill threatened
their livelihood and safety, they started to align themselves with
(07:19):
the people whose pay and working conditions tended to be poorer.
Mine managers knew that their workers were deeply frustrated by
all of this. On July, Charles Lawton, general manager of
Quincy Mining Company, said quote, I do not think it
would be hard at this time for the WFM to
call a strike with a hurrah from one end of
the copper country to the other. The call for strike
(07:42):
came not long after, and we're going to get into that.
After we first paused for a sponsor break. By the
spring of nineteen thirteen, about nine thousand copper mine workers
in Michigan had joined the Western Federation of Miners. This
made the union large enough to try to negotiate on
(08:03):
these workers behalf. Their demands included better pay, with an
increase to three dollars and fifty cents a day for
underground mine workers. That was up from between a dollar
fifty and two dollars fifty. They also wanted the work
day reduced to eight hours and for the minds to
stop the changeover to the one man drill. The workers
(08:23):
also wanted a formal grievance procedure and recognition of their
union as their collective bargaining unit. On July fourteen, the
Western Federation of Miners sent letters to Michigan's mind managers,
including Calumet and Hecla General manager James McNaughton. Calumet and
Hecla employed about people, and Red Jacket was one of
(08:44):
its company towns. This letter outlined the WfMS demands and
also stated, quote failure to answer will be taken as
proof that you are not willing to have the matters
settled peacefully. The mining companies naturally found this language threatening,
especially since some of the WfMS previous strikes had involved
violence on both sides. The mining companies were also deeply
(09:06):
opposed to the idea of negotiating with the union at all,
and their general perception was that if they made any
kind of reply to this letter, that would be taken
as evidence that they recognized the union as valid in
some way. So neither McNaughton nor any of the other
mine managers answered this letter. So on July twenty three,
copper workers went on strike. The union reported that ten
(09:29):
thousand men had joined the strike, while the mining companies
reported that that number was more like three thousand. Regardless,
at least for a time, the striking workers totally shut
down mine operations, both by refusing to work themselves and
by physically blocking non striking workers from getting into the mines. Immediately,
mine owners reported that the striking miners were likely to
(09:52):
be violent, and they asked for help. Governor Woodbridge Ferris
started ordering the National Guard go to the peninsula's mining towns,
starting at about ted am on the morning of There
is an odd disparity in the accounts from the early
days of the strike. Accounts from mine operators and the
National Guard report that the striking workers were terrorizing the
(10:13):
rest of the population and described the situation as total
chaos and lawlessness. But in the first weeks of the
strike there were no fatalities on either side. The National
Guard were slowly recalled starting in mid August, and in
the end the only National guardsman killed in connection to
his duty in Copper Country had died because he was
(10:33):
kicked by a horse. Yeah, this is contrary to a
lot of the previous episodes based on like the late
nineteen early twentieth century, when the National Guard has been
called out like in almost every story other than this one,
that has led to extreme violence and many deaths among
the people who, in theory, the National Guard was being
(10:55):
sent to protect. So this is an outlier in terms
of all that. Meanwhile, the mind companies didn't really have
a lot of incentive to negotiate with the miners or
to recognize the union. Most of the mining companies had
a surplus of unsold copper and they had plenty of
cash on hand, so they weren't in dire straits to
(11:16):
get this resolved. At the same time, though they didn't
want to stop production entirely, so they hired replacement workers.
They started recruiting newly arrived immigrants at port cities on
the coast and paid for their train ticket to Michigan,
which was then deducted from their pay once they started working.
The mine companies also hired several detective agencies, including Wattle
(11:36):
Mahone detective agency, to help break the strike. They protected
the replacement workers and generally harassed and intimidated the strikers.
Most of these men were armed, and some were given
formal authority by being deputized under the local sheriff. So
while it's certainly true that there were some instances of
violence on the part of the striking workers, we're going
(11:57):
to get to some of that in just a moment.
These seemed to be individual people's actions which were not
authorized by the union. Meanwhile, the mining companies had partnered
with detective agencies to hire an armed force of strikebreakers,
some of whom had been deputized by the sheriff. On
August fourteenth, two striking miners were killed after at least
(12:20):
six strikebreakers opened fire on the boarding house where they
lived in Ceberville, Michigan. Two different miners had been walking
back to the boarding house on a path that crossed
over company property. Deputies had told them to turn around,
and they didn't because they didn't speak English and didn't
understand what was being said. When deputies arrived at the
(12:40):
boarding house to arrest them for having done this, they
refused to go. That is when the strikebreakers opened fire
through the windows. At least two other people in the
house were injured but recovered after this, this led to
a coroner's inquest that required five different interpreters because the
witnesses spoke five languages. Four of the strike breakers were convicted,
(13:02):
a fifth was acquitted, and a sixth fled before the
trial was over. On Labor Day of nineteen thirteen, Margaret Physicus,
who was fourteen, was shot in the head while picketing
after a fight broke out between strikers and strikebreakers. She
did recover from that. Although a deputized strikebreaker was arrested
for the shooting, a grand jury declined to charge him
(13:24):
with any crime. On December seven, and three men were
murdered at a boarding house in Payinsdale, Michigan, which was
owned by Thomas Dally, and Dally was one of the victims.
Several men boarding with Dally were working in the mines
during the strike. W f A member James Houdah, confessed
to the crime and others were also charged, but Hoodah
(13:45):
refused to testify against them. This was definitely an incident
in which striking miners instigated the violence, in this case
against men who were working in the mines in spite
of the strike. Also in December, supporters of Michigan's copper
mining industry formed the Citizens Alliance. This was another organization
that was meant to try to break the strike into
(14:06):
harass and intimidate the striking workers. This organization was funded
by mine management and about eight thousand people joined it.
So at the time the winter holidays approached in the
situation in copper Country was tense. Apart from the multiple
instances of violence, striking miners had been out of work
for about five months. They and their families were mostly
(14:28):
living on donated food and financial assistance from the union,
although that money was running out. So Annie Cleming, head
of the Women's Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners,
decided to hold a Christmas party for the children of
the striking miners with the hope of raising their spirits Clement,
whose name you'll also see sometimes spelled as Clemmings. Uh.
(14:49):
There's that appears in writing in a number of different ways.
She was known as Big Annie because she was more
than six feet tall. She was the daughter of Slovenian
immigrants and was married to a Croatian miner. She had
been extremely active in the strike up to this point,
including carrying an American flag and the union's demonstrations and parades,
and one of these parades she was threatened by an
(15:10):
armed deputy and she told him, quote, kill me. If
this flag won't protect me, I'll die with it. For
this party, she's solicited donations with the hope that each
child attending could get a small gift like a hat
or a pair of mittens where a piece of fruit
or candy. The venue for the party was the Italian
Hall in Red Jacket, which, as we said earlier, is
(15:31):
now called Calumet. The Italian Hall was a multi use
building that belonged to the Italian Mutual Benefit Society. It's
lower floors housed a saloon and an Atlantic and Pacific
tea company store, and upstairs was a space that could
be used as a banquet hall, a meeting room or
a theater. It was in the upstairs space. The between
five hundred and seven hundred people gathered for a Christmas
(15:53):
party on Christmas Eve. During this party, somebody came into
the hall and shouted fire. Annie Clemicc didn't see or
smell any smoke, and so she told people to stay
calm and to stay at the party. Other people probably
did this as well. But this cry of fire spread
through the crowd and people panicked and started trying to
(16:14):
rush through the door and down the stairs. The first
few dozen people that tried to flee the Italian Hall
were able to get out, but at some point someone
tripped and fell, and this started a chain reaction, with
other people who were also trying to get out falling
over and onto the people below. The fire department was
just across the street, and firefighters were on the scene
(16:35):
almost immediately, but the crush of people at the foot
of the stairs was so high and so tightly packed
that they couldn't start a rescue operation from below. They
had to climb up a fire escape one that people
in the party either hadn't known about or hadn't thought
about in the panic to try to escape, and they
had to work from above, slowly removing people from this
(16:56):
steep staircase that had just become completely impassable. Exact counts
vary because of discrepancies in record keeping, but at least
seventy three people died, mostly from being crushed to death
or suffocating. More than half of them were finished immigrants
or people of Finnish descent. About sixty of those victims
were children. There was no fire, and we're going to
(17:18):
talk about the aftermath of this tragedy after we take
a little break and hear from one of our sponsors.
Immediately after the tragedy in the Italian Hall, reports started
to spread that this had been a deliberate act of
violence against the striking miners. Multiple witnesses say they saw
(17:42):
the person who falsely shouted fire, and that it wasn't
a miner, but with somebody wearing a Citizens Alliance button
on his coat. Early reports placed what el Mahones strikebreaker
Edward Manly in the stairwell after the incident. What el
Mahones sources said that he had gone into the stairwell
to try to help, but he was never questioned and
he disappeared from Calumet not long after. Some deathbed confessions
(18:06):
were also reported in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties,
but they were second and third hand. None of those
were ever verified. The disaster immediately became national news, including
a front page story in the New York Times on
Christmas Day, but newspapers in Michigan carried distinctly different accounts
depending on whether they supported the striking workers or the
(18:27):
mine management. For example, a Finnish American socialist newspaper called
two Amius or Worker, published a bilingual, Finish and English
edition on Christmas Day and that included reports that a
man with a Citizens Alliance badge and his hat pulled
down had yelled fire. A headline in this paper on
the twenty six translated to eighty three murdered. Some of
(18:50):
the newspaper staff were arrested on December twenty seventh of
nineteen thirteen for quote causing a riot. Because of these claims,
the newspaper was shut down at temporarily, and it eventually
moved its headquarters to another state. Meanwhile, the Calumet News
reported on how the Citizens Alliance and security guards from
Calumet and Hecla were part of the rescue, while not
(19:12):
mentioning all the miners who were also part of it.
Papers also reported that w f M president Charlie Moyer
was financially benefiting from the strike in some way, with
absolutely no evidence for that claim. Moyer to be clear
how it checkered past. He had served time in prison
in Illinois after another man's confession implicated him in a
(19:33):
string of crimes, including a home invasion and a department
store burglary. He was also implicated in a December bombing
that killed former Governor Frank Stunnenberg of Idaho, although that
case was dismissed after the other accused men were all acquitted.
People also questioned his leadership in the Copper Country strike.
He had authorized it even though the people at the
(19:56):
WFM headquarters were opposed to it, but after the Italian
Hall incident, Moyer avoided placing blame on any particular person. Instead,
he began sending numerous telegrams calling for an investigation, saying
that there was enough about the tragedy that was suspicious
that it warranted an extra look. The local sheriff and
several people from mind Management and the Citizens Alliance told
(20:19):
Moyer to stop writing these telegrams and to issue a
statement that would absolve the Citizens Alliance of any blame.
Moyer refused, and his account the sheriff said something to
him along the lines of then I can't protect you anymore.
Later that night, several men attacked Moyer and he was
shot in the back when a pistol discharged as he
was being beaten with it. The men dragged him to
(20:41):
the Portage Lake Bridge with a bullet still lodged in
his back, and threatened to throw him off of it,
and then they took him to the train depot and
put him on a train bound for Chicago, threatening to
kill him if he ever returned. No one was ever
prosecuted for any of this. On Christmas Day, finished Fatie,
a grapher John William Nara took pictures of the Italian Hall,
(21:03):
which continued to be a primary source of information about
what the scene was like. In the immediate aftermath of
the tragedy. The coroner held a three day inquest, but
didn't rule on a cause of death for the people
who had died in the incident. During the investigation, witnesses
were required to hear and answer questions in English, regardless
of what language they actually spoke, and the questioning seemed
(21:25):
more oriented towards clearing the citizens alliance of suspicion than
uncovering the truth of what actually happened. A grand jury
that had been convened to investigate strike crimes also issued
no indictments in the disaster or in the attack on Mowyer,
although it indicted Moyer for his organizing on behalf of
the miners. Congressional hearings into the disaster didn't really go anywhere,
(21:49):
As was the case with so many other mass tragedies
that we've talked about on the show before, Calumet was
not prepared to cope with a disaster of this scale.
There wasn't a more large enough to help manage all
the bodies. There weren't enough coffins, especially child sized coffins.
Help had to be brought in from surrounding communities to
try to manage it all. Most of the funerals took
(22:10):
place on December twenty, with all of the churches involved
coordinating to allow one massive funeral procession through town. That
procession drew about twenty spectators. Miners had dug into the
frozen ground for mass graves for most of the victims,
with twenty two buried in a Catholic cemetery in forty
four in a Protestant cemetery. The rest of the victims
(22:33):
were buried in family plots. Although mine management and the
Citizens Alliance raised money for a victim's fund, Mowyer and
the w f A refused to take it. They said
they did not want money, they wanted justice. Moyer also
said that the union would bury its own dead. Although
the strike didn't officially end until April of nineteen fourteen,
(22:53):
it was more or less over after this. Henry Ford
was offering people five dollars a day to work on
his automotive assembly line for work that was far less
dangerous than working in the copper mines, so a lot
of people moved to Detroit to work there. We actually
have several episodes on Henry Ford in our archive for
folks who would like to know more about the nuance
on all of that. After the Western Federation of Miners
(23:16):
voted to cut aid to the striking workers in the
spring of nineteen fourteen, those who hadn't already left for
other industries voted to go back to work. They got
a small pay increase in an eight hour work day,
but otherwise none of their demands were met. This disaster
was also part of the end of the Western Federation
of Miners. The union lost more than half of its
(23:37):
membership between nineteen thirteen and nineteen sixteen, and the Michigan
strike depleted its treasury almost entirely. In nineteen sixteen, the
union reformed as the International Union of Mine Mill and
Smelter Workers. That union was actually part of our episode
on the Bisbee deportation. Apart for the calls for justice
that went unanswered and the immediate aftermath of the tragedy,
(24:00):
the people of Calumet seemed to mostly want to move on.
There was no coverage of the disasters one year anniversary
and local newspapers, and it wasn't something that seemed to
be widely discussed. That started to change after Ella Reeves Blur,
known as Mother Bluer, published her autobiography We Are Many
in nineteen forty. She had been one of the organizers
(24:21):
that was involved in this strike, and her book included
an account of the disaster. That account inspired Woody Guthrie
to write his song nineteen thirteen Massacre about the incident.
He put out that song in nineteen forty one. Because
the investigation into the disaster was handled so sloppily. It
is still not clear exactly what happened, and some of
(24:41):
the details that have become widely remembered are not actually
supported by the evidence. In some accounts, including Woody Guthrie
song lyrics, supporters of the mind bosses physically stopped people
from leaving the hall, or they laughed as children fell
and died. One widely held piece of misinformation and is
that the doors out of the hall opened the wrong way,
(25:03):
something that was absolutely true and some of the other
disasters that we have discussed, but that was not the
case in the Italian Hall. There are actually photographs that
show the doors opening outward. It seems very likely that
the person who shouted fire was opposed to the strike
and the striking workers and wanted to ruin the party.
But some people go so far as to conclude that
(25:24):
their intent wasn't just to harass the miners and their
families and to spoil their good time, but that it
was intended to create a fatal stampede on purpose. Because
there was never a thorough investigation, it's really hard to
say that conclusively. Big Annie Clemenc eventually moved to Chicago,
remarried and had a daughter. Her descendants did not know
(25:44):
about her work as a labor organizer or the Italian
Hall disaster when they were asked about it. In more
recent years. She has since been inducted into the Michigan
Women's Hall of Fame and Labor's International Hall of Fame.
Michigan's copper mines went into decline. They started closing in
the nineteen sixties, with the last closing down in nineteen
A law passed in two thousand four allowed mining to
(26:06):
resume in the state, though and Eagle Mine was the
first one to open under this new law. In Some
people point to the Italian Hall disaster as the beginning
of the downward trend in the industry that led to
its temporary total shutdown, but there was really a lot
more to it than that. Michigan's deep underground mines were
expensive and dangerous to operate, and in the nineteen teens
(26:28):
and beyond they were facing increasing competition from the mines
in the West and the Southwest, which were a lot
cheaper to operate. The Italian Hall was placed on the
National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty, but then
it was later removed. It was torn down in nineteen
eighty four, with its sandstone entry arch remaining as a
memorial for years. That archway had a sign that read
(26:49):
quote Michigan Historic Site Italian Hall. On December nineteen thirteen,
area copper miners had been on strike for five months.
The miners were fighting for better a shortened work days,
safer working conditions, and union recognition. That day, during a
Yule Tide party for the striking miners and their families,
someone yelled fire. Although there was no fire, seventy three
(27:13):
persons died while attempting to escape down a stairwell that
had doors that opened inward. Over half of those who
died were children between the ages of six and ten.
The perpetrator of this tragedy was never identified. The strike
ended in April nineteen fourteen. That wording was edited to
remove the reference to the inward opening doors. In twelve
(27:34):
of Michigan Technological University professor and students were part of
an archaeological study at the side of the Italian Hall.
This included ground penetrating radar work to determine the building's
original boundaries. The radar itself was actually on loan from
the q and Abey Indian Community Tribal Historic Preservation Office,
and it was run by the offices archaeologist who also
(27:55):
donated his time. On Christmas Eve, a granite monument was
dedicated at the site of the disaster and it lists
the names of the victims. This site is part of
the quan On National Historical Park and today the calum
At Rotary Club puts luminaries at the site each Christmas Eve.
There is one for each victim. For folks who want
more detail on all of this, Steve Lato has written
(28:17):
books about it, and there are some talks and articles
by him in the show notes for this episode on
our website. I have a couple of pieces of listener
mail that are overall on us a lighter note because
they're about television. They're short, so I'm going to read
both of them. The first one is about television, but
(28:37):
it's also about a disaster. It is. This is from Tatum.
Tatum says, Hi, they're a longtime listener, but this is
my first time writing in. I just thought your listeners
might want to know that the Netflix series The Crown
featured the Abervan mining disaster in a recent episode Season
three episode three. Because I was watching the episode, I
started to realize that I knew where this story was
going due to having heard your episode from November. So
(29:01):
if any of your listeners would like to see what
the disaster may have looked like as it took place,
I would recommend checking that out. Uh So, thank you
Tatum for that. UM. Tatum went on to say some
kind things about us, but I don't know that every
single person needs to hear all of that. Yes, we
talked about that disaster in November. Like that email says,
(29:22):
that's a little newer than we typically do for Saturday Classics.
But if folks watched The Crown and thought I didn't
know anything about this disaster, that is something they could
find in our archive. UM. And then the other quick
email about television is from Emily. Emily says, I just
wanted to write a quick thank you for your episode
on Matthew Hopkins because it combined two of my favorite things,
(29:43):
your podcast and the book Good Omens by Neil Gaming
and Terry Pratchett. If you're not familiar, there's a character
in it named Shadwell who was a seemingly self appointed
witch Finder sergeant. I was delighted to know that his
asking at least two characters, how many nipples have you got?
Was inspired by their real life We're nous slash terrible
nous of Hopkins. Thanks again for hours of entertainment, Emily,
(30:04):
Thank you Emily for this note. I love the book
Good Omens. It's been so long since I've read it that,
as with many books, the details on a lot of
it are very fuzzy. So I only got caught up
on watching the Good Omens series that came out recently
after we had recorded that episode, and I was like, oh, yeah,
that guy. I forgot he was in the book. I
(30:26):
forgot to I. Um, it's been a long time since
I've revisited that one. Yeah yeah. I'm currently having the
same experience watching his Dark Materials, which is a book
series that I love. But it's been oh, more than
a decade since I read it. Probably, um, I could
be that could be too, but big of a number.
It's been years since I read it, So as I'm
watching it, I'm like, this is how the book was,
(30:47):
I don't remember anyway. That's some historically oriented television, not
his Dark Materials, but the other ones for folks to
check out if they would like. We are at History
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. If you would like
to send us an email about this or any other episode,
that is a new email address if you have not noticed,
and we are also all over social media at missed
(31:08):
in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,
and Instagram. And you can come to our website missed
in History dot com for the show notes for all
the episodes that Holly and I have worked on together
in a searchable archive of every episode ever. And you
can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, the I
heart Radio app, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
(31:31):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I Heart Radios. How stuff Works. For more podcasts For
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
If you've been listening to our show for a long time,
you might have noticed the uncanny number of just terrible
(00:22):
tragedies we've covered that have happened right around Christmas. There's
the Iroquois Theater fire, and the Richmond Theater fire, and
the Christmas tree ship that sank in like Michigan, and
the disappearance of the Solder children after their family home
caught fire. We would probably see a similar pattern of
tragedies if we picked just any random date and looked
(00:43):
at the stuff from right around it. But the proximity
to major holidays for all of these always just makes
them seem particularly sad. There are so many others of
these that we've never talked about on the show. But
while I was looking through our listeners suggestion list to
try to figure out what I wanted to talk about next,
one in particular struck me. It is the Italian Hall disaster,
(01:05):
which was suggested by listener Mark long enough ago at
this point that it's in the upper third of the list,
which means it was a long time ago. This disaster
happened in Michigan on December in a town that's now
known as Calumet, but was called Red Jacket at the
time for some reason. All of those prior tragedies that
(01:28):
I listed off a minute ago are all episodes that
I researched. So when I found this one, I told
Holly I didn't know if I had the stomach for
another Christmas tragedy, But even as I tried to move
on to other topics, I just couldn't stop thinking about
this one. So I decided to go ahead and do it,
just not to have the episode come out right around
(01:49):
the anniversary off when it had actually happened, which this
year is roughly at the same time as both Christmas
and Hanukah. You just keep picking the sad ones, Tracy.
I know, I know, I'm over here, like you'll go
out um. The Italian Hall disaster happened during a strike
in Michigan's Copper Country, which lasted from the summer of
nineteen thirteen to the early spring of nineteen fourteen. And
(02:12):
Copper Country is on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. That's the northernmost
part of the state, particularly concentrated on the Kiwana Peninsula.
Native people knew that there was copper in the area
long before this, but people of European descent learned about
it in the eighteen forties. That discovery, kind of in
quotation marks, is often credited to Samuel O Nap or
someone who worked for him. In eighteen forty seven, they
(02:35):
found pits that Native people had excavated for copper, possibly
going all the way back to the prehistoric mound building
peoples who lived in the area. These ancient pits became
the sites of many of Michigan's first underground copper mines.
As Michigan's copper mining industry grew, it had a lot
of the same issues as other mining industries in other
parts of the world. The industry operated on a system
(02:58):
of paternalism. Caller Country was remote, so mining companies built
entire towns to try to attract and retain workers. If
you worked in a copper mine, it was very likely
that your home, your children's school, the hospital, the stores,
and everything else was owned by the mind. Although the
mine companies usually framed this as a mark of their
(03:19):
generosity and care toward their workers. It was also a
way to keep people in line. If you got in
trouble at work, the mine could restrict the services and
facilities that you could access in your off hours. If
you got fired, the mind could evict you from your home,
and if you were killed on the job, it was
entirely possible that your family would be evicted immediately so
that your home could be used by your replacement. Mining
(03:41):
in general was also very dangerous, and copper mining was
particularly so. On average, every week someone died in Michigan's
copper mines, and at least ten other people were seriously injured.
Every year, roughly one out of every two hundred copper
mine workers died. Apart from these safe the issues, working
conditions in the mind were just difficult. The minds had
(04:04):
to be very deep in order to get to the copper,
and without electricity, the illumination was mostly from candles and lamps,
so workers were deep underground and almost total darkness for
ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week.
Pay was also very low, particularly in the jobs that
mostly involved physical labor, such as trammers who pushed loaded
(04:25):
carts of or through the mind generally along a track.
In addition to being low, the pay for these jobs
was often unfair. Trammers were paid by the pound for
how much material they moved, but most of the minds
did not have scales, so they're pay basically boiled down
to a manager's best guess at how much they had
hauled based on like a visual assessment. This combination of
(04:47):
factors meant that most of the people working Underground and
Michigan's Copper Minds were recent immigrants to the United States,
and they came from several parts of Europe, including England, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland,
Croatia and Slovenia. Coworkers often didn't speak the same language,
and job assignments were made by ethnicity, with some ethnicities
(05:07):
disproportionately getting the least prestigious jobs. For example, Cornish immigrants
often became managers, with Germans and Scandinavians also holding more
prestigious jobs. Meanwhile, Italians, Fins, and Croatians tended to work
in jobs that were primarily manual labors, such as being trammers.
The diversity presented a challenge when organizers started trying to
(05:29):
establish labor unions in copper country in the eighteen eighties,
it wasn't uncommon at all for workers in one mind
to speak at least five or six different languages among them.
The Western Federation of Miners, which was established in eighteen
ninety three, proved to be particularly adept at organizing people
from different ethnic groups who had different backgrounds and cultures
(05:50):
and spoke different languages. The w f M brought in
organizers who could speak to all of these different groups.
By the nineteen teens, membership in the West During Federation
of Miners was really growing. Among Michigan's copper miners, copper
was in high demand thanks to things like increasing use
of electric power, the growing automobile industry, and other industrialization,
(06:12):
but this increased demand was not trickling down to better
pay for the workers and the minds. On top of that,
mine managers were increasingly focused on the idea of scientific management,
or using scientific principles to improve workplace efficiency and reduce
the need for labor. One innovation that came out of
this and was widely criticized by mine workers was the
(06:34):
one man drill. Before this point, the drills used in
copper mining required two people to operate. Workers thought that
the one man drill was going to cause workers to
lose their jobs, because the idea was that the mining
companies could cut their workforce by half, not that they
could run twice as many drills. Yeah, it also seemed
inherently less safe to go from working as a team
(06:57):
of two people to working all by yourself. People like,
if something goes wrong, there won't even be anybody around.
He can come and help me. Drill operators were regarded
as skilled laborers in the minds, and before this point
they had more often aligned themselves with management when there
were labor disputes, But as the one man drill threatened
their livelihood and safety, they started to align themselves with
(07:19):
the people whose pay and working conditions tended to be poorer.
Mine managers knew that their workers were deeply frustrated by
all of this. On July, Charles Lawton, general manager of
Quincy Mining Company, said quote, I do not think it
would be hard at this time for the WFM to
call a strike with a hurrah from one end of
the copper country to the other. The call for strike
(07:42):
came not long after, and we're going to get into that.
After we first paused for a sponsor break. By the
spring of nineteen thirteen, about nine thousand copper mine workers
in Michigan had joined the Western Federation of Miners. This
made the union large enough to try to negotiate on
(08:03):
these workers behalf. Their demands included better pay, with an
increase to three dollars and fifty cents a day for
underground mine workers. That was up from between a dollar
fifty and two dollars fifty. They also wanted the work
day reduced to eight hours and for the minds to
stop the changeover to the one man drill. The workers
(08:23):
also wanted a formal grievance procedure and recognition of their
union as their collective bargaining unit. On July fourteen, the
Western Federation of Miners sent letters to Michigan's mind managers,
including Calumet and Hecla General manager James McNaughton. Calumet and
Hecla employed about people, and Red Jacket was one of
(08:44):
its company towns. This letter outlined the WfMS demands and
also stated, quote failure to answer will be taken as
proof that you are not willing to have the matters
settled peacefully. The mining companies naturally found this language threatening,
especially since some of the WfMS previous strikes had involved
violence on both sides. The mining companies were also deeply
(09:06):
opposed to the idea of negotiating with the union at all,
and their general perception was that if they made any
kind of reply to this letter, that would be taken
as evidence that they recognized the union as valid in
some way. So neither McNaughton nor any of the other
mine managers answered this letter. So on July twenty three,
copper workers went on strike. The union reported that ten
(09:29):
thousand men had joined the strike, while the mining companies
reported that that number was more like three thousand. Regardless,
at least for a time, the striking workers totally shut
down mine operations, both by refusing to work themselves and
by physically blocking non striking workers from getting into the mines. Immediately,
mine owners reported that the striking miners were likely to
(09:52):
be violent, and they asked for help. Governor Woodbridge Ferris
started ordering the National Guard go to the peninsula's mining towns,
starting at about ted am on the morning of There
is an odd disparity in the accounts from the early
days of the strike. Accounts from mine operators and the
National Guard report that the striking workers were terrorizing the
(10:13):
rest of the population and described the situation as total
chaos and lawlessness. But in the first weeks of the
strike there were no fatalities on either side. The National
Guard were slowly recalled starting in mid August, and in
the end the only National guardsman killed in connection to
his duty in Copper Country had died because he was
(10:33):
kicked by a horse. Yeah, this is contrary to a
lot of the previous episodes based on like the late
nineteen early twentieth century, when the National Guard has been
called out like in almost every story other than this one,
that has led to extreme violence and many deaths among
the people who, in theory, the National Guard was being
(10:55):
sent to protect. So this is an outlier in terms
of all that. Meanwhile, the mind companies didn't really have
a lot of incentive to negotiate with the miners or
to recognize the union. Most of the mining companies had
a surplus of unsold copper and they had plenty of
cash on hand, so they weren't in dire straits to
(11:16):
get this resolved. At the same time, though they didn't
want to stop production entirely, so they hired replacement workers.
They started recruiting newly arrived immigrants at port cities on
the coast and paid for their train ticket to Michigan,
which was then deducted from their pay once they started working.
The mine companies also hired several detective agencies, including Wattle
(11:36):
Mahone detective agency, to help break the strike. They protected
the replacement workers and generally harassed and intimidated the strikers.
Most of these men were armed, and some were given
formal authority by being deputized under the local sheriff. So
while it's certainly true that there were some instances of
violence on the part of the striking workers, we're going
(11:57):
to get to some of that in just a moment.
These seemed to be individual people's actions which were not
authorized by the union. Meanwhile, the mining companies had partnered
with detective agencies to hire an armed force of strikebreakers,
some of whom had been deputized by the sheriff. On
August fourteenth, two striking miners were killed after at least
(12:20):
six strikebreakers opened fire on the boarding house where they
lived in Ceberville, Michigan. Two different miners had been walking
back to the boarding house on a path that crossed
over company property. Deputies had told them to turn around,
and they didn't because they didn't speak English and didn't
understand what was being said. When deputies arrived at the
(12:40):
boarding house to arrest them for having done this, they
refused to go. That is when the strikebreakers opened fire
through the windows. At least two other people in the
house were injured but recovered after this, this led to
a coroner's inquest that required five different interpreters because the
witnesses spoke five languages. Four of the strike breakers were convicted,
(13:02):
a fifth was acquitted, and a sixth fled before the
trial was over. On Labor Day of nineteen thirteen, Margaret Physicus,
who was fourteen, was shot in the head while picketing
after a fight broke out between strikers and strikebreakers. She
did recover from that. Although a deputized strikebreaker was arrested
for the shooting, a grand jury declined to charge him
(13:24):
with any crime. On December seven, and three men were
murdered at a boarding house in Payinsdale, Michigan, which was
owned by Thomas Dally, and Dally was one of the victims.
Several men boarding with Dally were working in the mines
during the strike. W f A member James Houdah, confessed
to the crime and others were also charged, but Hoodah
(13:45):
refused to testify against them. This was definitely an incident
in which striking miners instigated the violence, in this case
against men who were working in the mines in spite
of the strike. Also in December, supporters of Michigan's copper
mining industry formed the Citizens Alliance. This was another organization
that was meant to try to break the strike into
(14:06):
harass and intimidate the striking workers. This organization was funded
by mine management and about eight thousand people joined it.
So at the time the winter holidays approached in the
situation in copper Country was tense. Apart from the multiple
instances of violence, striking miners had been out of work
for about five months. They and their families were mostly
(14:28):
living on donated food and financial assistance from the union,
although that money was running out. So Annie Cleming, head
of the Women's Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners,
decided to hold a Christmas party for the children of
the striking miners with the hope of raising their spirits Clement,
whose name you'll also see sometimes spelled as Clemmings. Uh.
(14:49):
There's that appears in writing in a number of different ways.
She was known as Big Annie because she was more
than six feet tall. She was the daughter of Slovenian
immigrants and was married to a Croatian miner. She had
been extremely active in the strike up to this point,
including carrying an American flag and the union's demonstrations and parades,
and one of these parades she was threatened by an
(15:10):
armed deputy and she told him, quote, kill me. If
this flag won't protect me, I'll die with it. For
this party, she's solicited donations with the hope that each
child attending could get a small gift like a hat
or a pair of mittens where a piece of fruit
or candy. The venue for the party was the Italian
Hall in Red Jacket, which, as we said earlier, is
(15:31):
now called Calumet. The Italian Hall was a multi use
building that belonged to the Italian Mutual Benefit Society. It's
lower floors housed a saloon and an Atlantic and Pacific
tea company store, and upstairs was a space that could
be used as a banquet hall, a meeting room or
a theater. It was in the upstairs space. The between
five hundred and seven hundred people gathered for a Christmas
(15:53):
party on Christmas Eve. During this party, somebody came into
the hall and shouted fire. Annie Clemicc didn't see or
smell any smoke, and so she told people to stay
calm and to stay at the party. Other people probably
did this as well. But this cry of fire spread
through the crowd and people panicked and started trying to
(16:14):
rush through the door and down the stairs. The first
few dozen people that tried to flee the Italian Hall
were able to get out, but at some point someone
tripped and fell, and this started a chain reaction, with
other people who were also trying to get out falling
over and onto the people below. The fire department was
just across the street, and firefighters were on the scene
(16:35):
almost immediately, but the crush of people at the foot
of the stairs was so high and so tightly packed
that they couldn't start a rescue operation from below. They
had to climb up a fire escape one that people
in the party either hadn't known about or hadn't thought
about in the panic to try to escape, and they
had to work from above, slowly removing people from this
(16:56):
steep staircase that had just become completely impassable. Exact counts
vary because of discrepancies in record keeping, but at least
seventy three people died, mostly from being crushed to death
or suffocating. More than half of them were finished immigrants
or people of Finnish descent. About sixty of those victims
were children. There was no fire, and we're going to
(17:18):
talk about the aftermath of this tragedy after we take
a little break and hear from one of our sponsors.
Immediately after the tragedy in the Italian Hall, reports started
to spread that this had been a deliberate act of
violence against the striking miners. Multiple witnesses say they saw
(17:42):
the person who falsely shouted fire, and that it wasn't
a miner, but with somebody wearing a Citizens Alliance button
on his coat. Early reports placed what el Mahones strikebreaker
Edward Manly in the stairwell after the incident. What el
Mahones sources said that he had gone into the stairwell
to try to help, but he was never questioned and
he disappeared from Calumet not long after. Some deathbed confessions
(18:06):
were also reported in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties,
but they were second and third hand. None of those
were ever verified. The disaster immediately became national news, including
a front page story in the New York Times on
Christmas Day, but newspapers in Michigan carried distinctly different accounts
depending on whether they supported the striking workers or the
(18:27):
mine management. For example, a Finnish American socialist newspaper called
two Amius or Worker, published a bilingual, Finish and English
edition on Christmas Day and that included reports that a
man with a Citizens Alliance badge and his hat pulled
down had yelled fire. A headline in this paper on
the twenty six translated to eighty three murdered. Some of
(18:50):
the newspaper staff were arrested on December twenty seventh of
nineteen thirteen for quote causing a riot. Because of these claims,
the newspaper was shut down at temporarily, and it eventually
moved its headquarters to another state. Meanwhile, the Calumet News
reported on how the Citizens Alliance and security guards from
Calumet and Hecla were part of the rescue, while not
(19:12):
mentioning all the miners who were also part of it.
Papers also reported that w f M president Charlie Moyer
was financially benefiting from the strike in some way, with
absolutely no evidence for that claim. Moyer to be clear
how it checkered past. He had served time in prison
in Illinois after another man's confession implicated him in a
(19:33):
string of crimes, including a home invasion and a department
store burglary. He was also implicated in a December bombing
that killed former Governor Frank Stunnenberg of Idaho, although that
case was dismissed after the other accused men were all acquitted.
People also questioned his leadership in the Copper Country strike.
He had authorized it even though the people at the
(19:56):
WFM headquarters were opposed to it, but after the Italian
Hall incident, Moyer avoided placing blame on any particular person. Instead,
he began sending numerous telegrams calling for an investigation, saying
that there was enough about the tragedy that was suspicious
that it warranted an extra look. The local sheriff and
several people from mind Management and the Citizens Alliance told
(20:19):
Moyer to stop writing these telegrams and to issue a
statement that would absolve the Citizens Alliance of any blame.
Moyer refused, and his account the sheriff said something to
him along the lines of then I can't protect you anymore.
Later that night, several men attacked Moyer and he was
shot in the back when a pistol discharged as he
was being beaten with it. The men dragged him to
(20:41):
the Portage Lake Bridge with a bullet still lodged in
his back, and threatened to throw him off of it,
and then they took him to the train depot and
put him on a train bound for Chicago, threatening to
kill him if he ever returned. No one was ever
prosecuted for any of this. On Christmas Day, finished Fatie,
a grapher John William Nara took pictures of the Italian Hall,
(21:03):
which continued to be a primary source of information about
what the scene was like. In the immediate aftermath of
the tragedy. The coroner held a three day inquest, but
didn't rule on a cause of death for the people
who had died in the incident. During the investigation, witnesses
were required to hear and answer questions in English, regardless
of what language they actually spoke, and the questioning seemed
(21:25):
more oriented towards clearing the citizens alliance of suspicion than
uncovering the truth of what actually happened. A grand jury
that had been convened to investigate strike crimes also issued
no indictments in the disaster or in the attack on Mowyer,
although it indicted Moyer for his organizing on behalf of
the miners. Congressional hearings into the disaster didn't really go anywhere,
(21:49):
As was the case with so many other mass tragedies
that we've talked about on the show before, Calumet was
not prepared to cope with a disaster of this scale.
There wasn't a more large enough to help manage all
the bodies. There weren't enough coffins, especially child sized coffins.
Help had to be brought in from surrounding communities to
try to manage it all. Most of the funerals took
(22:10):
place on December twenty, with all of the churches involved
coordinating to allow one massive funeral procession through town. That
procession drew about twenty spectators. Miners had dug into the
frozen ground for mass graves for most of the victims,
with twenty two buried in a Catholic cemetery in forty
four in a Protestant cemetery. The rest of the victims
(22:33):
were buried in family plots. Although mine management and the
Citizens Alliance raised money for a victim's fund, Mowyer and
the w f A refused to take it. They said
they did not want money, they wanted justice. Moyer also
said that the union would bury its own dead. Although
the strike didn't officially end until April of nineteen fourteen,
(22:53):
it was more or less over after this. Henry Ford
was offering people five dollars a day to work on
his automotive assembly line for work that was far less
dangerous than working in the copper mines, so a lot
of people moved to Detroit to work there. We actually
have several episodes on Henry Ford in our archive for
folks who would like to know more about the nuance
on all of that. After the Western Federation of Miners
(23:16):
voted to cut aid to the striking workers in the
spring of nineteen fourteen, those who hadn't already left for
other industries voted to go back to work. They got
a small pay increase in an eight hour work day,
but otherwise none of their demands were met. This disaster
was also part of the end of the Western Federation
of Miners. The union lost more than half of its
(23:37):
membership between nineteen thirteen and nineteen sixteen, and the Michigan
strike depleted its treasury almost entirely. In nineteen sixteen, the
union reformed as the International Union of Mine Mill and
Smelter Workers. That union was actually part of our episode
on the Bisbee deportation. Apart for the calls for justice
that went unanswered and the immediate aftermath of the tragedy,
(24:00):
the people of Calumet seemed to mostly want to move on.
There was no coverage of the disasters one year anniversary
and local newspapers, and it wasn't something that seemed to
be widely discussed. That started to change after Ella Reeves Blur,
known as Mother Bluer, published her autobiography We Are Many
in nineteen forty. She had been one of the organizers
(24:21):
that was involved in this strike, and her book included
an account of the disaster. That account inspired Woody Guthrie
to write his song nineteen thirteen Massacre about the incident.
He put out that song in nineteen forty one. Because
the investigation into the disaster was handled so sloppily. It
is still not clear exactly what happened, and some of
(24:41):
the details that have become widely remembered are not actually
supported by the evidence. In some accounts, including Woody Guthrie
song lyrics, supporters of the mind bosses physically stopped people
from leaving the hall, or they laughed as children fell
and died. One widely held piece of misinformation and is
that the doors out of the hall opened the wrong way,
(25:03):
something that was absolutely true and some of the other
disasters that we have discussed, but that was not the
case in the Italian Hall. There are actually photographs that
show the doors opening outward. It seems very likely that
the person who shouted fire was opposed to the strike
and the striking workers and wanted to ruin the party.
But some people go so far as to conclude that
(25:24):
their intent wasn't just to harass the miners and their
families and to spoil their good time, but that it
was intended to create a fatal stampede on purpose. Because
there was never a thorough investigation, it's really hard to
say that conclusively. Big Annie Clemenc eventually moved to Chicago,
remarried and had a daughter. Her descendants did not know
(25:44):
about her work as a labor organizer or the Italian
Hall disaster when they were asked about it. In more
recent years. She has since been inducted into the Michigan
Women's Hall of Fame and Labor's International Hall of Fame.
Michigan's copper mines went into decline. They started closing in
the nineteen sixties, with the last closing down in nineteen
A law passed in two thousand four allowed mining to
(26:06):
resume in the state, though and Eagle Mine was the
first one to open under this new law. In Some
people point to the Italian Hall disaster as the beginning
of the downward trend in the industry that led to
its temporary total shutdown, but there was really a lot
more to it than that. Michigan's deep underground mines were
expensive and dangerous to operate, and in the nineteen teens
(26:28):
and beyond they were facing increasing competition from the mines
in the West and the Southwest, which were a lot
cheaper to operate. The Italian Hall was placed on the
National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty, but then
it was later removed. It was torn down in nineteen
eighty four, with its sandstone entry arch remaining as a
memorial for years. That archway had a sign that read
(26:49):
quote Michigan Historic Site Italian Hall. On December nineteen thirteen,
area copper miners had been on strike for five months.
The miners were fighting for better a shortened work days,
safer working conditions, and union recognition. That day, during a
Yule Tide party for the striking miners and their families,
someone yelled fire. Although there was no fire, seventy three
(27:13):
persons died while attempting to escape down a stairwell that
had doors that opened inward. Over half of those who
died were children between the ages of six and ten.
The perpetrator of this tragedy was never identified. The strike
ended in April nineteen fourteen. That wording was edited to
remove the reference to the inward opening doors. In twelve
(27:34):
of Michigan Technological University professor and students were part of
an archaeological study at the side of the Italian Hall.
This included ground penetrating radar work to determine the building's
original boundaries. The radar itself was actually on loan from
the q and Abey Indian Community Tribal Historic Preservation Office,
and it was run by the offices archaeologist who also
(27:55):
donated his time. On Christmas Eve, a granite monument was
dedicated at the site of the disaster and it lists
the names of the victims. This site is part of
the quan On National Historical Park and today the calum
At Rotary Club puts luminaries at the site each Christmas Eve.
There is one for each victim. For folks who want
more detail on all of this, Steve Lato has written
(28:17):
books about it, and there are some talks and articles
by him in the show notes for this episode on
our website. I have a couple of pieces of listener
mail that are overall on us a lighter note because
they're about television. They're short, so I'm going to read
both of them. The first one is about television, but
(28:37):
it's also about a disaster. It is. This is from Tatum.
Tatum says, Hi, they're a longtime listener, but this is
my first time writing in. I just thought your listeners
might want to know that the Netflix series The Crown
featured the Abervan mining disaster in a recent episode Season
three episode three. Because I was watching the episode, I
started to realize that I knew where this story was
going due to having heard your episode from November. So
(29:01):
if any of your listeners would like to see what
the disaster may have looked like as it took place,
I would recommend checking that out. Uh So, thank you
Tatum for that. UM. Tatum went on to say some
kind things about us, but I don't know that every
single person needs to hear all of that. Yes, we
talked about that disaster in November. Like that email says,
(29:22):
that's a little newer than we typically do for Saturday Classics.
But if folks watched The Crown and thought I didn't
know anything about this disaster, that is something they could
find in our archive. UM. And then the other quick
email about television is from Emily. Emily says, I just
wanted to write a quick thank you for your episode
on Matthew Hopkins because it combined two of my favorite things,
(29:43):
your podcast and the book Good Omens by Neil Gaming
and Terry Pratchett. If you're not familiar, there's a character
in it named Shadwell who was a seemingly self appointed
witch Finder sergeant. I was delighted to know that his
asking at least two characters, how many nipples have you got?
Was inspired by their real life We're nous slash terrible
nous of Hopkins. Thanks again for hours of entertainment, Emily,
(30:04):
Thank you Emily for this note. I love the book
Good Omens. It's been so long since I've read it that,
as with many books, the details on a lot of
it are very fuzzy. So I only got caught up
on watching the Good Omens series that came out recently
after we had recorded that episode, and I was like, oh, yeah,
that guy. I forgot he was in the book. I
(30:26):
forgot to I. Um, it's been a long time since
I've revisited that one. Yeah yeah. I'm currently having the
same experience watching his Dark Materials, which is a book
series that I love. But it's been oh, more than
a decade since I read it. Probably, um, I could
be that could be too, but big of a number.
It's been years since I read it, So as I'm
watching it, I'm like, this is how the book was,
(30:47):
I don't remember anyway. That's some historically oriented television, not
his Dark Materials, but the other ones for folks to
check out if they would like. We are at History
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. If you would like
to send us an email about this or any other episode,
that is a new email address if you have not noticed,
and we are also all over social media at missed
(31:08):
in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,
and Instagram. And you can come to our website missed
in History dot com for the show notes for all
the episodes that Holly and I have worked on together
in a searchable archive of every episode ever. And you
can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, the I
heart Radio app, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
(31:31):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I Heart Radios. How stuff Works. For more podcasts For
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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