(HOST) As we celebrate Labor Day, commentator Vic Henningsen invites us to consider an unusual connection between French literature and Vermont labor history.
(HENNINGSEN) In 1885, Emile Zola published Germinal, a vivid depiction of the French working class and its struggle for basic rights and human dignity. The novel describes the grim lives of coal miners. Driven to desperation by steadily declining living and working conditions, the miners in the book strike and are brutally suppressed by the police and the army.
Widely considered Zola’s masterpiece, Germinal reflects his thorough research into mining operations, and the events and aftermath of a crippling strike in 1884.
We have no evidence that Zola’s research included reading accounts of a Vermont miners’ strike in 1883, but the novel almost exactly duplicates the events of what came to be known as the "Ely War."
At the time, the Ely Copper Mine in Vershire produced 3/5 of America’s copper, shipping as much as three million pounds a year. But it was a terribly wasteful and destructive process. Only 3% of what the 800 miners extracted from the ground was marketable copper, made so by a smelting process requiring an immense quantity of wood to run. The resulting pollution created incredibly corrosive acid rain, which combined with deforestation to reduce that section of Orange County to something resembling a moonscape.
By 1883 the Ely lode was playing out and, with the opening of western mines, copper prices plummeted. Mine managers fell months behind on the payroll and, by July, the miners had had enough. Like Zola’s fictional miners, they not only struck, but rioted. For almost a week, armed workers stopped the pumps to flood the mines, destroyed company buildings, and threatened to dynamite the whole place if they weren’t paid. As in Germinal, terrified managers screamed for help and Governor Barstow sent five companies of the state militia to put down the insurrection. Sneaking into town at night, the militia arrested strike leaders in their beds. Strikers awoke to find their leaders in irons and armed troops patrolling the streets. The so-called "Ely War" was over.
In a supreme irony, also present in Zola’s novel, the strikers essentially destroyed their own livelihood, for flooding the pits made the Ely mine unworkable. Unable to meet its obligations, the company went bust and miners received little of their back pay. In this episode of working class struggle, everyone lost.
Although we celebrate Labor Day, we often forget that it commemorates a serious, sometimes violent, struggle for human dignity. Workers sought safe conditions and decent pay. Too often, management chose to suppress labor’s grievances rather than address them. Certainly the parallels between French fiction and Vermont facts suggest there are some universal truths about that conflict worth recalling. Alas, the novel is as unread in these parts as the Ely War is unremembered. On both counts, that’s too bad.
Vic Henningsen is a teacher and historian.