Debility and the Mine-to-Poorhouse Pipeline
Judicious Mixture as Infrastructural Warfare
By Kevin Slovinsky
In 1973, interdisciplinary scholar Kenneth E. Bailey introduced the concept of “judicious mixture” to the nascent, but rapidly growing, community of activists and scholars interested in Appalachian Studies. He argued that coal companies in Central Appalachia sought to create a racially and ethnically diverse worker pool — a “judicious mixture” — in order to “forestall unionism by playing one group off against another.”1 Since then, judicious mixture has become an integral component in Appalachian labor and social history. Most recently, Karida Brown’s book Gone Home positions judicious mixture as a central mechanism in the creation of majority-Black communities in Eastern Kentucky. In this paper, I propose another way of looking at judicious mixture that turns away from its intended purpose (i.e. to prevent unionization), focusing instead on how it combined with other coal company policies to debilitate working-class coal mining communities in Southwestern Pennsylvania, laying the foundation for what I call the mine-to-poorhouse pipeline. By looking at judicious mixture through the lens of disability scholar Jasbir Puar’s concept of debility, I am also hoping to take up Rebecca Eli-Long’s call for Appalachian studies scholars to use “theories from disability studies to understand some of the ways that people in Appalachia have been disenfranchised and viewed as less capable.”2 With all being said, permit me to set the scene for a story.
Somerset County is located in the rural southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, a region known mostly for its beautiful rolling pasture-covered hills and the black bituminous coal that lies deep within them. Although its peaks in the Laurel Highlands are not as high as West Virginia or its hollows as deep as East Kentucky, Somerset County shares a hydrocarbon history with Central Appalachia.3 The early 20th-century coal corporations that established themselves in Somerset County — namely Consolidated Coal Corporation and the Berwind-White Coal Company — transformed the dominant character of the county’s environment, economy, demographics, and infrastructures of care.
In April 2010, a team of construction workers contracted by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to expand State Correctional Facility Laurel Highlands, a state-run prison primarily for geriatric inmates in Somerset County. While digging, they encountered something they were not expecting: the decomposed remains of 23 people. Although the construction workers found the corpses between the two parallel sets of fourteen-foot-high barbed wire electric fences that surrounded the prison, the bodies did not belong to people who were incarcerated at SCI-Laurel Highlands. The land from which the corpses were exhumed had only been enclosed as a prison since 1996. According to researchers from Mercyhurst College, the exhumed people had died between the 1860s and 1930s — when a poorhouse, not a prison, occupied the land.4 The people buried under what is now a 150-bed prison unit were not inmates of SCI-Laurel Highlands, they were inmates of the county-run poorhouse: the Somerset County Home for Employment.5
Although the bodies are unidentifiable — and therefore, nameless and recordless — we can imagine who they might have been by looking at the people who lived and died in the County Home.6 The County Home register book of inmates holds vital information about poorhouse inmates, including their name, birthday, sex, nationality, occupation, physical condition, and “cause of pauperism.” It shows that a wide variety of people boarded at the County Home, from widowed housewives and geriatric farmers to orphaned children and those labeled with mental illness. Of the working-class residents of Somerset County, however, none were better represented in the poorhouse register than European immigrant coal miners labeled “not able-bodied.”7
The dangers of coal are well known; after hundreds of major mining accidents, the coal industry has become virtually synonymous with death, injury, and disease. Every time a coal miner climbed onto the mantrip to venture into the mine, they put their lives and livelihoods at risk. Non-fatal accidents were a consistent feature of Pennsylvania’s bituminous fields and far out-numbered annual fatality counts.8 Yet, as Puar notes in her book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, maiming often evades critical attention because accident reports “convey the false impression that the wounded are going to be okay.”9 This impression has, in turn, directed popular memory and academic literature on the danger of coal mining to almost exclusively focus on large disasters, further erasing the magnitude of non-fatal incidents and their effects on miners and mining communities.10 The poorhouse register demonstrates that — even if an accident left a miner alive — if his resulting injuries were deemed “incurable,” he was foreclosed from participating in the local economy. In a local economy dominated by an industry that provided little to no employment opportunities for disabled people or those unwilling to exacerbate their existing disabilities and illnesses, many injured miners were left with no other option other than the poorhouse.
While the surface mines that now scar the Laurel Highlands exemplify the coal industry’s present capacity to degrade the environment, the injured miners of the 20th-century poorhouse encapsulated the industry’s historic capacity to kill and maim, but also to debilitate working-class communities through, what Puar calls, “infrastructural warfare.” I argue that the corporate policy of judicious mixture, while designed to prevent unionization, effectively served as a method of infrastructural warfare. To both illustrate my point and attempt to do what poorhouse historian Megan Birk calls “personalizing poverty,” I will tell you all a story about just one of the many debilitated miners who lived and died in the poorhouse.
Ralph Sundacoss
Although the actual identities of the remains found at SCI-Laurel Highlands are and will likely remain a mystery, it is not outside the realm of reason to imagine that one of the 23 bodies belonged to the Italian coal miner Ralph Sundacoss. Ralph’s birth, immigration, and census records are, so far, lost to history but it can be inferred from the census that he immigrated to the United States sometime between 1900 and 1906 and quickly found employment as a coal miner for Somerset Coal Company.11 Considering that Ralph was single, far from home, and certainly not wealthy enough to purchase a home, he probably did what most European coal miners did in Somerset County and boarded in a multi-unit company-owned home with other Italian miners and managed by an Italian matriarch.12 Having come with very little money, Ralph was unlikely to make much money while working in the mines. Like many other miners in Appalachia, Ralph was paid in company scrip that could only be used at the company store. Considering the low wages, the high prices at the company store, and miners’ dependence on credit, it is possible that within a year of arriving in Pennsylvania, Ralph would have already been indebted to the Somerset Coal Company.13
While the records do not indicate when Ralph started working, they are abundantly clear about when he stopped working. Before the workday ended on March 27, 1906, a roof collapse crushed the 24-year-old Ralph Sundacoss while he was working in a Somerset Coal Co. mine. The company’s accident report to the Pennsylvania Department of Mines noted: “scalp lacerated and back partly dislocated by fall of slate.”14 But, local newspaper coverage of the incident revealed that the incident was much worse than the accident report let one; Ralph would not be “had his legs crushed so badly in a mine accident near Meyersdale that his lower extremities were paralyzed and he lost control of his body below the hips.”15 The Somerset County Star meanwhile found it fit to simply note that Ralph suffered from “partial paralysis of the body.”16 Ralph’s death certificate confirms the newspaper reports; Ralph Sundacoss was paralyzed from the waist by a fall of slate at the young age of 24.17
Immediately after the incident, Ralph was sent to the Connellsville Cottage Hospital, a state hospital in nearby Fayette County that primarily served “disabled miners and laboring men throughout the region.”18 After boarding there for a year, the hospital sent Ralph to the Somerset County Home in August of 1907.19 According to the Somerset County Star, Ralph was provided with a “cheap tick filled with straw” where he was “compelled to lie on it day and night without the least attempt in the way of sanitary protection until it became a mass so unspeakably foul and offensive.”20 Although the physicians reportedly asked the Directors of the Poor for more resources to care for Ralph, their requests fell on deaf ears. Ralph lied on this straw mattress for a month “in a filthy condition, without proper nursing, proper bedding, [or] protection from flies in hot weather.”21 Dr. Henry Wilson, the physician in charge at the County Home, testified in 1908 before a county court that Ralph’s living conditions were “worse than if he were lying on a dung heap!”22 Left unattended, his condition worsened. As the Somerset County Star gruesomely described, Ralph was “so utterly neglected that his body became infested with maggots.”23 Ralph Sundacoss died on September 19, 1907, of septicemia, and was buried two days later on the grounds of the County Home — far from his home in Italy.24 Indeed, Ralph spent the last eighteen months of his life slowly being killed by the “fall of slate” and the neglect of institutional care workers. Yet, in Somerset Coal Company’s reports to the Bureau of Mines, he was listed as one of many non-fatal accidents
Debilitating Immigrant Coal Communities
Once incarcerated at the poorhouse, Ralph Sundacoss was, as disability scholar Eunjung Kim has written, seemingly “read as being in a condition of a ‘nonlife’ — without a future and denied meaning in the present.”25 Institutionalized in a heterotopia, excluded from the ongoing economic life of Somerset County, and removed from the working-class community that European immigrants built around the local coal industry, Ralph was effectively condemned to a condition of social death.26 It is with this in mind that I say that disabled miners were “incarcerated” at the poorhouse. To be clear, the directors and staff of the poorhouse did not force miners to stay in the poorhouse. Even though poorhouse directors referred to boarders as “inmates,” the records indicate that they were permitted to leave. Instead, miners were incarcerated in the poorhouse by the exclusionary character of the local economy. In this sense, we can and should understand miners’ condition of disability as a product of their relationship with the regional economy and political order. As relationships exist on a continuum, between mutually supportive and hierarchically exploitative, so too does disability exist on a continuum between the moving goalposts of “success or failure in terms of health, wealth, progressive productivity, upward mobility, enhanced capacity.”27
This political/relational model of disability is perhaps exhibited most clearly by another injured immigrant miner, Mike Orban.28 Despite being labeled as “not able-bodied,” Mike came and left the poorhouse for month-long periods during his 25-year-long stay there, suggesting that his relationship with the economy and political order of Somerset County was different than Ralph Sundacoss’ relationship. Unlike Ralph, whose complete exclusion from the economy marked him as close to the “disabled” end of the disability/able-bodied spectrum, Mike’s condition of semi-exclusion demonstrates that not all injured miners in the poorhouse were equally marked as disabled. Nevertheless, both Mike and Ralph lived — and slowly died — at the poorhouse because they were part of a population targeted for debilitation.
Building off of Lauren Berlant’s concept of “slow death,” Jasbir Puar’s concept of debility challenges the traditional temporal framing of disability. For Puar, debility “foregrounds the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled.” While the concept of disability “creates and hinges on a narrative of before and after for individuals who will eventually be identified as disabled,” debility “comprehends those bodies that are sustained in a perpetual state of debilitation.”29 Debility acknowledges that many people — particularly people of color in the Global South — who are not typically considered “disabled” are racialized and selected by colonizing powers as viable targets for maiming and slow deaths.
Looking at Ralph Sundacoss’s life story through the lens of debility means going beyond the moment of the “fall of slate” and looking instead to the conditions that paved the way toward his incarceration and death. In other words, debility forces us to look at the social relations of the coal town and the labor policies of the coal companies. Widening the scope of analysis to include the workspace and the living space of European coal miners reveals a clear narrative: coal companies in Somerset County debilitated the working-class, majority-immigrant, coal communities by coercing them into working in unsafe conditions, paying them paltry wages, and implementing hiring policies that weakened miners’ capacity to create effective infrastructures of care. The institutionalization of Ralph Sundacoss is, of course, a compelling narrative about the inadequacy of care. But, when the temporality of the narrative is expanded to include Ralph’s environmental, social, economic, and political condition prior to the “fall of slate,” his story becomes a compelling sign that coal companies made miners vulnerable to pauperization and institutionalization
For Puar, who wrote about Israel’s colonization of Palestine, debility is a racial process insofar as racialization marks populations as targets for debilitation. Although Southwestern Pennsylvania is and historically was an overwhelmingly white part of the country, racialization still targeted certain populations for debilitation.30 Ninety percent of the miners that lived in the area surrounding the company town of Windber in 1910 were recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The “native-born” Americans who owned the farms and mines of Somerset County did not consider the Magyar, Slovakian, Polish, or Italian laborers who produced the county’s mineral wealth as wholly “part of the club” of whiteness.31 Positioned somewhere within the “de-gradations of whiteness,” the Southern and Eastern European miners of the early twentieth century could not claim all the privileges that came with whiteness and were positioned as valid targets for coal companies to debilitate in the pursuit of profit.32
As historian Mildred Beik found, "regional coal companies strongly implemented judicious mixture despite the relative absence of African Americans in Somerset County." Biek discerned that promoting “segregated ethnic enclaves and other measures that divided and maintained a docile multiethnic workforce” was a central component of Berwind-White’s anti-union policy.33 Instead of creating disunity between African Americans, European immigrants, and American-born whites, the labor agents of Somerset coal operators targeted a diversity of European migrants to foment ethnic, even if not necessarily racial, divisions.
Although the militant miner strikes of the 1920s demonstrated that judicious mixture was an ineffective method of preventing unionization, the policy did effectively sabotage miners’ autonomous infrastructures of care. Even when miners quickly unified along class lines to improve working conditions, they remained separated along ethnic lines within the company town. A direct product of ethnic segregation was the creation of ethnicity-specific fraternal organizations such as the Italian Workmen’s Beneficial Association (IWBA). Since most operators did not offer any compensation or insurance policies, and private insurance companies refused to offer coal miners coverage because their occupation had “high death and accident rates,” miners turned to their ethnically-defined communities to mitigate the risk of employment.34 Indeed, miners created the IWBA and the myriad of other ethnicity-specific fraternal organizations that operated in Somerset County during the first three decades of the 20th century to “provide minimal death and sickness insurance benefits to victims or their families.”35 That is to say, miners created mutual aid institutions that provided a much-needed service that, sometimes, allowed miners to remain in their homes while they healed from a workplace injury. These fraternal organizations/mutual aid institutions were key components of a complex health infrastructure that, as historian Karol Weaver has explored in the anthracite coal fields, also included European folk medicine and the women who performed and disseminated folk knowledge.36
While judicious mixture fractured the mining communities of Somerset, it also effectively restricted the effectiveness of these mutual-aid programs. The basic structure of insurance programs meant that the more people who paid into the policy, the more money beneficiaries received. But, miners’ mutual aid programs reflected the larger segregated structure of the company town. By limiting their clientele to those sharing an ethnic identity, fraternal society leaders ultimately constrained their ability to provide coverage. The grotesque abundance of immigrant coal miners in the Somerset County poorhouse records indicates judicious mixture’s fractionalization of mutual aid programs limited their effectiveness, compounding miners’ vulnerability to injury and institutionalization.
Indeed, when the poorhouse record is approached through the lens of debility and put in context with the corporate practice of judicious mixture, it becomes clear that coal companies were waging, what Puar has called, “infrastructural warfare” against the working-class coal communities of Somerset County. You all already know that the coal companies treated miners as disposable; they put miners in conditions in which slow death — via physical injury or illnesses like black lung — became predictable, if not inevitable. But the magnitude of the “mine-to-poorhouse pipeline” and the framing of debility clearly indicates that coal companies actively undermined miners’ attempts to create infrastructures that would mitigate the physically debilitating effects of their work. So, when the process of working predictably made miners physically unable to continue working in the mines, miners were left with no other option but the county-run poorhouse — an institution that was unequipped to provide care for the diversity and size of the disabled miner population. The European immigrant miners were, in other words, subjected to a “slow wearing down” not only in the sense that they were forced to inhale coal dust and hunch in positions that gave them rheumatoid arthritis but also in the sense that their healthcare infrastructures were sabotaged by corporate policies that sought to divide workers along ethnic lines. This infrastructural warfare ultimately paved the way for miners to turn to the poorhouse as a matter of last resort, creating a miner-to-poorhouse pipeline that has received little to no attention in the historiography of coal mining in Appalachia.
Now, Puar’s writings on debility argue that debility is an intentional process carried out by the oppressing power — in her case, Israel — against the targeted population. Given the sources available, I cannot make that same argument about debility in the coal communities of Somerset County. The maiming of the targeted population was not “the end goal,” as Puar argues it is for the Israeli Defense Force. But maiming and the institutionalization of miners was, nonetheless, a predictable outcome of corporate policies that sought to maximize profits.37 When a company like Berwind-White or Somerset Coal Company knew that the working conditions they cultivated reliably sent a significant portion of miners to the poorhouse every single year, but then did nothing to mitigate that crisis, is that not equivalent to intentional maiming?
As Kenneth Bailey concluded fifty years ago, judicious mixture was a rather nefarious plot by coal companies to divide workers, prevent unionization, and preserve criminal profit margins. But, when we introduce the poorhouse into our narratives of coal communities and adopt the lens of debility, it becomes clear that it also functioned as a tool of infrastructural warfare, slowly wearing down mining communities’ capacity to mitigate the pauperizing effects of workplace injuries. As depressing as this re-framing might be, I want to end this presentation on a more hopeful note. Although I have, admittedly, held up Ralph Sundacoss as a tragic symbol of the debilitating effects of extractive capitalism, we can also imagine that Ralph likely played a constructive role in his working-class community, even while the Somerset Coal Company intentionally divided him from his peers.38 As an Italian miner, he might have participated in and paid into the Italian Workmen’s Beneficial Association, committing his time and money to provide aid for other workers. In other words, Ralph may have been a part of a community of people committed to making a livable world in a built environment designed by the coal industry to control bodies and through those bodies, extract wealth from the earth.39 He was not only a worker who produced value, or a disabled body that symbolized the destructive capacity of the coal industry, but a person with hopes of escaping debilitation in the coal fields of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, capitalism has a way of punishing people who, as Puar has written, dared to escape a targeted population.
Endnotes
1. Although Bailey first wrote about judicious mixture in a 1972 article in West Virginia History, it is most associated with an expanded version of that first article that was published in the 1985 edited collection Blacks in Appalachia. The quote here is from the Blacks in Appalachia version of the article. Kenneth R. Bailey, “A Judicious Mixture: Negroes and Immigrants in the West Virginia Mines, 1880-1917,” in Blacks in Appalachia, ed. William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1985), 127; Kenneth Bailey, "A Judicious Mixture," West Virginia History no. 34 (1972): 152-154.
2. Rebecca-Eli M. Long, “Cripistemology of Appalachia: Disability, Quareness, and the Speculative Present,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 28, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 70–87; Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Melton, United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2017)
3. Like Central Appalachia and distinctly unlike the coal-producing counties of western Pennsylvania, the coal of Somerset County and the other southwestern counties was bituminous, not anthracite. Along with its neighboring Maryland counties, the Appalachian Regional Commission considers Somerset County a member of the Northern Appalachia subregion.
4. Russ O’Reilly, “Researchers Excavate Cemetery on Prison Grounds,” Johnstown Tribune-Democrat, September 12, 2010; Bruce Siwy, “Bones Headed Back to Prison,” Somerset Daily American, October 28, 2010; Bruce Siwy, “Bodies Found at Prison Interred,” Somerset Daily American, December 17, 2010.
5. The Directors of the Poor frequently referred to the people living in the poorhouse as “inmates.”
6. People referred to poor relief institutions with a variety of names and usually used them interchangeably. This includes the terms: poorhouse, almshouse, county home, house of employment, poor farm, and infirmary. This essay uses the terms poorhouse and County Home interchangeably as the Directors of the Poor did in the early 20th century.
7. Somerset County Home of Employment, “Almshouse Register,” January 1, 1924, Somerset County Clerk’s Office (hereafter cited as Somerset County Home of Employment, “Almshouse Register”); For literature on rural poorhouses, see: Megan Birk, The Fundamental Institution: Poverty, Social Welfare, and Agriculture in American Poor Farms (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2022); Michael Daley and Peggy Pittman-Munke, “Over the Hill to the Poor Farm: Rural History Almost Forgotten,” Contemporary Rural Social Work Journal 8, no. 2 (September 1, 2016); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America, (New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1986).
8. In 1913 alone there were 609 fatalities but 1,076 non-fatal injuries (419 of which were caused by roof falls) in Pennsylvania’s bituminous mines. Albert H. Fay, United States. Bureau of Mines, Coal-mine fatalities in the United States, 1870-1914: with statistics of coal production, labor, and mining methods, by states and calendar years, 1916, 99.
9. Puar, The Right to Maim, 142.
10. For literature on mining disasters in the coal industry, see Joshua Stahlman, “Tragedy at Avondale: The Causes, Consequences, and Legacy of the Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal Industry’s Most Deadly Mining Disaster, September 6, 1869,” Pennsylvania History 77, no. 4 (2010): 517–18; J. Stuart Richards, Death in the Mines: Disasters and Rescues in the Anthracite Coal Fields of Pennsylvania, Illustrated edition (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2007); Peter A. Galuszka, Thunder on the Mountain: Death at Massey and the Dirty Secrets Behind Big Coal (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2012).
11. Like many Italian coal miners in Pennsylvania, he likely docked in either New York City or Philadelphia and was part of what scholar Robert F. Harney dubbed the “commerce of migration,” wherein shipping agents and padrones profited from seducing young Italians to try their luck in America’s labor market. R. F. Harney, “The Commerce of Migration,” Canadian Ethnic Studies = Etudes Ethniques Au Canada 9, no. 1 (January 1, 1977): 42–53; also referred to as the “migration industry,” Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Ninna Nyberg Sorensen, and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International Migration (London, UK: Taylor & Francis Group, 2012), 24; Department of Mines, “Report of the Department of Mines of Pennsylvania, Part II: Bituminous,” 1906, 509-510.
12. Although Ralph lived in Somerset, not the Berwind-White company town of Windber in northern Somerset, the structure of the boarding house was likely the same. Historian Mildred A. Beik explored the boarding homes of Windber, including their economic significance and social composition, in her study of Windber. Beik, The Miners of Windber.
13. For literature on the miners and company towns of Somerset County, see Mildred A. Beik, The Miners of Windber and Margaret M. Mulrooney, A Legacy of Coal: The Coal Company Gowns of Southwestern Pennsylvania (Washington, D.C: Historic American Buildings Survey, Historic American Engineering Record, National Park Service, 1989). For Pennsylvania in general, see: Karen Bescherer Metheny, From the Miners’ Doublehouse: Archaeology and Landscape in a Pennsylvania Coal Company Town, (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2007); Barry P. Michrina, Pennsylvania Mining Families: The Search for Dignity in the Coalfields, (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015); Andrew B. Arnold, Fueling the Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country, (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2014); Paul A. Shackel, Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018).
14. Note the use of passive voice here which conveniently obfuscates the company’s responsibility for the accident. Pennsylvania Department of Mines, Report of the Department of Mines of Pennsylvania, Part II: Bituminous, 1906, 521.
15. Meyersdale, a small town known for its maple syrup, is only about two miles from Summit Township. “Directors Indicted,” Somerset Herald, May 6, 1908.
16. The newspaper reports refer to him as “Ralph Sangrass” and his death certificate uses “Sandgrass” but the Somerset Herald article noted that this was his “Americanized name.” All the evidence indicates that Ralph Sundacoss and Ralph Sangrass/Sandgrass were the same person. “Terrible If True,” Somerset County Star, May 14, 1908.
17. Ralph Sandgrass, death certificate, 22 Sep. 1907, file no. 91524, available in “Pennsylvania, U.S., Death Certificates, 1906-1968,” s.v. “Ralph Sandgrass” (1883-1907), Ancestry.com.
18. The Cottage Hospital in Connellsville was one of ten hospitals in Pennsylvania that were taken over by the state government and made into State Hospitals for Miners. Along with all the other State Hospitals for Miners, the government ultimately divested from Connellsville State General Hospital (as it was known when under state control) and left it to become a “community owned not for profit institution.” “Highlands Hospital » History,” accessed October 8, 2022; “Several Soft Snaps,” The Pittsburgh Dispatch, October 23, 1891.
19. In his history of the Black Lung compensation movement, Alan Derickson noted that in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, “public assistance meant not monetary allowances but confinement in state or county institutions.” He went on to explain that state hospitals like Connellsville Cottage Hospital “refused to admit individuals with incurable chronic diseases. The absence of state services left only the county poor houses. Although dread of the primitive conditions in these institutions and of the stigma of such confinement kept the disabled at their jobs as long as possible, many former miners ultimately could not avoid this degradation.” Alan Derickson, Black Lung: Anatomy of a Public Health Disaster (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Ralph being sent to the state hospital: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JMHXNvzW3uk1fDCtIF5HdMZoB8bcoGPq/view?usp=sharing; Digital Almshouse Register, “Deaths,” 1907.
20. The word “tick” here refers to a tick mattress, a rather uncomfortable bed even by the standards of turn-of-the-century Americans. “Directors Indicted,” Somerset Herald, May 6, 1908.
21. “Terrible If True,” Somerset County Star, May 14, 1908.
22. “Not Guilty Verdict,” Somerset Herald, December, 1908.
23. “Terrible If True,” Somerset County Star, May 14, 1908.
24. Ralph Sandgrass, death certificate, 22 Sep. 1907, file no. 91524, available in “Pennsylvania, U.S., Death Certificates, 1906-1968,” s.v. “Ralph Sandgrass” (1883-1907), Ancestry.com.
25. Eunjung Kim, Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea, Illustrated edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2017), 7.
26. There is a lot of literature on social death but the introductory text is generally regarded to be Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, First Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). Although, Bisan A. Salhiand’s and Anwar D. Osborne’s article "Incarceration and Social Death — Restoring Humanity in the Clinical Encounter" is particularly relevant here. Bisan A. Salhi and Anwar D. Osborne, “Incarceration and Social Death — Restoring Humanity in the Clinical Encounter,” New England Journal of Medicine 384, no. 3 (January 21, 2021): 201–3.
27. Puar, The Right to Maim, 15.
28. For an introduction to the political/relational model, see Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013).
29. Puar, The Right to Maim, xiv.
30. Unlike the coal counties of Central and Southern Appalachia, Somerset County never had more than a tiny Black population in the early twentieth century.
31. The nativist organizations of early 20th-century Somerset County, including the Ku Klux Klan, made it abundantly clear that they did not consider Southern and Eastern European immigrants as “white.” Beik, The Miners of Windber, 174-182.
32. “The four big nationalities—Magyar, Slovaks, Poles, and Italians—alone constituted 85 percent of [inside miners, loaders, or coal cutters].” Beik, The Miners of Windber, 62; In her call for further analysis of whiteness in Appalachia, sociologist Barbara Ellen Smith recognized that mountain whites have historically not been considered as white as American-born Anglo-Saxons who lived on the Eastern Coast of the United States. The systematic “othering” of Appalachian whites is evidence of the existence of “de-gradations of whiteness.” Barbara Ellen Smith, “De-Gradations of Whiteness: Appalachia and the Complexities of Race,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 10, no. 1/2 (2004): 38–57; Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91.
33. Beik, Miners of Windber, 342.
34. In an oral history interview, Mildred Beik asked an old miner “if somebody died in the mines, did they get any benefits” to which he replied “at first there were no benefits [...] That's why they had fraternal societies, you know what I mean. They didn’t get nothing, nothing at all at first. Then they started the compensation laws, you know what I mean, where you got compensation. Yeah, oh but they wanted to push you into the mines as fast as possible, these compensation people.” Joseph John Novak, “Interviews with Joseph John Novak and Justina Julia Bogdan Novak” by Mildred A. Beik, May 19, 1985; Beik, Miners of Windber, 124.
35. Worker’s compensation legislation was not passed in Pennsylvania until 1915. Jonathan L. Schaffer, “The History of Pennsylvania’s Workmen’s Compensation: 1900–1916,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 53, no. 1 (1986): 26–55.
36. Karol K. Weaver, Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880–2000, 1st edition (University Park, Pa: Penn State University Press, 2011).
37. Puar, 143.
38. This is my attempt to take up Eve Tuck’s call to turn away from “damage-centered research.” Although seeing as the large majority of this paper does forward damage-centered research, I hope that this final paragraph suggests that there are alternative ways of framing miners’ fraternal societies — and even the poorhouse — that eschews the damage-centered orientation presented in this paper. Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (2009): 409–28.
39. By using the phrase “making a livable world,” I am hoping to tie miners — who constructed their own autonomous institutions to mitigate, if not combat, the threats posed by capitalism — to the efforts of people of color currently living in colonized spaces that cooperate with one another to similarly make “livable worlds” for themselves, their kin, and their community members. Hilda Llorens, Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021).