Michael Punke's account of this disaster follows the accident almost minute by minute, from the initial accident to the spread of the fire and the attempts by various heroic individuals to warn and help people out. It is a horrible story, told well and with an eye on the human side of events. Punke draws out the lives of the individuals trapped, the heroism and the aftermath. This was a international immigrant workforce - the men trapped below, and their families above, came from many different heritages, and Punke gives a real sense of how the colonial US was built by workers from across the world.
However Punke does not simply tell the story of the mine disaster. He places it in the context of rising US capitalism and the extractivism that went alonside it. The copper from Butte didn't just fuel imperialist war, it was used to literarily connect America through the telegraph and electric networks. A small number of "copper barons" enclosed almost all the profit from the miners' labour and grew fabulously wealthy. The "war" between these barons to control the mines was often a physical one, but it was also a war that left death, environmental destruction and devestation behind as well. Today, Anaconda and Butte are still horribly scarred by the ecological legacy of the mines and their poison.
So Punke frames the story of the disaster in the wider rise of extractivist capitalism, and the battles it caused. Some of these are the war between the "band of brothers", but most interesting are those of the miners' and associated industrial workers of Butte, who fought for a bigger share of the profits and better health and safety. In the aftermath of the disaster, tens of thousands of workers' struck - forming radical unions that broke from the traditional unions that were every much tied to the company. These radical unions led a general strike in the area, that briefly pushed the mining companies onto the back foot. However the mine bosses were experienced enough to "divide and rule" the different sections, and miners had to fight alone. The bosses also resorted to violence - they killed the most radical leader of the IWW in the area, Frank Little, lynching him and threatening other radicals - which helped break the strike movement.
The aftermath of the disaster was marked by countrywide shock and horror, but little lasting change for the miners. While some concessions were wrested from the bosses, mostly things carried on. Punke finishes the story by telling what happened to Butte and Anaconda later in the 20th century, as the industry faltered and collapsed in the area, leaving unemployment and poverty in its wake. The powerful mining companies whose wealth had allowed them unprecedented influence in Montana and national politics, were eclipsed. The workers' were forgotten.
Punke's book is an excellent overview of these events and the trajectory of Montana's mining. But he doesn't really have the politics to tell the story of the mineworkers' properly. For Punke Butte was trapped between the radicals and the bosses. Unfortunately the only people who really had a vision for real change were the radicals, but they are dismissed as merely part of the story. Punke's book falls back on a semimystical idea that Butte's inhabitants always have "hope" which should see them through. But the hope for a better world, as the miners' of 1917 really knew, only comes from struggle. In 1917 these ideas were not abstract - the Russian Revolution was in progress, and workers' were well aware of events. Hope, on it's own, is not enough. Nonetheless, Michael Punke's Fire and Brimstone is a good overview of a crucial period of US history, little known outside this part of Montana and not well enough known outside the country. A good starting place.
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