Coal-cracker Elegy

 Those of us born in the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania are invested with a strong and complex identity. There is pride: the coal of our region powered the US industrial revolution, turning a nation hardly 100 years old at the time into a world leader. Coming from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, later from Eastern Europe and Italy, immigrants flowed into the region and found work in the mines. They built homes and communities and became Americans. Without the coal, without their hard work, the United States would not be what it is today, one of the leading industrial nations in the world, surpassed only by China.

There is also shame. What happened? How could things have changed so fast? How does a thriving downtown become a stretch of smoke shops and empty storefronts? What happened to the industries, the mines, the well-paying jobs, the unions (in 1868 John Siney organized one of the first miners’ unions in Saint Clair), a strong sense of community?

 

I don’t have the answers and I know what I have just described is not limited to mining regions, yet the men who wrested coal from the tortuous Mammoth Vein, which runs west from Carbon County into Schuylkill and beyond, were doing one of the hardest jobs in the world and had every reason to be proud. Have we recognized the depth of their courage and sacrifice, doing a job where death was always at their side?

That lack of recognition has produced a legacy of injured pride.

In 2012, the coal fields of northern France, in a region bordering the English Channel and Belgium, were inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. In many ways this part of France resembles the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. In both, coal mining was once the dominant activity and most industry revolved around it. Also, immigration was essential to its growth.

The Arenberg Pit, part of UNESCO World Heritage Site c. H. Bouvet

Geographically, however, the two regions could not be more different. In northern France, the coal fields stretch across 75 miles of plains. Mining activity, now over, was limited to underground mines, their presence marked by impressive redbrick collieries with massive steel headframes for transporting men and material underground. Company towns, experiments in creating an ideal environment for workers, were also built of brick.

 

Another difference with the Pennsylvania fields, those French mines were located near important urban centers, the city of Lille (population: ± 232,700), once the heart of France’s textile industry, Valenciennes, known for its lace, and the port of Calais. In the early 19^th century, the Allegheny Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania were considered hostile and inhospitable territory. Many early mining operations failed and many investors lost the shirt off their backs.

Forests, though, were abundant and the collieries, the mine shafts and the company towns were built of wood. Such was the case of the first Saint Nicholas Breaker of Mahanoy City, built in 1861, torn down in 1928, replaced by the monumental steel and glass Saint Nicholas, razed in March 2018. There was once talk of making it a heritage site, but the plans never panned out. I remember the breaker, as I’m sure many readers do. It is a shame that more of that mining heritage has not been preserved with pride.

Destruction of the Saint Nicolas Breaker in 2018

 

As for politics, northern France and Schuylkill County are in synch. In the 2022 French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the National Rally, a far-right movement, came out on top, though Emmanuel Macron won nationally. In the first round of legislative elections this past June, Le Pen, representing northern France, was easily reelected to her seat in Parliament.

In Schuylkill County, in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Donald Trump won almost 70% of the vote.

Today, many towns in the mining region of northern France are held by the National Rally. One such town is Hénin-Beaumont, whose mayor, Steeve Briois, until recently a member of the party’s national committee, has been in office since 2014. That year, he won the first round of elections with a little over 50% of the vote. In 2020, his score increased to 74%.

Briois’s supporters claim the town has become a better place. The downtown has been beautified; the façade of city hall, cleaned; a new swimming pool, built (privatized since, though paid for with taxpayer euros). Yet unemployment has increased and the poverty level, 24%, is among the highest in France.

19th century miners' housing in Hénin-Beaumont

Critics say the mayor has prettied up the surface but deep problems remain, beginning with a clampdown on all dissident voices. Municipal authorities have removed subsidies from local clubs and organizations that critique Briois’s politics. Stridently anti-immigrant, the mayor calls for “national preference” for jobs and housing, a position that runs contrary to the French constitution.

Many ask if Hénin-Beaumont, once an important coal town, is a microcosm of what National Rally politics would look like if the party held power at the national level, power that slipped through its fingers in legislative elections earlier this month.

Now, in US politics, a grandchild of the mines has reached national prominence. Here I refer to J. D. Vance, whose grandparents moved to Middletown, Ohio from the coal fields of southeastern Kentucky. In his acceptance speech at the recent Republican Party convention in Milwaukee, Vance claimed he would bring jobs back to the United States, fight for American citizens, produce American energy, build factories, sink mines. He promises to protect the wages of American workers, help them build a better future and buy affordable homes.

Strip mining in eastern Kentucky

 

Yet J. D. Vance, for his successful 2022 election bid for the US Senate, received 10 million dollars in campaign funding from tech giant and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Vance opposes Pro-Act, the bill that would allow workers to freely form unions and bargain collectively. He supports free medical care for childbirth but is against free daycare, which he considers a boon for the affluent, overlooking the working-class moms who need it most.

Perhaps we’ll see how those promises play out on a national stage. Perhaps we’ll find out if this man truly stands for the working class. Perhaps he’ll surprise us if, after accepting millions in funds from the super-rich, he proves he can still fight for the little gal and guy.

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

 

 

            

         

It’s been quite a month!

 

June, not over yet, has been quite a month. In France, it began on the beaches of

Normandy. On June 6^th, a handful of WWII veterans who participated in the 1944 D-Day invasion of occupied France, gathered on Omaha Beach. There, in the company of Presidents Biden and Macron, they commemorated the Allied victory that these men, today aged between 96 and 101, made possible.

This year marks the 80^th anniversary of the Battle of Normandy. Each year, there is a memorial ceremony, but only the ten-year commemorations bring together the leaders of the 13 nations that participated in the liberation of France. In 2034, will any veterans of the battle be alive?

Some of these men remain hale and hearty. Harold Terens, born in 1923, who enlisted in the US Army Air Corps in 1942, took advantage of his time in Normandy to marry his fiancée, Jeanne Swerlin, age 96, at a ceremony in Carentan-les-Marais, twenty miles from Omaha Beach. Between the ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery, the international commemoration at Omaha Beach and a dinner at Elysée Palace with President Macron, Cpl Harold Terens, member of the 350^th Fighter Squadron, 8^th Air Force, had the time to get married and take a few spins around the dance floor with his bride.

June 6^th was a perfect day. At Omaha Beach, the air was cool and a stiff wind came in off the Channel. At low tide, the beach was a mirror reflection, a study in blue and white, of the changing sky overhead, and the only sound was the distant breaking of gentle waves, a far cry from the sounds of bombs and bullets, the cries of the wounded and dying, the fear and horror of June 6, 1944. 

As leaders from around the world paid homage to the veterans, wrapped in warm blankets to protect them from the wind, on a wide platform constructed on the beach, a youth choir sang songs of freedom: le Chant des partisans, the hymn of the French Resistance, first broadcast from London, the headquarters of Free France, to occupied France on May 17, 1943; and le Chant des Marais, in English known as the Peat Bog Soldiers Song, written in 1933 and sung by political prisoners in German concentration camps, taken up as a song of resistance throughout Europe.

I was not there to attend the ceremony. It was almost impossible to get near Omaha Beach on June 6th, but I was glued to my TV screen because my friend Tiago Lucet-Rémy was among the singers, with a solo part in le Chant des Marais. Some readers may remember him from my October 2023 article on the World Rugby Cup. His choir, the Youth Chorus of Opéra comique, sang the French national anthem for rugby fans around the world. This time their songs were powerful reminders of the cost of peace, freedom and democracy. And in France, this past month, we’ve needed some reminding…

Between June 6^th and 9^th, Europeans voted for members of the European Parliament, with chambers in Brussels, Belgium and Strasbourg, France. In France, the National Rally, a nationalist far-right party, came out on top, with more than 30% of the vote, a searing defeat for the presidential party’s list, which garnered less than 14%.

On the evening of June 9^th, once the results became official, President Macron dissolved the lower house of Parliament, provoking shockwaves throughout France. He called for legislative elections to begin today, June 30th, leaving it up to the French people, obviously dissatisfied with the center-right party supporting the president, to decide how they wish to be governed.

I ask Americans, used to political campaigns that go on for years, to imagine this. At the snap of his fingers, President Macron exercised his prerogative to dissolve the National Assembly. Between the moment of dissolution and the first round of the two-part electoral process, candidates for the new Assembly have 21 days to get their act together, which includes all the administrative rigmarole to simply get their names on the ballot. Next, paper ballots must be printed and delivered to polling places all over France. Then there are the meetings, the speeches, the media coverage, the opinion polling, the almost-certitude that for the first time in the history of the French Republic a far-right party may govern France.

 

We’ve tried everything else, French voters say. The left-right divide that has marked French politics since the Third Republic (1870-1940) has lost its meaning. Too many foreigners, France is no longer France, and nobody is looking out for the poor and middling sort—unless they happen to be immigrants.

Sound familiar? Not exactly the same words, but you can hear similar refrains in the United States. Let’s destroy everything, even democracy, and start all over again…

I am writing these words before the first debate between President Biden and former president Trump. By the time this goes to press, we’ll know the outcome. This month of June has also been a busy one in the United States.

Following US news from this side of the Atlantic, I’ve noticed a lot has been going on with guns. There’s the June 21^st mass shooting in Fordyce, Arkansas, leaving 4 dead and 9 injured, another added to the list of at least 234 mass shootings having taken place in the US this year.

I was also dumb-founded by the June 14^th Supreme Court ruling to strike down the bump-stock ban. In other words, it is once again legal to convert semiautomatic weapons into machine guns, making the job of anyone dead set on carrying out a mass shooting a whole lot easier—and more effective in terms of the potential for destroying lives.

Today, the French vote with fear and trembling. After the second round, on July 7th, will the French Republic have the first far-right government of its history? Many Americans, months beforehand, feel the same anxiety about November 5^th.

That’s why, to conclude, I’ll remember only the best of this past month, June 6^th, Omaha Beach, the veterans who fought for a country that was not their own; the Youth Choir of Opéra comique, a group of very talented young people, multiracial, multireligious, totally French, exactly the kind of people those veterans, on June 6, 1944, were fighting for.