by | 14 January 2006 · 12:11 pm

Australia-Japan Baseball Diplomacy

1930s:

The Claxton Shield [national baseball competition] was inaugurated without fanfare at the 1934 carnival in Adelaide. Held between 4 and 11 August 1934, the first series was won by South Australia.

Shortly before the second Claxton Shield, a Japanese team visited Sydney as part of the Japanese Training Squadron. New South Wales played their representative Claxton Shield side against this team and won 9-2. As the other leading baseball nation of the world besides the United States, Japan was highly regarded by Australian baseballers. The Australians made numerous efforts to play visiting Japanese sides and recruit Japanese residents into Australian teams. Japan reciprocated this support, with the Japanese consul general sponsoring the Sydney first-grade competition, to be known as the Nippon Cup, the most significant trophy in New South Wales baseball to date.

1950s:

In 1954, nine years after the end of hostilities against Japan, the ABC [Australian Baseball Council] arranged for a Japanese baseball team called the Tokyo Giants to tour Australia. Prime Minister Robert Menzies gave assurances that the tour would proceed without hindrance or incident, but he did not count on the powerful Returned Serviceman’s League (RSL), who had objected to the tour from the outset. Nor did the Japanese team improve their standing with the RSL by arriving in Australia on Remembrance Day, 11 November. The visitors defeated the Queensland team 10-1 before only five hundred spectators. Three easy victories over Sydney teams were followed by the first “test” against Australia on 17 November. This test proved the most exciting game of the tour, with the score tied 8-8 after ten innings. The Giants would score 6 runs in the eleventh inning to win the game.

Traveling to Canberra for games on 19 and 21 November, the Japanese met Prime Minister Menzies, along with his minister for the interior, Kent Hughes, a former prisoner of the Japanese. Both warmly welcomed the visitors. Tokyo’s schedule had included games in Melbourne and Perth, but relentless pressure from the RSL forced the cancellation of the rest of the Australian tour.

SOURCE: A History of Australian Baseball: Time and Game, by Joe Clark (U. Nebraska Press, 2003), pp. 53, 64

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by | 14 January 2006 · 11:15 am

Australian Baseball Lingo

It’s not surprising that Australia has its own particular Strain of baseball jargon. Here’s a sampling.

  • “BALLS OUT!” – called by umpire to tell fielding side to throw practice balls back into the dugout as the inning is about to start.
  • BLUE – Umpire, because of blue umpire’s uniform, even used when the umpire is not wearing blue. Victorian Baseball Association umpire, Greg Howard, has the car number plates “HEYBLU”!
  • DEAD – Out, as in “How many dead, Blue?” “Two dead”.
  • FOUR – colloquial reference to home plate. Only used in context of game situation though, as in “Look at Four! Look at Four!” from the third base coach to a runner running full speed into third, or “Four! Four!! Four!!!” from a catcher calling for a throw with a runner going home.
  • HOOKIE – Left handed batter, announced as “Hookie!” or by swallowing the first consonant ” ‘ookeeeee!”. Called by fielding side so outfielders can shift to the right side.
  • LOADED BASES – Bases Loaded. (Australian baseballers always place the adjective first here).
  • SIDE (Batting or fielding) – possibly a cricket term, referring to “the fielding side” (defence) or “the batting side” (offence).
  • SIDE – Called by the umpire to indicate three outs have been made in a half inning and it is time to swap from offence to defence and vice versa.
  • “TIME AND GAME!” – Most Australian club games are timed, usually two hours or less. When a timed game is over, the umpire yells “Time and game!”. Mixed reactions are predictable when this is yelled, from jubilation by the winners to painful shrieks of ‘C’mon, Blue!?!” and other prevarications by the losers who may feel unjustly denied their right to try and win.

The Australian Baseball History website contains a fuller list.

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by | 13 January 2006 · 6:00 pm

If a Tree Farts in the Forest …

A surprising new study published in Nature, reported by the Guardian on 12 January 2006, may help explain why Kyoto Protocol signatories Canada and New Zealand haven’t managed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions any more effectively than nonsignatory Australia. Too many plants, not enough desert?

According to a study published today, living plants may emit almost a third of the methane entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

The result has come as a shock to climate scientists. “This is a genuinely remarkable result,” said Richard Betts of the climate change monitoring organisation the Hadley Centre. “It adds an important new piece of understanding of how plants interact with the climate.”

Methane is second only to carbon dioxide in contributing to the greenhouse effect. “For a given mass of methane, it is a stronger greenhouse gas, but the reason it is of less concern is that there’s less of it in the atmosphere,” said Dr Betts.

But the concentration of methane in the atmosphere has almost tripled in the last 150 years, mainly through human-influenced so-called biogenic sources such as the rise in rice cultivation or numbers of flatulent ruminating animals. According to previous estimates, these sources make up two-thirds of the 600m tonnes worldwide annual methane production.

Frank Keppler, of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, who led the team behind the new research, estimated that living plants release between 60m and 240m tonnes of methane per year, based on experiments he carried out, with the largest part coming from tropical areas.

Other perplexing results:

Tree planting

Researchers in North Carolina found that planting trees to soak up carbon dioxide can suck water and nutrients from the ground, dry up streams and change the soil’s mineral balance

Aerosols

A recent study in Nature found cutting air pollution could trigger a surge in global warming. Aerosols cool the Earth by reflecting radiation back into space. Scrapping them would have adverse consequences

Global dimming

In 2003 scientists noticed levels of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface had dropped by 20% in recent years because of air pollution and bigger, longer-lasting clouds

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by | 11 January 2006 · 5:33 pm

Orwell and Agee as Fieldworkers

David Denby’s review of the collected works of James Agee in the latest New Yorker contains an interesting comparison of Agee and Orwell as cross-cultural fieldworkers.

For Agee, … the point was not that these families suffered from atrocious social conditions. The point was that they existed. In an age concerned largely with the “masses,” Agee was impressed by the notion that other human beings idiosyncratically are what they are, in every ornery fibre. Flesh, bone, desire, consciousness–in almost every way, the farmers were different from him and therefore obdurate in their singleness and as capable of pleasure and misery as he. A young couple sitting on a porch and staring at Agee had in their eyes “so quiet and ultimate a quality of hatred, and contempt, and anger, toward every creature in existence beyond themselves, and toward the damages they sustained, as shone scarcely short of a state of beatitude.” [A little projection of self-hatred here, perhaps?–J.] Agee, born an Episcopalian, and deeply religious as a child, was no longer an orthodox believer. But he had a consciousness of the sacred in people and in ordinary objects that believers associate with God’s immanence. He loved, and took literally, Blake’s proclamation “Everything that lives is holy.”…

Agee’s lyrical gift set him off from other writers of liberal or radical conviction of the day. At almost exactly the same time that he and Walker Evans were in Alabama, George Orwell was exploring living conditions in coal-mining towns in the North of England, and it’s instructive to compare Orwell’s remarkable report, “The Road to Wigan Pier,” with “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Orwell boarded for a while in a little house that took in miners:

The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances.

So often in Orwell there is a strong sense of the sordid–­the scandal of meanness, decay, filth. And he was appalled by sloth and inanition. When, with much greater sympathy, he describes the miners and their wives in Wigan and other towns he typically catches them not “creeping” but moving vigorously–working, washing, cooking, or searching a slag heap for usable coal. Orwell is a chronicler of man as actor, and the second half of his book is a call for action in the form of socialist reform. But Agee chronicles being. He evokes the farmers and their families not just in sleep but at rest, sitting on a porch, or staring shyly and saying nothing. And he was incapable of physical disgust. For him, there is only an endless variety of shapes, textures, and dispositions, none of them beyond redemption in words.

In “Famous Men,” Agee is not a political writer but a poetic and metaphysical writer, who wanted to honor reality, and also to abolish it. There is a trap built into his kind of intense receptivity. That a person or a thing is itself and nothing else, and is therefore worthy of notice and celebration, may be the beginning of morality, but it’s also the beginning of tragedy. As Agee sits on the porch or alone in a room in one of the houses, he tries to take in, all at once, everything that the family is, everything that exists in the house–­for instance, Mrs. Ricketts’s dress, which is shaped “like a straight-sided bell, with a little hole at the top for the head to stick through, the cloth slit from the neck to below the breasts and held together if I remember rightly with a small snarl of shoelace.” He stares at a pair of coarsely sewn and nailed work boots, or at a tattered doll, or at the worn-through oil cloth on an old table, and is amazed at how much life went into the making and use of that table, amazed by how much life is going on in similar households, unnoticed, unrecorded. The mood is one of Wordsworthian awe and submission, though Agee extended his sympathies to objects–­even mass-produced, industrial products–­as well as to nature. At the same time, however, he is stunned by how limited the families are. Being so vividly and absolutely themselves, they are unable to be so many other things, and some of the angriest, most eloquent pages of the book are devoted to the deformations wrought on the children by early work and poor schooling. They have been cheated out of the most elementary ways of teaching themselves–­and therefore cheated out of pleasure. When they grow up, and become similar to that disdainful couple Agee encountered on a porch, the fierceness of their pride will be created as much by ignorance as by anger. The rhapsodist of things as they are is necessarily caught in a position of infinite regret. That is why the book, for all its celebratory tone, never falls into bathos. No one could confuse the tenant farmers’ days with a complete mastering of life.

via Arts & Letters Daily

UPDATE: As much as I admire Orwell, I’m beginning to develop an interest in Agee (born in Knoxville, TN), whose works I am far less familiar with. Part of it may be a vague admiration for the chutzpah of Southern writers who manage to invade and colonize New York City on their own terms. Among those I’m most familiar with are Harper Lee, William Styron, Mark Twain, Tom Wolfe, and Richard Wright. (I must confess that I don’t much admire such purveyors of bald stereotypes–northern and southern, respectively–as Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell.) The beginning of a 1964 William Styron review in the New York Review of Books explains what they were up against.

‘There is a saying among the Negroes in Harlem,’ James Baldwin said recently, ‘to the effect that if you have a white Southerner for a friend you’ve got a friend for life. But if you’ve got a white Northerner for a friend, watch out. Because he just might be the kind of friend who decides to move out when you move in.’ This is a sentiment which may be beguiling to a Southerner, yet the fact does remain that a Southern ‘liberal’ and his Northern counterpart are two distinct species of cat. Certainly the Southerner of good will who lives in the North, as I do, is often confronted with some taxing circumstances. There was the phone call a number of years ago in the distant epoch before the present ‘Negro revolt,’ and the cautious interrogation from my dinner hostess of the evening: a Negro was going to be present–as a Southerner, did I mind? If I wished to stay away she would surely understand. Or much later, when Prince Edward County in Virginia closed its schools, the deafening and indignant lady, a television luminary, who demanded that ‘we’ drop bombs on ‘those crackers down there.’ (She got the state wrong, Virginians may be snobs but they are not crackers [you’re wrong, Bill; we’ve got all kinds!–J.]; nonetheless, she was proposing that ‘we’ bomb my own kith and kin.) Or quite recently, a review in The New Yorker of Calder Willing-ham’s [sic] Eternal Fire, a remarkably fine novel about the South which the reviewer, Whitney Balliett, praised extravagantly without knowing exactly why he was doing so, charging that the book was the definitve [sic] satire on Southern writing (through the book is funny it is anything but satire, being too close to the bone of reality), and polishing off Faulkner, Welty, Warren, et al. with the assertion that Southern fiction in general, in which the Negroes had served so faithfully as ‘a resident Greek chorus,’ had now terminated its usefulness. It is of course not important what this particular reviewer thinks, but the buried animus is characteristic and thus worth spelling out: white Southern writers, because they are white and Southern, cannot be expected to write about Negroes without condescension, or with understanding or fidelity or love. Unfortunately, this is a point of view which, by an extension of logic, tends to regard all white Southerners as bigots, and it is an attitude which one might find even more ugly than it is were it prompted by malice rather than ignorant self-righteousness, or a suffocating and provincial innocence. Nor is its corollary any less tiresome: to show that you really love Negroes, smoke pot, and dig the right kind of jazz.

Yes. Familiar types, all.

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by | 9 January 2006 · 5:56 pm

Indian Sati, German Totenfolge in Universal Context

The September 2004 issue of Journal of World History has a thought-provoking article on a much maligned, but not nearly rare enough phenomenon: the Indian custom of sati (= suttee). Author Jörg Fisch’s title is Dying for the Dead: Sati in Universal Context. Here’s the conclusion (courtesy of The History Cooperative).

Sati, the burning of widows in India, has probably been the best-known (and the most despised or lamented) Indian custom in Europe since the ancient Greeks. Comparisons with other customs usually have been made on the phenomenological level, especially with the burning of witches and heretics. Here it is suggested to introduce comparisons on the functional level. The main question is thus not what happens, but what the function and purpose of the act are. Seen in this perspective, the central aspect becomes the connection between this world and the other world, between the living and the dead. On the basis of a belief in a hereafter that is an immediate continuation of this life, both worlds are connected by an act in which a dead person is followed, voluntarily or by force, in a public ceremony, by one or several living persons, thus emphasizing the continuity between the two worlds. The particulars of the ritual, whether it is killing or self-killing, and the manner of killing are, from a functional point of view, unimportant. Usually, this manner corresponds to the manner of disposing of the dead. Thus, for example, in Indian castes that bury the dead, sati is usually performed by burying alive. In other contexts, the method of killing is to preserve the body of the followers as intact as possible, so as to enable them to do their duties in the hereafter, which often leads to strangling.

Following into death thus defined can be shown to have occurred, in the course of history, in most areas of the world for a longer or a shorter time, with the notable exception of Western Europe [Eva Braun?–J.], for which there is no satisfactory explanation so far, due to the lack of sources. Two further important questions cannot be answered either: we can only guess the context in which such customs had their origin, as we don’t know when they developed, and we do not know whether there was a kind of diffusion from one point of origin or whether the relevant customs developed independently from each other in different places. The only exceptions are Southeast Asia, where the occurrence of widow burning makes Indian influence very likely, and Japan, where there was probably Chinese influence.

Following into death is of special interest because it links two worlds and thus religious with sociopolitical aspects. It is a matter of life and death. As it is physically impossible to accompany every dead person, the question of who has the right to be followed and who has the duty to follow arises. Following into death thus not only becomes a mirror of social structure and political power; it also can influence them. There are two main functions in this framework. Especially in India, sati reflects, confirms, and strengthens the subordination of men to women [vice versa, surely–J.]. In many other places it has the same effect for the superiority of the ruling groups. The ceremony of killing the followers shows the long-term results of social and political power struggles.

Following into death presupposes certain religious beliefs (as a necessary, not a sufficient, condition). Wherever beliefs in a final judgment prevailed over beliefs in a transfer of this world into the other, following into death either vanished, if the beliefs of the people at large changed, or were suppressed, if foreign conquerors had sufficient strength to abolish them. This is what European colonialism did, mainly with humanitarian arguments, but basically because of its own religious background.

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by | 8 January 2006 · 5:43 am

Pirate vs. Pirate on the South China Coast, 1630s

The new governor of Taiwan, Hans Putmans, had inherited an island of surly, fractious natives, and a tenuous alliance with [Nicholas] Iquan’s family. He was surprised to find himself dealing not with Iquan, who was inland quelling the bandits, but with Iquan’s mother and eldest brothers.

Unlike Pieter Nuijts, Putmans learned a little about the history of the region before he waded in. From his later activities, it is clear that he placed no faith at all in Iquan’s continued friendship; after all, Iquan was merely the latest in a line of opportunists extending back to the legendary Captain China. But Putmans was also greatly impressed with Iquan’s career path–from henchman, to pirate, to privateer, to admiral. Trawling through the books and records of the previous few years, Putmans hit on a new plan.

It was common knowledge that the Dutch had long coveted a port of their own on the coast of China. Veterans still remembered the disastrous 1622 attack on Portuguese Macao that had indirectly led to the Dutch presence on Taiwan. But it had been some time since anyone in the Dutch East India Company had given much thought to how the Portuguese had first achieved their foothold in China. They had been granted the land by the Chinese, Putmans believed, because they had cleared the Pearl river delta of pirates. The answer to their problem, as far as Putmans could see it, was not to wage war on the Chinese, but to wait until the pirate problem in Fujian was impossible for the Chinese to deal with, and then offer to step in and clean things up–on the condition that the Dutch could have their own little port like Macao.

Jacques Specx [governor general of Batavia], who had heard it all before, diplomatically tried to talk Putmans out of the idea, since it had several critical flaws. One, which Putmans never seems to have acknowledged, was that there was a considerable difference between the relatively small area of a river delta, and the thousand miles of Fujianese coastline Putmans was proposing to patrol. More importantly, Putmans was offering to clean up a pirate infestation that was not actually there–Iquan had already pacified the region.

But Putmans had already thought of a way around this. If there wasn’t a pirate problem off the coast of Fujian, then the Dutch could make one. Putmans had worked out how much the average Fujianese pirate earned in a year of plundering, and proposed that the East India Company hire a number of them, both to wreak havoc offshore, and then to sail in to the rescue under the Dutch flag. Although it sounded a trifle silly on paper, was this not essentially what Iquan had done himself? Had the Chinese not ended their recent pirate problems by picking the toughest bandit and making him an admiral?

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), pp. 73-74

More here: Tonio Andrade, “The Company’s Chinese Pirates: How the Dutch East India Company Tried to Lead a Coalition of Pirates to War against China, 1621–1662,” Journal of World History 14 (2004).

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by | 8 January 2006 · 4:56 am

Fujian’s ‘Ode to the Sweet Potato’

In a period of great climactic [sic] uncertainty, plagued with floods and famines, the Fujianese merchant Chen Zhenlong was greatly impressed by the high-yield, fast-growing sweet potatoes he saw cultivated in the Philippines. He bought some of the exotic American plants and brought them home, growing them experimentally on a plot of private land. When Fujian was struck by a crippling famine in 1594, the canny Chen approached the governor with his new discovery, and persuaded him to introduce it that season. The venture was rewarded with a crop that saved the lives of thousands of Fujianese. The governor gained the nickname ‘Golden Potato’, and the incident led to the composition of He Qiaoyuan’s ‘Ode to the Sweet Potato’, part of which went:

Sweet potato, found in Luzon,
Grows all over, trouble-free
Foreign devils love to eat it
Propagates so easily.

We just made a single cutting
Boxed it up and brought it home
Ten years later, Fujian’s saviour.
If it dies, just make a clone.

Take your cutting, then re-plant it
Wait a week and see it grow
This is how we cultivate it
In our homeland, reap and sow.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), p. 15

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by | 7 January 2006 · 9:12 am

Hero of My Lai Has Died

Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who interrupted the My Lai massacre in 1968, has died.

NEW ORLEANS — Hugh Thompson Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot honored for rescuing Vietnamese civilians from his fellow GIs during the My Lai massacre, died early Friday. He was 62.

Thompson, whose role in the 1968 massacre did not become widely known until decades later, died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Alexandria, hospital spokesman Jay DeWorth said….

As the years passed, Thompson became an example for future generations of soldiers, said Col. Tom Kolditz, head of the U.S. Military Academy’s behavioral sciences and leadership department. Thompson went to West Point once a year to give a lecture on his experience, Kolditz said.

“There are so many people today walking around alive because of him, not only in Vietnam, but people who kept their units under control under other circumstances because they had heard his story. We may never know just how many lives he saved.”

A U.S. News heroes page has more details of that day.

On that historic morning, Thompson set his helicopter down near the irrigation ditch full of bodies. He asked a sergeant if the soldiers could help the civilians, some of whom were still moving. The sergeant suggested putting them out of their misery. Stunned, Thompson turned to Lieutenant Calley, who told him to mind his own business. Thompson reluctantly got back in his helicopter and began to lift off. Just then [crew chief Glenn] Andreotta yelled, “My God, they’re firing into the ditch!”

Thompson finally faced the truth. He and his crew flew around for a few minutes, outraged, wondering what to do. Then they saw several elderly adults and children running for a shelter, chased by Americans. “We thought they had about 30 seconds before they’d die,” recalls Colburn. Thompson landed his chopper between the troops and the shelter, then jumped out and confronted the lieutenant in charge of the chase. He asked for assistance in escorting the civilians out of the bunker; the lieutenant said he’d get them out with a hand grenade. Furious, Thompson announced he was taking the civilians out. He went back to [door gunner Lawrence] Colburn and Andreotta and told them if the Americans fired, to shoot them. “Glenn and I were staring at each other, dumbfounded,” says Colburn. He says he never pointed his gun at an American soldier, but he might have fired if they had first. The ground soldiers waited and watched….

Thompson wasted no time telling his superiors what had happened. “They said I was screaming quite loud. I was mad. I threatened never to fly again,” Thompson remembers. “I didn’t want to be a part of that. It wasn’t war.” An investigation followed, but it was cursory at best.

A month later, Andreotta died in combat. Thompson was shot down and returned home to teach helicopter piloting. Colburn served his tour of duty and left the military. The two figured those involved in the killing had been court-martialed. In fact, nothing had happened. But rumors of the massacre persisted. One soldier who heard of the atrocities, Ron Ridenhour, vowed to make them public. In the spring of 1969, he sent letters to government officials, which led to a real investigation and sickening revelations: murdered babies and old men, raped and mutilated women, in a village where U.S. soldiers mistakenly expected to find lots of Viet Cong.

Not all soldiers at My Lai participated in the carnage. Some men risked courtmartial or even death by defying Calley’s direct orders to shoot civilians. Eckhardt doesn’t think these men were heroes, because they didn’t try to stop the murderers. But Colburn thinks they did the best they could. “We could just fly away at the end of the day,” he notes. The ground troops had to live together for months.

The Pentagon’s investigation eventually suggested that nearly 80 soldiers had participated in the killing and coverup, although only Calley (who now works at a jewelry store in Columbus, Ga.) was convicted. The eyewitness testimony of Thompson and Colburn proved crucial. But instead of thanking them, America vilified them. Many saw Calley as a scapegoat for regrettable but inevitable civilian casualties. “Rallies for Calley” were held all over the country. Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, urged citizens to leave car headlights on to show support for Calley. Thompson, who got nasty letters and death threats, remembers thinking: “Has everyone gone mad?” He feared a court-martial for his command to fire, if necessary, on U.S. soldiers.

via Winds of Change

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by | 6 January 2006 · 10:21 pm

Good News on the Malaria Front

The NewsHour on 4 January carried a fascinating (to me) report about some real progress on the malaria front in Africa: a WHO-backed experiment to manufacture and distribute mosquito nets impregnated with slow-decay insecticide.

JONATHAN SNOW: How the Olyset long life nets are made is another part of this story.

The AtoZ factory is a huge complex in the northern Tanzania city of Arusha. Mosquito netting in vast profusion being produced by Africans, for Africans, African workers, 1,200 of them quite literally saving other Africans’ lives.

The engineers are Chinese. The technology is Japanese. The labor is African. And the money to purchase the completed nets is international.

In sum total, this is the global partnership to roll back malaria. And already this one factory is producing three million nets a year. But this is no place of altruism. This is a vigorously commercial enterprise.

The resin for the yarn comes from ExxonMobil in Saudi. They give the sum AtoZ pays for it back to UNICEF to buy still more nets.

The Japanese pharmaceutical company Sumitomo sells the magic long-life insecticide ingredients to AtoZ but has donated a free and vital technology transfer.

Inside each of these white pellets is insecticide which will bleed out of the yarn over five years.

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by | 5 January 2006 · 9:43 am

Mining Disasters and Rumor Reporting

If you Google “mining disasters” you get 1.6 million search results (0.1 million more than I got yesterday), with Springhill Mining Disasters leading the list, plus a sponsored link to Public Grief by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler on ‘Coping with public loss and tragedy’.

I don’t have any coal miners in my family that I know of, but my mother was born in West Virginia’s Mercer County, one of the 11 counties in the National Coal Heritage Area (NCHA) that comprised the Pocahontas Coal Field, and she died in Roanoke, Virginia, headquarters of the Norfolk & Western Railway, which made its fortune hauling Appalachian coal to the port of Norfolk. (My father grew up on a Tidewater tenant farm down toward the Norfolk end of those tracks.)

The success of Southwest Virginia‘s coalfields–lying in Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, Russell, Scott, Tazewell, and Wise Counties–is inexorably linked to the expansion of railroads and to northern capital. After the Civil War, rail companies expanded westward as entrepreneurs and industrialists opened coal seams in Virginia’s southwestern region. Norfolk & Western shipped its first coal from the Pocahontas Coalfield in 1883 and quickly developed lines through Tazewell to Norton. The Louisville & Nashville built into Norton and the Wise County coalfields by the 1890s. By 1900, companies developed lines that delivered coal from southwestern Virginia to piers at Hampton for shipment to both domestic and international markets. Southwest Virginia coalfields supplied high-grade coking coal to fuel the steel industry and steam coal for industrial and domestic use. The boom economy created by mining in the early 1900s faltered during the Great Depression but recovered during World War II. By the 1950s, many of Virginia’s veins, which had begun operations more than fifty years earlier, were mined out.

Beginning in the 1880s, investors in New York and Philadelphia formed mining companies that purchased large tracts of land or negotiated mineral and timber rights in these rural counties. Before the boom ended in the 1920s, as many as 125 coal camps, or company towns, thrived in Southwest Virginia. The coal camps brought together, often for the first time, miners of different cultures and nationalities. To meet labor demands, mining and railroad companies advertised for and brought emigrants not only from other states, but also from Italy, Hungary, and Poland.

That family history is probably why I spent more time watching Anderson Cooper star in the Sago Mine Disaster than I did watching him star in Hurricane Katrina. (I have family friends down there, too, but gave up on the TV coverage pretty quick.) Anderson now joins Geraldo in my expanding category of instant channel-surf inducements. Just as the most experienced fly fishermen know where to cast for trout, the stars of the 24/7 Disaster News Networks know where to cast for the best rumors. If newspapers were once the first draft of history, the 24/7 TV news networks (and a whole lot of partisan political blogs) are the first draft of hysteria. God forbid anyone should read a little history or provide a little context or verify a few facts before they reach for the smelling salts.

How much more horrible is it for the kith and kin of the mine victims to have to show their jubilation, then grief in front of international TV cameras and microphones?

As usual, the NewsHour did a decent job. When a guest on Tuesday mentioned the 200+ violations the Sago Mine had been cited for, host Jeffrey Brown actually had the good sense to ask how that compared to other mines. The Sago Mine was much worse than most. On Wednesday night, Margaret Warner had the good sense to ask a former mine inspector for historical comparisons.

MARGARET WARNER: Thank you. How dangerous is coal mining today as compared to the past?

BRUCE DIAL: Well, coal mining today is much safer than it was say even 30 years ago. One of the reasons is that the New Mine Act passed in 1977, which made the inspections, when the inspector goes on to a mine site and they write violations there is a monetary fine on every citation that they write.

Other things, there are new technologies, like long wall systems, coal systems and things like that, that get out more coal with less employees.

Used to, to run a heading [coal extraction site] it would take about 25 employees. Today, a heading is typically run with five to 10 people. So there are less people in the mine.

That left me wondering how North American mining disasters have compared to those in, say, China. Fortunately, the Guardian has already run an AP report on that very point. China accounts for 80% of all world coal fatalities.

BEIJING (AP) – Small, privately owned and worked by moonlighting farmers, the coal mine in central China’s Xin’an County was like hundreds throughout the country.

And, like thousands of Chinese miners, those below ground faced the daily danger of injury or death. On Dec. 2, a nearby river overflowed, sending water pouring into the mine and drowning 35 miners.

In most other countries, it would have been the deadliest industrial accident of the year. But in China, where more than 5,000 coal miners die on the job annually, it went largely unnoticed at a time when a pair of bigger disasters killed a total of 260 miners.

The big accidents grab public attention, but small mines like Xin’an County account for 73 percent of reported deaths. Experts say if Chinese leaders are to make good on repeated promises to improve safety, they must start there. And according to the government’s own statistics, they are failing to make progress.

In the United States, 22 coal miners were killed on the job in 2005 – a record low, according to Suzy Bohnert, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration. In 2004, the number of U.S. coal mining deaths was 28.

On Monday, a coal mine explosion in West Virginia that may have been sparked by lightning trapped 13 miners 260 feet below ground.

In China, most accidents are blamed on mine managers who ignore safety rules and hide fatalities, often with the help of officials who own a stake in the mines they are charged with regulating.

The government said this year it would close 7,000 small mines – about one-quarter of the country’s total – in an effort to improve safety. The 2004 China coal mining death count – officially just over 6,000 – represented 80 percent of all world coal fatalities.

UPDATE: Of course, raw numbers don’t mean much, although Chinese workers do seem overrepresented in mining disasters even relative to their huge proportion of the world’s population. I don’t know where to find statistics on the total number of Chinese mineworkers, but the CBC has tabulated a timeline of major Chinese mining disasters since 1990, with the following introduction.

China’s mines are by far the world’s most dangerous. About 6,300 people were killed in 2004 in floods, explosions and fires in China’s mines.

China’s poor record with mine safety is a long one. In 1942, an accident killed 1,549 miners in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in China’s northeast, still the world’s worst coal mining disaster.

For the U.S., I tabulated mine fatalities as a percentage of the mining workforce over the past century, using the MHSA table. Death (and injury) rates have been steadily dropping in the U.S., from 3 deaths per 1,000 workers in 1900 to 3 per 10,000 in 2004. The big drop in death rate between 1970 and 1980 results partly from the decision in 1973 to expand the workforce numbers to include office workers. But the drops since then reflect real improvements.

Year Deaths Workers Death Rate
2004 28 108,734 0.03%
2000 38 108,098 0.04%
1990 66 168,625 0.04%
1980 133 253,007 0.05%
1970 260 144,480 0.18%
1960 325 189,679 0.17%
1950 643 483,239 0.13%
1940 1,377 533,267 0.26%
1930 2,063 644,006 0.32%
1920 2,272 784,621 0.29%
1910 2,821 725,030 0.39%
1900 1,489 448,581 0.33%

UPDATE 2: Among the factors accounting for the improved safety records are pressure from unions, federal regulations, and the increasingly skilled nature of mine work. Here’s a pretty telling response during Margaret Warner’s interview with a former mine inspector on the NewsHour:

BRUCE DIAL: Well, in an area like where this accident occurred, mining is really the only big industry where a person can make a very good wage. The average miner will earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, with overtime, maybe, up to as much as $80,000 a year.

This is in a region where individual incomes average $20,000 a year, and household incomes $40,000. I wonder what the average is for teaching faculty at West Virginia University.

PressThink has a long and thoughtful compilation of assessments of the media coverage of the disaster, with a long and not always quite so thoughtful comment thread.

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