Coal Minig Essay, Research Paper

In the book The Way We Lived, I recently read a story written by a coal miner in the early 20th century called Our Daily Life Is Not a Pleasant One. I found this story extremely interesting because my grandfather worked in the coalmines of eastern Pennsylvania. When I read this essay, although the name of the author is not included. I felt it could have been my grandfather speaking to me.

The article is about a hardworking man and his struggles trying to keep his family, including his brothers, afloat and the purpose of him striking. In the chronicle, I was immediately drawn to the imagery of the dark coalmines. He makes the mines sound very hellish as they must have been by describing the mines as chambers. He also uses dark colors when describing the mines. I cannot really imagine the mines being any other color, which adds to the images.

When describing his job, the author states, We grow old quickly. One insight of growing old quickly that he mentions a couple of times is the miners asthma. This is caused by the coal dust being built up in the lungs from all the time spent in the coalmines. When he talks about getting miners asthma, he doesn t sound like it is a bad thing, but something that happens to everyone. The person that wrote this essay lived in the coal-mining region all his life. He sees people all around him develop this condition and probably expects the same for himself.

If I were the miner, I would wonder why I had to work under these conditions. The writer answers this by explaining how he had no other choice. He first talks about how little of an education that he and all his peers had gotten and how early in life they all went to work. He says how he went to work as a driver boy until he got his strength up to be a miner.

After talking about having no other place to go, he mentions his strike. One major thing I liked about this piece of writing was the information the author writes about on the strike that he takes part in. The persuasive aim of this essay is obviously to explain why he is striking. He says that he strikes because he doesn t make enough money. It is at this point in which he describes his wife getting sick and his brother almost dying. He doesn t blame how much he is making really on his strike, but how little he can buy with his earnings. He has roughly five to ten percent of his monthly income left to spend for his and his families own use, which he mainly uses to buy work equipment.

Later in the paper, he describes how he keeps his brother and nurses him until he is well again. He says that the reason he didn t send him to the hospital was because We are American citizens and we don t go to hospitals and poorhouses. When he says this, he means that he and probably his brother were too proud to admit being sick or lame. He would much less rather take on the extra burden put on by his brother rather than admit defeat and let someone else take care of him (his brother). I feel that this is an underlining theme as to why he strikes. I think that the writer probably feels like he has been working too hard for everyone, including his family, to make a life for himself. I think the writer would not have stopped working unless he had not been under some severe hardships.

In conclusion, after reading this excerpt, I realized that the workers not only striked for the terrible working conditions, but over the unreal wages that they were getting paid. I always thought that the workers were upset over the deadly working conditions, but got paid decent wages, but now I realize the true struggle of the coal miner during this time period.