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| Central Illinois coal mining roots remembered“Horse Shoe Bottoms,” by Tom TippettMayfly Productions, $14.99, P.O. Box 380, Elmwood IL 61529-0380 ISBN: 978-0-9789156-2-9 Reviewed by Mike Matejka, Grand Prairie Union News Before there were unions, working life was often fraught with danger. Accidents were common and there was no workers’ compensation, insurance or other protections for a family. No industry was as brutal as coal mining, which annually tallied thousands of deaths and accidents. 
Those early days are beautifully recalled through a reissued 1935 novel, Horse Shoe Bottoms, written by a union organizer with strong literary skills, Tom Tippett (1890-1979). Born in 1890 to a coal mining family near Peoria, Tippett went to work in the mines, survived a mine explosion and also worked on the railroad and in the oil fields. While working as an Amalgamated Clothing Workers organizer, Tippett took night classes at the University of Chicago, eventually earning a degree at Columbia University in New York. Besides organizing, Tippett worked as a labor journalist, educator, playwright and 1930s New Deal government public works administrator. He finished his career as education director for the International Association of Machinists. Tippett’s literary skills were so highly regarded he won a prestigious Guggenheim grant to write three novels. Only one resulted, Horse Shoe Bottoms. The book, originally published by Harper & Row, won high acclaim in 1935 and is now available again, thanks to Bill Knight, of Peoria’s Labor News and Western Illinois University. Horse Shoe Bottoms survives 70 years well and is still an excellent read. Much like Tippett’s own family, the book tells the story of a young Welsh immigrant couple John and Ellen Stafford, coming to central Illinois to work in a fellow Welshman’s mine. Soon the local operator is bought out by larger corporate interests, and the Stafford family watches wages cuts, unsafe conditions and poverty slowly diminish their hopes and dreams. After repeated accidents, risks and wage cuts, the workers haltingly organize a union, suffering repeated setbacks until they achieve success. Tippett’s parents emigrated to central Illinois in 1875 and his father, like the fictional John Stafford, worked to build a union but died age 44, when Tippett was five. Many novels were published in the 1930s with working class themes. Some portrayed triumphant workers battling an evil boss. Horse Shoe Bottoms is more subtle, showing individuals trapped by life circumstances – whether those circumstances are company bosses pushing miners to produce more at their own safety’s expense, or company bosses feeling pressure from financiers and those higher up to cut costs and speed production. Likewise, the union battle is no easy victory. The miners stumble and struggle, just like early union organizers did. They soon realize that organizing their own camp is not enough, if other coal companies are not organized. And even if they organize their region, they are victims of a competitive national industry, incapable of improving conditions unless they can build a national organization. Tippett’s youthful experience underground helps him realistically portray early mining conditions, with mules and tram cars, wooden timbers, gas lamps and the constant peril of collapse, floods and mine explosions. Tippett also has a nuanced ear for the workers’ home life, sensitively portraying the miners’ wives trying to maintain a decent home in rugged coal camps, trapped by the company store, poverty, constant soot and men who sometimes drink up their wages at the nearby company-operated saloon. Horse Shoe Bottoms is inhabited by real people, not superheroes, who realize that their salvation and dreams, not so much for themselves but for their children, will only come when they organize and stand up for better conditions. Novels like this deserve to be reprinted and shared anew. The immigrant story here is a very contemporary one and there are workers in sweatshops here, Chinese coal mines and Central American factories who would relate well to the Stafford family and their monumental struggle for basic human dignity. |