X-Ray Testimonials in Muriel Rukeyser David Kadlec (bio) During the earliest and most severe years of the Great Depression, from 1930 to 1931, migrant laborers from Georgia to North Carolina followed word of employment to work-camps near the mouth of a hydro tunnel in the mountains of West Virginia. One of a series of massive hydroelectric projects launched during the 1920s and 1930s, this three-mile conduit had been licensed to divert water from the New River to a nearby power plant, generating “white coal” for both public and commercial use. 1 From its inception in 1924, however, Hawk’s Nest Tunnel had been intended not as a public utility, but as a power source for a new electrometallurgical complex—one owned by Union Carbide and Carbon, the corporate entity that had commissioned the tunnel. 2 With metallurgic processing apparently in mind, engineers and geologists had plotted the tunnel to run through veins of ninety-seven to ninety-nine percent pure silica. 3 During construction, these highly refined mineral concentrations were extracted and sold to the Electro-Metallurgical Company for use in processing steel. Large sections of the tunnel, those that contained the richest deposits, had been widened to maximize profits from in-house transactions (HC, 20, 27, 66). Licensed as a public utility, Hawk’s Nest Tunnel had been drilled as a silica mine. Illicit dry-drilling practices, said to be three times faster than drilling with water, sped the project toward completion, foreclosing a possible shutdown by the Federal Power Commission (HC, 4–5, 59–62, 66). Coupled with substandard ventilation and the contractor’s failure to issue respirators to workers, high velocity drilling had aggravated what industry specialists knew to be a dangerous enterprise. During an epoch [End Page 23] when displaced southern agricultural workers found themselves vulnerable to industrial exploitation, racist divisions of labor facilitated the reckless construction of an “oddly obscure” landmark that still stands as a “marvel of engineering prowess” (HN, 1, 22). Of the 2500 men who worked the tunnel’s interior between 1930 and 1931, a small percentage were white-coal miners and laborers from the nearby town of Gauley Bridge. African Americans, most of them emigrants from southern coastal states, made up eighty percent of this low-paid work force; and they composed an even larger majority of the tunnel’s drillers, nippers, and muckers, workers whose proximity to the drilling-face treated them to the highest concentrations of silica dust. 4 While it is still not known how many black workers were killed by their exposure to the Gauley Bridge tunnel, it was clear to many by the mid-1930s that a large number may have succumbed to industrial disease. Living in segregated, company-owned work camps, and earning subsistence-level wages, black migrant workers in particular lacked the resources to resist hazards that resulted in close to 600 deaths. 5 In late 1935, with rumors of mass graves in West Virginia now circulating in the national press, the New York congressman and labor advocate Vito Marcantonio called for an investigation into allegations of corporate negligence in the suspected silicosis deaths at Gauley Bridge. 6 A group of doctors, journalists, and former tunnel workers arrived in Washington to testify in early 1936. At the congressional hearings mandated by House Joint Resolution 449, a silicotic bench driller named George Robison was asked to testify regarding the working conditions in and around Hawk’s Nest Tunnel. Robison spoke of threats and beatings used by white foremen to coerce black workers back into the mountain after interval dynamite blasts. Reentering the bore within minutes of each shoot, teams of muckers and drillers could see only with difficulty through a white haze of silica (HC, 58, 67). As work resumed at the head, accelerated rounds of dry drilling forced fresh jets of mineral straight back into the faces of workers. Pails of drinking water carried into the shaft looked like buckets of milk. In describing the deathly white residue that coated the tunnel’s interior as well as the “flour-sprinkled” woods around its mouth, Robison treated the white congressional committee to an unsettling image. “As dark as I am,” Robison told...
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Feb 3, 2009
Patricia J Lee + 14
Open Access
