Making Something Happen by Michael Thurston

Author:Michael Thurston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Extending the Document

MURIEL RUKEYSER

In 1929, the New Kanawha Power Company, a West Virginia subsidiary of Union Carbide, contracted the Dennis and Rinehart Company of Charlottesville, Virginia, to dig a three-and-a-quarter-mile tunnel from Gauley’s Junction to Hawk’s Nest, West Virginia. The tunnel, which 2,000 men worked to dig, would direct water from the nearby New River to a hydroelectric plant at Gauley’s Junction. The plant would then sell the power to the Electro-Metallurgical Company, another Union Carbide subsidiary. The tunneling operation uncovered a huge deposit of extremely pure (90–99 percent) silica. The silica, useful in the electro-processing of steel, was shipped to Electro-Metallurgical’s processing operation in Alloy, West Virginia. The tunnel construction was quickly transformed into a mining operation; the tunnel’s width was doubled to facilitate the extraction of silica, and the faster dry-drilling method was used in order to extract the silica more quickly. According to the U.S. Bureau of Mines, silica was to be mined with hydraulic water drills, which reduced the amount of deadly silica dust raised, and miners were to wear safety masks with filters over their mouths while working. Union Carbide’s insistence on drilling the tunnel dry resulted in the release of tons of silica dust (Time magazine compared the tunnel full of dust to a “flour bin” in which workers “died like ants”) (“Silicosis,” 63).1 Moreover, the company’s refusal to provide safety masks (if workers had worn the masks, they would have had to stop every hour to rinse dust from the filters) resulted in somewhere between 476 and 2,000 miners’ deaths from silicosis.2

In a series of subsequent lawsuits, workers and their families sought compensation from Union Carbide. The company, though, attempted to conceal its complicity in the workers’ deaths by bribing doctors to misdiagnose silicosis (workers were told they had pneumonia, pleurisy, or tuberculosis, and one of these diseases was given as the cause of death on death certificates) and by paying the local undertaker to bury workers secretly in a cornfield (Congressional Record, 10). The case was finally investigated by Congress, but the further investigation recommended by the Subcommittee of the Committee of Labor in the House of Representatives was blocked.3 Those workers who did receive compensation were charged half their receipts by their own lawyers (An Investigation, 14–15).

It was a bad year all around. The stock market crash in October slammed the economic brakes on nearly a decade of postwar industrial growth and consumer confidence, ushering in the depression that would become “Great” as it stood the test of time and failed to respond to federal remedies. The depression would provoke the rapid growth of a fairly new genre, the documentary.4 The decade prematurely born in 1929 brought to full fruition peculiarly social documentary, that distinctive brand of reportage that seeks not only to increase our knowledge of public facts but also to “sharpen it with feeling” (Stott, 20). Indeed, as Paula Rabinowitz has written, “anyone with even a passing interest in the [1930s] . . . [r]eferences it through the images

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