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- [00:09]
A
Just a quick note. Today's episode contains recreations of real congressional testimony.
- [00:17]
B
The House subcommittee of the Committee on Labor will now come to order. We'll continue our investigation into the health conditions of workers employed in the construction and maintenance of public utilities.
- [00:31]
A
The last place George Robinson ever pictured himself. Was standing before a congressional hearing. But at the start of 1936, that's exactly where he was. All the way in Washington, D.C. answering a bunch of congressmen's questions About a job he'd taken out of desperation.
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B
Please give your name in residence to.
- [00:48]
C
The reporter George Robinson. Veneta, West Virginia.
- [00:52]
B
Did you work in the tunnel at or near Gauley, West Virginia?
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C
Yes, sir.
- [00:58]
A
It had been nearly six years since construction first kicked off in 1930. On the Hawks Nest Tunnel project near Gawley, West Virginia. The tunnel diverted water from the New river to hydroelectric generators three miles away. That would in turn power the nearby plant owned by the Union Carbide Corporation. Union Carbide and its subcontractor, Reinhart and Dennis. Needed a lot of men to dig their tunnel. They went to locals first, but couldn't get enough of them to sign up for the dangerous, low paying work. So the companies started recruiting from other states. Mostly from poor black communities in the Deep South. George Robinson was one of those recruits.
- [01:38]
C
I had not had a job for two years. When I heard about this work in West Virginia. 1 couldn't get a job anywhere else. Then a friend of mine had been up to West Virginia and he found this job. He told me he knew I could get work there too.
- [01:56]
B
You were desperately in need of work?
- [01:59]
C
Yes.
- [02:00]
B
How many hours a day did you put in?
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C
12 hours.
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B
And during those 12 hours you worked persistently. And there was no let up.
- [02:09]
C
If one let up, the boss at once wanted to know what was the matter. A fella simply had to keep on the move all the time.
- [02:18]
A
George worked for four months in the tunnel as a driller.
- [02:21]
C
The boss was always telling us to hurry, hurry, hurry. When the rocks were in danger of falling at any time. The foreman kept telling us that everything was alright. And that we should just keep right on.
- [02:33]
B
Did they kill any men by falling rock?
- [02:36]
C
Yes. Me and my buddy drilled only four feet from two other fellows drilling. And those two fellas got killed by falling rock. The two fellas never knew what hit them. They got crushed beyond recognition.
- [02:50]
A
The tunnel was finished ahead of schedule in just 18 months. Earning Reinhart and Dennis a substantial cash bonus. But the human cost was far higher than anyone knew at the time. The companies kept it quiet. And when the tunnel was done. They sent workers on their way without a second thought. George Robinson thought he was one of the lucky ones. He avoided a workplace accident and earned a solid wage. But then, about seven or eight months after he stopped working at Hawks Nest, he noticed when he walked up a hill he suddenly had trouble breathing. So he went to a doctor who told him he had tunnel dust in his lungs. And George remembered how thick the dust was from drilling underground. As he would later tell the Congressman.
- [03:37]
C
As dark as I am when I came out of that tunnel in the mornings, it if you had been in that tunnel too and had come out at my side, nobody could have told which one was the white man. There was so much dust that it looked like somebody had sprinkled flour around the place. It really looked pretty.
- [03:56]
A
Pretty, but also deadly. It took years before George and other workers understood the full extent of what had happened in that tunnel, because something had gone very, very wrong. And if the companies had their way, it would stay a secret forever. From wondry I'm zach goldbaum and this is lawless planet. Each week we tell a new story about the true crimes fueling the climate crisis and the people fighting to save the planet or destroy it.
- [04:37]
D
I think the silence around it was absolutely an attempt to cover up what had happened. Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience, and a drive to keep moving forward. So it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile. With the VentureX business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with big purchasing power, you can spend more and earn more. This is your sign to take your business to the next level. The Capital One VentureX business card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com for details.
- [05:22]
A
Emirates Premium Economy Class elevates the flying experience with an entirely new level of comfort and sophistication. Settle into wider cream leather seats with generous legroom and enjoy priority boarding. Savor premium dining with Royal Dalton China paired with Chandon sparkling wine and exclusive business class vintages. The 13.3 inch HD entertainment system offers thousands of options for your journey. This isn't just Premium Economy, it's Emirates Premium Economy. Exceptional service meets unmatched comfort at a smarter price point. To find out more about Emirates premium economy, visit emirates.com us that's emirates.com us. West Virginia may be known as coal country, but one of the worst industrial accidents in our nation's history didn't occur in a coal mine. It happened in a tunnel chiseled out of a Mountain for a hydroelectric power plant. Back in the 1930s, thousands of men, most of them poor black workers from the south, began to work on the three mile long Hawk's Nest Tunnel. The men went into the tunnel healthy, but that wasn't the case when they came back out. The companies involved in the tunnel managed to successfully cover up the true scale of destruction and company malpractice companies. That included Union Carbide, the same corporation responsible for the 1984 Bhopal disaster, which you may remember from an earlier episode in the case of Hawksnest, everyone who was involved died long ago. But with the help of some dogged researchers, old newspaper accounts and congressional testimony, we're going to try to bring the story back to life. This largely forgotten piece of history is surprisingly relevant today because when extractive industries break ground, more often than not, the first victims tend to be the workers themselves. Katherine, for someone who's never been there, can you describe what the area near Gali, West Virginia looks like?
- [07:32]
D
Sometimes I like to describe southern West Virginia as kind of looking like the surface of a brain. And the creases are where all the creeks and the rivers live and the folds are the mountains.
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A
That's Catherine Venable Moore. She's a writer and historian who moved back home to West Virginia around 2010 to the New River Gorge area.
- [07:53]
D
You can imagine the New River Gorge as this deep fissure in a kind of a high plateau. And so at the bottom of the gorge you are. It's pretty dark, like the sun doesn't really get in there very often. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.
- [08:10]
A
The New River Gorge also happens to be where the Hawk's Nest outlook is and the tunnel that runs beneath it.
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D
It's a series of large pieces of infrastructure. The first is a dam across the New river, an enormous dam that pools up water and covers a huge circular opening that's the beginning of the Hawks Nest Tunnel.
- [08:33]
A
When the door of that tunnel opens, the water flows inside and travels underneath Gauley Mountain, sloping slightly downward. Over the course of the three miles, that water builds up a lot of energy. By the time it gets to the end, it's fed into electrical turbines which convert all that energy into usable electricity.
- [08:53]
D
I was living very close by to the Hawk's Nest Dam and sometimes I would hear this shrill kind of ghostly whistle that would fill the air.
- [09:05]
A
That sound was the warning alarm that the water was going to rise down at the New river and that the tunnel doors were going to open.
- [09:14]
D
And so this noise would fill the air and it would remind me on a weekly monthly basis that there was this huge thing near me called the Hawks Nest Dam.
- [09:25]
A
Katherine was only vaguely aware of the history of the dam and the tunnel. But hearing the warning alarm over and over made her curious. She's a self described history nerd. So she started looking into it. She read whatever she could get her hands on, which admittedly wasn't a lot. It seemed like the history of the tunnel had been mostly erased. But then she came across an odd collection of poems published in 1938 by a writer named Muriel Rockheiser. It was called the Book of the Dead. Rukeyser was a journalist turned poet and wrote 20 narrative poems documenting what happened to the workers who built the Hawks Nest Tunnel. They weave in first person interviews and congressional testimony with lines from the Bible and the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. One of the poems was called George Robinson Blues. Here's Catherine reading that poem.
- [10:19]
D
Gauley Bridge is a good town for Negroes they let us stand around on the sidewalks if we're black were brown Veneta's over the trestle and that's our town the hill makes breathing slow, slow breathing after you row the river and the graveyard's on the hill Cold in the springtime blow the graveyard's up on high and the town is down below. Did you ever bury 35 men in a place in back of your house? 35 tunnel workers the doctors didn't attend died in the tunnel. Camps under rocks everywhere. World without end.
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A
Catherine could hardly believe what she was reading. She hadn't realized the scale of the tragedy that had happened in her own backyard. She pored over Rukeyser's work to the point where it became almost like a guidebook for her to follow.
- [11:18]
D
So it kind of started me on this. What felt almost like solving a mystery and picking up clues along the way. I started looking for descendants of survivors or descendants of victims to see, you know, what remained of this story. What did people still remember?
- [11:41]
A
As Catherine started to dig into the history of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel, she quickly realized there weren't a lot of sources beyond Rukeyser's poems and a few old dusty transcripts from congressional hearings.
- [11:53]
D
There was a very large, powerful and well resourced entity that was highly invested in keeping what had happened quiet. And so over the years, the Union Carbide Corporation and their subcontractor Reinhardt and Dennis did a pretty good job keeping tabs on any kind of record or document that would have existed as proof of what had happened. And so that's one way to keep something quiet is just to. To literally destroy the evidence.
- [12:21]
A
But what she learned was that back in the late 1920s, West Virginia was desperately trying to modernize their electricity infrastructure. The Union Carbide corporation, which created the first ever petrochemical plant in West Virginia, Answered that call. They came up with plans to build a new hydroelectric plant and dam in the state. But the location they'd chosen. Meantime, they would need to carve a tunnel through three miles of mountain to get the water from the new river to the power plant. As a bonus, while they dug, they also planned on extracting silica, A mineral that was in much of the rock that they were drilling through and is often used to make iron, steel, and glass products. There was some pushback to the plan from the state's coal mining industry and others that the state government gave it a green light. No one called it this back then, but it was essentially a renewable energy project. Union Carbide got quick approvals, and even though they were definitely mining underground, they found a sneaky workaround where they labeled it as a public works project. That was important because there were basically no regulations at the time about public works. Reinhart and Dennis would be in charge of the labor. Union Carbide would oversee planning and supervision, and they'd handle inspections and safety measures. But they were on a tight deadline. Union Carbide wanted it done in two years, and they offered incentives for Reinhart and Dennis to get it done even sooner. So the contractor started looking for workers to hire fast. The work on the Hawks nest tunnel began in earnest in June 1930, as more than 2,000 workers descended on Gulley Bridge, West Virginia. There were some local hires, but most came from out of state.
- [14:09]
D
Since there were so many unemployed workers at this time, A lot of black workers were recruited to come to West Virginia to leave their homes and come up on trains to work inside the tunnel.
- [14:23]
A
Reinhart and Dennis would go to the south and give black workers one way fares to West Virginia, which then made the workers indebted to the company and unable to leave. You've already heard about George Robinson, but another name that shows up in old records is Dewey Flack, A black teenager who left his home in North Carolina with hopes of providing for his family. He promised to send money back home to his parents and five younger siblings, Although some of his siblings thought he had just run away and left them behind. Once workers like George and Dewey got to West Virginia, they were placed in segregated camps. The white workers were assigned Four men to a shack that had electricity, and they were paid in cash. The black workers were treated much worse. They had up to 10 or more men assigned to a shack, had to foot the bill for their own electricity, and were paid with company scrip instead of cash. Here's how George described it in his congressional testimony.
- [15:19]
C
We had to pay shack rent amounting to 75 cents a week. Doctor bill amounted to 25 cents a week. Hospital bill was 25 cents a week. The light bill was 25 cents a week.
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B
When you finished, did you owe the company or did it owe you?
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C
I always owed the company. At the end of the week, every morning, one got a check. They gave a fella a check, and it was put through at the window. By the time one paid for three meals and got a pint of moonshine, everything was gone.
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B
Did the commissary sell moonshine?
- [15:53]
C
No. When we began to cough, we thought we had gotten a cold. And we thought it would be well to take some whiskey for it. Then, too, we took some moonshine to cut the cold from the lungs. We got the moonshine every day. I don't believe we could have stayed there without it.
- [16:12]
A
But even with the moonshine, some workers became too sick to work in the tunnel. Reinhart and Dennis enlisted the sheriff and private security to force them out of their shacks and back to work.
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C
I have seen the sheriff and his men run the workers off their places when they were sick and weak. So sick and weak that they could hardly walk.
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A
One man named McLeod was especially intense.
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B
Did you ever see a man named McLeod, the Rouster, strike anybody in calling him back to work?
- [16:48]
C
I never did, but I have heard it. He always had the two pistols and the blackjack. I did, though, see a foreman beat a boy with the pick handle at the tunnel.
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B
Why did he beat him?
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C
Because he told him to go back to work, and the boy gave him some back talk.
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A
Shifts were 10 to 12 hours long, six days a week. The goal was to explode dynamite and remove as much rock as possible. Workers also used heavy machinery to help chip away at the tunnel. The safest way to deal with the dust being created would have been to wet the surfaces before work in a process called wet drilling. But that wasn't done because it would have slowed down production.
- [17:29]
C
The drilling there had to be dry drilling because otherwise they couldn't drill fast enough. A fella could drill three holes dry to one wet. That is, it's about three times faster when a fella drills dry.
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A
Technically, workers were supposed to wait until after the dust had cleared from the dynamite. But some said they were forced to go into the tunnel sooner. The men were digging into mainly sandstone, which is made up of silica or silicone dioxide. When it's drilled into, it shatters into tiny pieces. It's like glass particles slicing through the air. Silica dust particles are tiny and abrasive, and if they get into your lungs, they can tear and scar it. Breathing in too much silica dust over time can lead to silicosis, an incurable and often fatal disease.
- [18:19]
D
The dust that was created by the drilling would have been choking. It would have been scarring and scratching at their skin and eyes. It would have been difficult to breathe.
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A
And that dust was constant. It got into everything, even the drinking water. Workers recalled the water being so thick with silica dust that it looked like milk.
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C
When they would bring in water to drink, the dust would settle on top of it, and one would have to drink that dust, too. When drilling, the hole would go straight down, and the air would then force the dust back into one's face.
- [18:57]
A
Another worker claimed that there was so much dust in the air, he could practically chew it. Workers weren't given respirators to wear, so they were left entirely unprotected while they worked. They could barely see a few feet in front of themselves.
- [19:12]
D
The dust was so thick that it came out of the opening of the tunnel and covered the trees and the hillsides around the opening of the tunnel. So you are in this kind of like, you know, ghostly white powder covered everything.
- [19:30]
A
The effects of the silica dust were apparent almost immediately. So many men were getting sick. The workers had nicknamed the illness tunnelitis. Here's one worker speaking in archival footage recovered by pbs. And each and every day that I worked in that tunnel, I have carry out from 10 to 14 men was overcome by the dust. Initially, the workers didn't realize the gravity of the situation. They thought they were just dealing with a chronic cough, maybe pneumonia, but that it would clear up once they finished working. In reality, they had silicosis, and it wasn't going away.
- [20:07]
D
It's a sort of a choking sensation. The dust gets inside your lungs. Silica is glass, so it's cutting these tiny, tiny slices into your lung tissue. Those are developing scars. And so your lungs become this sort of like, mass of scar tissue, unable to get blood into it, and thus unable to deliver oxygen to your body.
- [20:31]
A
The craziest thing is, the condition was known. It might have been referred to by different names, but it was clear that silica dust was A danger to people, and companies knew how to avoid it. Workplaces needed proper ventilation, workers needed respirators, and wet drilling was much safer. But Union Carbide and Reinhart and Dennis did none of that. Silicosis can take 10 to 30 years to develop after exposure. For companies working on a tight deadline and trying to maximize their profits, it's something they can push off and ignore. But this was no ordinary level of exposure.
- [21:07]
D
There's a form of silicosis called acute silicosis that comes about when you're in really extreme conditions like these. And this can develop very quickly, actually, if you're exposed to dust at that level day after day after day.
- [21:23]
A
Acute silicosis can kill in a matter of months. Turnover was extremely high. 60% of the men worked on the tunnel for less than two months. 90% worked on it for less than a year. But while the workers were aware of what was going on, not many outside of the area knew. The companies had a gag order for workers so they couldn't talk to the press. In February 1931, a local newspaper manned to get enough details to publish a report claiming that 37 people had died in just two weeks. Most of them were black laborers. But the news went no further. In fact, the problems happening at Hawks Nest were largely ignored.
- [22:06]
D
The company wanted to downplay or outright deny that anything was happening. The company would blame the workers, the black workers especially. They're drinking too much. It's pneumonia. It's not anything to do with the dust. They're lazy. There was no sympathy or any attempt to improve the conditions.
- [22:31]
A
That same year, Dewey Flack, the teenager from North Carolina who was sending money back to his family, worked his last shift in the tunnel. Two weeks later, he died. The cause of death was pneumonia. In the summer of 1931, Union Carbide claimed to have learned there were even higher deposits of silica than they'd anticipated. Instead of giving the workers any safety precautions to protect from the increased dust, Union Carbide simply told them to expand the tunnel from 32ft wide to 46ft so they could mine even more of the mineral. After all, silica was helpful for steel and glass work, which Union Carbide profited off of. That obviously meant more silica dust in the air. The main work on the tunnel was completed just three months later, less than 18 months after it began and months ahead of schedule. After that, a majority of the workers were paid and sent on their way. The ones who survived, at least Union Carbide and Reinhart and Dennis acknowledged that it had been dangerous work. And they claimed a few dozen men had died during construction. But their numbers didn't add up. Although it wouldn't be until five decades later that someone really checked their math.
- [24:05]
E
There was no real good documentation and no good materials. There was this big disconnect and I knew it was important, but it seemed like one of these historic issues which would be very hard to investigate so far after the fact.
- [24:18]
A
That's Dr. Martin Cherniak, a physician and professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut's medical school and the author of the Hawk's Nest Incident, America's worst industrial disaster. Like Catherine Moore, Dr. Cherniak first stumbled onto the Hawks Nest story somewhat by accident. Back in the 1980s. He was working at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health when he was assigned to investigate an elevated number of deaths at a metals plant. It was also in West Virginia and was also owned by Union Carbide. One thing led to another and he eventually discovered Union Carbide's shady record of silicosis cases at Hawks Nest.
- [25:00]
E
And as I dug deeper, more things became apparent. There were surviving children of major protagonists at the time. There were survivors still alive.
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A
Then Dr. Cherniak found out that far more workers had died than Union Carbide or Reinhardt and Dennis had ever admitted to. And what's more, the companies seem to have made a concerted effort to keep that fact out of the history books.
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E
There was an effort over the years to suppress and eliminate any public communication.
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A
One day, Martin was in Fate County, West Virginia, when he was approached by a stranger.
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E
A middle aged gentleman came up with a box and he said, you might like to look at these. And I said, what are they? They said, they're related to the area that you're interested in. And I asked him if he could identify himself and he said no. And it was a lot of material from the cases and the trials. So his father must have been involved as an attorney with all of this way back when was my guess.
- [26:01]
A
Almost as soon as work on the tunnel was complete. Back in 1931, lawsuits against Union Carbide and Reinhart and Dennis started piling up. More than 150 men filed suit. Presumably the gag order could no longer be enforced. And now that the men weren't employed by the company, one of the first cases to go before a jury was filed in 1933 by a white 38 year old man named Raymond Johnson. He had worked in the tunnel for about a year and said he'd contracted silicosis during that Time he was seeking $25,000 in damages, or just over 620,000 in today's dollars. Raymond testified at his own trial, and he wanted to make the effects of this disease clear. Here's Dr. Cherniak describing what Raymond did next.
- [26:48]
E
His trial was just stripped onto the waist, and he had the emaciated body of a person with end stage lung disease and had lost over 20% of his body mass.
- [27:03]
A
We know from other victims that when silicosis is at its worst, it's nearly impossible to breathe. Some can't walk or even stand up. They have to rely on their loved ones to care for them. In Raymond's case, his doctors had given him about a year to live. Raymond's lawyers brought in other workers who shared their stories, too. Workers who coughed through their testimony and discussed the health challenges they faced because of their work in the tunnel. Experts testified that more than 95% of what was tested in the tunnel contained silica. The defense by the companies tried to discredit Raymond's claims. A former state mining official testified that Hawks Nest Tunnel was dust free, and the companies insisted that there had been every reasonable safety precaution in place. The companies also claimed that they did not know about silicosis at the time. The trial took a month. Then the jury went away to deliberate. They spent 20 hours debating, but ultimately couldn't come to a verdict. So the case was deemed a mistrial. Raymond got a new lawyer to try again. But in 1934, he died before his trial could take place. He had been bedridden for six months at that point, and many of those who testified at the first trial had also passed. Dr. Cherniak went through the documents and tried to calculate exactly how many men had died during the construction of the tunnel and its aftermath. But that proved incredibly difficult. Official records were mostly written by company men. Autopsies were spotty and incomplete, and several workers were buried in unmarked graves. Back in 1936, the companies pegged the death toll at 109 workers, far lower than the four or 500 alleged during the congressional hearing. And Dr. Cherniak was convinced that even that number severely underestimated the amount of black workers, workers who died. So he looked at the lung disease mortality rates between 1931 and 1935among local white men. Given the rate of white male deaths during that time, Dr. Cherniak calculated the total, if that same rate applied to black men working in the tunnel. And that was how he arrived at his final number, a staggering 764 people. According to Dr. Cherniak, even that is a conservative estimate. He believes that it's highly probable that black men's exposure was higher. After all, they were more likely to be placed in even more dangerous situations deeper in the mines. But nobody knew this. Back in the 1930s, in fact, nobody really knew anything at all until finally a writer from a national pro labor magazine wrote a series of articles about Hawks Nest. And that caught the attention of a crusading congressman who was determined to bring these men and their stories out of the shadows and into the light of day. According to Dr. Martin Cherniak, what happened underground at Hawks Nest may have stayed buried were it not for a colorful politician from New York City.
- [30:12]
E
Ovito Marchantonio was a very interesting New York congressman who was actually a Republican, but was probably the paragon of the social justice left in the US Congress, very involved with workers protection, and he decided there should be federal hearings.
- [30:29]
A
Vito Marcantonio is quite a character. He was one of the most successful socialists to ever hold office in New York. During his seven terms, the immigrant populations of East Harlem who he represented loved him. He was a real man of the people and a staunch supporter of organized labor. Almost a century later, New York City's new mayor, Zorhan Mandani, called him an inspiration. He certainly had his detractors, some of whom called him a radical. In response, he said, quote, if it be radicalism to believe our natural resources should be used for the benefit of all and not for the purpose of enriching just a few, then I plead guilty to the charge. So that's the guy who read about hawks nest in 1935 in a lefty magazine and felt he needed to do something. So in January 1936, he opened a congressional inquiry into silicosis. They didn't have subpoena power, so no one from Union Carbide or Reinhart and Dennis testified. The company's official totals for those who died remained at 60. But the committee did get some workers to testify who echoed earlier lawsuits, saying they weren't given protective equipment like masks. The real bombshell testimony came from the final worker to take the stand, George Robinson.
- [31:45]
C
I knew a man who died about 4:00 in the morning in the camp, and at 7:00 the same morning, his wife took his clothes to the undertaker to dress her dead husband. And when she got there, they told her the husband had already been buried.
- [32:00]
B
Who paid the undertaker's bill?
- [32:03]
C
Reinhardt and Dennis.
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A
Here's historian Catherine Moore.
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D
Again, he seems to have been someone who had A strong sense of justice. He seemed to have been a person who was very courageous. Because speaking out at this time, especially as a black man who was a victim of this very powerful corporation, you know, he was taking a huge risk.
- [32:29]
A
George worked at Hawks Nest Tunnel for only about four months, but afterwards he developed wheeze and severe silicosis. In his testimony, he said that he had attended at least 35 burials of black workers while working in the tunnel. Here's Congressman Marcantonio pressing George about if there were even more victims not accounted.
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B
For in your opinion, about how many persons have died from working in that.
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C
Tunnel that I know personally.
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B
That you know of.
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C
I know about 118 who have died close to that. I believe they're colored people.
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B
Colored people only. You have no knowledge of such white persons?
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C
I know several white people who have died from that work. I know some foremen who have died. The foreman had to stay in the dust to keep the men there.
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B
You know foremen too, who have died?
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C
Yes, sir. Several foremen have died. They were 15 or 20, perhaps more than that. They are dead? Yes, sir, they are dead.
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A
Union Carbide tried to downplay his testimony. They said Robinson worked in the tunnel for only 26 days and their doctors said his X rays were negative for silicosis.
- [33:41]
D
They said that he was faking all of this and that he was just trying to enjoy, quote, notoriety, travel without cost to himself, and the pleasure of making an impression on white people for probably the first time. These are cruel, belittling, racist attacks.
- [34:05]
A
The president of Reinhart and Dennis had also told reporters ahead of the hearings that while some of the men had died, it wasn't from silicosis. It was due to pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhoid and workplace injuries. He said the accident numbers were actually pretty low for a project of this size and that, quote, every known device to protect the workers was used and that reports of deaths were grossly exaggerated. The members of the subcommittee were taken aback by what they had heard. They called the companies barbaric. One congressman said that workers had been, quote, treated worse than dumb animals should be treated. The committee concluded that the negative impacts of silica had been known for years and the need to address it had been ignored. They said there was a pattern of disregard for human health and that many men died from silicosis due to outright ignorance or negligence by the companies. The committee requested $10,000 from Congress to look into the issue further. They also asked for subpoena power to question the company's and recommended the full House investigate Silicosis in Hawks Nest. But in the end, their requests were denied and their recommendations were ignored.
- [35:19]
D
That congressional testimony really didn't. Nothing really came of it. It exists as a kind of a record, as a kind of proof that this happened, and that's really important. But after that congressional hearing, there was no additional investigation.
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A
Although there was no official follow up. The press was now paying more attention to the plight of the workers, at least some of them.
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D
One of them was a guy named Charlie Jones. He was a white man with a large family and a wife named Emma Jones.
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A
Emma had watched her husband and three of her sons all go to work in the Hawk's Nest tunnel and all come back with silicosis.
- [36:01]
D
The Jones family sort of became the face of the disaster. So Emma was interviewed, Charlie was interviewed for a brief period. They were kind of thrust into the spotlight. To their credit, they were speaking out against a really, really powerful entity, a very, very powerful corporation.
- [36:20]
A
One of the people who read about the Jones family was the poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser in New York, the same poet whose work would later inspire Catherine Moore. In the spring of 1936, Rukeyser and a photographer friend went to the Hawks Nest area. She spoke to survivors and family members and translated those interviews into poems for her book of the Dead.
- [36:43]
D
You can almost kind of think of them as collages of words that incorporate sort of what you might expect to find in a poem. So her own text mixed in with the words of some of the workers themselves.
- [36:59]
A
In particular, she wrote about the Gawley Bridge Committee, a group of citizens and their families who were trying to provide relief to the victims of Hawks Nest and bring attention to the tragedy. George Robinson was one of the group's leaders. He and Rukeyser spoke at length while she was in the area, which is what inspired her poem George Robinson Blues.
- [37:21]
D
I've put them down from the tunnel camps to the graveyard on the hill Tin cans all about it Fixed them tunnulitis hold themselves up at the side of a tree I can go right now to that cemetery. When the blast went off, the boss would call out Come, let's go back when that heavy loaded blast went white Come, let's go back telling us Hurry, hurry into the falling rocks and muck.
- [37:57]
A
George Robinson would never see this poem published. In June 1936, he was in the hospital. He died the following month, just seven months after giving congressional testimony. Decades later, Catherine searched for living descendants of the victims. Many of them had no idea that their relatives had been involved in the Hawk's nest disaster.
- [38:23]
D
I spoke with descendants of the Jones family and they also didn't know until they were adults really what had happened to their grandparents and it impacted them deeply. One of them described it as very overwhelming, very emotional and they're angry still. Unfortunately the perpetrators here have disappeared. I mean there's no one to appeal to for any kind of justice at this point but there still impacting people.
- [38:58]
A
In 1936, the blues musician Josh White recorded a song called Silicosis is killing me. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was close with White apparently heard the song.
- [39:15]
D
Six bits a day. Didn't know I was digging my own grave.
- [39:23]
A
Silicosis eat my lungs away. That same year, FDR's Labor Secretary Francis Perkins declared war on silicosis and the president helped pass a law requiring companies working for the government to maintain safe and healthy working conditions. Eventually other laws were passed to regulate exposure to silica. But now all of these years later, some of those regulations are at risk of being rolled back.
- [39:54]
D
It's a cautionary tale, you know, it's a tale for us who live today about what it can look like when we cede too much power to corporate will and corporate interest and we don't allow workers to have a voice in their workplace.
- [40:15]
A
Until recently, what happened to the workers at Hawks Nest Tunnel had been mostly swept under the rug because of the power of corporations like Union Carbide and the entrenched racism in the United States. But today, thanks to researchers like Catherine Moore and Dr. Martin Cherniak, we have a fuller understanding understanding of the tragedy that occurred and its terrible toll on human lives. And thanks to Muriel Rockyser's poetry, we can still hear the voices of men like George Robinson.
- [40:45]
D
Our drinking water. The camps and their groves were colored with the dust. We cleaned our clothes in the groves, but we always had the dust looked like somebody sprinkled flour all over place the the parks and groves it stayed and the rain couldn't wash it away and it twinkled. That white dust really looked pretty down around our ankles. As dark as I am when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night with a white man. Nobody could have told which man was white. The dust had covered us both and the dust was white.
- [41:42]
A
On the next episode of Lawless Planet. When activists taking on an oil and gas giant find their emails are being stolen. Clues lead back to an international network of mercenary hackers. We start putting the pieces together to try to solve not only what's the objective of these hackers, but who are they? What's really behind this campaign. For today's episode we relied heavily on Dr. Martin Cherniak's the Hawk's Nest Incident, America's worst industrial disaster and Oxford the Book of the Dead by Catherine Venable Moore as well as George Robinson's congressional testimony and the poetry of Muriel Rockyser. Lawless Planet is produced and hosted by me, Zach Goldbaum. This episode was written by Alex Burns. Our senior producer and senior story editor is Derek John. Senior producer for Wondry is Andy Herman, our senior. Our managing producer is Lata Panya. Our managing producer is Jake Kleinberg. Our associate producer is Alexi Piri. Sound design and music by Kenny Kuziak. Dialogue edit by George Drabing Hicks. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Versan Sync fact checking by Naomi Barr. Our legal counsel is Deb Derues and Margot Arnold. Executive producers are Marsha Louie and Jenny Lauer. Beckman for Wondry. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next week. Sam.