—Rachel Scott, Muscle and Blood1
No one knows how many people died in the Hawk’s Nest tragedy of the early 1930s, and no one ever will. The number of deaths is probably greater than the number who perished with the sinking of the Titanic, but there is no ship’s register or other list of names that can be used to tabulate the casualties, many of whom were buried in unmarked graves. Nor are you likely to read about Hawk’s Nest in history books, even though it is generally recognized by industrial health researchers as the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history. For a long time it was dangerous to talk about it in West Virginia, where the disaster occurred. In 1939, the governor of West Virginia refused to sanction a Federal Writer’s Guide to his state until the writers toned down their lengthy and graphic discussion of Hawk’s Nest. Even in the 1960s, a West Virginia university professor received more than a dozen death threats when he set out to interview some of the survivors. In 1986, physician Martin Cherniack wrote a meticulously documented account of the disaster, titled The Hawk’s Nest Incident, but although Cherniack’s book was praised by reviewers, it too has gone out of print and into obscurity.
The passengers on the Titanic included scions of wealthy families—people whose passing was deemed important enough to memorialize in books and movies. By contrast, the five thousand workers at Hawk’s Nest were poor, predominantly black, and considered expendable in the early years of the Great Depression. Drawn by promises of better pay and steady work, they left the coal mines and were put to work drilling a three-mile-long tunnel to divert water for a hydroelectric plant being constructed by the Union Carbide Company to provide power to its nearby petrochemical plant. They had no way of knowing that the dusty air in the tunnel would send as many as half of them to an early death. The tunnel still stands today, behind a commemorative plaque that describes it as an engineering marvel. In 1986, the state of West Virginia finally agreed to place a second marker at the site, a three-foot-square sign with a mere eleven lines of text dedicated to the memory of the men who died there.
The mountain through which the workers bored was made of almost pure silica, the hard glassy mineral from which sand and quartz derive. Inhalation of silica dust had been identified 15 years earlier as the cause of an often fatal disease that slowly suffocates its victims by destroying the ability of their lungs to absorb oxygen. Before the scientists labeled it “silicosis,” the disease was called “miners’ phthisis,” “potters’ consumption,” or “grinders’ rot”—names associated with the professions that brought workers into contact with the dust. At Hawk’s Nest, Union Carbide’s management and engineers were mindful of the dangers associated with silica dust, and they wore face masks or respirators for self-protection when they entered the tunnel for periodic inspections. The workers themselves, who spent eight to ten hours a day breathing the dust, were not told about the hazard, nor were they given face masks. Wetting the job site would have reduced the amount of dust in the air, but this was not done either. “The company doctors were not allowed to tell the men what their trouble was,” one of the doctors would testify later. If a worker complained of difficulty breathing, he would be told that his condition was pneumonia or “tunnelitis.”2 For treatment, the doctors prescribed what came to be called “little black devils”—worthless pills made from sugar and baking soda.
In moderately dusty conditions, workers would be expected to contract silicosis after 20 or 30 years. For jobs such as sandblasting, accelerated silicosis might strike in 10 years. At Hawk’s Nest, conditions were so bad that workers were dying from acute silicosis within a single year. The road that led from the workers’ homes to the work site became known as the “death march.” On their way home, the workers would be covered in white rock dust, giving them a deathlike appearance. Many were disturbingly thin, sick, coughing and bleeding.3 “I can remember seeing the men, and you couldn’t tell a black man from a white man. They were just covered in white dust,” recalled a woman who lived near the Hawk’s Nest tunnel.
George Robison, a tunnel worker, said people were forced to live in company houses until they were too sick to work, at which time the sheriff would evict them. “Many of the men died in the tunnel camps,” Robison said. “They died in hospitals, under rocks, and every place else. A man named Finch, who was known to me, died under a rock from silicosis.” 4 A local undertaker, paid by the company, buried 169 of the men in a mass grave in a nearby field.5 The widow of one worker had her husband’s body exhumed only to find that the man, buried by the company barely hours after his death, had three other men stacked on top of him.6 Some family members never found out what had happened to their loved ones. When they inquired, the company would just say that the worker had moved on.
It took a militant labor movement and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to bring the Hawk’s Nest scandal to national attention. Congressional hearings were held in 1935 to probe what one senator described as “American industry’s Black Hole of Calcutta.” At the hearings, a Union Carbide contractor admitted, “I knew I was going to kill those niggers, but I didn’t know it was going to be this soon.”7 The estimated number of deaths among the workers who labored in the tunnel ranged from a few hundred to two thousand. Worse yet, the Hawk’s Nest disaster was not an isolated incident. Thousands of other workers throughout the country were developing silicosis through occupational exposures in foundries, mines, potteries, and construction sites. With public interest aroused, popular and scientific magazines began to write about conditions in the “dusty trades.” Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, declared “war” on silicosis.
The response from industry set a pattern that would be repeated countless times in subsequent years when corporate interests faced similar crises. As science writer James Weeks observes, “Surprisingly similar stories—concerning the meaning of ‘scientific’ terms and attribution of responsibility—could be and have been told about asbestos-related diseases, ‘black lung,’ byssinosis [brown lung disease], cancers caused by occupational exposures, lead poisoning, and others.”8 In each case, the exposures that cause disease were only the symptoms of a deeper problem—corporate denial regarding the deadly risks associated with growing industrialization. The company doctors who lied to dying workers at Hawk’s Nest were following a new version of the Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm to the boss.” This willingness to subordinate health to profits was common and notorious among physicians who worked for industry. As physician and public health reformer Alice Hamilton observed, a doctor who left private practice to take such employment thereby earned “the contempt of his colleagues.” Company doctors were known as the least competent and least ethical members of their profession.
Hygiene Hijinks
Less than a week after the 1935 Hawk’s Nest hearings adjourned in Congress, a group of industrialists met privately at the Mellon Institute, a foundation that had been established by financiers Andrew and Richard Mellon in 1913 to “benefit American manufacturers through the practical cooperation of science and industry.” The meeting led to the formation of a new organization, headquartered at Mellon, called the Air Hygiene Foundation (AHF). “Because of recent misleading publicity about silicosis and the appointment of a Congressional committee to hold public hearings,” noted a confidential Mellon report, “the attention of much of the entire country has been focused on silicosis. It is more than probable that this publicity will result in a flood of claims, whether justified or unjustified, and will tend toward improperly considered proposals for legislation.” In order to fend off these feared laws and lawsuits, the Air Hygiene Foundation planned a public relations campaign that purported to “give everyone concerned an undistorted picture of the subject.”9
Leading scientists and public officials were appointed to serve as members and trustees of the foundation. Its spokesmen began to be widely quoted in popular trade publications. “Silicotics are rare compared with men driven from their jobs by shyster lawyers,” commented AHF represen
tative Alfred C. Hirth. The AHF’s own “shyster lawyer,” Theodore C. Waters, accused doctors of fabricating claims of silicosis. “In many instances,” he stated, “employees have been advised by physicians, untrained and inexperienced in the diagnosis and effect of silicosis, that they have the disease and thereby have sustained liability. Acting on this advice, the employee, now concerned about his condition, leaves his employment, even though that trade may be the only one in which he is able to earn a living.”10
Companies did finally begin to limit the worst abuses, improving ventilation, wetting down the dust, offering respiratory masks, and using other methods to reduce silica exposures. Gross slaughters like Hawk’s Nest were easily preventable, and they generated headlines that were bad for business. Businesses were also aware of their increasing financial liability due to lawsuits. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the legal system was heavily biased to prevent workers from successfully suing their employers. By the 1930s, however, courts had become increasingly willing to hold employers liable for both actual and punitive damages. Driven by rising jury awards and insurance awards, the “dusty trades” took their problem out of the courts by convincing state governments to incorporate silicosis into state workers’ compensation schedules.
With the Air Hygiene Foundation, industry had found an effective propaganda formula: a combination of partial reforms with reassuring “scientific” rhetoric, under the aegis of an organization with a benevolent, independent-sounding name. Even though the AHF was governed by and for the dusty trades, it had successfully become a vehicle for deployment of the “third party” technique. “A survey report from an outside, independent agency carries more weight in court or before a compensation commission than does a report prepared by your own people,” explained AHF membership committee chairman C. E. Ralston at the foundation’s fifth annual meeting. By 1940, the AHF had 225 member companies, representing such major polluters of the day as American Smelting and Refining, Johns-Manville, United States Steel, Union Carbide, and PPG Industries. In 1941, it changed its name to the Industrial Hygiene Foundation (and later still to the Industrial Health Foundation), broadening its agenda beyond dust-related diseases to encompass other industrial health issues. By the 1970s, it had more than 400 corporate sponsors, including Gulf Oil, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Kawecki Berylco Industries, Brush Beryllium, Consolidated Coal, Boeing, General Electric, General Mills, Goodyear, Western Electric, Owens-Corning Fiberglass, Mobil Oil, and Dow Chemical.11
In the mid-1930s, silicosis was regarded as the “king of occupational diseases,” as well known and notorious as asbestos would become in the 1990s. Thanks in large measure to the work of the AHF, however, it began to fade from the headlines by the end of the decade. The history of silicosis is documented in a book titled Deadly Dust by professors Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, who study the history of occupational and public health policies. By the 1940s, they note, industry health analysts declared silicosis a “disease of the past,” and by the 1950s, it was “officially declared unimportant, and those who spoke about it found it necessary to apologize for ‘bringing up such a shopworn, dusty topic.’ ” Its disappearance from the headlines is arguably an even bigger scandal than the coverup at Hawk’s Nest, because the disease itself has not been eliminated, even though its cause is well understood and avoidable. In England and other parts of Europe, a ban on sandblasting has been in place since 1949. In the United States, however, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) currently estimates that a million U.S. workers are at risk of developing silicosis, of whom 100,000 are in high-risk occupations—such as miners, sandblasters, rock drillers, pottery and mason workers, roof bolters, and foundry workers. NIOSH estimates that 59,000 of these workers will develop adverse health effects from silica exposure.
“Despite years of assurance that silicosis was a disease of the past and that workers could be adequately protected through proper ventilation, substitution of non-silica abrasives such as steel shot or garnite, and protective equipment, the reality is that during the postwar years workers continued to be exposed to excess amounts of silica and that silicosis never really vanished,” write Rosner and Markowitz. “However, it is virtually impossible to develop reliable statistics concerning its prevalence in the decades following World War II given the general complacency of industry and the industrial hygiene and medical communities regarding this disease and the fact that silicosis was often not listed on death certificates as a cause of death or contributing factor. In general, doctors were neither trained to diagnose this disease nor given reason to suspect its prevalence among industrial workers.”12
Recent cases that we do know about, culled from news stories and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13 include the following:• A 39-year-old man was diagnosed with silicosis and tuberculosis in April 1993 after working 22 years as a sandblaster, during which he typically spent six hours a day sandblasting. He had worn a charcoal filter respirator, but it failed to protect him.
• A male nonsmoker was diagnosed with advanced silicosis, emphysema, and asthma at age 49 after working 23 years as a tile installer. His work included polishing and drilling tile, and he was exposed to grout dust and sandblasting. He did not use a respirator, because information about dust control had not been made available to workers.
• A brick mason was diagnosed with silicosis, emphysema, and lung cancer at age 70 after 41 years on the job. He had worn a respirator while working in dusty conditions, but again it wasn’t enough protection.
• A 47-year-old man was diagnosed with severe silicosis in 1992 after working 22 years as a rock driller. He lingered for two years before dying in 1994. The drills he had used were equipped with dust controls, which were usually inoperable.
• Leslie Blevins, a 41-year-old coal miner, spent three months cutting through sandstone to get to a coal seam. On orders from the company, he helped conceal his sandstone mining from federal inspectors. “There’s a lot of things that wasn’t supposed to be done, but you either do it or you go home,” he explained. The mining machine that he worked on was an old machine. Its water sprays—used to suppress dust—were constantly breaking. The dust was suffocating. “Sometimes I’d have to shut the miner down and go back in the fresh air and puke,” he said. “My boss would come back and tell me to go back in.” A year later, he was diagnosed with severe silicosis. A doctor gave him two years to live, but he managed to hang on for three.14
Not everyone dies from silicosis. Some are permanently disabled and turn for help to the worker’s compensation system that industry helped put in place in the wake of the Hawk’s Nest scandal. Often, however, they must fight insurance companies to obtain benefits. “Even if they win, the payments they receive rarely equal their previous earnings and may end after a period of years,” notes Houston Chronicle reporter Jim Morris. “The maximum benefit for a ‘permanent, total’ disability in Texas, for example, is $438 per week for 401 weeks, or a little more than 7½ years. That’s hardly comforting to an incapacitated, 40-year-old silicosis victim who had expected to work another 25 years.”15
Rediscovering the Obvious
Even today, most states and the federal government make no serious attempt to track silicosis, which is not classified as a reportable disease. “If you look at the whole surveillance system, it’s been a joke,” says Dr. Kenneth Rosenman, an associate professor of medicine at Michigan State University, noting that government health officials “can’t even keep track of how many people actually die from falls and other trauma in the workplace. The Bureau of Labor Statistics probably has a 75 percent under-count of silicosis.”16 The workers of today, in other words, are not that much different from the workers at Hawk’s Nest. No one knows how many are dying from exposure to deadly dust, and perhaps no one ever will. Aside from the workers themselves and a few academics and isolated government officials, no one really seems to care.
The story o
f silicosis since Hawk’s Nest has unfolded as a series of episodes in which, every decade or so, the disease gets “discovered” all over again, followed by efforts at regulatory reform. Each time, these efforts to defeat the disease have been thwarted by industry campaigns modeled after the pattern set by the Air Hygiene Foundation. In the 1960s, for example, university researchers documented an epidemic of silicosis among shipyard workers in Louisiana. When similar reports in the 1970s prompted the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to propose more stringent standards for worker silica exposure, the affected industries established a group called the Silica Safety Association (SSA). Like the AHF, it professed concern for worker safety, stating that its mission was to “investigate and report on possible health hazards involved in [the] use of silica products and to recommend adequate protective measures considered economically feasible.”17 The key phrase here, of course, is “economically feasible.” In reality, the SSA regarded any new policy measures to restrict silica exposure as unfeasible. After successfully lobbying to prevent the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from adopting the proposed new NIOSH standard, the SSA disbanded in 1982, its true mission accomplished. At about the same time, a new epidemic of silicosis emerged, this time among Texas oil workers who contracted the disease while sandblasting pipes and storage tanks. A six-month investigation by the Houston Chronicle in 1992 found that “silicosis is often misdiagnosed by doctors, disdained by industry officials and unknown to the very workers who stand the greatest chance of getting it. . . . Old warnings and medical studies have been ignored, products falsely advertised and government rules flouted—especially with regard to sandblasting, an activity so hazardous that NIOSH recommended its banning in 1974.” As late as 1996, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimated that more than a million workers continue to be exposed to silica.18 A study by the Centers for Disease Control found 14,824 cases of silicosis-associated deaths between the years of 1968 and 1994.
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