Who Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards show, where I enunciate the title slightly differently so that you stay interested and don't slip into a belief that you all of these episodes are just kind of like one long episode and you're just sort of like lost in space consuming it. Anyway, that was that what you were going for there, buddy? Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like a k hole but for your ears, speaking of while not really speaking about ketamine, but anyway, Jason pargin.
Part two, The Triumphant Part two, the first part kind of ended on an Empire strikes back a down note. This is going to get us through to the Return of the Jedi, when the Empire is finally finally going to fall in. This company, this evil corporation behind this disaster going to be dissolved. That they could clearly not still in business after nineteen thirty whatever, once this stuff all comes out. I'm sure I've not looked it up.
I'm sure they were not allowed to operate anywhere in the world after this.
I've forgotten most of what I wrote here, but I'm sure you're right on that one.
Jason.
Now, Jason, are you do you have a thing that you've got a plug here that you yes, yeah, moving.
The new book is called Zoe is Too Drunk for This Dystopia. Add in all formats on October thirty first, twenty twenty three. If you are listening to this after that date, it should be out wherever books are sold in any possible format. If it is not out, boy, google my name, because something terrible must have happened. I can't imagine. It must have gotten canceled and pulled from shelves.
Yeah, Jason got canceled for his clandestine work in Nicaragua in the nineteen nineties or something like that. Look, we all have we all have a dark history of clandestine work in Latin America at some point in the nineties. You know, don't don't be judgmental people, they'll come for you next. This is the problem with cancel culture.
And also that does not get you canceled. Those people are.
Those people are very much you know, they're all fine. So let's talk about another kind of canceled silicosis. So one of the you know you mentioned there's not a lot of sources on this. There there are some very good sources on this, but they are kind of obscure and buried, and honestly the very best, like early like the the in terms of like stuff that how close it is to the actual disaster, probably the best overall work kind of covering this at least that that's kind
of contemporary to it. Happening is not a piece of traditional journalism or like a traditional nonfiction book. It's a poem, an epic poem. So we're not talking about like a little rhyming thing. We're talking about almost like the Illea or the Odyssey. Right, there's an epic poem about the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, The Book of the Dead, written
by Muriel Rukeiser. She was, you know, someone who grew up soon after the disaster and came to west you know, this part of West Virginia and was able to meet and interview a bunch of the survivors and their family members. And so it's this mix of you know, art where where she is, you know, using kind of the medium of poetry to talk through, to kind of set the scene and to talk through you know, how horrifying this was.
But also large chunks of it are straight up interviews with survivors and their family members that have been kind of set to meet her in order to fit into the work. I haven't ever encountered anything like this before actually, and within sort of West Virginia, you know, academic spheres. It's a pretty famous book. I had to, you know, actually buy a physical copy of it because it's not online.
But it's it's very good. It's it's really remarkable, and it is considered one of the more important pieces of kind of labor journalism of this era. I think it's been forgotten by most people now, but it shouldn't be. It is a pretty remarkable work of art. So I do want to encourage people check out Muriel Rakaiser's Book of the Dead. We're going to be quoting from it a couple of times here because it contains interviews with people from that period of time.
In the last episode, we kind of joked about the fact that I'm mostly known for TikTok, which is true. Far more people have watched my tech talks and have read any of my books. But I on there, I talked about the HBO mini series they did about Chernobyl, Yeah, and I talked about how they made it not as a documentary or as a docuseries or anything like that. They made it as a horror movie. Yeah, Like it
is highly stylized, and I was in that technok. I was defending that choice because I was like, you can't convey the reality of Chernobyl without trying to convey the fact that it played out like cosmic horror to these people, that you had this church demon thing you brought into the world, and that everyone who looked at it their
flesh started melting off their bones. So it is highly stylized because that's the only thing to really drive home, Whereas if you just try to convey it as a clinical piece of journalism, it doesn't hit the same way. It is trying to bring you into what it was like to live that situation that no one had ever lived through before. There had never been a meltdown before. Where here, I think it's the same thing if you're trying to convey the actual horror of what occurred. Because
this mind, as we described in the previous episode. Please go back to listen to that one if you have not yet, it was hell on Earth. Yeah, Like you're in this dark space that is cramped. Even if it's a spacious mind, you're still you know, it's now far enough that you're long out of the sunlight, and the air is burning you. It's burning your eyes, it's burning your nose, it's burning your lungs. It's probably burning your
skin like you're the teeny tiny pieces of glass. An epic poem is as appropriate as anything as I can think of to try to convey that this is an epic tragedy. It's so easy to talk about this in a way that we talk about numbers in the science of it that doesn't convey what it was like to get up and go to work in this place every day.
Yeah, Yeah, absolutely, And I think Rukeiser does a really admirable job of that. One of the accounts that she provides is from a woman, and this is from one of the relatively small number of laborers who were from the nearby town of golly Bridge. This woman, this mother, is named Absalom, and she has three sons who all go to work in this tunnel. They had been coal miners previously, but work was uneven, and as ru Keiser writes, quote,
a power company foreman learned that we made homebrew. He formed a habit of dropping by in the evenings to drink, persuading the boys and my husband to give up their jobs and take this other work. It would pay them better. Sureley is my youngest boy. He went into the tunnel. I saw the dust at the bottom of the tub. The boy worked there about eighteen months. Came home one evening with a shortness of breath. He said, mother, I cannot get my breath. Shirley was sick about three months.
I would carry him from his bed to the table, from his bed to the porch in my arms. So that's terrible, but it's also worth noting Absalom and her family are kind of among the luckier victims in that her kids and her husband, when they get sick, they have a home in town that's stable, they have family to take care of them. They're not completely in the wind. So when Shirley gets sick, he's able to stay with
his mom and get care from his mom. This does not ultimately save his life, but it's a less horrific experience than a lot of these black laborers are forced to endure. I want you to imagine not just the tunnel horror, which Jason just described pretty ably, but living and working in a camp outside the dig project. Right, you're in these cramped quarters. You're in a tiny box of a room with ten to fifteen other guys. None of you are able to There's not hygiene facilities that
are good or super regular, so everything reeks. There's also this chloeing silica dust that you just can't get all the way off you. It's always on everything, and one day you find that you just can't draw in breath. It feels like a flu at first, maybe that's what it is, you think, and you start coughing incessantly, But the misery is so intense eventually that you stop being
able to work, and you can't sleep at night. Right, So in the morning when it's time to go in, you're not like you can't function right, you can't go in there and do your job. You're coughing up a lung and you haven't slept in days. This is an
experience that happens to a lot of these guys. In nineteen thirty six, a newsreel interviewed one of these hawks next workers after the fact, who claimed, quote, each and every day I worked in that tunnel, I helped carry off ten to fourteen men who was overcome by the dust now there's no sick days in this period of time, especially not for black migrant laborers in the midst of
a massive labor surplus. From Maine harton Davis's perspective, right, the contractor union Carbide is directing to do all this. Workers staying in their shanties are taking up space, and if they're not working, that space has to go to someone who will. So they hired security from the nearby town to go through the camp after everyone had left for work and hunt down the sick people who might be like hiding, trying to like sneak a day sleeping
or something while their lungs rot in their chests. Cherniac writes of this quote, Ryan Hart and Dennis retained as an enforcement officer and formerly called a shack rouster. A Georgian named McLeod, who was assisted by a black camp overseer called Big John McLoud, carried firearms in a club. With these, he is said to have forced black workers to vacate the camp at the start of each work shift. According to a surviving black tunnel worker, beatings were routinely
administered as part of this early morning ritual. The camps of the colored men we're not close to the camps of the for the white men. If a colored man was sick and really couldn't go out to work in the morning, he had to hide out before the shock rouster came about. That fellow had two pistols in a blackjack to force men to go to work. And it's worth highlighting here the two pistols because rousters there's other rousters. They're usually listed as carrying one. McLoud is carrying two.
Because the only reason to do that if you're in this situation is if you're worried that you might find yourself at the center of a mob of angry, sick workers and need to kind of blast your way through a bunch of people. Right, that's the only reason you would need that for this job, which is basically just like poking people in their bed and getting them up, so kind of let you know the quality of dudes who are doing this job.
You made a mention that these are very replaceable workers because there's a labor surplus, and this is something we imaged the first episode. I really want to reiterate this context. There are so many people out of work and so many people desperate for work. Again, at a level of abject poverty that we kind of don't have anymore in America, Like, no matter how bad it gets, it doesn't get bad like this was because again, they didn't have the infrastructure
back then. So the fact that it is so easy that when somebody dies or somebody is incapacitated, that you can drag them away and know that when you post that job you will have one hundred guys or migrants willing to come in and fill it. The value of a human life drops blow zero because they're costing you
money for every minute they're not up and working. It's that is the context that they know they can replace these people, because it would be different if you were talking about a core group of guys who have been trained for months and had to do a job, and then when one goes down, the productivity drops. Now you have to be concerned, not at for humanitarian reasons, but for productivity reasons, like if they're all sick, like we got to fix this, We got to get them because
they're not working. It's not like that they're all so interchangeable that when one of them drops, they can just plug another one in.
Yeah. Yeah, And that really is the core of like why they're able to get away with a lot of this. So there are reports that sick men were sometimes even killed by rousters for refusing to leave. MacLeod and his men were essentially immune to the consequences of whatever actions they took. He had been deputized by the Sheriff of
Fayette County, so he's legally a law enforcement officer. This like maniac who's like rolling into shacks full of dying people with two handguns to like force them out, is a cop at this point in time too. He's in the pay directly of the Union Carbide Corporation. And McLoud also runs a Saturday night saloon. It's illegal to drink and gamble in this area at this point, but you know, he's a cop, so he's able to get away with it. And it was specifically a Saturday night saloon for black laborers.
So McLeod is kind of getting you know, when these guys get out of work exault, they need something to distract them. He runs this thing that takes their money for booze and for gambling. And then when they're out of work and they're sick, or when they're out of money and they're sick. He'll make money kicking them out of these shacks that they stay. And it's also when he does this night saloon, most nights will end with
a raid and a mass arrest because he's. Part of why he's allowed to do this is he's coordinating with the sheriff of Fayette County and the sheriff of Fayett County. When they arrest these guys for gambling and drinking, they don't take them to jail. So that's good because that would hurt Union Carbide, right, that would slow down production. They find them all right, so they just take money from them because they got caught drinking at this thing
that the police are basically helping to run. It's just like these black labors are being so comprehensively mined while they are mining. Right, That's one of the things that is kind of worth acknowledging about how unjust this situation is.
A corporate world, they call this synergy.
Yeah, this is synergy.
There's snitchs all possible angles to make sure that you're maximizing the every possible dime you could squeeze from this human being before they can no longer stand up.
And again you couldn't do the sheriffa Fayette County wouldn't do this to a workforce that was local, right because number one, those are your voters, right, And number two, that'll endanger you. Someone's got to kill you eventually for doing that in town if you're doing that to your neighbors.
Right.
But these guys they're not from town. They're black, and they're dying so quickly that there's very little institutional memory that can protect them from scams like this, right, by which I mean you get in there and maybe your fellow workers have only been there for a couple of weeks because people are turning over so quickly, so like nobody really knows how much they're getting fucked with, so there's not much warning to get There's not old timers
in a lot of cases, right, because they die so quickly.
Now.
Cherniac is also careful to note that racism was experienced by black ow workers, often at the hands of their fellow victims, white tunnel workers who are also getting silicosis. So you know that is a dimension here. Quote discipline of blacks by whites is similarly recalled by a gully Bridge man whose elder brother worked on the tunnel and
later died from silicosis. He described his brother as not liking the and then he uses a slur, an attribute which apparently served to qualify him as a foreman for Ryan Harton Dennis. He routinely attended to his duties in the tunnel armed with a baseball bat. And again he was one of the guys. He's forcing these black laborers forward into this dust cloud, but he is also entering
the dust cloud without protection. So that's a decent number of the men who die are the guys who kind of do this and don't realize that, like, as they sign the death warrants of these other men, they're also killing themselves.
I realize that it sounds like we're making some sort of a ham fisted metaphor that these guys don't realize they're breathing the same they're all breathing the same poison air that, like their race, convinces them that somehow they're coming out on top, even though the bosses equally don't care about their lives. Really, but it's not really a metaphor. It's just a thing that's literally happening.
In this case. It's just what's going down, Yeah, Joe, it's yeah, cool stuff. Sometimes reality provides us with those moments. I guess, I don't know.
Do you think there would be a solidarity in those tunnels with those white guys saying, hey, I now kind of get it. I get it. I see we're on the same team against the people who control the capital. Maybe we should all join up together. It's like, no, as long as I have my racism, I don't need clean air.
Yeah, it is it. Really, there's a lot to dig into here. This is part of the way I think this is such a worthwhile moment and disaster for people to know more about. Like, it really is important for people to be aware of this history, and that's one reason why. So Also, you know, if we're talking about outside of the rate and the speed of silicosis here, these are all things happening in other minds and industrial
construction projects around the country, right. The use of white workers to do violence to black workers to force them to labor. You know, these kind of like cops basically hired by these companies to enforce their who take advantage of them, rob them, beat them, kill them. All. All of that is common in other projects. The difference here is that at Hawk's Nest, they're doing it to men who are dying in a matter of weeks, sometimes of
an easily preventable illness caused by the labor. Right, sixty percent of the men who work in this tunnel last less than two months. Eighty percent lasts less than six months. Virtually everyone quits, dies or becomes too sick to work in less than a year. You know, when we're talking about these low skilled, unprotected workers, right, almost no one makes it a year. Right again, sixty percent less than
two months. Now, a lot of those guys are leaving because they're like, maybe they've got a little more options, they've got some money, and they're like, well, this is a death trap. I'm not going to stay here. But a significant chunk of that sixty percent are getting sick and eventually dying, you know, after just a couple of
weeks of labor. Absalom's son, Shirley, who we heard from earlier from that poem, was one of the first to fall ill before the company admitted any awareness to the dangers of silicosis, and before the local medical community realized what was happening. Her story lays out in horrifying detail, how frustrating the process of trying to find any answer could be quote, and this is Ruke Heiser kind of quoting from her interview of this mother. When they took sick,
right at the start, I saw a doctor. I tried to get doctor Harlest to x ray the boys. He was the only man I had any confidence in the company doctor in the Copper's mind. But he would not see Shirley. He did not know where his money was coming from. I promised him half if he'd worked to get compensation, but even then he would not do anything. I went on the road and begged x ray money. The Charleston hospital made the lung pictures. He took the
case after the pictures were made. After two or three doctors said the same thing. The youngest boy, Shirley did not go down there with me. He lay and said, Mother, when I die, I want you to have them open me up and see if that dust killed me. Try to get compensation. You will not have any way of making your living when we are gone, and the rest are going too. And what surely means by that is her husband and all three of her sons are in this mine, and as he gets sick. Shirley realizes we
are all dead. Mom's going to be alone. She'll have no like the only hope of support is for us to get compensation through some sort of lawsuit right for our deaths, because we're already dead men. That's about as bad as it gets already.
I think there are some listeners out there who are feeling a sense of dread because at the very top of the first episode we mentioned how the death toll from this disaster ranges from a couple hundred to two over a thousand, and I think there are some people saying, well, how can they not know? Like, you've got doctor visits, You've got aren't there records? Aren't there records of who joined the project and of what happened to those people.
We're going to get into that because the answer of how you can lose hundreds of dead people, this is something that you could do in the nineteen thirties. You could not do now because everyone has tracked, everyone has papers, everyone has a social security number, driver's license, on and on and on. This was an era when that stuff did not exist to a very large degree. This was an era when if you wanted to leave and abandon
your family. You could just move like five miles down the road and you just tell people you went by a different name, and that's it, Like there was there's esuchally as photo ID is. So you could just lose people. And I do not think people appreciate the opportunities it creates for everything from serial killers to industrial disasters, that you could just pile people in a mass grave and literally nobody knows what happened to them. Somewhere in another state,
in Virginia or Tennessee or North Carolina. You've got some family and they know that this guy went off to go take a job in West Virginia and he just never came back. And you don't know if maybe he just stayed there, maybe changed his name, maybe passed some unrelated reason. Maybe he moved and now he lives in Montana. You just didn't know.
Yeah, And it's you know, it's it's it's particularly like fucked up that like that story we told of Absalom horrible because she's a local, because she lives, she's part of a community, she has some stability. She's going to be able to like sue and stuff like that. That is how this gets out like when this becomes known, when there start to be news articles about it, when there's investigations. It's because of the fairly small minority of
locals who lose family members. These black were are like you said, they don't exist once they reach the mind right, like they die, and you as we'll talk about like you can kind of make them disappear so that there's not going to be any kind of like justice for most of these guys. Their families never find out what's happening. Now when it comes to the rate at which sort of it becomes obvious what's making these people sick, there is that mortician who finds out earlier that doesn't get
out very far past. Like executives at the company, Ryan Hart and Dennis employed two physicians in order to like watch over the workforce, take care of people who get sick and injured, and both men primarily existed to deny sick workers that their ailments had anything to do with the tunnel project. They would usually say it was pneumonia or some other communicable disease. They would tell people to
keep working. They would tell them that they did not need any protective gear, and then they would give them pills. These two guys, doctor Simmons and doctor Mitchell, their primary path like method whenever someone comes in with silicosis is to give them and these pills called little black devils, these little black pills that are just their placebos. It's baking soda covered in sugar. Like they know that they're
not giving people real medicine. It's a delaying tactic. And another thing you have to realize when it's like, how did this they get away with this? This is all taking place pretty much in a year or so, right, eighteen months for some of the work, I think, but it happens very quickly. So both Union Carbide and Ryan Hart and Dennis know all we got to do is push through to the completion line and then our lawyers can handle the fallout. Right, So give these guys some
fake medicine. Maybe that'll keep them at Bay another couple of months. A lot so many of them will die that then we won't have to deal with those guys. And like, every week we can put this off gets us closer to the finish line.
Right.
There's also you know a decent amount of ignorance basically among the local medical community, and it's not because they don't know about silicosis. As I said, this is a really well known illness, but it normally takes years, even decades for people to get black lung of this severity. No one has mined silica this peer and this quantity before, Like it's pretty much unprecedented. I don't think there were really any minds of this size dealing with this quantity
of pure silica. So there there are doctors who know about silica who are not you know, unethical men, but they're just seeing how much this is. This is hitting people, killing them, you know, three four, five hundred percent faster than they're used to. So they don't they don't necessarily know that. They're like I have, I don't. Maybe this is something different, right, Maybe this is some new virus
that's sweeping through town. So there is among some of the medical professionals who are trying to puzzle this out, there is reason to be consumed concerned, right, But within the company doctors, there's there's evidence that the company has access to that makes it much clearer what's happening, and that would have made it clearer to everyone earlier on that they delect, like deliberately keep away from people, right, So yeah, further evidence for this comes from the fact
that company policies on stuff like wetting the drills would change depending on whether or not government observers were in town to monitor the work. Right when people start dying, the government sends in teams to like monitor, and so Ryan Hart and Dennis will say, Okay, everybody, today, we're going to wet down the drills and we're going to wait two hours after blasting to send new teams in.
And then when the government observers leave, they go right back to the old procedures that are much faster and much more dangerous.
You know.
Again, you can't just like regulate by having a guy come by once to check something like this. That's easy to deal with.
There's Yeah, there's a very much things worked on the honor system in that era. Like there may have been a perfunctory check or whatever, but if they had really wanted to make sure they were, you know, abiding by the rules, there's ways you can do it. You can plan somebody there for a week, like you know, make them, make them do it the whole time you're there, and pay attention to do They seem to have respirators for
everyone because the inspectors wore them, is my understanding. When they showed up to take a look, they did not go in that mind without breathing equipments like what are you nuts?
Yeah, yep, so yeah. It seems safe to say that Union Carbide deliberately avoided acquiring information that would have forced them to improve safety practices and thus slow production. The American Society of Safety Professionals their analysis, notes Union Carbide had taken core samples along the course of the proposed tunnel before construction began, and knew the rock was extremely
high in silica. Despite the generally well understood relationship between exposure to airborne silica and death by silicosis, neither Union Carbide, New Canawa Power, nor Rhin Harton Dennis ever measured dust levels in the tunnel. Rhine Harton Dennis only conducted two tests for carbon monoxide during the seventeen month duration of the dig. A proven technology existed to measure clouds of dust. The impinger was developed in nineteen sixteen by the US
Public Health Service. Impingers, also known as bubblers or small bottles, used with an air pump to collect airborne contaminants into designated collection liquids for later laboratory analysis. So they again this is not don't just because this is ancient. They have the ability to test and know their silica in the air. It is standard on mines. But this isn't a mine, even though they're mining, it's not a mine.
But also it's it's absurd because the idea of saying that, well, we never got a chance to bring the instruments in to see if the air was bad. That would be like a house fire, and like, well, I never put it. I never took up therrometer in there. See It's like, well, okay, it was not there was no visibility in the tunnel for the dust. Yeah, So like that, even that's not an excuse. I get what they're saying is ludicrous.
Yeah, it's it's it's obscene. And what's also obscene are the low low prices our advertisers have or their product. Ah, we're back back from that glorious pivot. So as the death toll starts to accelerate, which happens again that first start dying after two months. By the six month point, a lot of people are getting sick and dying, and Ryan Hart and Dennis find themselves with a new logistical problem,
what do we do with all these corpses? Right, white workers could be buried in local cemeteries pretty easily, especially local workers who died, but most of the workers dying are black laborers, and these white you know, the cemeteries in town are whites only establishments. Right, They're so racist that it's like, well, we're not going to let black people into our cemetery. So at first, the majority of these black tunnel workers who have died are are sent
to like a local cemetery. Specifically, it's an old local slave cemetery, right, Like that's literally where they are burying these men. Records suggest that only ten of the black of the hundreds of black laborers who die on this project are shipped back to their homes after death. So the vast majority of these guys, to all their family knows,
just disappear forever. This leaves hundreds, you know, the fact that you fit I think a couple one hundred in the slave cemetery, but there's still a lot more people who are dying. So rhin Hart and Dennis, you know, they've got the resources obviously to transport all these buckets of silica, but they don't want to use their own resort. They don't want to like deal with the dead people that they're creating themselves, So they have Union Carbide pay
contractors to deal with all of the dead people. And the contractor that they hire is a local undertaker named Hadley White. They pay him fifty five dollars for each body he will take out of their hands and bury. Now, Hadley is running the same calculation as every other unethical
contractor and company in this. They're paying him to bury people in theoretically in coffins in a cemetery, and he's like, you know, it's cheaper than a coffin is throwing people in a bag and putting them in a mass grave. That's much less expensive, right, So Hadley is going to transfer pretty rapidly from burying people the way that he's being paid to to you know, doing a mass grave
kind of situation. So once they run out of room at that old slave cemetery behind the church where the behind a local church where his company is located, he starts driving the corpses forty miles away. He will just stack them. It's often described as being stacked like cordwood,
like firewood. In the back of a truck, like just this kind of like wrap stuffed in the clothes that they died, and stuffed into canvas bags and thrown into a mass grave in Somersville out of you know, within hours of dying, right, like just kind of taken immediately off the line, or you know, in their beds where they pass thrown into a bag, stuck in a truck and then tossed into a mass grave again within hours
in a lot of cases. In the Book of the Dead, Rukaiser cites the testimony of a worker named George Robinson on this matter, quote, I knew a man who died at four in the morning at the camp. At seven, his wife took clothes to dress her dead husband. At the end at the undertakers, they told her the husband was already buried.
So like.
That's you know, how they're treating It's just like trash, right, that's how they're treating these these people Like we're not even going to wait for their loved ones to you know, have any sort of like when they have loved ones, Like, we don't even care to know if there's anyone who like will want to do a funeral. We're just going to toss them in a mass grave and sorry, your husband's gone already.
You know, maybe what I'm about to say is obvious, But this was not that long ago.
Now there's people alive from then.
Still, there are people alive from they're very old, but there were people that were born in this Sarah that are still alive. This was We are talking about this like it is another planet that something like this could happen, and could happen in public, in broad daylight. And that mostly to the indifference of all the local officials and everyone around there living there, because at this point a lot of people got to know. You have a lot of dead people. Now, a lot of those bodies have
passed through a lot of hands. A lot of people know, and this is just the kind of thing that happens at this time and in this place. And it is not that long ago. It's one long lifetime ago.
Yeah, if you want an idea of like how recent this is, this is all happening about five years before Hunter S. Thompson is born, Right, He's not a figure from the distant past, you know, Like this is like, yeah, I think that is important, Like how how kind of directly connected this is to us. You know, it's like treating people this way does not seem like a kind
of thing you would get away with. But there's not a lot separating us from a period of time in which people were getting away with this directly, just kind of literally treating these people like like a fucking sprocket or something that breaks in a machine and he just toss in the trash. You will not be surprised to hear that. The exact number of workers who die this way is unclear. About three hundred certainly are buried by Hadley White, maybe significantly more, we don't know. It might
have been a couple one hundred more than that. More lingered on sick in the town of Gawley Mountain, or they either had to rely on the family members or the kindness of strangers. So many pale, gasping men spent their last years shambling around Golly That acquired a new nickname among locals, the town of the living dead. That's like what they would call this place because of all of the fucking black lung sufferers. No effort was made to inform the family of dead migrant workers, and this
is shown well by the story of Dewey Flack. Dewey was a seventeen or eighteen year old black man who left his home in North Carolina on a one way train ticket to West Virginia Yea. The last his family saw him, he promised to send back the money he made to help them. Quote from an article in NPR, Flak died on May twentieth, nineteen thirty one, two weeks
after his last shift in the tunnel. His death certificate said he died of pneumonia, but according to Cherniac, company doctors often misdiagnosed workers' deaths or attributed them to a disease they called tunnel ititis. The company would later use those death certificates to prove there were few, if any, silicosis deaths in the tunnel. NPR did find one relative, Sheila Flack Jones of Charlotte, North Carolina, who was Dewey
Flack's niece. My father mentioned when I was younger that he did have a brother, but the brother he thought he'd run away, Black Jones says of learning her uncle's fate. I'm heartbroken that my family died thinking that he had run away, and they never knew the real truth. And I think that Dewey's death here kind of stands in for hundreds of these black migrant labors. You know, you
tell your family you're going. I'll send back money, you know, I'll try to set up a place, you know, get money so we can move to this northern town, and ever hear from your husband, your son, your nephew, ever again, Like that's the reality for a lot of these people.
What was the specific year you just mentioned there.
I believe he's nineteen thirty one. Yeah, May twentieth, nineteen thirty one.
That's the year William Shatner was born, right, right, So Clint Eastwood was one year old by the time this happened. Again, they they lived long enough to see a world where this happened. I brought up this thing about this not being that long because I knew that thing about the town, this village of the walking Dead was coming, because that, to me, is the most nightmarish part of this, because
eventually you had these people in no place to go. Yeah, they couldn't afford to travel, they were kicked off the job site, they couldn't work, and so they were just sent back to this town. As town started to become overwhelmed of these people who were just walking around drowning in the air, like they can't gasping for breath, and they're getting sicker and just kind of shambling around this town. And you have dozens or hundreds of them, we don't know how many. They just had nowhere to go and
they're human beings and there's no support system. There's no support system. I don't know how to convey that to people, like they had no one to go to for help.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine a situation that, like anything worse than that, right, Like that's as desperate as it fucking gets. So disinformation about the causes of the illness and the demographic realities of the workforce delayed the coalescence of any sort of effective resistance to what was happening by workers. The first public warnings about what was happening came courtesy of the local radical press. And we're talking unions off and run newspapers here, so some of this
is coming out through that. And there's like socialist papers in the area, and these are the first people to start reporting on this sickness sweeping through the camps. As one of these papers, this is like a very new deal supporting like left wing paper The State Sentinel warned, quote strange and weird tales are a concerning the number of fatalities. They are said to number four a week.
Now.
Radical papers kind of different in how radical they were. In the case of the State Sentinel, they do note later on that they were sure Union Carbide was in a sense of any wrongdoing because Ryan Harton Dennis had been contracted to handle the actual construction. It's worth noting people that's not necessarily them trying to protect Union Carbide at this stage. These random little papers you don't know
necessarily the relationship between these two companies. It becomes obvious later that Union Carbide has engineers who are their employees on scene, they are directing rehin harton Dennis, they are in charge of the project, right, But that's not really known necessarily to all these papers at the time. So I don't think it's really anything against them. It's worth noting it is through these little radical presses that like,
that's where this story gets out to start. It will eventually be picked up by kind of larger news organs. Lawsuits start to fly, and from mid to late nineteen thirty two. This is late in the construction process, more than eighty separate claims are filed from workers seeking compensation for silicosis. Cases start winding their way up rapidly to the state Supreme Court. There's a case there. They rule
on it and it opens. The ruling that the Supreme Court gives basically is that you can sue rhine Hart and Dennis for your silicosis. Right. So after this, this kind of opens the floodgates and this ocean of new claims start to flood in several hundred, eventually totaling two point seven two five million dollars in damages is what they're requesting. That's a lot more money. Back then, rehin
Hart and Dennis file injunction. After injunction, they're trying to delay, and this is they know they're going to have to make some sort of payout right. They know they can't avoid this. This was kind of always in their calculations, but injunctions delay sort of the start of that process, and it allows them to Again, the whole goal is as long as we finish ahead of schedule, we get enough extra money to make this worthwhile, right, So that's
what they're doing. Union Carbide also starts hiring rein Hart and Davis executives away from the contractor, right, and these guys are still doing the job they were doing from rein Hart and Davis. They're just Union Carbide employees now. And the reason that Union Carbide is doing this is that when you have these guys in house, you have legal excuses to talk them through and direct their court because you shouldn't be directing their responses to their court case.
But once you bring them on, you have all these sort of excuses to talk to them. You can have your lawyers represent them. It's just another way to kind of protect the bag, right, And it's more evidence of how closely tied these companies really are. So yeah, there's also significant evidence that they bribe government officials. Union Carbide does in order to try and delay the start of
any kind of like accountability. After this first wave of lawsuits hits, the Department of Minds sins in an inspector, a guy named Robert Lamby to investigate conditions at the tunnel complex and particularly the death of black workers. Lamby carries out a full inspection and he's pretty critical of the mind There's like a lot of people see him. He's yelling at a company for men about how unacceptable this is. He's like, it seems for a little bit like oh, the government sent a man. He's seen how
bad this is, and something's going to get done. And you know, he does act. Initially, he sends a letter to an executive at the New Kanawa Power Company, which is again remember that's Union Carbide, and he lays out like this is dangerous. All you need to do all this stuff to make it safer, you have to start issuing respirators to your men. He orders them. This is a government official ordering New Canawa to put respirators on workers, and New Canawa just says, now, we're not going to
do that. They ignore it, and they continue sending unmasked workers into the tunnel. Now this should be pretty damning for what happens in court. But two years later, you know, after Lamby gets there, and after some five hundred lawsuits from survivors are kind of churning their way through the legal process, Lamby gets called into court and you would expect him to be a pretty devastating testimony on behalf of these miners. I told them to give respirators to
these guys, and they did not write. But he behaves very differently once he's in a court room, as Cherniac writes. Testifying on behalf of Ryan Hart and Dennis for a whole day on tenth of April nineteen thirty three, he described exemplary conditions in the tunnel, where air was supplied at a face velocity of twenty seven miles per hour, visibility was to f from five to seven hundred feet,
and water was constantly used to suppress dust. Vigorously cross examined about the extreme inconsistencies between this testimony and his earlier condemnatory letters, which had been read into the court record by the attorney for Raymond Johnson, that's the miner in this case two weeks earlier. Lamby blamed an accurate
information supplied by his staff. Although he conceded that he had ordered respirators in writing, he said that he had later countermanded this order orally when he better appreciated the excellent working conditions and clearness of the air in the tunnel. Two of Lambie's staff inspectors, who had originally filed highly critical reports, now shared in their director's change of heart.
Testifying on The following day, C. B. Bishop and D. R. Sullivan joined him in tribute to the admirable conditions at Hawk's Nest. They indicated that Ryan, Hart and Dennis had always cooperated fully and repeated Lamby's praise of the freedom from dust and wet drilling. They described the reports they had made in nineteen thirty one as purely precautionary and unrelated to actual conditions. Lamby's startling about face was never
explained to everyone's satisfaction. Less than a week after his testimony, however, the Charleston Gazette reported a remarkable coincidence. The former director of the West Virginia Department of Mines had just opened his doors to the prestigious Canawa Valley Building in the capital city as a private consultant to the leading mining and industrial corporations of the state.
Now, fortunately, that kind of revolving door is long in the past. Like that's the kind of thing that today would be outrageous to even.
And you know, as an aside, don't look up people who have been a poor pointed in the last twenty years to had regulatory agencies and what they did after the period of time at which they headed those agencies. Don't go Google in that because there's nothing to find, right, that never.
Occurring to your results.
Yeah, serier results. So yeah, construction on the Hawk's Nest tunnel was completed by nineteen thirty two. This is about twice as fast, a little less than twice as fast as had been initially expected. So that's a lot of extra money for rehin harten Davis. By all accounts, it was a marvel of engineering and craftsmanship. It is still in works today. It's considered an exemplary I forgot how to pronounce a word I've known since I was a
small child for just a second. There. It's considered to be an exemplary piece of construction, and Union Carbides shareholders make a fortune the equivalent of many billions of dollars in modern money from the subsequent projects that this enables. For the families of the men who die, though, money is a lot harder to find. And we're going to talk about that, but first maybe an ad product service
or too, you know. Yeah, and we're back. So for the families of these guys who died, money is going to be a lot scarcer than it is for the executives who will spend the rest of their lives and their grandchildren's lives profiting off of this project. There are two massive state trials in nineteen thirty three and nineteen thirty four, but only a fraction of the requested damages or ever paid out in settlements, about two hundred thousand dollars.
And I should note here the amount of money awarded to black laborers for the same ailments as white labors. It's about half. I think individual awards are anywhere from thirty dollars to sixteen hundred dollars, which is minimal, I would say. But Union Carbide executives still complained was ruinous to them. They described sick workers as mooches seeking to
get rich out of frivolous lawsuits. The West Virginia Encyclopedia notes of this case, the largest trial ended with a hung jury, evidence of jury tampering, and generous compensation to the plaintiff's attorneys. It's you know, this is corrupt as hell.
This whole thing is just pretty fucked. That said, the story does not go away, and over time, you know, it starts in these radical papers, but it starts to get coverage from like large from like the New York Times and shit, like their big journalists start to cover this, it becomes kind of a cause celeb among a lot of the left. For I think there's you know, a period of a couple of months or so where like this is sort of the big thing if you're like
a Northeast liberal elite to be really angry about. And I'm not saying that to be like, you should be angry about this, and because of how angry people get about in nineteen thirty six, which is kind of five years after the first men start dying, and thirty five thirty six is really when sort of the media attention around this starts to starts to hit critical mass. The House of Representatives holds their first inquiry into the Hawk's
Nest Tunnel disaster. NPR rights vote. Representatives from the tunnel companies declined to attend. One submitted a letter that called witness testimonies slanderous rumors and hearsay. We know of no case of silicosis contracted on this job, the letter concluded. The Congressional committee said the tunnel was completed with grave and inhuman disregard for all consideration for the health, lives
and future of employees. Congress took no action against the companies, but that same year it passed a law requiring the use of respirators in dusty working conditions. So they don't penalize anyone. But this is where we get the legal requirement. It's no longer an option. You have to give respirators to your guys if they're working in the dust. So it took a lot of death, but we got a single regulation, hooray.
And most regulations that we have in workplace protections.
Yea.
There is somewhere at the bottom of it are bones and ash and of dead people who died in order to It would be grotesque to say they sacrificed themselves so that we have these regulations, because they did not do that. They were trying to.
Work so that they wanted to make rent.
Yeah yeah, and and not to get rich either. They were taking the only work that was available. But you know that, and then that's one good thing. And then of course knowing that Union Carbide was surely ruined as a company and does not Yeah, it never did not exist after that because as they mentioned, these payouts, you know, of course they could not afford it financially. Must have
crippled them permanently. They probably had to sell off all of their factories, all of their real estate, all their machines. Probably they had to sell them all just to pay off these ruinous thirty and forty dollars payouts.
That's why the town of Bopaul, India has a reputation for being the least polluted town in India and the town motto twenty thousand of us didn't die and an industrial accident costs by union garbide great place to go visit check it out. So, speaking of death toll, which we're obviously talking around, it's kind of hard to determine. The Congressional Inquiry estimates a little short of five hundred, four hundred and sixty four deaths that they estimate cherny acts.
So the two books I read for this are Murial Rakaiser's The Book of the Dead and then The Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster by this guy Cherniac, who is He's not just a journalist or a writer, he's actually an epidemiologist. So when he makes a death toll estimate, this is not just some like reporter interviewing people and kind of making a guest This is a guy whose professional job is to try to calculate this sort of thing. So I give, I lend a lot of credibility to cherny
Act's estimate. He suspects somewhere north of seven hundred and fifty people died as a direct result of silicosis from this tunnel. There are some more modern estimates that will suggest an overall death toll. The highest I've seen is about two thousand, right, Because people take a long time to die, it can be kind of hard, especially as
undocumented as a lot of these dudes are. But between seven hundred and fifty and two thousand dead is what we're looking looking at for the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, which is you know, again that's in access of the Chernobyle death toll. You know, that's a lot of fucking people.
This was. Yeah, even with modern record keeping and computers and everything in databases, it's extremely difficult to for example, with the you know, the COVID pandemic and the death ranges worldwide are swinging wildly because you have a case where if someone got very sick and they got over and then two years later they got pneumonia, that killed them because there's weak their lungs had been so weakened
by the COVID that they had recovered from. It's like, well, do you count that as a COVID death or not? And here I think it's kind of the same thing where if you had someone who's lung capacity was damaged by eighty percent due to the you know from this mind, and then three years later they got you know whatever pneumonia or something that that finally put them away, well there's no way that's going to get recorded as a death. But it absolutely was like this person, it doesn't die
without the damage. It's just that if they didn't die on site and then have me buried nearby, if there's not a grave you can find. It's so hard to know because again, somebody could have went off and then died in nineteen thirty eight living in some rural part of Montana and to even their family would not necessarily realize. They just knew that they were very frail ever since
they took that mining job. So yeah, the amount of investigative work it probably took just to arrive that number is probably extraordinary, just trying to track down just all of the old documents and the movement of these people and then trying to figure out where they eventually wound up.
Yeah, I mean it's a cherniac puts in. I mean, his book is remarkable. It's both very readable and like a very kind of scientific forensic analysis. Whereas Rukeiser number one, it's kind of actually we're about to talk about her. It's a very direct source and a little more emotional. I think both together give you a pretty comprehensive understanding
of what happened here. And I did think it's worth talking a little bit more about Muriel Rukaiser because there's a lot, there's a lot to say about our country and her specific story here. Muriel is one of the first people outside of the Galley Bridge area to learn what was going on. At twenty three, she was a budding author and journalist and an avid leftist. She learned
about the disaster from radical publications at the time. In nineteen thirty five, when one of these magazines puts out an article about Hawk's Nest, it goes viral among kind of the New York intelligencia set and becomes this, as I said, this kind of big cause celeb for the while and for most people it's a thing, you know, maybe you'll do a little march or something on it, you'll try to raise some money, and then kind of it goes away and you move on to the next thing.
Rukeaiser never does. And you know, she watches this congressional inquiry, and the Congressional inquiry when it ends, it's pretty it condemns Union Carbide, and it says we should have a full federal investigation. But they never do it. There's never any official, full federal investigation into this disaster. And Muriel is she's not just furious about that. She's the kind of person who is like, she's angry and she's gonna
fucking do something about this. And so she drives down to gally Bridge with a friend to investigate on her own. She kind of takes this like road trip, one of our country's first great road trip stories. You could say. Now at this point, Muriel's not a nobody. She is already a celebrated poet for her first book, Theory of Flight, which had won a Yale Younger Poets Prize, and the Book of the Dead is kind of based on this road trip she takes through Fayette County and all of
these people that she talks to. It's this very remarkable synthesis of gumshoe reporting and high art. It's worth noting that much of what we know about ru Keiser's life and why she did all this comes not from anything she wrote, but from the FBI. J ed Grew Hoover's civically gives orders for this woman to be followed and I'm going to quit from an article in the Oxford American. Here in nineteen forty three, j Edgar Hoover authorized his agency to spy on the poet as part of a
probe to uncover Russian spies. Her communistic tendencies placed her under suspicion of being a concealed Communist. When the investigation began, she was noted as thirty dark, heavy with gray eyes. In nineteen thirty three, the report reads, she and some friends drove from New York to Alabama to witness the Scottsborough trial. When local police found them talking to black reporters and holding flyers for a Negro student conference. The
police accused the group of inciting the Negroes to insurrections. Then, in the summer of nineteen thirty six, after her trip to Galli Bridge. Rukaiser traveled to Spain to report on Barcelona's anti fascist People's Olympiad. In the process, she observed the first days of the Spanish Civil War from a train before evacuating by ship. Her suspicious activities in the nineteen fifties included her appeal for world peace and her
civil rights zeal. The FBI mentions The Book of the Dead only once, in passing as a work that dealt with the industrial disintegration of the peoples in a West Virginia village riddled with silicosis. I find a lot interesting there.
And it's hard to overstate the degree to which anti communist stuff was really just anti labor stuff, because if you were any kind of like, you didn't have to be that much of a radical to be frank, before they would start looking at you as like, well, you've got communist ties, you got socialist ties. You sat in on this meeting, and in this meeting were some communists,
and it's like, well, yeah, because there's overlapping. There's overlap between activistsho are trying to, you know, pushing for better labor rights and everything else and people who wanted to take it Further so, a lot of the persecution of communists was really just people that had spoke out on behalf of labor. It became a very convenient thing for people to do.
And I also find one of the other things I find interesting here is like just kind of the disinterest with which her report sums up the Book of the Dead and the disaster that it's reporting on, right, because I think that's obviously the FBI is concerned in other stuff here, But like, I do think that kind of disinterest you see there is emblematic of the overall attitude the federal government has to what happened here, right, And it's worth noting like there are not like all of
the people killed by anarchist bombers or whatever in this period, and fuck throw in bank robbers there too, right, which is another thing the FBI deals with, do not equal the death toll of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster.
Right.
This is a much bigger danger to American citizens by any rate than like, I don't know, the fucking gangster robbing banks and shit in this period.
Well, nobils to do the math during Prohibition, the total number of people killed by say al Capone's gain it wasn't a thousand.
Yeah, of course, No, you can't make a business doing that like I guess the cartels do. But it's a different era.
Yeah, the way we treat different types of crime and the way one thing is like a crisis that we need to completely overturn the entire system to address, versus this, where the amount of disinterest is kind of shocking, like even to this day, like the memorials for this, it's just such an afterthought. The combination between the suffering that was caused the number of people to suffer versus the reaction to it is just so out of whack. It's so crazy the things that we choose to be frightened of.
Yeah, it really is so. One of the articles that I came across in my research was a twenty eighteen in PR Frontline investigation. This was not about the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, but was analyzing decades of regulatory data from dust collection monitors in coal mines modern coal mines operating today, and they found evidence that government regulators have had half for the last fifty years. Basically, there has been hard evidence that silica exposure in about fifteen percent
of US minds vastly exceeded safe levels. This means that regulators had evidence that a significant number of workers were in unsafe conditions where they would get sick and die, and that our regulators failed to step in and demand direct steps be taken to mitigate this danger. Celeste Montfornton weird last name Celest Montfornton, who is a former MIND safety regulator under Clinton, said this, we failed. Had we taken action at this time, I really believe we would
not be seeing the disease we're saying now. And what he's talking about is what the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety has described as an epidemic of silicosis among miners today. This is happening right now as we as we say this, unless you're listening hundreds of years
in the future, it's yeah. One of these epidemiologist Scott Lany is quoted as saying, we're counting thousands of cases, thousands and thousands and thousands of black lung cases, thousands of cases of the most severe form of black lung,
and we're not done counting yet. One culprit of all this, one reason this is happening, is that the best and biggest coal seams were all mined out generations ago, so modern coal miners are often drilling thinner seams that are laced with sandstone, and sandstone has a high and elevated silica content. Not as high as what they were removing from the Hawk's nest tunnel, but elevated, and that means
people get sicker faster, NPR writes quote. The NPR Frontline investigation found thousands of instances in which miners were exposed not just to col dust, but to dangerous levels of toxic silica dust. The Federal Mind Safety and Health Administrations own data chronicles twenty one thousand instances of excessive exposure to silica since nineteen eighty six. At the same time, NPR identified black lung diagnoses involving miners in their thirties
who also experienced rapid progression to the advanced stage. Smith says he was diagnosed at nine. NIOSHA has confirm this trend in its studies. I don't have an exact death toll for you. Now. Obviously there are more things to keep people alive, you know. Now, as Jason keeps saying, there's a lot more these people are. This is a bad situation. It's terrifying, but they do have like much more in the way of support than the folks suffering
a hawk's nest. But we are talking thousands and thousands and thousands of cases of people dealing with black lung right now that they didn't need to be dealing with that. The technology existed warning the situation was unsafe, and they were not given the proper equipment. Air circulation systems were not installed, mitigation efforts weren't taken because it would have cut down on the profits of the mining company. You know,
that is still happening today. I will say one thing that's good is that there have been some lawsuits, particularly against One of the issues here is that like a lot of dust masks issued to miners were found not to work the company's figure. I think what happened is that some of the masks suppliers just assumed, well, our air circulation shit, the mitigation stuff is so good, nobody's going to know if we kind of cheap out making
these masks, these safety masks. And a huge number of miners have actually sued several masks suppliers, filing product liability lawsuits, and there have been a like multi billion dollar verdicts in this. So one of the good things is that there is much more of a protective apparatus. I shouldn't say protective, because it didn't protect these guys they got sick. But there's more of a I guess, apparatus of vengeance
to where this is not. You know, when you're talking a multi billion dollar lawsuit, you are talking about something that significantly more of an issue for these companies to deal with than the kind of money that Union Carbide had to pay out. So I'm not gonna say you should take too much be too happy about that, because again it's still fucking happened. But I don't know.
There you go.
That's what I have to say.
One thing that is very that has not change since those days, has not changed the last couple hundred years. Our entire civilization exists because of mining. Everything you have change from a mine. Everything runs on mines. Everything in your phone came from a mine, everything in your PC, everything in this microphone. I'm talking into everything in this chair, I'm sitting on all of the metals, all of the steel, everything, all of the silica. Everything came from a mine. And
I don't think on it today. Basis we appreciate this that if the miners went away, all of this stops all of it, because you can't you can't walk two feet without walking on something that came out of a mine. The green energy revolution that we all want with the solar panels and whatever nuclear power plants or fusion plants, or when all of that stuff, the windmills, all of that stuff came out of a mine.
Yeah. And the degree to which these are yeah, just disposable people still, I think that's kind of important to note that, like the disposability of the folks who make every aspect of society possible is uh. I mean, I would say it hasn't changed, but it's they're not not disposable still. And by the way, I should also highlight here we're talking about the miner when we say miners
are what makes the world possible. When it comes to like the shit mind in your computers, that's not some like hard work and you know man with the fucking creases on his face and whatnot and a big old helmet and the light working in like West Virginia, that's like an eleven year old in Central Africa. Mining mirror
rare earth minerals to a significant extent. Right, This is one of the problems with the production of smartphones and computers and stuff is that, like it, there's basically inevitable that there will be human trafficking at some stage of that because some of the critical environment, like ingredients to
these machines are only mined through means that are illegal internationally. Right, It's just one of those things where there's so many layers of separation and shit that like you can get away kind of with Nobody wants to talk about where the cobalt comes from or whatever the fuck, Like this is just the way it is, and that.
Will always be dirty work. It will always be dangerous work, and we are so disconnected from it, especially people like me, even people who are very progressive. But we work office jobs and we send our emails and we sit at our laptops and really do not think of where that stuff inside the microprocesses came from, because at the end of it is a very dirty mine in a very dark place and someone working very hard, probably in pain.
Like you can technology until you have a mind that's entirely run by robots, but even then, the stuff that the robots are made of will have come from a mind like at the base of everything we do, no matter how high minded and sophisticated. When we land a robot on Mars, that robot is made out of materials that came from a mine. Like there's somebody in whatever West Virginia or Africa or somewhere that dug it up out of the ground and put it at a cart and shipped it across the world. Yep.
And I guess that's a good place to end, Jason, you want to plug your book.
Well, just one final there's one kind of post mortem. The Union Carbide Company. Of course, now as of I try to look them up and see when they went out of business. It turns out that in twenty nineteen they had four point four billion dollars in revenue. Great, but they have now been they've now been swallowed up by the Dal Chemical Company, a small company, a family owned operation that it has a market cap of thirty six billion dollars I believe, yeah.
And is not involved in anything horrifying in history. Don't look at don't google down chemical Vietnam right like, there's no reason to do that whatsoever.
We are a very forgiving society. Don't you see when people reform themselves as long as you are a gigantic corporation, it's all about second chances in America. Yeah, we're willing to let you turn your life around. Yeah, anyway, yes, thank you. If you want to find me on TikTok, I am Jason K. Pargan. We have repeatedly made jokes about me being reduced to a TikTok person. I have three hundred and thirty thousand followers on there. I'm primarily a TikToker. The author stuff is now just a trivial
footnote in my biography. My gravestone will say he was a beloved tich talker and.
Prominent talker, prominent TikToker.
I'm Jason K. Pargan on TikTok. Also that same thing on Twitter, SAH. Also the same thing on Blue Guy and threads and YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and some others that I don't remember to update because there's too many substack, all of them, all of them. Jason K. Pargin P A R G. I N thank you. You know. I do.
We shit talk TikTok a lot us olds, but I will say it's actually kind of helpful that that's how you initially learned. It's kind of hopeful that that is how you found out about this because this is like so important, right, this is like critical history. It's critical for understanding a lot of things about this country today. And it's just critical because you need to know about
what happened to these people. And the fact that this story spread widely on TikTok, I think is pretty rad actually, so that's good, that's.
Nice, and to be that serious. There's a lot of really cool stuff on TikTok, and it's it's not fifteen second long clips of like teenage girls asy and people will hear that I'm on TikTok. They think, oh, so you're on there with the fifteen year old girls, that's your thing. It's like, no, TikTok. Now, there's long form stuff on there. Let's say long form, I mean seven, eight, nine minutes long for TikTok getting into subjects like this. Because this video had a lot of views on it,
that's how I saw it. That's what cued me into this. And then when I went to look it up found out that there's barely anything on Wikipedia because it's kind of flew under the radar, and so that inspired me to see if we want to do an episode about this, because I suspected that there was a lot to unearth. It was worse than I thought, as it always is every time I come on here. The details are always worse than what you've heard. But this is the kind
of story. For whatever reason, we love to make movies about serial killers that killed five people, but a corporation that kills a thousand through being exactly as cruel and whatever. We kind of just like, well, yeah, but their job creators, and they made that tunnel, Like, don't they get credit for making that.
Tunnel solid tunnel?
Yeah, it's like they didn't make. A whole bunch of people whose names you'll never know made that tunnel. Yeah, and they broke their bodies to make it.
Yeah, So I don't know, go off into the world. Buy Jason's book, Remain Angry at Union Carbide. Definitely do that. Okay, that's the episode, Go away now, everybody. Hey everyone, Robert Evans here. As we mentioned in the first episode, Jason asked for this as the result of a TikTok that they'd seen. I'm not waunch of a TikTok guy. So I just kind of went on and did my research. But I've been informed that the person who put together this TikTok, which is an account called Schoolhouse Clock like
like the buildings supply c a ulk. Schoolhouse Clock, who's creator is a fellow named Michael, put out a video specifically talking to us. He wanted to let us know. There's a website hawksnest names dot org that was created quite a while ago to try and put together an actual, definitive list of the men who died as a result of this. They've got both a list of death certificates, worker names, some reports on you andion carbide, and some
other information. Really good info if you're interested in this, and you can also if you're someone who may have lost a family member obviously a long time ago in this disaster, there's a way for you to kind of reach out to them and try to add that name.
That website was offline for a while, but then Michael, the fellow with the TikTok apparently was able to raise some money through his viewers or listeners whatever you call them on TikTok to put it back up, which is great, and so they he asked that we put in a shout out, which I am doing now. So please check out hawksnest names dot org for more information on this disaster. Thanks everybody. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.