Dying for a job: African Americans, industrial hegemony, and the Hawk's Nest Tunnel, 1930--1936 (West Virginia)

During the early 1930s, an industrial disaster of monumental proportion occurred in West Virginia as hundreds of workers perished while laboring on a hydroelectric project. Known locally as the Hawk's Nest Tunnel, the project included a dam and the diversion of water into a three mile tunnel. During the drilling of the tunnel, workers encountered a deadly mineral deposit of silica. Estimates claim between seven hundred and two thousand workers died over the next six years from silicosis. Union Carbide routinely disregarded safety restrictions and engendered America's deadliest industrial disaster.; This work examines cultural, political, and economic issues that contributed to this calamity. Union Carbide deliberately utilized many African American transients and migrants, and the implications of race, class, and anti-migrant prejudices are analyzed. Lacking support, isolated, and powerless, workers were easily exploited. With labor prostate, state officials compliant, and corporate restraints removed because of the economic crisis of the Great Depression, the corporation achieved a form of industrial hegemony. Promoting its agenda of progressive industrialization, Union Carbide exercised a free hand in West Virginia.; The corporation utilized the fear and uncertainty of the Great Depression to achieve its industrial goals. Suppressed antagonisms and class animosities flared up, and racial incidents increased as normal race relations were modified. Union Carbide, allied with local, county, and state officials, waged an unrelenting persecution against former tunnel workers in a vicious attempt to force them to leave the area.; This study challenges many of the conclusions others have asserted about African American communities, industrialization, and migration in West Virginia. The construction of the tunnel exemplified the results of unrestrained capitalism in West Virginia and illustrated the acquiescence of many people to the demands of industrialists. This work resurrects a forgotten piece of history to learn more of the event, the community, and the era. This is a story of immense human suffering, corporate greed, and persecution of powerless people; but it also describes the emergence of an oppositional resistance to industrial and cultural hegemony within Appalachia. Many people refused to let the story of the disaster be suppressed, and their efforts spurred various inquiries and investigations.