[Petrochemicals] began as many American industries have begun, almost by chance, in scattered places, in many winding rivulets of enterprise before it became a river running imperatively to the sea.
—Fortune, 1941
The Kanawha, 1936
“THESE ARE ROADS to take when you think of your country,” wrote the poet Muriel Rukeyser about a road trip she took to central Appalachia in 1936. It’s a refrain she repeats throughout The Book of the Dead, a series of witness poems responding to the industrial tragedy at Hawk’s Nest.
In the early 1930s, thousands of workers dry-tunneled the New River in southern West Virginia through Gauley Mountain—more than three miles of sandstone and silica. The tunnel was part of a hydroelectric project that included the Hawk’s Nest Dam, which “fathered” the tunnel, which fed the power plant, turning its giant turbines. “They work as a triad,” the essayist Catherine Venable Moore told me. And they still do, powering ferroalloy furnaces at the Kanawha River plant once belonging to Electro Metallurgical in the old coal town the company renamed Alloy. ElectroMet’s parent: the Union Carbide and Carbon Company (later Union Carbide or Carbide for short).
For eighteen months, workers labored in the bowels of the mountain, emerging with their clothes, skin, and airways cloaked in white silica dust. An estimated 764 died initially from acute silicosis—inflamed lungs, scarred, breathless and wheezing until their breathing ceased altogether—though inhaling silica was a well-described danger and silicosis a well-known disease. More sickened and passed as the years pressed on, making the final death toll impossible to assess. Some were buried in unmarked graves, their families never notified. Most were Black men who’d come from the South seeking work. Workers’ faces, Moore said, had been scratched from the photographic record.
In 1936, after two lawsuits settled out of court, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Labor held nine days of hearings. Members of the Gauley Bridge Committee, formed by tunnel widows and surviving (but sickened) workers, provided statements. Carbide countered, discounting their claims in calculated language. The witnesses were dismissed for being Black, for being plaintiffs, for recounting “the same details in much the same way,” not because they’d experienced the same deadly working conditions but, as the company claimed, because they were “drilled in the same school of witness-ship.”
The rebuttals survive in a photocopy Moore recovered from the Gauley Bridge Historical Society, who in turn, had been given an illicit copy retrieved from a locked closet inside the power station. Such a riverine course history travels to reach us in the present.
Rukeyser returned to New York and built her poems as a chemist synthesizes the elements. Stock prices fused with lyrical observations from the road and testimony culled from the Congressional Record. “A corporation is a body without a soul,” she writes.
Carbide grew into a multinational corporation with hundreds of plants worldwide and office towers on the skylines of Chicago and New York City. It wasn’t much of a consumer-facing company, the exceptions being EverReady batteries, Prestone antifreeze, and Glad bags and straws. Carbide’s customers were other
