Word: coal
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From the rusting spans of its once proud bridges to the leaking sewers beneath its streets, America is structurally unsound. Highways are crumbling. Avenues are cracking. Trains jump their worn-out tracks. Coal ships languish outside overburdened ports. While the U. S. has the technological prowess to blast a magnificent space shuttle into orbit and land it gently back on earth, it has failed to care properly for its most important public works...
Secondary roads off the interstates are often in much worse shape. In eastern Kentucky, where pockmarked roads suffer a relentless pounding from overloaded coal trucks, drivers bitterly complain that most of their tires blow out before they wear out. The main road between Baton Rouge and Shreveport, La., is so bumpy that freight haulers avoid it by going some 130 miles out of their way through eastern Texas. Says Trucker John Wooley, a former rodeo cowboy: "That road just tears a rig apart. It's like riding a bucking bronco." In California, Highway 101 outside San Jose is full...
Though Church stumped the pit heads from Springfield, Ill., to Pittsburgh to push the pact, the union rebuffed it by a vote of more than 2 to 1. Many members argued that provisions in the contract gave mine operators power to lease coal property to nonunion companies as well as skimp on contributions to pension funds. On the other hand, industry officials seemed to feel that the rejection simply reflected the union's weakening grasp its members. Said one: "Facts had nothing to do with it. Rationality went out the window. What developed was emotion, suspicion and misinformation...
Because big coal users like public utilities and heavy industry have stockpiles that should last nearly four months, the U.S. is in good shape to weather a fairly long strike. The U.M.W. itself is another matter. Union membership has grown slightly, while nonunion mines have proliferated in the East and Midwest, along with the sprawling strip-mining operations of the Rocky Mountain states. As a result, mines covered by the U.M.W. agreement currently account for only 44% of overall U.S. coal production and the strike will probably reduce this figure further. Said Doug Heape, 23, a Tamaroa, Ill., miner with...
What raised the banal to art was, among other things, social commitment. Few of the realist painters were actually the children of workers, but many of them responded to an inescapable subject matter: the making of the French working class, from city coal heaver to country peasant, in the aftermath of the revolutions...