Word: gauley
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Despite her humorless yen to dress her poems in proud, premature long pants, Poet Rukeyser succeeds, in The Book of the Dead, in giving a clear flash of what makes the contemporary U. S. hard for everybody to take: At Gauley Bridge, W. Va., a hill being tunneled on a hydro-electric project turned out to be 90-even 99% pure silica, of great metallurgical value. Consequences: the silica, for greater speed, profit, was mined dry; the tunnel workers developed silicosis, died like ants in a flour bin; lawyers representing the workers charged their clients some 50% of the piddling...
...written in America. Taken all together, the poems are an exciting and, on the whole, trustworthy appeal to all the belligerents who [and only who, if you ask Poet Rukeyser] know the world. Only these, she implies, can be in on the secret of what really happened yesterday at Gauley Bridge, is happening today in Spain...
Union Carbide & Carbon, dragged into the Gauley Bridge affair by its toes, declared that it was "very proud of its safety record everywhere." President P. H. Faulconer of Rinehart & Dennis asserted that "every known device to protect the workers was used and that reports of deaths were grossly exaggerated...
Other Rinehart & Dennis officials issued statements in which they claimed that an epidemic of pneumonia, not silicosis, was responsible for scores of deaths at Gauley Bridge. They charged that damage suits were filed by some men proved not to have worked in the tunnel and by others who worked only an hour or two. According to the apologists, the death list from various diseases did not exceed 50 out of some 2,000 workers...
Engineering News-Record jumped to defend excavators everywhere by editorially calling the Gauley Bridge furore "fantastic bunk." On the other hand, "The time has come," declared that journal, "to bring out authoritatively all the facts of silicosis hazards." When the inquest was petering out for lack of wind last week young Senator Rush Dew Holt of West Virginia appeared before the House Committee with a commonsense statement: "This was and is American industry's 'Black Hole of Calcutta.' I have had first-hand knowledge of it for several years-despite a combine of big-business silence. Unhappily...