Behind the Bastards - Part Two:The Deadliest Workplace Disaster in U.S. History

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Robert and Jason continue their discussion of the deadliest workplace catastrophe in U.S. history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A brand new historical true crime podcast. When you lay suffering a sudden brutal death, starring Allison Williams, I hope you'll think of me. Erased, the murder of Elma Sands. She was a sweet, happy, virtuous girl. Let's go up here! Until she met that man right there.

Written and created by me, Allison Flop. Is it possible, sir? We're standing by for your answer. Erased, the murder of Elma Sands. on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. When Tracy Rekel Burns was two years old, her baby brother died. I was told that Matthew died in an accident. Her parents told police she had killed him.

I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for burden of guilt, the new podcast that tells the true and incredible story of a toddler who was framed for murder. Listen to burden of guilt on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The system's broken. I said something's wrong here, you know, whenever a woman is allowed to kill my two kids. Unrestorable is a new true crime podcast that investigates the case of Catherine Hoggel,

a mother accused of murder. Despite signs that Catherine Hoggel took her tiny children one by one into the night, never to come home again. She has yet to stand trial. Listen to Unrestorable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Coolza 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 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. Was that what you were going for there, buddy? 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.

They clearly not still in business after 19, 35 or whatever once the 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, uh, do you have a thing that you're, you've got a plug here that you're, yes, yeah, moving. The new book is called Zoe is too drunk for this dystopia, add in all formats on October 31st, 2023, if you're a 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.

Yeah, I can't imagine. It must have gotten canceled and pulled from shelves. Imagine it wasn't come canceled and pulled from shelves. Yeah, Jason got canceled for his clandestine work in Nicaragua in the 1990s or something like that. Look, we all have a dark history of clandestine work in Latin America at some point in the 90s. 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 all too great. Very much. They're all fine. Let's talk about another kind of canceled, silicosis. You mentioned there's not a lot of sources on this. 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 very, 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 what 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 the illiator, the Odyssey, right? There's an epic poem about the hawks nest tunnel disaster, the book of the dead written by Muriel Rookheiser. She was someone who grew up soon after the disaster and came to 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 art where she is using kind of the medium of poetry to talk through, to kind of set the scene and to talk through 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 meter in order to fit into the work. I haven't ever encountered anything like this before, actually.

And within West Virginia, 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 very good. 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 Rekaiser'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. And 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 TikToks and read any of my books. But on there, I've talked about the HBO mini-series they did about Chernobyl.

Yeah. And I've talked about how they made it not as a documentary or as a docu-series or anything like that. They made it as a horror movie. Yeah. Like it is highly stylized. And I was in that TikTok. 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 us people. That you had this cursed demon thing you brought into the world and 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. But 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. 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 breathing teeny tiny pieces of glass. An epic poem is as appropriate as anything. 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 and 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 Rukaiser 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 Gauley 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 Rukaiser writes, quote, a power company foreman learned that we made home brew. 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.

Shirley is my youngest boy. He went into the tunnel. I saw the dust at the bottom of the tub. The boy worked there about 18 months, came home one evening with a shortness of breath. He said, Mother, I cannot get my breath. Surely 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, absolom in 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 10 to 15 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 clothing 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 intensive, 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 1936, a newsreel interviewed one of these hawks net workers after the fact, who claimed, quote,

each and every day I worked in that tunnel, I helped carry off 10 to 14 men who was overcome by the dust. Now, there's no sick days in this period of time, especially not for black migrant laborers and the midst of a massive labor surplus. From my heart and Davis's perspective, right, the contractor union car bite 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. Chernyac writes of this quote, Ryan Hart and Dennis retained as an enforcement officer informally called a shack rouster, a Georgian named McCloud who was assisted by a black camp overseer called Big John. McCloud carried firearms in a club with these he has said to a 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 were not close to the camps 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 shack raster came about. That fellow had two pistols and a blackjack to force men to go to work. And it's worth highlighting here the two pistols because rasters, there's other rasters, they're usually listed as carrying one. McCloud 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 that is something we mentioned first episode of really want to reiterate this context there are so many people out of work and so many people desperate for work uh... again at a at a level of object poverty that we kind of don't have any more 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, when somebody dies or somebody is incapacitated, you can

drag them away and know that when you post that job, you will have 100 guys or migrants willing to come in and fill it. The value of a human life drops below zero because they are 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 her 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 also 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 rasters for refusing to leave. McLeod 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 McLeod also runs a Saturday night saloon. It's illegal to drink and gamble at this area at this point, but 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 MacLeod is kind of getting, you know, when these guys get out of work exhausted, 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 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 court. Part of why he's allowed to do this is he's coordinating with the sheriff of Fayette County and the sheriff of Fayette 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,

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 laborers are being so comprehensively mined while they are mining, right? That's one of the things that like is a kind of worth acknowledging about how unjust this

situation is. A corporate world they call this synergy. Yeah, this is this is synergy. There's more checks in with the whole. All possible angles to make sure that you're maximizing the every possible dime you can squeeze from this this human being before they can no longer stand up. And again, you couldn't do the sheriff of 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 end danger to you. Someone's got to kill you eventually for doing that in town. If you're doing that to 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,

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 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 Goli 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 Reinhart and 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. Um, and I realized that it sounds like we're making some sort of a hand-fisted metaphor that these guys don't realize

they're breathing the same, they're all breathing the same poison air that like their racism 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. Cool stuff.

Sometimes reality provides us with those moments, I guess. I don't know. We 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 why 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, this stuff 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 lay who take advantage of them, rob them, beat them, kill them. All of that is common in other projects. The difference here is that at Hawks 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. 80% last less than six months.

Virtually everyone quits, dies, or becomes too sick to work in less than a year. When we're talking about these low skilled, unprotected workers, almost no one makes it a year. Again, 60% 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 60% are getting sick and eventually dying, you know, after just a couple of weeks of labor. Absalon'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 this is a ruchiser kind of quoting from her interview of this this this mother. When they took sick right at the start I saw a doctor. I tried to get Dr. Harless to x-ray the boys. He was the only man I had any confidence in. The company doctor in the coppers 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 to." And what Shirley 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 supply. 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. Yeah, 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 over a thousand and I think there are some people saying, well, how can they not

know? Like, you've got Dr. 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 gonna get into that. Because the answer of how you can lose hundreds of dead people, this is something that you could do in the 1930s, you could not do now because everyone is tracked,

everyone has papers, everyone has a social security number, drivers license, on and on and on. This was an arrow when that stuff did not exist to a very large degree. This was an arrow. 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. There was a such thing as photo ID. 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. That 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 it never came back and you don't know if maybe he just stayed there maybe change his name Maybe passed some unrelated reason maybe he moved in I was in Montana. You just didn't know Yeah, and it's you you know, it's some, it's particularly in 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 gonna 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 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 workers 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 gonna 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, Dr. Simmons and Dr. Mitchell, their primary path, like method whenever someone comes in with silicosis is to give them these pills called little black devils, these little black pills that are just their placebo. 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? Year, 18 months for some of the work, I think. But it happens very quickly. So both union carbide and Reinhart and Dennis know all we got to do is push through to the completion line and then our lawyers can handle the fallout. So give these guys some fake medicine. Maybe that'll keep them at bay in other couple of months. A lot so many of them will die that we won't have to deal with those guys and every week we

can put this off gets us closer to the finish line, right? There's also 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 pure 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 are doctors who know about silica who are not unethical men, but they're just seeing how much this is hitting people, killing them, you know, three, four, 500% faster than they're used to. So 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 concerned, right? But within the company doctors, there's evidence that the company has access to that makes it much clearer what's happening and that would have made it clear to everyone earlier on that they do like deliberately keep away from people, right? So yeah, further evidence for this comes from the fact that company policies on stuff like wedding 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 wants 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 abiding by the rules, there's ways you can do it. You can play somebody there for a week. 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 as my understanding when they showed up to take a look. They did not go in that mind without breathing equipment. It's like, what are you nuts? Yeah. Yeah. 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 silicaosis, neither union carbide, new canoapower, nor Reinhart and Dennis ever measured dust levels in the tunnel. Reinhart and Dennis only conducted two tests for carbon monoxide during the 17-month duration of the dig. Approved technology existed to measure clouds of dust. The impinger was developed in 1916 by the U.S. Public Health Service.

Impingers, also known as bubblers, are small bottles used with an air pump to collect airborne contaminants into designated collection liquids for later laboratory analysis. So they had, again, this is not, 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. Not also 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 took a thermometer in there. See, it's like, well, okay, there was no visibility in the tunnel for the dust. So like that, even that's not an excuse.

Like what they're saying is ludicrous. Yeah, it's it's it's obscene Um, and what's also obscene are the low low prices our advertisers have for their product This podcast is sponsored by better help Robert Evans here I've had a lot of trouble sleeping off and on over the years, and it's just a difficulty turning my brain off sometimes, and it's something I've gotten some help with in the past via a therapist. If you're ever feeling like your brain is getting in its own way, you might want to try therapy, and better help is a great option for that.

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You just don't know what it's like when you'll do anything for somebody. Listen to Byrdon of Guilt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 right now, Dynas find themselves with a new logistical problem.

What do we do with all these corpses? White workers could be buried in local cemeteries pretty easily, especially local workers who died. But most of the workers dying are black laborers. These white, 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 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 tin 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 of hundred in the slave cemetery, but there's still a lot more people who are dying. So Ryan Hart and Dennis, 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 $55 for each body he will take out of their hands and Barry. Now, Hadley is running the same calculation as every other unethical contractor and company in this. They're paying him to bury people theoretically in coffins in a cemetery. And he's like, you know, it's cheaper than a coffin.

It's throwing people in a bag and putting them 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 a local church where his company is located, he starts driving the corpses 40 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 rap stuff 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, of dying, right? Like, just kind of taken immediately off the line, or, 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. And 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 it's just like trash, right? That's how they're treating these people.

Like, we're not even gonna 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 want to do a funeral. We're just gonna toss them in a mask 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. No, there's people alive from then still. There are people alive from their very old, but there were people that were born in this era 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 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 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 a fucking sprocket or something that breaks in a machine and you 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 300 certainly are buried by Hadley White, maybe significantly more. We don't know. It might have been, you know, a couple of hundred more than that. More lingered on sick in the town of Gauley 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 are 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 17 or 18 year old black man who left his home in North Carolina on a one-way train ticket to West Virginia. The last his family saw him. He promised to send back the money he made to help them.

Quote, from an article in NPR. Flack died on May 20, 1931, two weeks after his last shift in the tunnel. His death certificate said he died of pneumonia. But according to Charney Act, company doctors often misdiagnosed workers' deaths, or attributed them to a disease they called tunnelitis. The company would later use those death certificates to prove there were few, if any, silicoces' 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. Flack 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 laborers. 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 they just never hear from your husband, your son, your nephew ever again.

Like that's the reality for a lot of these people. And while it was the specific year, you just mentioned there? I believe he's 1931. Yeah, May 20th, 1931. That's the year William Schatner was born. Right, right. So Clint Eastwood was one year old by the time this happened.

Again, 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 nightmare as part of this. Because eventually you had these people in the place to go. They couldn't afford to travel. They were kicked off the jobsite they couldn't work.

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 the gasping for a 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 their 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 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 afloat concerning the number of fatalities. They are said to number four a week. Now, radical papers kind of differed in how radical they were. In the case of the state sentinel, they do note later on that they were

sure union carbide was innocent of any wrongdoing because Reinhart and 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 Reinhart and 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 1932, this is late in the construction process. More than 80 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. 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 Reinhart 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 $2.7, $25 million in damages is what they're requesting. That's a lot more money back then. Ryan 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 injunction's 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 Reinhart and Davis executives away from the contractor, right?

And these guys are still doing the job they were doing from Reinhart 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 sends 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 Canoa 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 canoes to put respirators on workers. And new canoes 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 Lambie gets there and after some 500 lawsuits from survivors are kind of churning their way through the legal process, Lambie gets called into court and you would expect him to be a pretty devastating testimony on behalf of these minors.

I told them to give respirators to these guys and they did not, right? But he behaves very differently once he's in a courtroom as Cherny-Ack writes. but he behaves very differently, once he's in a courtroom as Cherniac writes. Testifying on behalf of Ryan Hart and Dennis for a whole day on 10th April 1933, he described exemplary conditions in the tunnel, where air was supplied at a face velocity of 27 miles per hour.

Visibility was to from five to 700 feet and water was constantly used to suppress dust. Vigorously cross-examined about the extreme inconsistencies between this testimony and his earlier condimentatory letters, which had been read into the court record by the attorney for Raymond Johnson, that's the minor in this case, two weeks earlier, Lamby blamed inaccurate 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 Lamby's staff inspectors, who had originally filed highly critical reports, now shared in their directest change of heart. Testifying on the following day, CB Bishop and DR Sullivan joined him in tribute to the admirable conditions at Hawks Nest.

They indicated that Reinhart and Dennis had always cooperated fully and repeated Lamby's praise of the freedom from dust and wet drilling. They described the reports that had made in 1931 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 Mindines had just opened his doors to the prestigious Canowa 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. 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 appointed in the last 20 years to had regulatory agencies and what they did after the period of time in which they had those agencies. Don't, don't go Google in that, because there's nothing to find, right?

This is never a critical year. Because you're a result. Yeah, zero results. So yeah, construction on the Hawks Nest Tunnel was completed by 1932. 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 Reinhart and 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 two, you know? Yeah. A brand new historical true crime podcast. The year is 1800, a city hall, New York.

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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 1933 and 1934, but only a fraction of the requested damages are ever paid out in settlements, about $200,000. And I should note here, the amount of money awarded to black laborers for the same ailments as white laborers is about half, I think. Individual awards are anywhere from $30 to $1,600, which is minimal, I would say, but Union

Carbide executives still complained was ruinous to them. They described sick workers as moochers seeking to get rich out of frivolous lawsuits. The West Virginia and Cyclopedia notes of this case, the largest trial ended with a hung jury, evidence of jury tampering and generous compensation to the plaintiffs' 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 there's start 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, we're 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 1936, which is kind of five years after the first men start dying and 3536 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 Hawks' Nest Tunnel disaster. NPR writes, quote, representatives from the Tunnel companies declined to attend, one submitted a letter that called witness testimony slanderous rumors in hearsay. We know of no case of silicoces 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. Array!

And most regulations that we have in workplace protections, there is somewhere at the bottom of it are bones and ash, and of dead people who died in order to 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. They wanted to make rent. Yeah. Yeah. And not to get rich either. They were taking the only work that was available. then that's one good thing. And then of course knowing that union carbide was surely ruined as a company and does not, and 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 of their machines, probably they had to sell them all just to pay off these ruinous $30 and $40 payouts. That's why the town of Bo Paul, India has a reputation for being the least polluted town in India and the town motto, 20,000 of us didn't die in an industrial accident caused by union carbide. Great place to go visit, check it out. So speaking of the death toll, which we're obviously talking around, it's kind of hard to determine.

The congressional inquiry estimates a little short of 500, it's like 464 deaths that they estimate. Churniacs, or the two books I read for this, are Muriel Rechaiser's the book of the dead, and then the Hawks 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 guess, 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 Cherniac's estimate. He suspects somewhere north of 750 people died

as their 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 2000, 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 750

and 2000 debt is what we're looking at for the hawks nest tunnel disaster. Which is, again, that's in excess of the Chernobyl death toll. That's a lot of fucking people. This makes it. 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 swing 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 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 whose lung capacity was damaged by 80% due to, you know, from this mind, and then three years later, they got, you know, whatever pneumonia or something that finally put them away, well, there's no way that's going to get recorded as a mining death, but it absolutely

was. Yes. Like, this person doesn't die without the damage they said. It's just that if they didn't die on site and then have be 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 1938, 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.

It's 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 Rukaiser, number one, it's kind of actually we're about to talk about it. 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 do think it's worth talking a little bit more about Muriel Rukaiser because there's a lot to say about our country and her specific story here. Muriel is one of the first people outside of the Gauley Bridge area

to learn what was going on. At 23, she was a budding author and journalist and an avid leftist. She learned about the disaster from radical publications at the time. In 1935, when one of these magazines puts out an article about hawksnest, it goes viral among kind of the New York intelligentsia set and becomes this, as I said,

this kind of big cause to love for the while. And for most people, it's a thing, you know, you 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. Rook Heiser 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, she's angry and she's going to fucking do something about this. And so she drives down to Golly Bridge with a friend to investigate on her own. She kind of takes this like roadtrip.

One of our country's first great roadtrip story, she could say. Now at this point, Muriel's not a nobody. She has already a celebrated poet for her first book, Theoria 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 is this very remarkable synthesis of gum shoe reporting and high art. It's worth noting that much of what we know about Rukaiser's

life and why she did all this comes not from anything she wrote, but from the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover specifically gives orders for this woman to be followed. And I'm going to quote from an article in the Oxford American here. In 1943, 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 30, dark, heavy, with gray eyes. In 1933, the report reads, she and some friends drove from New York to Alabama to witness the Scottsboro 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 1936, after her trip to Goli 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 1950s included her appeal for 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 and a West Virginia village riddled with silicosis. I find a lot interesting there. It is hard to overstate the degree to which anti-communist stuff was really just anti-labor stuff.

Yeah. 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've 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 activists who 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 the 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's concerned and 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 throwing bank robbers there too, right? Which is another in the FBI deals with, do not equal the death toll of the Hawks 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, no bills to do the math.

The during prohibition, the total number of people killed by say Al Capone's gain. It wasn't a thousand. Yeah, of course not. No, you can't make a business doing that. Like, I guess the cartels do, but it's a different era. Yeah. Like 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 who suffered 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 2018 NPR Frontline investigation. This was not about the Hawks 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 of the last 50 years basically. There has been hard evidence that silica exposure in about 15% of U.S. mines 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 Monfortin, weird last name, Celeste Monfortin, who was a former mine 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.

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 say this, unless you're listening hundreds of years in the future. The, it's, yeah, one of these epidemiologists, Scott Laney, is quoted as saying, we're seeing 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 seems 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 moving from the Hawks and S 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 cold us, but to dangerous levels of toxic silica dust.

The federal mine safety and health administration's own data chronicles 21,000 instances of excessive exposure to silica since 1986. At the same time, NPR identified black lung diagnoses involving miners in their 30s, who also experienced rapid progression to the advanced stage. Smith says he was diagnosed at 39. NIOSH has confirmed 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 in Hawks 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, 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. 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 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 mask 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 mask suppliers filing product liability lawsuits, and there have been a multi-billion dollar verdicts in this. 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. There's more of a apparatus of vengeance to where this is not, when you're talking a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, you are talking about something that's 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 going to 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 changed since those days is not changed last couple hundred years Our entire civilization exists because of mining Everything you have came from a mine Everything runs on mines everything in your phone came from a mind. 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 a day-to-day basis. We appreciate this that 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 wind, 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, I mean, I would say it hasn't changed, but they're not disposable still. And by the way, I should, 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 minor, when we say minors 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 a fucking creases on his face and whatnot and a big ol' helmet and a light workin' in West Virginia, that's like an 11 year old in Central Africa mining 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 there's basically inevitable that there will be human trafficking at some stage of that because some of the critical 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, you know, nobody wants to talk about where the cobalt comes from or whatever the fuck. Like, this is just the way it is. And it 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 microprocessors came from, because at the end of it is a very

dirty mind and 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. 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 ship 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 host mortem. The Union Carbide Company, of course. Now, as of I tried to look them up and see when they went out of business. It turns out that in 2019 they had $4.4 billion in revenue. Great.

Well, they've now been swallowed up by the Dow Chemical Company, a small company, a family owned operation that it has a market cap of $36 billion, I believe. Yeah. And it's not involved in anything horrifying in history don't look at don't google doubt chemical vietnam right like there's no reason to do that uh... whatsoever we are a very forgiving society you see when when people reformed themselves as long as you are a gigantic

corporation we we it's all about second chances in America. We're willing to let you turn your life around. Anyway, yes, thank you. If you want to find me on TikTok, I am Jason K. Pargin. We have repeatedly made jokes about me being reduced to a TikTok person. I have 330,000 followers on there. I'm primarily a TikToker. The author stuff is now just a trivial footnote in my biography. My grave stone will say he was a beloved TikToker and prominent TikToker. I'm Jason K. Pargin on tick tock also that same thing on Twitter slash X also the same thing on blue sky and threads and YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and some others that I don't remember to update because there's too many substack

I did all of them all of them Jason K. Pargin P.A.R. G.I.N. Thank you. You know, I we do we, we shit talk, tick talk 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 TikTok and it's not 15 second long clips of teenage girls dancing. People here that I'm on TikTok, they think, oh, so you're on there with the 15-year-old girls. That's your thing. It's like, no, TikTok now. There's a long-form stuff on there. I would say long-form, I mean, 7, 8, 9 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 queued 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 that for whatever reason, we love to make movies about serial killers, the killed five people, Cheerio killers, they 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 they're job creators, and they made that tunnel. Like don't they get credit for making that tunnel? Yeah, it's great tunnel, solid tunnel. Yeah.

It's like they didn't make it. A whole bunch of people whose names you'll never know made that tunnel, and they broke their bodies to make it. Yeah. So I don't know. Go off into the world by Jason's book, remain angry at Union Carbide. Definitely do that.

OK, 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 sure if 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 SchoolhouseCalk, like the building supply, CAULK, Schoolhouse Hawk, whose creator is a fellow named Michael. Put out a video specifically talking to us. He wanted to let us know. There's a website, hawksnestnames.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 and you and 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 off line 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 he asked that we put in a shout out, which I am doing now. So please check out hawksnestnames.org for more information on this disaster. Thanks everybody. Behind the bastards is a production of Coolzone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website CoolzoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. A brand new historical true crime podcast.

When you lay suffering a sudden brutal death, starring Allison Williams, I hope you'll think of me, erased the murder of Elvis Sands. She was a sweet, happy, virtuous girl, until she met that man right there. Written and created by me, Alison Flon. Is it possible, sir? We're standing by for your answer. Erased, the murder of Elma Sands.

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