Medical-Industrial Discourses: Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead"

In 1936, Muriel Rukeyser traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to investigate the first and, to this day, one of the most severe industrial disasters in the United States. Born in 1913 in New York City, Rukeyser attended Vassar College in the 1930s and then committed herself to the field of leftist journalism. Although never on record as a member of the Communist Party (which did not prevent later extensive investigation of her by the McCarthy Committee on Un-American Activities), she became involved with the Popular Front and began writing for leftist journals such as the New Masses and the Daily Worker. On their behalf she went to Spain to cover the People's Olympiad alternative antifascist games set up to protest the 1936 Berlin Olympics. She was evacuated at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and, upon her return to the States, sent to cover the Scottsboro trials of eight black men accused of raping two white women. From there she went to Gauley Bridge.

In Gauley Bridge, Union Carbide had contracted for the construction of a hydroelectric power plant on the New River. This involved building two power stations and two dams and digging two tunnels. The tunneling turned out to be through almost pure (97–99 percent) silica, a glass mineral component crucial to the electroprocessing of steel. The company's efforts promptly shifted to the extraction of the silica. Despite U.S. Bureau of Mines regulations that silica was to be mined with hydraulic water drills to limit dust and that miners should wear masks with filters, Union Carbide chose the faster method of dry drilling and failed to provide the masks, which would have required work interruptions every few hours to clean the filters. The dry drilling, combined with the processes of dynamiting and removing the rock, produced a high density of silica dust. Labor in the tunnel involved a six-day work week with two ten-hour shifts per day; each man worked the tunnel in two three-hour shifts. The work was performed predominantly by black migrants who had come to Gauley Bridge in hope of employment during the Depression years.

Workers began to complain of shortness of breath, and more than 2,000 miners eventually sickened from silica lung poisoning, which led to their suffocation and death. The claims of silica poisoning were contested by Union Carbide, and full records of the effects of the silica dust remain impossible to obtain since many miners moved on after their work stint and black migrant workers in particular were buried in unmarked graves.¹ Union Carbide doctors diagnosed these deaths as the result of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and pleurisy. Access to doctors not employed by the company, who might investigate and testify to other causes of death, was nearly impossible for the impoverished families. One woman, however, after the deaths of her husband and three sons, succeeded in obtaining X-rays by begging money on the highway. These X-rays showed silica dust in the lungs of her fourth and youngest boy, establishing the cause of death as silicosis—poisoning from silica dust—which then became the basis for legal action accusing Union Carbide of negligence and asking for worker's compensation. Lawsuits were filed, and the case was investigated by Congress, although a more extensive investigation recommended by the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Labor was blocked. Some compensation did emerge, but this largely went to the lawyers representing the cases, and when a 1935 West Virginia law included silicosis in worker's compensation, it provided many loopholes. In the face of these legal setbacks, Rukeyser's publicationssucceeded in bringing the issues of industrial disaster to national attention, in leftist as well as mainstream journals.

Rukeyser wrote about the Gauley Bridge disaster not only as a journalist but also as a poet. Personal accounts and filed medical reports, as well as legal proceedings and even legislative hearings that eventually emerged from the disaster, became the material from which Rukeyser constructed her poem series "The Book of the Dead." In these poems, she detects and...