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Conclusion: John Henry, Efficiency, and Community
- University of Illinois Press
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Conclusion: John Henry, Efficiency, and Community John Henry was a steel-driving man, but why did John Henry drive steel? Like most children, I assume, I learned the words to the song without knowing or even thinking about what he was doing in the first place. I knew it was about a man competing with a machine. I knew that John Henry won; I knew he died, and I knew that was supposed to mean something. The origin of the John Henry legend has traditionally been attributed to West Virginia around the time railroads expanded into the new frontier seeking the region’s rich raw materials. John Henry would have been one of many newly freed black workers brought to the region after the Civil War. Henry, his co-workers, and the evil steam hammer were laying tracks through Big Bend Mountain that would make up the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. The Chessie, as it was known, would bring industry, development, and progress to the mountains. Though there are many interpretations of the legend, John Henry still serves as a parable for the shift to modern industrial society and its ramifications. The social struggles represented by the conflict over mountaintop removal belong not to John Henry’s era, but to a subsequent social shift that West Virginians and Americans in general struggled with at the turn of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the relationships between corporate efficiency and community bonds are similar enough to warrant revisiting the parable. I once interviewed a retired mine foreman who had worked with my grandfather. Together, they reflected on the changes in work and life that had occurred during their lives. 158 Conclusion We’ve gone in my lifetime from when everybody had to farm these hillsides in order to help pay the bills. [The hillsides] are all grown up now. That was an agricultural society. We went to a mechanized society and we’ve gone now to another level where everybody is trying to make a million dollars in the stock market. . . . We’ve brought up a society and taught them it’s a shame to have to work with your hands. That it’s not right to have to get out there in that coal mine and work like that, or work on a farm. There’s been a tremendous change in the way a man makes a living in my lifetime. As a child, I thought John Henry’s death made his triumph over machine a hollow one. Folklorist Archie Green provides another perspective on John Henry framed within the context of American labor lore. “Did John Henry die only because he was black, or because all workers are doomed who defy modernity? How do losers function in a society caught up by worship of competitive sports and entrepreneurial spirit? Ideally, the C&O contractor or capitalist who brought the steam drill to Big Bend should have been honored by song. . . . Are we perverse in having elevated a defeated driller to Olympus?” As a child, I could not understand John Henry’s status as a mythic symbol for labor pride. As Green indicates, John Henry’s status as an American folk hero defies our society’s manic drive to worship champions. Under the logic that elevates sports heroes and CEOs as role models, all people who labor for a living should be seen as losers. But that is a perverse understanding of our society in which people have to work to make a living. The lessons taught by Appalachia’s mountaintop removal fight extend far beyond the coalfields. The struggle shows how we as a society are still struggling with the profound lessons that John Henry attempted to teach, though in new forms created by neoliberal globalization. Mountaintop removal is a graphic case that shows how, instead of serving our needs as a community, modernity in the form of mythical industrial progress (discussed in chapter 8) can work against our needs as a community. In 2004, the Discovery Channel aired a series called Mega Excavators that provided a who’s who of mammoth strip mining machinery. The program glorified machines like Big Muskie, the biggest dragline ever built, as if they were heroes competing against the Earth like John Henry competed against the steam hammer. A dragline operator interviewed for the program talked about the fast pace and stress of loading three hundred hauling trucks in a twelve-hour shift. Each moment that the dragline is not loading is a moment the $100...