In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 From the Silver Bridge to Farmington and Rumblings at the Grassroots From Monongah to Mannington, the same script is grimly familiar. The national searchlight is focused on a disaster. The company officials promise that everything possible is being done. The surviving coal miners and their sons say that, of course, they will go back in the mines. Soon everybody goes back to the status quo until the next disaster. Congressman Ken Hechler, 1968 A new generation of coal miners had got some education, got smarter, done their service, maybe fought over there in Vietnam. They came back and they seen their daddies dying. . . they knew something was wrong. They figured they weren’t going to be as dumb as people made miners out to be. Bynum “Junior” Gilbert, Raleigh County coal miner The collapse of the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River between Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio, on December 16, 1967, one of the worst bridge disasters in American history, proved to be but a prelude to 1968, an annus horribilis that unfolded with a long succession of disquieting events. The Vietcong Tet Offensive in Vietnam in January convinced many already skeptical Americans that the Johnson administration’s optimistic assessments of the war had been misleading and escalated an already divisive debate about the war. The assassinations of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (April 4) and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (June 5) took two figures from the American scene who many thought had offered the best hope for change. The year also saw urban riots, campus rebellions, 217 From the Silver Bridge to Farmington a contentious and bloody Democratic convention in Chicago in late August, and a convulsive presidential election.1 West Virginia suffered through these travails with the rest of the country but also endured a remarkable series of its own, including the painful aftermath of the Silver Bridge collapse, political scandals and reversals of fortunes that further revealed the corrupt nature of state politics, campus tensions and a bombing, the worst airplane crash in the state’s history, a near disastrous chemical fire and gas release, racial conflict, two mine disasters, rumblings at the grassroots as the poverty war faded, and a miners’ revolt. In the face of all this, many reporters and editorialists found the “collapsing structure” imagery compelling.2 Prelude: The Silver Bridge As the new machine age advanced rapidly in the post-World War II era, with its growing automobile traffic and ever larger trucks and heavier loads for aging highways and bridges, perils lurked in unanticipated places. In the waning light of late afternoon on December 15, 1967, cars and trucks hurried both ways in bumper-to-bumper traffic carrying holiday shoppers and commuters across the Ohio River on the Silver Bridge connecting Gallipolis and Point Pleasant. Suddenly, the 1,750-foot bridge collapsed, shearing away on the West Virginia side and spilling some seventy cars and trucks with their passengers and cargoes into the river and onto the Ohio shore under the bridge, resulting in the deaths of forty-six people. Rescue units rushed to the scene, but the descending dark of a cold December night hampered rescue operations. Governor Smith and Governor James A. Rhodes of Ohio also hurried to the scene with their staffs as did newspaper and television reporters from the regional and national media.3 Swollen by autumn rains to depths two feet over its normal level, the river current flowed at six miles per hour, making it impossible for divers in deep-sea gear to stand on the river bottom. Conditions delayed recovery efforts until the Army Corps of Engineers closed floodcontrol gates at twenty-three dams upriver between Point Pleasant and Pittsburgh and downriver at Gallipolis Roller Dam to cut the flow rate in half, enabling divers to return to around-the-clock operations. Nevertheless, many weeks passed before recovery efforts ended.4 218 From the Silver Bridge to Farmington The American Bridge Company had opened the Silver Bridge (socalled because of its aluminum-based paint) in 1928 as a privately operated toll bridge. The state of West Virginia later purchased and operated the bridge without tolls. One of the few examples of its type (a bridge built in Florianopolis, Brazil, in 1924 had used the same principle as did a nearby West Virginia bridge across the Ohio at St. Marys), the Silver Bridge hung from carbon steel chains suspended from towers, unlike other suspended bridges such as the Golden Gate Bridge...

Share