NY Times, Sunday Book Review, Sept. 20, 2020
America Has Mistreated Its Coal Miners. Here’s Their Fight for Justice.
By Héctor Tobar
SOUL FULL OF COAL DUST
A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia
By Chris Hamby
435 pp. Little, Brown. $30.
The ailing coal miners in Chris Hamby’s “Soul Full of Coal Dust” are a
tough bunch of men, even though they may no longer look the part. After
decades working underground in the sooty air of coal mines, many are
severely disabled. They get winded after walking up just a few stairs,
and some can only breathe with oxygen tanks feeding their lungs, day and
night. X-rays show grainy masses in their chests, and they regularly
spit up black phlegm, symptoms of pneumoconiosis, more commonly known as
black lung disease.
Thanks to a federal law dating back to the 1960s, miners who contract
the disease are due monthly disability checks (usually less than $700)
and coverage of all their medical expenses — unless the company that
hired them argues the miners aren’t really sick at all.
In “Soul Full of Coal Dust” we meet miners who have been fighting their
employers 20 years or longer for those payments. They argue their cases
before administrative law judges, or are represented by low-budget
attorneys who are overmatched in endless legal sparring with coal
companies and their powerful lawyers. And yet, their Appalachian
fortitude is such that they keep up the fight, even as death approaches.
The key for them is finding incontrovertible medical evidence of their
disease. “Given his age and poor health, undergoing a lung biopsy would
likely be too risky,” Hamby writes of 66-year-old Steve Day, denied the
benefits by his mining company. “That left one other way,” Hamby writes.
He’d repeatedly told his wife to have an autopsy performed on him if he
died.
After Day’s passing, a tissue sample sliced out of his lungs offered the
final proof: His job had killed him.
Class conflict in the United States is a largely private and domestic
drama these days. In the mountain towns of Appalachia, as elsewhere,
ordinary people battle corporate power reluctantly, and most often these
struggles don’t involve the drama of the picket line, but rather reams
of paperwork. In “Soul Full of Coal Dust,” Hamby, a journalist at The
Times, employs dogged investigative work and a deep well of empathy for
his subjects to painstakingly bring this private pathos to life. After
following a long and miserable paper trail, we finally begin to see a
larger picture: how a corporate and political power structure conspired
to crush the bodies of the men who faithfully served the coal industry.
Most of the book is set in West Virginia, where 68 percent of voters
backed Trump in 2016, more than any other state. Today, the coal-mining
industry is a favored-child of the Trump Administration, which has
loosened environmental restrictions on Big Coal, even as the world
chokes on greenhouse gasses. In 2017, a group of miners joined Trump at
a White House ceremony for one of his first acts as president — signing
into law a bill to roll back environmental regulations for coal mines.
It’s easy to forget that the men and women who labor to produce coal
were once a reliably Democratic constituency. The laws designed to
protect coal miners from the black dust that saturates the air
underground were born in that long ago blue-state era, as Hamby reminds
us. In the first chapters of “Soul Full of Coal Dust” the open class
warfare that defined Appalachian history in the 20th century — with
miners in a leading role — comes back to life again.
The pivotal moment was the 1968 disaster at a Farmington, W.Va. mine; 78
men were killed. Before Farmington, Hamby tells us, the lung ailments
that struck miners were shrouded in mystery, disinformation and
folklore. After Farmington, underground working conditions became a
cause célèbre. The physician I.E. Buff and other activist doctors spread
use of the term of “black lung” as a way of dramatizing the plight.
“You all have black lung, and you’re all gonna die!” Buff would yell at
gatherings of miners.
A coalition of miners, physicians and activists known as the Black Lung
Association began pressing for comprehensive reforms, including new
programs for workers’ compensation. Miners carried signs at legislative
hearings proclaiming “NO LAW, NO WORK.” Soon the movement reached into
the mines themselves, with a 1969 strike of 200 workers in Raleigh
County, in southern West Virginia.
“The news quickly spread, and within just a few days, more than 10,000
miners in neighboring counties had joined the protest,” Hamby writes.
“It was a wildcat strike; the United Mine Workers leadership didn’t
approve.” Some 40,000 more workers across West Virginia soon took part
in what Hamby calls “the largest political strike in U.S. history.”
As a result of the “black lung uprising,” West Virginia passed its first
workers’ compensation laws related to the disease; Kentucky and Ohio
soon followed. In 1969, Congress passed a comprehensive reform that
attacked black lung at its source by requiring companies to sharply
reduce (and to continually monitor) coal dust. Richard Nixon quietly
signed it into law; unlike Trump he didn’t invite coal miners to the
signing ceremony, because he didn’t have one.
The reforms were supposed to eradicate black lung, consigning it to coal
mining’s primitive past. But putting the laws into practice was another,
slower and much less visible fight. By the dawn of the new century,
black lung was on the rise again, while coal miners had collectively
assimilated a red state view of the world. Describing this new reality
takes up most of Hamby’s book.
At first, the new generation of black-lung sufferers saw their ailment
as “the way of the world.” As one miner tells Hamby: “If you wanted to
keep your job, you worked when and how the company told you and didn’t
complain.” And another: “If you was lucky enough to get a job and you
had a family to feed, you done what you had to do to feed your family,
sacrifice your body.”
Hamby is not an elegant or emotional writer, but he does manage to
capture the inner turmoil of his subjects as they get sick and realize
the coal mining companies and their high-power attorneys are getting the
best of them. Mostly, he accomplishes this with a blow-by-blow
description of repeated doctor visits and proceedings before
administrative law judges.
“We weren’t lawyers. Didn’t know anything about the law,” Mary Fox, the
wife of the miner Gary Fox says, remembering the couple’s first, unaided
attempts to get black lung payments. “We had never seen a courtroom
before.” An advocate stepped in to help the Foxes: John Cline. After
several frustrating years working at a rural medical clinic, and seeing
lawyers get the best of West Virginia miners again and again, Cline had
gone to law school himself, at the age of 53, just so that he could
represent them.
Through the eyes of Cline, Fox and others, we begin to see how the
system is stacked: Coal companies rig the tests that are supposed to
monitor the coal dust underground; and the company’s lawyers contract
pliant doctors to do the industry’s bidding, including one at the
prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital, Paul Wheeler.
As a journalist first drawn to the black lung saga, Hamby constructed a
database with more than 3,400 X-rays examined by Wheeler, who rejected
the black lung claims of each of the more than 1,500 miners whose
medical histories he examined. Hamby’s work discredited Wheeler, and
eventually earned the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting. As
an author, Hamby applies that same relentlessness to the chapters in
which he details Cline’s failed attempts to prove one West Virginia law
firm engaged in “fraud on the court” — the firm’s lawyers had
systematically hidden X-rays and doctor reports showing evidence of the
disease.
By the end of “Soul Full of Coal Dust,” we’ve read as many profiles of
attorneys, doctors and judges as we have of miners. Not all of this
makes for exciting reading. But the larger story of coal miner fortitude
and company malfeasance is a timeless one. With thorough reporting, and
boundless concern for his subjects, Hamby has created a powerful
document of this drama, one that is unfolding, largely unseen, in the
hills and valleys of West Virginia.
Hector Tobar is the author of “Deep Down Dark” and a contributing writer
for The New York Times opinion pages.
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