Gauley Bridge is a disheveled village on the forest-fringed New River of central West Virginia. There six years ago, a construction company named Rinehart & Dennis began to excavate a three-mile waterpower tunnel for a subsidiary of Union Carbide & Carbon Corp. Last week Rinehart & Dennis were putting in last licks on their tunnel. But many a man who began the digging in 1929 was not alive to see the finish in 1936. Some had died of silicosis, incurable lung disease caused by inhaling silica dust. Pneumonia and tuberculosis had caused the deaths of others who may or may not have been suffering with silicotic irritation.
Recently the radical press of the nation learned about the deaths at Gauley Bridge, began to rattle the skeleton of what it claimed was a hideous industrial scandal (TIME: Jan. 6). One who heard the clatter was young Representative Vito Marcantonio of Manhattan, who has a sharp ear for the kind of news stories that will help him in his Harlem district. As a friend of the working man he called for a Congressional investigation and witnesses. Quickly formed in Manhattan was a National Gauley Bridge Committee to which such notables as Professor Haven Emerson of Columbia University, Socialist Norman Thomas and Drug Manufacturer William Jay Schieffelin subscribed. They paid expenses to Washington of a few Gauley Bridge residents to testify before Congressman Marcantonio's Committee, which by last week had heard the following evidence:
Gaunt Philippa Allen, social worker, testified: "Dry drilling was the cause of the dense silica dust. It would stop when State mine inspectors entered the tunnel. Men acted as lookouts to warn of their presence. As a result inspectors testified that the tunnel was practically dust free. Mrs. Charlie Jones of Gamoca was the .first to find what was killing the men." Mrs. Jones, according to Miss Allen, begged money along the road to pay for x-rays of the lungs of her son Shirley who asked on his deathbed to "be opened up to see if I didn't die from the job."
Gaunt Mrs. Charlie Jones, who bought a house and cow with $1,600 she received as compensation for the deaths of three sons who worked in the Gauley Bridge tunnel, claimed : "Shirl's lungs was all gone when they took them out." Later she complained: "We get two dollars a week relief, and I earn one dollar a week takin' in washin'. That helps buy feed for the cow."
Charlie Jones, 49, big and ruddy tunnel worker, wheezed: "The only work I could do after I left the tunnel—that was only a bit—was pickin' bony at the tipple at the coal mine. And that's the easiest work they is. boys' work. I hed to give that up. Now I cain't hardly lug a bucket of water, and that not fur. I cain't hardly git up on a chair and haul window blinds. I give myself 'bout a year. I know I'm goin'. I'm not foolin' myself. But there's no use cryin' 'bout that now, is they?"