Northern industry, with the help of southern collaborators, is destroying the South and buying the southern worker at bargain-basement prices in modern-day slave markets.
Us vs. Them
More than a century ago, the military and economic might of the northern United States was unleashed. against the southernmost states in a bloody civil war.
A lot of Americans were taught then, and are still being taught, that it was a holy war against the clearly recognized evil of slavery — that the crusaders from the North were concerned solely with freeing thousands of blacks whose families, futures , bodies, and very minds had been enslaved by the corrupt southern system.
Slavery had a great deal to do with the war, to be sure, and was worth fighting about. But we tend to overlook another, less worthy motive that some students of the period also ascribe to the North and that may, in fact, have even taken precedence over slavery in the minds of many of the crusaders: a desire, strong enough to make war over, to beat the South to a bloody pulp in order to take advantage of the entire region — to effect its economic enslavement.
The Southland of a century ago was a place rich in natural and human resources, a place whose red clays and black topsoils and golden sea islands and extravagant sunlight produced crops that northerners wanted but could not grow and contained minerals that the North needed but could not mine. It should not be surprising, then, to learn that southerners of those days, and even some of their grandchildren of today, saw the North’s great crusade as tinged by more than a bit of hypocrisy
It is happening again now. The question of human slavery is gone with the winds of more than a century, but the issues of economic and social exploitation remain. Northern-based industry and business (and, increasingly now, wealthy businesses and multinational conglomerates from overseas) are buying the southern environment. They are taking the southern land, the mountains, the seashore, as never before, and they are strip-mining it, exhausting it, erecting fences around it. They are depleting the water tables and fouling the streams and rivers and skies. They are buying the southern worker, white and black, at bargain-basement prices in modern-day slave markets run by compliant southern governments and euphemistically called “vocational” and “technical” colleges.
These outsiders are, in fact, receiving a great deal of help from state and local governments in their efforts to strip into exhaustion both the land and the bodies of the people who work on it. Public tax monies pay for efforts to keep that terrifying word unionization from intruding into the vocabularies of many parts of the region. Local governments invite exploitative industries with promises of deferred or abated taxes — which could have been used to improve the welfare of the people of the region, who badly need such improvement. State judges and administrators routinely deny the southern worker the most elementary forms of compensation for lives, limbs, and lungs lost in the service of far-off boards of directors of textile mills and coal-mining combines. Organized religion, which remains an important component of many southerners’ lives, may be found in the pay of the exploiters. Spies and collaborators were among the southerners in that other civil war, too.
The degree to which some southern politicians, educators, bankers, realtors, churchmen, and assorted promoters sell out the region of their nativity is scandalous, but the chief exploiter of the modern-day South remains the nonsoutherner. It is not difficult, in fact, to see the situation as some kind of a new civil war.
It is as foolish to generalize about southerners as it is about any other ethnic group, but it may be said that a notably high percentage of the region’s population is tolerant of what business and industry do — tolerant, in fact, to the point of gullibility. That tendency has been true for decades. It has to do with southerners’ basic awe of one another’s property rights, and it has a lot to do with the historical poverty of the region. Southerners have been so economically deprived for so long — since well before the earlier war — that they have been pathetically and understandably eager to take whatever is offered to them in the name of “economic progress,” even if it is progress achieved at the expense of human lives and the destruction of the environment.
So far, the exploiters have been winning. But just as in the earlier conflict, impassioned opposition to the foreign intruders and to the collaborators and spies at home has formed among the southern ranks. The militants are thoroughly outnumbered, but they are far from dismayed, and they have never been stronger. One gets the impression, when one talks with them, that they think of themselves as engaged in some sort of a holy crusade against the forces that would ruin their homeland. They know that outside industry, having built, desecrated, and finally abandoned the industrial slums of the North and Midwest — the Fall Rivers, the Garys, the Jersey Cities — has no compunction about doing the same with Norfolk’s vast tidewater fortune or with Georgia’s brooding Marshes of Glynn, the wild and primitive Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
Those who have vowed to fight this civil war against the outsiders from the North know that the South is a delicate organism. Both its environment and its people are increasingly subject to modern pressures that could erode its identity. Nobody has ever been able to explain just what that southern identity is, but it is fairly correct, if an oversimplification, to say that the two biggest treasures of the region are its physical environment and its people. If either of them was taken away or seriously altered, as those who exploit the South would surely do, the South would cease to exist. It would become another Fall River, another Gary, another Jersey City.
The list of ways in which the Southland and its people are being exploited is limited only by the promoters’ ideas about how to turn a fast buck. Here are some of the more prominent ones.
The first is strip-mining, in all its manifestations and variations. This is one of the most obvious and depressing ways in which the southern environment is profaned. It is practiced wherever the corporate mind perceives a need for what lies under the soil and wherever local opposition can be overridden, bought out, intimidated, or co-opted. But it is at its worst in the southern mountains, where almost half of the nation’s coal is produced.
According to one estimate (in which Appalachia is broadly defined as the high ground from southern New York State to northern Mississippi), the region has 81 percent of the land in the nation that has been “disturbed” by strip-mining and then left unreclaimed. It also contains threequarters of the nation’s areas that are prone to mine subsidence and more than 93 percent of the total miles of streams damaged by the acids that drain out the mines.
The word raped is often used to describe the condition of much of the southern highlands where minerals are found, and it is hardly an exaggeration. Mining and landdevelopment companies own property or mineral rights on great portions of the elevated land, particularly around the Cumberland Mountains in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, and they strip-mine it mercilessly. They have intimidated landowners who preferred not to sell to them; and once they have gained control of the land, they have methodically proceeded toward the morally outrageous goal of tearing mountains apart.
They dynamite the tops and sides off the hills, caring little that the explosions damage homes below. The resulting landslides block highways and, more important, streams, from which much of the Appalachian population gets its drinking water. Acids from the operation pollute the water as well. The “overburden,” which is the name the strip miners use for the upper layers of soil that stand between them and the coal they seek, is thrown down the hill. Huge draglines — machines that resemble toy steam shovels but are as big as movie houses — are brought in, and they steadily scrape everything out of the earth that is in their way.
The process causes horrible erosion, and farmers who have retained the bottomland (which the coal companies don’t want, since it doesn’t bear coal) have found that they can’t work it anymore. The streams there become more prone to flooding, and in some cases silting has filled in the stream beds and caused them to rise. As a result, a farmer who once owned twenty acres of workable bottomland may find that he now owns twelve or thirteen.
A new federal reclamation law requires miners to restore land that is stripped (but not that which was ruined before the law’s enactment), and there have been reports that the larger strippers have been obeying it. But huge segments of the Appalachian environment have been ruined, and some wildcatters are ignoring the rules.
Through widespread underassessment. the coal companies pay far less than their fair share in real-estate and other taxes, thus contributing to the poverty of the region and the inability and disinclination of state and county officials lo provide adequate health and educational programs for the people. In fact, it has been charged that the strip-miners would be happy if there were no people in the mountains at all. Strong backs were once in great demand when coal was taken (as it still is in some places) from deep mines. The coal companies despised the workers, but they needed them; so they tolerated them. Strip-mining can be done by a handful of people; so now the companies think of humans as just additional overburden to be stripped away.
One giant in the field of strip-mining is AMAX, Inc., which used to be known as American Metal Climax, lnc. — an odd name likely to be remembered by New Yorkers who go to and from their Rockefeller Center subway station through the bowels of something called the American Metal Climax Building. AMAX extracts things from the ground in fifteen countries, and not long ago it obtained a lease on some 140,000 acres of southern Appalachian coal holdings from the J.M. Huber Company, a New Jersey firm.
AMAX is a New York corporation, with its headquarters in Greenwich, Conn., and 1977 sales of $1.337 billion. Among the things it likes to take from the earth, besides coal, are copper, iron ore, lead, zinc, molybdenum, tungsten, potash, and platinum. In 1975 Standard Oil of California acquired 20 percent of AMAX’s stock. This is part of a recent trend, born in the energy crisis, in which the petroleum cartel seeks to gain control of other forms of energy as well. In 1975 energy conglomerates owned three of the nation’s top four coal producers.
Then there is phosphate mining, which may turn out to be the worst pestilence of all. Phosphorus is essential to human life. It and potassium and nitrogen form the great triumvirate of soil nutrients; without them, yields are certain to be low. The only known source of phosphorus is phosphate rock, which generally occurs in sedimentary deposits originating with the sea — and 84 percent of the nation’s marketable phosphate rock comes from central and northern Florida and coastal North Carolina.
In addition to agricultural uses, the mineral is added to detergents (except where localities have outlawed it because of the damage caused when it reenters the water supply and produces rampant algae growth), food preservatives, medicines, soft drinks, fuel additives, plastics, and insecticides. It is used in photography. So it’s useful. But phosphate rock classically is strip-mined and getting it out of the ground and through the processing machinery causes dangers and discomforts to the surrounding environment and people. There have been problems with radioactivity, depletion of groundwater supplies, and wholesale destruction of fish and wildlife.
In Florida the “overburden” averages twenty feet in thickness. In North Carolina the draglines must remove about ninety feet of sandy coastal soil before they hit pay dirt. Until fairly recently, when public and governmental pressures caused a change. the ravaged open pits remained after the draglines had moved on, just as they did in the southern mountains once the coal had been taken. According to one estimate, 130,000 acres of land have already been stripped In Florida. As is the case with coal, most mines stripped before the passage of reclamation laws don’t have to be reclaimed.
Phosphate mining is highly capital intensive (in Florida, where most of the mineral in the United States is stripped, only 6,000 people were employed in the process in 1977), and the capital is retained in the hands of relatively large firms having little or no allegiance to the southern environment. Their names are familiar: W R. Grace & Company of New York; Texasgulf of Connecticut; Mobil Oil of New York; Swift Agricultural Chemicals of Chicago; U.S. Steel’s Agri-Chemicals division of Pittsburgh; Borden of New York City; International Minerals and Chemical Corp. of New York; Phillips Petroleum of Bartlesville, Okla.; and Hooker Chemical (of Love Canal disaster fame) of Niagara Falls, N.Y By the 1970s fifteen companies mined more than 95 percent of the nation’s phosphate. Most of it came from strip mines in the South, and most of the companies had their headquarters outside the region.
The environmental and other problems caused by the mining and processing of phosphate are enormous, even when one considers the undisputed value of the mineral. Strip-mining itself is bad enough, but there’s plenty to worry about after the rock is wrenched from the earth and processed into forms that are more efficiently used in agriculture. (Even environmentally minded agriculturists acknowledge that raw phosphate rock, straight from the earth, is vastly inferior to refined versions of the mineral.)
‘Because of underassessment, coal companies pay far less than their fair share of taxes, thus contributing to the poverty of the region. ‘
The processing involves some unwanted side products, among them an impure gypsum with few uses and a gelatinous slime that the industry prefers to think of as “waste phosphatic clays” and which the U.S. Bureau of Mines refers to as a “difficult-to-dispose-of waste material.” The gypsum and slime are impounded in man-made lakes.
Southern phosphate mines use vast quantities of electricity to drive the giant draglines, and they gulp down copious amounts of water. Texasgulf Incorporated, which refers to itself as part of “the natural resources industry,” owns or leases some 35,000 acres near Aurora, N.C, next to the incredibly rich and irreplaceable Pamlico Sound. Tg, as it is known, has its headquarters in Stamford, Conn.
Since 1963, Tg has been going after an estimated 1 .2 billion tons of phosphate near Aurora. most recently with four draglines that look like something out of space-exploration movies. The largest such electrically powered machine weighs 4,435 tons; with each excavation of the rich vein of North Carolina phosphate, its bucket picks up enough payload to fill a twocar garage. It cuts a swath about 150 feet wide and 3,000 feet long. The view from the edge of the strip-mine pit in Aurora is like the view of one of our western canyons, with one important exception: there is no beauty in Aurora, Just an ugly open pit that is far larger than the eye is prepared to behold, next to a blinding white mountain of gypsum waste. Company officials are not reluctant to remind the awed spectator about phosphate’s importance to human life. “It’s not a question of whether you want phosphate mining or not,” said one of them recently while escorting a visitor to the pit. “You’ve got to have it if you want to eat. There’s no substitute for it.”
Water is important to human life, too, however, and the Aurora mine pumps 67 million gallons of it out of the ground each day in order to relieve pressure in the underground aquifer so that the mine may be kept relatively dry. This action has the additional effect of reducing the pressure in the wells of most of Tg’s neighbors, most of them farm families. Some firms might have removed the water with impunity, responding to local complaints with a “Let them drink Coke” attitude, but Tg has accepted responsibility for the lowering of pressure and has replaced about 900 pumps for nearby residents since operations started
There is a great deal more concern about the effects of phosphate mining on the Floridan aquifer in Florida, where population and industrial growth have strained the groundwater system almost to its capacity. And there is an additional threat that is posed by the lakes of colloidal slimes. In Florida the slimes are usually impounded within dikes, which frequently leak and break. The slimes are not chemically poisonous, according to Gene McNeill, an expert with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Atlanta, but “they coat everything that’s in their path and kill that way fish, wildlife, vegetable life, you name it. It has been estimated that it takes three years for a place to recover from one of these breaks.” The Peace River, which flows into the Gulf south of Sarasota, has been hit by at least two score of slime floods. In 1971 one of them released an estimated 1 billion gallons into the river. The slimes had been impounded by the Cities Service Oil Company
Florida has a reclamation law. but as one official of the state’s Department of Environmental Regulation puts it, “Reclaimed’ means different things to different people. You can fill a pit with water and call it a lake — Some of them put signs on the dams around the slime ponds that say ’Reclamation Project.’ It looks good from the road, but on the other side it’s just slime.
And that’s not all. There are forty-one petitions now pending before the secretary of the interior for phosphate strip-mining rights in the Osceola National Forest in northernmost Florida — the Florida Audubon Society says that one-third of the forest will be destroyed — and there are few encouraging signs that the land and its water and wildlife and future will not be turned over to the exploiters from outside. But in the long run even this may be less important than the problem of radiation.
In Florida’s phosphate deposit, there is radioactive material — from 0.1 to 0.4 pound of it per ton. The EPA’s Gene McNeil! says that the slurry water used to carry the gypsum by-product around the mine site is “highly contaminated” with a number of potentially dangerous products, among them “high levels of radium.” Although the effects, if any, of the mixture on the underground water table are unknown, “they’re highly suspect,” McNeil! says. “And if Floridan aquifer gets contaminated, that’s it for Florida’s water supply”
Additional radioactive material, says McNeill, enters the above ground environment through a procedure that phosphate miners use to dry the rock. This problem, along with most of the others, could quite likely be solved through changes in production techniques. some of them already developed experimentally by the miners themselves. But there appears to be little effort in that direction when a government agency such as the EPA makes such a proposal. “They resent being told to do it,” said McNeill.
Radiation is a special problem on Florida land that has been mined and then “reclaimed,’’ according to studies conducted by Florida and the EPA scientists. One of those studies reported that reclaimed areas had radiation levels higher than those set by the U.S. surgeon general for uranium miners. And an amazing document from the EPA in 1976 reported a link among phosphate mining, radiation, lung cancer — and Florida architecture.
Central Florida houses are typically built on concrete slabs poured directly on the ground. Where homes have been constructed on reclaimed phosphate-mine land. a radioactive gas known as radon- 222, a descendant of decaying uranium, bubbles up through the soil that has been stirred by the “reclamation” process. It enters the homes and lungs of the residents.
“Radon is known to cause cancer,’’ says Gene McNeill. “Living in some of those places is just like being in a uranium mine.” One proposed solution is to improve ventilation by constructing crawl spaces between the houses’ foundations and their living surfaces. The EPA has estimated that Floridians who wanted to reduce their exposure to radiation by 40 to 80 percent could so so, but that the modifications would add from $450 to $5,250 to the value of each new home over the life of the mortgage.
The southern environment — and especially that most vulnerable portion of it that is situated high in the forested mountains or along the rich, warm “low country” — is being threatened by another form of outside exploitation, one that would seem to be well removed from the dangers of radon-222 and colloidal slimes. Here the threats come from green, groomed golf courses and architecturally pleasing homes: from brochures promising the good and secure life: from fantasies about the deep, soft powder of Appalachian ski slopes.
Developers, many of them harboring no more appreciation of the southern environment than a phosphate stripper has, have descended on the region’s coast and mountains in droves, ruining the lives of those who were there first and closing off whole islands to the general public, which rightfully should own them. The desecrations are most easily seen, of course, in Florida, where land development has practically become a synonym for fraud and where one-quarter of the state’s wetlands has been lost to “development” in the last two decades. But other parts of the South, as well, have come under more recent attack by the developers.
The pitch now is a bit more sophisticated than it once was. Just as hustlers of everything from toothpaste to hair dye have latched onto the word natural as a spurious device for selling their products. the developers offer the buyers of condominiums and second homes a piece of imagined ecology along with their real estate. Builders have been instructed to leave a few trees standing around when they finish their houses. The development companies bestow on their creations such names as “Quail Hollow” and “Fiddler’s Ridge” and “Smoke Rise.” The advertising brochures are low-key and, in the case of the coastline, are filled with photographs of lush palmetto trees, egrets, deer, loggerhead turtles, and salt marshes — all of them backdrops for the implicit claim that human beings with plenty of money and a modicum of good taste can and should live or vacation comfortably in such surroundings, despite increasing evidence that it is inordinately stupid to attempt to build permanent structures along the ocean, and further evidence that when the second homes go up, the egrets, turtles, marshes and almost everything else will go away.
The condominium islands off South Carolina have become so exclusive that ordinary coastal people who traditionally have thought of the beach as the property of everyone in general and no one in particular, have lost access to it. A state planner commented not long ago that ’’it’s gotten so you almost have to go to the Holiday Inn to get to the beach.”
The southern mountains. which look like a good approximation of eternity but are actually among the most delicate of the nation’s regions, are under similar attack from the developers. These mountains are among the last few places in the continental United States where one can really “get away” on foot and truly be responsible for one’s own survival. Although they have been clear-cut by the lumber companies and disemboweled by the coal miners there is still enough left to make them a national treasure. But they may not last long.
Snow, once thought of as a wintertime nuisance in the highlands of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, has been rediscovered there, and ski resorts have been carved out of the mountainsides. Often they serve as little more than come ons for inadequately designed condominium developments that wreck the balance of the mountains’ resources and reduce the independent, self-reliant hill people to squadrons of motel chambermaids and parking-lot attendants.
Western North Carolina, which so far has escaped the worst of the coal miners’ draglines, appears to be the most affected by the developers’ bulldozers. Ski-condominium communities with fancy names in the North Carolina mountains often end up, their critics charge, as examples of low quality construction that produce air and water pollution and a great deal of erosion and place enormous strains on the social and physical resources of financially strapped local governments.
The knife is twisted even further, in the estimation of many in the mountains, by the fact that a unique federal-state agency that is supposed to be helping the region is, instead, promoting its continued ruination by outsiders. The agency is the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), created in 1965 by Congress to help build a self-sustaining economy and to provide “the health and skills needed by Appalachians to compete in the economic life of the nation wherever they choose to live.” It seems to be putting most of its resources behind a plan to construct a 3,000-mile system of mountain highways.
“The Appalachian Regional Commission is trying to centralize the population.” says John Burris, a staff member of Save Our Cumberland Mountains. Inc., a Tennessee organization whose primary commitment is the fight against strip-mining. “The ARC wants to bring everybody together out of the mountains, ostensibly so they can provide the services better and easier. But what that does is clear the way for mining and extractive industries and other forms of development.”
In matters of the physical environment, it is almost possible to understand — though certainly not to excuse — northern industries’ despoliations on the grounds that they are just acting as American businesses have always acted. Despite the pretty words that run through their annual reports and the institutional ad drivel about loving the environment and being responsible corporate citizens, most of these businesses lack anything that could pass for a conscience or a set of moral values. In their frenzies to extract what’s under the overburden, they are like that premier symbol of our popular culture, the shark, reacting involuntarily to the smell of food. No moral decisions are necessary. or even possible, before the kill.
It’s a little different, though, with the exploitation of the southern worker. Here human lives are immediately at stake. Radiation from phosphate mines may be a problem, even a lethal one, at some future time, but paying a living wage is a problem that occurs right now. It is a fact of American life that many northern industries are in the South right now because they know that they can get by without paying a decent wage. And it is another fact that persons and institutions of power in the South-state and local governments, chambers of commerce, banks, courts, regulatory boards — routinely assist the exploiters in evading this most basic obligation.
Just as the coal was stripped away and the ugly pit left to disfigure the land, the southern worker is raked over, cheated out of a decent wage, sometimes robbed of his or her health, and then cast aside, often without decent workmen’s compensation or a pension. The one remedy that could go a great distance toward curing this situation — the organizing of southern workers into unions — is fought like the Godless Communist Conspiracy by southern industry, southern money, and southern governments. However, some southerners see southern industry, money, and government and northern exploitation as being interlocking and interchangeable — as being, in themselves, the conspiracy.
In their opinion, this “conspiracy” succeeds because of a number of interrelated factors that are endemic to the latter-day South: Largely because of that other civil war, the region has been an impoverished, developing nation within the larger American society — pathetically grateful for any job opportunities that come along. Because of the much-heralded Sunbelt boom of recent years, the South’s position has been improving. But whole sections of the population and geography remain economically retarded.
Southern workers are different from many others. They do, by and large, believe in giving a day’s work for a day’s pay And they do, by and large, regard unionism with some apprehension. Because the labor movement has never before taken the time to understand the southern worker, he and she have never been able to understand that unionism doesn’t have to be the Teamsters or a rest home for shiftless bureaucrats — that it can be what they decide it should be.
Jim Sessions, a Texas preacher’s son (and a Methodist minister himself), is the director of Southerners for Economic Justice, an organization which hopes, among other things, that a new and better brand of unionism will evolve in the South. ’’It used to be that the textile workers’ union would bring in Yankee organizers,” he said not long ago at his home near Knoxville, “and they wouldn’t understand at all the role that religion plays in this area, or the cultural differences, the southern loyalties, the southern exclusivism that people hold so dear to their hearts — the parochialism, the isolation — especially in the mountains and in the rural mill towns. An ’outsider’ could be somebody from another family or the next county. Certainly a New Yorker would be an outsider.”
Because southern workers are different and come from a background of poverty, the exploiters pay less and get away with it. In the spring of 1978, the average hourly wage for southeastern workers was $4.89, while nationally it was $6.03. As might be expected, southern unionism is similarly encumbered: about 14 percent of the southern work force is unionized, a little more than half the rate for the nation as a whole. In North Carolina, the least unionized state in the nation (but the one with the fourth-highest rate of worker productivity), the rate is less than 7 percent.
Despite overwhelming evidence that a number of southern state and local governments don’t need to parade around like five-dollar hookers, offering anything at any price to northern industries that want to move south, they continue to do so. South Carolina is the bawdiest. “We Don’t Have Labor Pains,” says one of its ads in the Wall Street Journal (the picture shows a hard hat with a daisy in his mouth). Counties there routinely exempt new industries from taxes for periods ranging from three to ten years. And the state is a leader in establishing vocational and technical colleges to manufacture semi-educated workers to the precise specifications of industry. The practice is widespread in the region — Arkansas advertises a “free industrial training program!” for businesses as if it were a premium on a box of corn flakes.
Similar sacrifices may be in the offing for the physical environment of the South. The region was not exempt from the recent national tide of concern over ecological matters. Southern legislatures passed stronger laws dealing with pollution and destructive development, and “new South” governors made long speeches about the inviolate nature of the fields and streams. Now, however, the experts fear a backlash.
John De Grove, the director of the Joint Center for Environmental and Urban Problems of Florida Atlantic and International universities, says that he notices that some politicians in his state, which lately has become one of the South’s most environmentally minded, have begun to talk about “competing” with other southern states for business by “giving them economic incentives.”
“I thought we were beyond all that in Florida,” said De Grove, “and here it comes clean out of the woodwork. I’m afraid the next step will be to say, ’We’ve got to relax all these unreasonable environmental laws.’”
When decisions are made about the South, they never reflect the thinking of organized labor and rarely the feelings of working people. A “Commission on the Future of the South” was established a few years ago, and none of its nineteen members had anything to do with labor. Instead, they were representatives of business, education, insurance, law, and allied fields.
A major result of this exploitation of the southern worker, says Michael Russell, codirector, with Gloria Bentley, of Southerners for Economic Justice in Greenville, S.C., is that “working people here are little better off than serfs. I don’t mean slaves, in the sense that their bodies are owned, but they’re certainly like tenant farmers and sharecroppers.”
Russell frequently encounters southerners who remember the way things were many years ago, when industry — particularly the textile industry — was “a real messiah” for the impoverished South. It was a paternalistic industry; often the mill owners knew the workers by name. All that has virtually disappeared now
“I met a lady in Clinton,” said Russell, “who grew up with the man who’s now president of the mill where she works. She went to school with him and everything. And the lady’s got a classic case of byssinosis-brown lung disease, the disease that is connected with cotton dust. We were talking about going after brown lung benefits, and the first thing she wanted to know was whether, if she did apply, it would hurt this fellow who runs the company.
“And as we talked, I asked her some questions. I said, ’Does he give you a pension?’
“No.”
“Does he pay your social security?’
“No.”
“Well,” I asked, “what do you have from the mill?’
“Well,” she said, “I have this breathing problem.”
The woman’s fate unfortunately is shared by great numbers of southerners, especially those employed in the textile industry, where 10 to 30 percent of the workers are likely to be stricken by brown lung disease. It is a fate that is routinely ignored by the government and by the great movers and shakers of our society — the same people who rush to protect a creature on the endangered-species list. The woman has a few good people on her side — the Brown Lung Association for one, and Southerners for Economic Justice for another — but she doesn’t have the resources needed to fight back herself against the thing that has crippled her. Many other southerners, though, are fighting back, and they are telling the Yankee exploiter to take his nineteenth-century philosophies and brutalizing draglines and stick them where the southern sun doesn’t shine.
Sometimes the opposition takes the form of a little classical harassment, of the sort that southerners seem to excel at. The mayor of Selma, Ala., didn’t like the idea of trains carrying hazardous freight through his town on bad tracks; so he parked police cars and fire trucks across the tracks until the railroad promised to fix them.
In some cases, though not enough, southern political leaders have summoned their courage and declared that whoring for northern industry isn’t really necessary at all. Largely because Florida has served for so long as everybody’s horrible example of what senseless development can do, it has become one of the South’s leaders in legislation involving the environment and growth management.
A great deal of fervent opposition comes from those who are trying to promote organized labor in the South, and in the process they seem to be creating what some southerners hope is a new form of unionism-what Bob Hall, the young editor of the quarterly Southern Exposure, refers to as a desire “to make it happen better than it did in the North — to start all over again, and do it right.” Hall and others feel that the current effort in the textile industry is the first hesitant step in that direction
James Sala, the southern regional director of the AFL-CIO, acknowledges that organized labor has been slow to understand that the southern worker is different, but he thinks that those days are ending. “You’ve never seen a more beautiful sight in your life than these people standing up and becoming more militant,” he said, “even some of them who were viciously anti-union before. I’m convinced that it’s a lot harder to be a good union person down here than anyplace else. These people have been fired and tempered, and when they reach that point when they finally become union people, it’s because they believe in it.”
At the moment, though. most of the militancy and opposition, most of the South’s troops in this second civil war, come out of the old tradition of ordinary people organizing around issues that threaten their lives and homes. The members of Save Our Cumberland Mountains, of Jacksboro. Tenn., are doing this; much of their work involves producing solid research that proves the case they’re making and that influences others to make less-destructive decisions about what happens to the Cumberlands. A handful of people in the tiny Tennessee community of Piney, using the same weapons, successfully fought off a plan by AMAX to strip-mine them into oblivion.
It is similar old-fashioned hard work, including bake sales and house tours, that has saved the lush rolling pastureland of Green Springs, Va., at least temporarily, from the draglines of W R. Grace & Company. And the person behind the bake sales and house tours in Rae Ely, a young woman who drives around Green Springs in a white Mercedes and who owns, with her husband, a retired military man, a Tuscan mansion in the midst of English hunt country
When Grace discovered vermiculite — a mineral used chiefly in agriculture and industry — in Green Springs, it did what industry ordinarily does. It convinced the politicians and zoning officials in Louisa County that strip-mining would be good for the economy. It promised to reclaim the holes that it dug. It gained a toehold by purchasing some land from a family at a price so low that the company bragged about it in its 1977 annual report. And then it approached other landowners. That s Ely’s version of the operation. A Grace spokesman says that “our people are reluctant to discuss” the controversy.
Ely and a number of other Green Springs homeowners, most of them women, started fighting back. (They had had some previous organizational experience in resisting the construction of a state prison nearby.) They lobbied successfully for the area’s designation as a national historic site. Ely hired an airplane, flew over Grace’s South Carolina plant, and came back with color slides of a strip-mining operation that looked like a moonscape. The women collected evidence that true reclamation of their land, beyond the most superficial cover-up, was impossible. They literally held bake sales and house tours to raise money for their legal and other expenses. They bought stock in Grace and went to the stockholders’ meetings and made nuisances of themselves. And, like the folks who are trying to save the Cumberland Mountains, they did their homework, made sure their research was correct, convinced the press and others of their authenticity and reliability.
They had some formidable enemies. The state of Virginia says Ely, “is so industry hungry that it will sell its soul for anything.” And a lot of her fellow southerners, she thinks, are “gullible and vulnerable” in such matters. “I think southerners have been too easygoing,” she said. “They’ve been trusting.” It helped that she had lived other places, including the industrial Northeast, and had seen what unregulated exploitation could do.
W R. Grace itself was an obstacle, but not so big an impediment as one might expect. “It’s been clumsy and stupid,” said Ely “It gives us our real advantage. If you can analyze a problem, you can find a way to equalize your weight. It is so big and so rich and so powerful that it’s inflexible. It can’t move. It can’t think because it has a collective thought process.
“We can make a decision in five minutes and implement it. We can react instantly. It takes Grace weeks to get something through its bureaucratic structure. And as a result, in a way, it’s at a disadvantage.” W R. Grace & Company has, for the moment at least, postponed its plans to strip-mine Green Springs, Va.
The people who don’t want Green Springs strip-mined, however, are not relaxing. They’re still doing research and lobbying and raising money in old-fashioned ways. “We still have the bake sales, and we still open our houses, and we still have pig roasts.” said Rae Ely not long ago.
We roast two-hundred-pound hogs for eighteen hours. We’ve had as many as eight hogs going at a time. and we have bluegrass music and everything. We don t raise a lot of money, but it helps. Woman’s work is never done in Green Springs.
