Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  “What do you think the future will be like?” I ask.

  “Pretty bad,” Hechler answers. “Getting worse. You know, I was very active in the civil-rights movement. We had a period in our history when I thought we were going upward. Working for Harry Truman was a great thrill because he never allowed anybody to take a poll. He said that polls give you a temporary snapshot of perhaps ill-informed public opinion that hasn’t been corrected through education, but they don’t tell you the difference between justice and injustice. That was his moral compass when he was deciding whether to sign or veto a bill. He was way ahead of his time on civil rights, so at that time I was very optimistic about the future of the nation, but I’m sorry to say that I’m not optimistic now.”

  Joe and I made our way through the underbrush up the slope of Blair Mountain with Kenny King. King is part of a group that is trying to save the mountain, slated to be destroyed for its coal seams. Blair was the site of the largest civil uprising and armed insurgency in the United States since the Civil War. In late August and early September 1921, as many as fifteen thousand armed miners, angered by a series of assassinations of union leaders and their chief supporters, as well as mass evictions, blacklists, and wholesale firings by coal companies, for five days faced militias and police, who were equipped with heavy machine guns and held back advancing miners from behind a trench system still visible on the ridge above us.

  At the time of the uprising, thousands of miners and their families, thrown out of company housing because of union activity, were living in tent encampments along the Tug River. The incident that would set off the rebellion happened on May 19, 1920. Agents from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency—hired company goons referred to derisively by the miners as “gun thugs”—arrived in the town of Matewan to evict miners and their families from company houses. The local sheriff, Sid Hatfield, had turned down the usual coal company enticements to turn against the union. When Hatfield now tried to arrest the company-hired agents, a gun battle broke out, leaving ten dead, including Matewan’s mayor.60 Hatfield was indicted on murder charges but was acquitted in January 1921, which infuriated the mine owners. They had Hatfield charged after his acquittal with dynamiting a coal tipple. When Hatfield and his young wife, as well as deputy and friend Ed Chambers and his wife, walked up the courthouse steps in Welch for the new trial, they were assassinated by a group of Baldwin-Felts agents standing at the top of the stairs.61 The killings triggered the armed rebellion, with many of the Winchester rifles and handguns allegedly supplied by the United Mine Workers Union. The coal operators hastily organized militias and hired private planes to drop homemade explosives on the miners. General Billy Mitchell sent Army bombers to carry out aerial surveillance of the miners. It was only when the U.S. Army was ordered into the coalfields that the miners gave up. By the time the five days of shooting ended, perhaps one hundred miners were dead. The state of West Virginia indicted 1,217 miners for complicity in the rebellion, including charges of murder and treason. Many miners spent several years in prison. The union was effectively broken. It was not reconstituted until 1935, when the Roosevelt administration legalized union organizing.62

  The physical eradication of Blair Mountain, part of the methodical destruction of southern West Virginia, will obliterate not only a peak, but also one of the most important physical memorials to the long struggle for justice. The battle marked a moment when miners came close to breaking the stranglehold of the coal companies. And its neglected slopes, soon perhaps to be blasted into rubble, are a reminder of the relentless assault of corporations.

  Kenny King searches for evidence of the Battle of Blair Mountain.

  “The mountains that have been destroyed still exist in the mind of God,” novelist Denise Giardina said at the memorial service in Beckley for the fiery activist Judy Bonds, who died at fifty-eight of cancer:

  I said that as a way of addressing my own grief about what we have lost. Perhaps the most disheartening thing in this struggle against mountaintop removal is not the power of the coal industry. It is that if President Obama should issue a proclamation this very afternoon saying that mountaintop removal would no longer be allowed, we would still have lost five hundred mountains, mountains that aren’t coming back. And yet. And yet I said that years ago, and I repeat it today. Those mountains still exist in the mind of God. Wherever God is, those mountains are. And our friend Judy Bonds, whose loss we grieve today, still exists in the mind of God. Wherever God is, Judy is. She is surely among those lovely mountains she fought so hard to protect. And where those mountains are now, where Judy is, no coal company can reach.

  How many thousands of lives were lost in these mines and hollers for profit? How many families were left after mine accidents without fathers, sons and brothers? How many miners suffered and choked to death from black lung disease so shareholders and coal owners could enjoy a life of luxury and opulence? How many of the poor here have died of cancer? How many mountains have to be destroyed to make a few people rich? And why did we let them do it?

  In a small coal museum in Madison, West Virginia, Joe and I find a copy of a note taken from the body of Jacob L. Vowell, who died in a mine explosion on May 19, 1902. He was the husband of Ellen and the father of Elbert and four other children. The explosion took the lives of one hundred and eighty-four miners.

  “Ellen, darling, goodbye for us both,” the shaky handwriting reads. “Elbert said the Lord has saved him. We are all praying for air to support us, but it is getting so bad without air. Ellen, I want you to live right and come to heaven. Raise the children the best you can. Oh How I wish to be with you, goodbye. Bury me and Elbert in the same grave by little Eddy. Goodbye. Ellen, goodbye Lily, goodbye Jemmie, goodbye Horace. Is 25 minutes after two. There is a few of us alive yet. Jake and Elbert. Oh God for one more breath. Ellen remember me as long as you live. Goodbye darling.”

  4

  DAYS OF SLAVERY

  Immokalee, Florida

  In America today we are seeing a race to the bottom, the middle class is collapsing, poverty is increasing. What I saw in Immokalee is the bottom in the race to the bottom.

  —SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS

  Hoping for work in the La Fiesta parking lot, Immokalee, Florida.

  RODRIGO ORTIZ, A TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD FARMWORKER—A SHORT man in a tattered baseball cap and soiled black pants that are too long—stands forlornly in the half-light in front of the La Fiesta Supermarket on South 3rd Street in Immokalee, Florida. He is waiting for work in the tomato fields. Ortiz is on the lowest rung of the $50 billion, labor-intensive fresh produce industry in the United States.1 The supermarket, which opens at 3:30 A.M. to sell tacos to the workers, is a whitewashed, single-story cement block building. Workers inside the supermarket, which has brightly colored piñatas hanging from the ceiling and ads in Spanish for MoneyGram International and prepaid phone cards, are lined up before a grill, where two short-order cooks scrape their spatulas noisily on the greasy metal griddle covered with frying strips of beef.

  On the walls outside the front door, where knots of workers congregate, are painted the words Check Cashing, Grocery, Carnicería, Taquería, Panadería, and Tortillería, along with a sign posted by the Collier County Sheriff’s Office: “Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages in public is a violation of county ordinance. Violators will be prosecuted.”

  The parking lot is jammed with a few hundred workers seeking a day’s employment—referred to in Spanish as el labor—from crew leaders who operate school buses painted white and blue with logos such as “P. Cardenas Harvesting,” “Antonio Juarez & Sons New Generation,” and “Efrain Juarez and Sons.” Diesel fumes from the running bus engines fill the air. Groups of men and a few women, speaking softly in Spanish and Creole, cluster on the asphalt or sit at picnic tables. Roosters crow as the first light of dawn appears above the flat, dull horizon. Crew leaders have backed up pickup trucks to a large ice machine on the wall of the supermarket. They take turns shoveling ice into ten-gallon p
lastic orange containers. They lug the containers to the trucks. The pickers carry the water from the melted ice into the sweltering, humid fields, where temperatures soar to 90 degrees and above.

  Harvesting tomatoes and other produce from the nation’s agricultural fields is arguably the worst job in the country.2 Florida produces about forty percent of the nation’s fresh domestic tomatoes.3 There are weeks with no work and no wages. Once it starts to rain, field-workers are packed onto the buses and sent home. They can travel one or two hours on a bus and be prevented from beginning work for a few more hours because of the dew on the plants. Workers must bend over plants for hours in blazing temperatures. They are exposed to toxic chemicals and pesticides. They often endure verbal and physical abuse from crew leaders. Women suffer sexual harassment. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the agriculture industry has a death rate seven times higher than the average rate of most industries.4 The meager pay, along with endemic wage theft and systemic minimum wage violations, keep at least 30 percent of workers below the poverty line.5

  The average annual income for farmworkers is between $10,000 and $12,499, according to the 2005 Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey, about a third of the national average.6 A laborer must pick almost two-and-a-quarter tons of tomatoes a day to earn minimum wage. This is twice what they had to pick thirty years ago for the same amount of money.7 Half the people in Immokalee live below the poverty line. Two-thirds of the children who enter kindergarten never graduate from high school.8 And on any one morning as many as half of the laborers who wait in the collection spots walk away without a job.

  Ortiz is not fortunate. The last buses leave by 7:00 A.M. He walks forlornly to the overcrowded trailer he shares with nine other men. He worries that this week he may not get the $50 he needs to pay his landlord.9

  “Esta semana solo trabajé tres días”—“I only had three days of work this week,” Ortiz says. “I don’t know how I will pay my rent.”

  Ortiz sends about $100 home to Mexico every month to support elderly parents. He hovers between impoverishment and homelessness, never sure when he is going to be pushed over the line.

  Waiting to be taken to the fields.

  The food supply chain reaches from the squalid trailer parks and fields upward to the lavish suites of a handful of global corporations, such as Walmart, which buys tens of millions of pounds of tomatoes a year. Chains such as McDonald’s or Burger King, along with supermarkets such as Walmart, Giant, Stop & Shop, Trader Joe’s, and Publix, have the purchasing power of tens of thousands of restaurants.

  “Walmart makes farmworkers poor,” read a recent statement from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an organization that advocates on behalf of farmworkers. “But not just Walmart—all the major retail food brands that have grown at meteoric rates over the past thirty years have used the same volume purchasing strategy to drive their profits and growth at the expense of the workers who make that growth possible.”10

  The United Food and Commercial Workers, in a report titled “Ending Wal-Mart’s Rural Stranglehold,” quoted John Tyson of Tyson Foods, Inc., who, when confronted by an activist farmer on the low price paid for meat to the farm, answered: “Walmart’s the problem. They dictate the price to us and we have no choice but to pay you less.”11

  The suppliers and growers, beset by the rising costs of pesticides, fertilizer, and chemicals, along with the diesel fuel that runs their farm equipment and pumping stations, have few other ways to save money. In 1992, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, the farm share of the U.S. consumer dollar spent on tomatoes was 40.8 percent.12 This meant that nearly half of every dollar spent at the cash register went back to the farmer. By 2000, that number had proportionally dropped to one-fifth.13 Growers have lost half of their share of the retail price to the retailers. Wages in the fields have remained stagnant over the past three decades, and in real terms have declined.

  David Sanchez, missing several teeth and wearing a brown camouflage baseball cap that reads “Air Force,” waits in the lot outside the supermarket for work. Sanchez is fifty-five, considerably older than most field-workers. He came to Immokalee from Texas as a child with his parents and nine siblings. They lived in work camps in the fields. The children accompanied their parents to the fields.

  He bears the scars of the fields, including a bad back—a common ailment among workers, who spend up to twelve hours a day bent over plants and ferrying thirty-two-pound buckets of green tomatoes to a waiting truck.

  “The worst is when you lift that plastic mulch,” he says in English, of the rows of plastic that cover the tomato beds. “You pick up that plastic and you can’t even breathe. It burns your eyes. You be cryin’ all day long. Sometimes they give you a paper mask, but the fumes go right through it. The fumes knock you out.”

  The arid, sandy soil in southern Florida is devoid of plant nutrients. Growers saturate the soil with chemical fertilizers. More than one hundred herbicides and pesticides are used to prevent fungal diseases, weeds, disease spores, and nematodes. These chemicals often accompany the produce to supermarket shelves. Some are highly toxic, known to cause damage to the brain and nervous systems. But they are effective in the relentless war against the rapacious armies of potato, flea, and blister beetles, along with vine borers, squash bugs, spider mites, stinkbugs, loopers, and hornworms. Growers can spend about $2,000 an acre on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They often fumigate rows before planting with methyl bromide, a chemical that even in small concentrations can cause death in humans and is one of the leading causes of the depletion of the ozone layer. Methyl bromide is banned for use on most crops but is permitted on tomatoes, strawberries, eggplants, and peppers. It is injected into the tomato beds and trapped under a layer of green polyethylene plastic mulch.14 Workers such as Sanchez, who have to lift up the mulch, routinely complain of eye and respiratory ailments, rashes, open sores, nausea, and headaches.15 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health show that upward of twenty thousand farmworkers suffer from acute pesticide poisoning every year.16

  USDA studies found traces of thirty-five pesticides on conventionally grown fresh tomatoes for sale in the United States. As Barry Estabrook notes, three of those chemicals found in high concentration are “known carcinogens, six are neurotoxins, fourteen are endocrine disruptors, and three cause reproduction problems and birth defects.”17 Tomatoes are harvested before they are ripe. They are gassed in packing plants with ethylene into an artificial ripeness.18 By the time the tomato reaches the dinner plate, as Estabrook points out in his book Tomatoland, it is largely devoid of taste, robbed of most core nutrients, and carrying residues of poison. The rapid turnover of workers in the fields, which can be as high as forty percent a year, has made it hard to track the effects of the chemicals and the pesticides on those who harvest the plants. But anecdotal evidence points to severe health impairments, including high rates of cancer.

  Sanchez rubs his right hand up and down his left forearm.

  “Pretty soon your arm hair falls out,” he says. “You go home and you have to use Clorox to get the green dust off your skin and out of your hair. You sneeze all day long. You can’t get that smell out of you.

  “We know we are not supposed to be workin’ when they spray,” he says. “We all have to watch a video that shows workers wearing protective gloves. We sign a paper saying we know the regulations, but every time the growers spray around us and break the regulations we don’t say nothin’. We need the job. I don’t complain. If I complained then the next day I wouldn’t have a job.”

  Sanchez stands next to the crew leader, Rudy Rivera, a friend who often gives him work. Rivera owns an old school bus repainted blue and white, with worn brown vinyl seats, and the words R. Rivera Harvesting on the side. The top halves of the windows by each seat are open. Most of the workers inside are asleep, heads tilted back and mouths agape. Rivera ticks off
his bus expenses: “$7,000 to buy it, $9,000 to paint it, $4,000 for insurance, $370 for tires, $30 a day for diesel.

  “I usually look for men who are around eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years old,” he says. “When there is heavy work I don’t take women. They can’t do it. When we lay the plastic or we have to shovel, I want men. When you lay down the sticks and use the air hammer, I want men. I only use women when I do the planting and picking.”

  Rivera came to the United States from Mexico at the age of fourteen with an uncle who helped shepherd him across the border.

  “We walked for fifteen days,” he says. “I had huge blisters on my feet. I was cryin’ and cryin’. I told my uncle to let me go down to the highway and go home. He refused to let me go. He told me to be a man.”

  Rivera started work in the fields as a boy. He was caught five years later by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and deported.

  “When I showed up at my house, my mother burst into tears,” he says of his return to Mexico. “She hadn’t heard from me in five years. She didn’t know if I was alive. Then I crossed the border again and went back to work.”

  Rivera is one of the crew leaders for B. F. Stanford, a small farmer who has been in Florida for nearly five decades. Joe and I drive out early one morning to Stanford’s property. Stanford, sixty-eight, sits in the cab of a pickup truck with the window rolled down. It is early in the day, but in the intense Florida humidity the air is already oppressive. Nestled amid the breaks in the fields are fifty white beehives, rented each year so the bees will pollinate the crops. A handful of egrets, spoonbills, and pink flamingos flock around the edges of the irrigation canals. Stanford says he hangs on financially by his fingertips. His son, who worked for many years with a large grower, has recently returned to help his father. They scoff at the idea of cracking down on undocumented farm help, saying no farm would be able to stay in business. The economic downturn has seen a rash of thefts on the farms, from diesel fuel to the equipment locked in sheds. Stanford was robbed last season when the lock on his shed was cut one night and his equipment stolen.