John Henry

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 03:16 PM 10/7/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Keynes'   *in the long run we are all dead* notwithstanding, in the long
term there will be a business downturn even in the U.S. Then the
hoodwinking of the people about the amazing length of the boom , the
unprecedented, uninterrupted growth of the GDP will come home to roost. It
will be the stupid economy , instead of the economy, stupid. The class
struggle will heat up and the revolution will be thorough, more thorough
this time than the last, if we can unite the working class for struggle and
winning based on the concrete analysis of concrete events in the short term.
>
>John Henry

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 18, 1996

LEGACY OF JOHN HENRY, THE HAMMER MAN

BYLINE: Robert Tabscott

John Henry was just a little baby
Sittin' on his mammy's knee,
Said the Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O Road
Is gonna be the death of me, O, Lawd
Gonna be the death of me.

The history of the Big Bend Tunnel and the legend of the hammer man John
Henry are deeply embedded in the history of the American labor movement.

Brett Williams, who first gathered the various fragments of the Henry
legend describes the West Virginia tunnel: "Half a mile west of Talcott,
the Greenbrier River bends sharply southward, meandering 10 miles through
some of the most rugged landscape in the country, and returns to a point
only a little more than a mile from the beginning of the bend, thus giving
rise to the name Big Bend."

In laying out the track bed, the engineers could either follow the twisting
contours along the river or tunnel a mile and a quarter through the
mountain, a mammoth, dangerous undertaking. They decided to tunnel.

Construction began in 1869 and was completed in the autumn of 1872. Big
Bend Tunnel is not one of the great tunnels of the world, but is considered
a feat of extraordinary genius and skill. Construction meant blasting and
digging a channel through treacherous, shifting, hard red shale. At the
time, the area was a wild and desolate frontier wilderness, accessible only
by crude, rock-strewn paths and a narrow, twisting road.

Safety standards do not appear to have been a priority for railroad
officials who oversaw the operation. Fatalities among the tunnel workers
were astonishingly high.

Accidents resulting from bungled blasting methods and falling rocks were
common. It has been estimated that as many as 1,000 laborers, men and boys,
perished during the three-year construction of the tunnel. The dead were
buried unceremoniously in makeshift pits near the portals at both ends of
the mountain and were covered with rocks.

Construction chiefs are reported to have recruited their work force from
recently emancipated slaves and Civil War pariahs and transported them to
work sites such as Big Bend. Once recruited it was virtually impossible to
break free, or, as a later ballad would put it, "They owed their souls to
the company store."

Consequently, it was at Big Bend where a surging laboring man's
self-consciousness ran up against the monstrous power of the industrial
revolution. It was in the tunnel, amid these terrible conditions, that the
drama of John Henry achieved its ultimate expression.

Before I let your steam drill beat me down
Gonna die with my hammer in my hand,
Lawd, Lawd,
Die with my hammer in my hand."

The appearance of the steam drill set the stage for the contest between man
and machine. Some versions of the ballad of John Henry label the hero a
hammerin' fool. Others suggest that barely out of slavery and with no place
to go, the gandy dancer took a stand to save his job and his soul, standin'
down the steam-drillin' machine.

John Henry was a gandy dancer, a hammer man, which meant that his task on
the work gangs was driving steel drills into Big Bend's hard, red-shale
face, the first step in the planting of the nitroglycerin explosives. The
gandy man worked with a partner, a "shaker" or a "turner" whose task it was
to rotate the drill after each blow to prevent debris from clogging the
hole and the bit. Drivers used hundreds of drills every day. It was
dangerous, arduous, back-breaking work. Six hammer men working 12-hour
shifts needed a full day to bore enough holes for just one blast, which in
its occurrence advanced the heading by only 10 feet.

John Henry posed the essential question, as machines do more and more of
our work and in the process threaten to dehumanize us, "Can we survive
human? Whole?"

This is the truth embodied in the John Henry legend: That man, the maker of
wondrous mechanical things, is indeed more wondrous than the thin gs he
makes; that a man who ain't nothin' but a man is worthy of supreme dignity.

Though the railroad brought undisputable progress, it also became a hotbed
of anti-industrial sentiment. Workers were frequently poorly paid and
ill-treated, and the company towns that sprung up around the railroad,
mining, milling, chemical and textile enterprises were frequently the
center of conflicted attitudes of dependence and resentment, which often
resulted in labor wars. Examples of such controlled communities remain at
National City and Sauget.

It was at Big Bend Tunnel that the drama of the end of slavery, the
exuberance of emancipation and the meaning of the Constitution found
expression in the hammers of John Henry. At such places the evolution of
the black ballad was consummated, a sacred statement that slaves would not
internalize their master's conception of them as less than human. They saw
themselves as chosen, noble and destined. And so they were. Confrontation
was inevitable.

As history evolves, John Henry frames the meaning and struggle of workers.
Life with its accidents, its camp brawls, its murders and isolation made an
unforgettable impression on the workers who came to the great mountain to
puncture it. The black laborers, only a few years out of slavery, unweaned
from old superstitions, needed a story to hold them against the horrors of
their experience.

Who won the contest between John Henry and the steam machine? Some ballads
claim that John Henry, on his 12-hour shift, drove his hammers 14 feet
while the steam drill measured only nine.

One of the songs claims that John Henry died as a result of the contest,
"Hammered himself to death." But no matter. For, as the story goes, John
Henry had to die for the cause of freedom; but it was a noble death, and
subsequently those who heard the song came to believe that the old gandy
dancer's ghost haunted not only Big Bend Tunnel but labor camps across the
nation.

It was Henry's indomitable courage and passion that lived on in song. The
determination of the working man and woman who defied dehumanization, even
death, in the tunnels, the mines, the factories, the sweatshops, the
railroads, the sharecropper fields, those who fought for the union and
inspired ensuing generations to stand their ground and in so doing would
never have to face such grinding, hazardous toil as those like John Henry
before them.

As long as the struggle of workers endures, the shadow of John Henry will
remain.

Perhaps, that is why the U.S. Postal Service has decided to issue a stamp
this summer commemorating the legacy of John Henry in American life. The
dignity and honor of working men and women is what the old gandy dancer
represents, why John Henry is more than a postage stamp. He is the living
embodiment of any who strive to secure a useable future for themselves and
their children.

Copyright© 1999, LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights
Reserved.


Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)