Fiction. These are nonfiction novels and i can tell you that by the individual either be rooting for the heroes, hating the villains, or weeping with relief that justice has finally been done. Let me introduce you to our office for today. We had an Investigative Reporter writing a book about lawyers and doctors in minors as truth and justice seekers, and we have an author writing about the birth of investigative reporting. Let me bring to the stage the author of citizen reporters stephanie gorton. And also joining us today, chris hamby who 1800 surprise for his reports for the New York Times on how some lawyers and doctors rigged the system to deny benefits to coal miners digging with black lung disease. His reporting resulted in remedial legislative efforts and formed the foundation for the book that he is written out this year, soul full of coal dust. Stephanie and chris, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Both of you tell stories of Truth Tellers and truth seekers, and sometimes due to social change change the sometimes in pursuit of readers in selling magazines like mcclure. Which tells story at peoples with laws were able to bring about these changes. Can we set the stage for our views by just talking about who they were and they will talk about what they did and why it mattered . Stephanie, lets start with you. Who is s. S. Mcclure and ida tarbell, why did they matter . I like to think of s. S. Mcclure, stan mcclure and ida tarbell sort of as what you might call ghosts of history. Their influence can be felt in journalism and media world and how we consume culture today but their names are not usually commonly known. Which is one thing that i found was fascinating about telling their stories because theyre very colorful and remarkable personalities both were born in the same year, 1857, but the came from different circumstances. Mcclure immigrated from ireland when he was a child to rural indiana. He grew up in a Farming Household where the only books to read what the bible, pilgrims progress and his stepfathers agricultural catalog. He worked his way yearbyyear with incredible effort through high school and college. By the time he came out he had no idea what to do. He was very much an outsider to the media world of his time, and his first career job was as a bicycling instructor. The bicycle was a recent invention and itd taken the world by storm. He made the leap from there to a cycling magazine, and from there to new york and the world of magazine generally. His rise and his outsider status both are hard to overstate. By 1900 he was seen very widely as one of the most important man in america. Even a quote from life magazine claiming nobodys hand has been more per assessable than his on the crank that turns the world upside down. After this very surprised and starving origin story, mcclure developed an almost supernatural editorial vision, a sense of what people wanted, what they would buy and what stories were important to tell. He thrilled to the discovery of new writers. One of his most important discoveries was ida tarbell. He also was as you mention incredibly flawed personality and one of the things that was remark about him was his capacity for he narrated his own rags to riches story exhaustively to anybody who would listen. Tarbell came from the Pennsylvania Oil region, and she also suffered a pretty challenging upbringing in that race and a Prosperous Oil refining household, her father was driven into bankruptcy by the rise of Rockefellers Standard Oil when she was 15. That humiliation, that sense of trauma really never left her. She was also raised by staunch methodists who are abolitionists and feminists, and she took the unusual step of going to college, and later moved to paris to try to make a living as a writer. She decided at the early age of 14 that she would never marry, and that her independence was more important to her. In the course of my research on tarbell i came to admire her deeply. The opening is a second and subtitle, she is really the heroin and the protagonist of this book in the end. Not necessarily deliberate but thats something that came out of the research. Shes best known today for landmark series of standard oil, which was a twovolume book and led directly to the great standard of monopoly in 1911. She also was a kind of guiding hand behind bookstores magazine. She kept mcclure himself functional and really kind of held the machine together until a big implosion and a staff walkout and it was all for political favor in 1906 which is the kind of climax and final disaster of the book. So in a nutshell, thats what it takes you to this biography that is the plot of the book, and maybe provides the outline for some of the more dramatic incidents. I want to get to those incidents but first i want to turn to chris and ask him to give us the key players in your book, because in many ways you as an Investigative Reporter with the people in your book brought about the same kind of justice that ida tarbell did with some of her reporting. Tell us about john kline and doctors and the other lawyers as well as those miners were such a key part of your book. Yeah, and thank you. In my book theres really two primary characters, although you could say theres certainly a whole cast of characters, almost stand ends for this community of this kind of small but scrappy coalition of minors and some lay representatives and lawyers and if you sort of idealistic doctors and activists who really have fought back against the coal industry and they are enlisted doctors and lawyers, and the way i really started on this is that i came to the realization in 2011. I had actually come in reading a report, as part of my day job covering labor and environment and health for the republican integrity. In d. C. As a nonprofit investigative news outlet, came across a report that had as just sort of a sidebar that black lung was actually surging back especially central appalachia. This was a surprising finding. A lot of people still dont know that actually level of disease of the severe form of the disease or at the highest levels were reported today. That is worse than in the 1970s, which was just after the initial law was enacted was supposed to virtually eradicate this disease. That basically let me back there was a movement of minors when they rose up basically for themselves. They took on the legal and medical and political establishment and even their own union at the time. In 1968 and 1969 they won one of the strongest pieces of Occupational Health and safety legislation of the past, and in that legislation in 1969 federal coal mining safety act, we the American People acting through congress recently make two promises to the cold miners of this nation which was that we would force companies to control the dust which would virtually eradicate this disease, entirely preventable. And then in the meantime that we would provide modest, fair compensation in the form of monthly benefits and medical coverage for black lung to the people who got the disease. I was surprised 50 years later that has not been fully realized, those promises, we have not kept of those. It was while reporting an appellation that i met the first of the characters in my book, which is, he was by then a lawyer named john kline. Hes really a fascinating character and i pretty quickly came to realize that he needed to be one of the protagonists of this book once i i started worg on it six years ago. He came from upstate new york to the coalfields of southern West Virginia in 1968 as this idealistic antiwar, prosort of poverty warrior as as a vista volunteer actually, volunteers in service to america as part of the war on poverty, and he ended up staying in West Virginia after serving his vista stint. Andy worked as a carpenter and then he started the business where he built homes are most exclusively for people of modest means in the community who qualified for a government low interest loan program. Then he went to work at a rural Medical Clinic as a benefits counselor where he would help with the initial stages of screening miners for potentially having black cloth and then helping them apply for benefits under this federal program lachman to get started with people who did this didnt actually represent miners because i was crazy and you couldnt even get lawyers to take these cases for a variety of reasons. It was there he saw the injustices and was trying to understand why a lot of the people he was treating, that the clinic was treating and that he was helping file for benefits who obviously have black lung and were very ill were nonetheless not able to win benefits in the system. He began representing them, and he started to uncover what he felt like was a systematic scheme of withholding critical medical evidence from miners causing them to lose their claims improperly, that he felt like was orchestrated by the Largest Law Firm that represents a lot of large Coal Companies. He really started a 1520 your fight your fight to try to unravel this and putting into this, and it was partway through that where he met the other primary character in my book who was coal miner named gary fox. Gary was born into coal camp in southern West Virginia across the lake coal one of the facilities where they store the goal, loaded onto the trains, and so the coal dust would look over and coat their homes. His father was a coal miner who died when he was just a boy, likely a black lung although they just missed diagnoses as tuberculosis lot of time in those days. His mother cleaned homes for people in the area and raised gary and his three other brothers by herself. Gary ended up serving in vietnam, and he came back and worked driving a truck, and then got married, had a young daughter, and because he won to provide for them, like so many people in the area, he went into the mines. It was there where he worked more than 30 30 years until he became quite ill and apply for benefits under this federal program, and was wrongfully denied. It wasnt until years later after he had been forced really to go back to work because his wife had a chronic condition and needed health insurance, and he had become much sicker that he met john cline, and the two of them pursued his legal fight that really is the crux of my book. Great. Thanks. Thanks for describing the characters. I just see them as in the novel almost. Stephanie, tell us about the genius that was mcclure. May be in some cases almost certainly by paul from everything that you described, and how he attracted around him not only ida tarbell but other reporters who it on to kind of defined what Teddy Roosevelt eventually called mud raking. What was mcclure . How did he built that . Mcclure launched his magazine with a skeleton staff and was really the norm in the world of magazines at that time that every article would come from a freelancer, right who work for the same set of four owe five general interest magazines. They were harpers, scriveners, the century and the atlantic. Mcclure made a splash amongst all of these by dropping the price, being ten cents rather than 20 or 25 cents. And alongside discovering ida tarbell, she wrote an article about the street sweepers of paris that landed in the flesh pile of mcclure which was also operate as a literary syndicate. The story goes that mcclure read the story and asked his Business Partner who was at the school . She can read it right. He said i dont know but from her handwriting shows a middleaged new england schoolmarm. The time tarbell was in her mid\30{l1}s{l0}\30{l1}s{l0} living in paris and having a really hard time making a living as a writer. Mcclure offered her a salaried job. She did not want to leave paris but she financially had no choice sure she came back to your and started working for him. Other reporters that now, or semilegendary ended up at mcclure were lincoln stephanie wrote a series called corruption in the city. And ray baker who when i kept thinking of as i wrote christmas books because he also wrote about coal miners, and his gaze it was coal miners in pennsylvania who declined to participate in the strikes. Baker also wrote one of the first series on lynching to make it into the Mainstream Press that internet being read by the president. This gathering of reporters and the matching of the writer with subject matter which was really what mcclure is genius was come into the really fueling the magazine to thrive an incredible popularity. I think it was really this time when entertainment and Current Events converged right by the time of the spanish american war about 1899, 1900. At the same time print was the only mass medium. Publishers really had this powerful platform to gain a readership and to make a difference in the mines of people who were picking up the magazine to pass the time, would come away with a changed. There were many parallels between then and now that i i o the find in the course of the research. Most strongly what comes through is the increasing acrimony between the press and a president who really wanted to sway the narrative about himself and wasnt able to control it as completely as he wanted to. Theater roosevelt was an incredibly savvy pr operator and very prolific as a writer himself, but the more investigations turned up the stories of corruption and dysfunction and injustice across america, the more people turn to him to change things, to reform the country. And the more he begins to be irked and the inferior rated by what the press was doing,. In addition to journalism powerhouse, mcclures is also a place where fiction wife were discovered, so will a catheter was published their early on. Jack london, the first Sherlock Holmes stories are brought to america by mcclure and writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling were very much a part of mcclures inner circle. I also want to dwell on ida tarbells work on standard oil because when she was coming up come standard oil control upwards of 85 of Oil Production and distribution in america. So with her work i think she instituted some practices that were not necessarily, or even heard of at that time. She had dug through incredible volumes of court documents. She was one of the first journalists at the time to make a point of confirming what a resource told her with the second source. She declined any offer of a gift or even a kind of pleasant way of passing the time with in the upper interviewees were part of standard oil. She had a series, a years long series of interviews with henry rogers, the pr honcho there, and he always joked he couldnt even get her to drink a glass of milk in his office because she just wanted to focus on the work. I think part of the reason that work is almost, you know, id like situation that journalists had under mcclure. He paid them very well. He gave them expense accounts and years if they needed it to produce a series. There was definitely an element of escapism and writing this book because the circumstances are so different for writers and journalists now. I think you can see the legacy in what ida tarbell did much in writers like Rachel Carson or bob woodward, and the pioneers of new journalism in the 1970s, resurgence of magazine journalism as well, and today in work like what chris is doing, documentary, radio, tv as well. The mcclures is a magazine with the kind of birthplace of a lot of what we now think of as but ida tarbells series specifically set the mold for american Investigative Journalism that held objective as an ideal which have not necessarily been the case before, and set the bar for a new level of investigations of doing original work and upholding come journalists holding itself to a set of ethics. Maybe if i was going to summarize the legacy of mcclures and the tarbell those are probably the two main pillars. Thats great. Lets go to one of those people representing that kind of journalism today, chris, you. Tell us the story, the Jackson County law firm and john clines fight to uncover what they were doing. Ipod into it but me in the same category as some of those legendary muckrakers, but thank you. I do see sort of through line somewhat to what we were doing these days but so john as i mentioned was, he was only represented and this was in the early 90s and he was starting to see we felt like was his pattern of withholding evidence. He sort of, he tried to pursue it case by case but he was unable to really move the needle too much on that. He ended up actually in the late 90s deciding to go back to law school and emerging with his law degree at age 53. He was well in law school that he had, he came across while reading case law in the law library this period of fraud on the court, which is more than just gardenvariety fraud, but sort of heightened level of fraud that is basically a systematic scheme to subvert the entire judicial system. He felt like this apply to the conduct of this law firm, Jackson Kelly. This law firm is really one that was so intertwined in history of West Virginia and a lot of appellation to a degree i didnt really realize even when i was working on the original series, like i can back to do the book and look more into history but it was really a law firm traced roots back to the land of lawyers who largely wrote the laws that allowed outofstate companies to basically and help the individuals to control huge swaths of the coalfields basically, and sort of led to a lot of this legacy of exploitation for resources, that has dominated the history of West Virginia, a lot of that region. They had really been there, the Law Firm Lawyers had been there at every stage writing the constitution for the state, shaping its contours in legislatures and courtrooms and when there was a minor wars and the early 20th century, the law from which their standing with the coal operators opposite the legendary neighbor activists who were trying to unionize the area at the time. There was despite a mention to just recognize black lung exists and it is disabling and it was worthy of compensation, the law for from also one of the side of that fight trying to lobby to prevent legislation to basically recognize it should even provide fair compensation they have since been the premier law firm for a lot of these Coal Companies. What they ended up doing was, i sort of try to as part of my work to recreate some of what john had said he had seen and it is very difficult to figure exactly was going on in these cases. These are not publicly they are not like court files were you can go to the court and request them. And it open like that because these are administrative cases that have a lot of privacy protections, for good reason. What i had to do was identify cases of potential interest and then contact the miners or their family members and see if they would allow me permission to get the files that i ended up down to the Labor Department liking a whole bunch of boxes of files and logging those, and came to see what john was clinton was actually correct, that there was this pattern of withholding evidence in article cases that it caused miners to lose their claim, including garys claim, the other primary character. So when john and gary finally got together and teamed up, which is really sort of the narrative arc of this book, is john was able to pry loose these key reports that have been withheld in garys earlier claim. The real question became, what to do about it. Ultimately, i think there were some remarkable reforms that were enacted because of what happened to gary fox and minus liking. That was because john pushed to uncover the truth, even when it was not, the there were not a f people who agreed with him or saw what he was seeing at the time, but i think he has been vindicated by history. Yeah, and that scene in your book where the announcement element of the regulation changes, really brought tears to my eyes, the miners came in to take their seats, even ones who could not talk, for lack of breath is one thing i want to you though is, and maybe this gets to that third question of why it mattered, lets start with you, chris. Theres one creepy didnt mention that the doctors, both the doctors on the site of the angels and the doctors who were in cahoots with Jackson Kelly and others. Can you talk a little about that . Yet, so there certainly were some doctors behaved quite heroically and the original recognition, large of this trio of doctors who are helping miners and basically providing the Scientific Validation with a little bit of rabble rousing advocacy to actually win recognition of the disease but there certainly have been on the other side a number of doctors who were reliably testifying for Coal Companies who seem to have never seen a case of black long in their life. Black lung. Thats not necessarily surprising your the usual suspects in these types of litigation but when i was looking at this, the thing that did surprise me was about really for 40 years so many of the reports that were critical in opposing miners claims were coming from this small unit of radiologist at johns hopkins. So it was only after trying to figure out what one doctor in particular who was prolific what the records were so it created a massive spreadsheet. It never worked and also looking at whether their opinions come ported with the medical literature, and, when it became apparent, and its sort of needed a spotlight, then, they compelled to act. The evidence of the foundation, davis and mccourys magazine. What do you think lessons are from what happened to mcclures, how it started, how it imploded. What are the lessons today . The story of the magazine is illustrative of what can happen when Investigative Journalism is supported, given resources and what happens when it is deliberately torpedoed, the personal, creative and collaboration, very flawed personalities that led to the demise of the magazine. The end of the book, in 1906, had enough of journalists calling for reform and he gave a speech at the setting of the cornerstone of the house of representatives where he likened journalists to a character in pilgrims progress, the man with the muckraker, where it comes from. This character was someone who never his lifted his head looked around him but was always groping around with his rake in the muck to see what else he could find. There had been rumblings of this before the speech, nobody in the world of magazines were shocked that roosevelt felt this way. He had written to all the men, in a direct letter, that he was friendly with lincoln and to the white house previously. Urging them to put their landscape, not to focus on what was going wrong in america but to pick a more positive slant and when the student happen and the popularity of the magazine was not leaning in any sense that provoked his feeling this was urgent, and roosevelts power and charisma was such that there is a sentiment, antiinvestigations sentiment, all these satirical articles, railing against the trend for torrential journalism or for outrage as the currency readers are trading in. A lot of parallels to today in Media Outlets who are seen as only wanting to keep viewers eyes on the screen and continuing to keep their show running although in the case of roosevelt and mccord, it was one of the last destabilizing pieces in a slim edifice. Mccord at the same time was going through a Mental Health disaster and he came back with a grandiose plan about sending the magazine into university, a model town which is ironic because pool mens model town, one of the topics of early articles, and after receiving, a couple other stock members all walked out the same day. That happened a few weeks before roosevelts speech but they happened in such close conjunction, they were seen as one and the same and mccord was taken down by flying too close to the sun, not compromising with the president who was incredibly popular. There isnt exactly we can take from today but the circumstances are just different enough at that point in the gilded age that in a way there is an echo or a clue. Print is no longer the only mass medium, there are other drastic differences between then and now but there are enough similarities that it is an interesting incident to reexamine and why is that happening again . Can we stop it happening in the future . What can we take away from your works since we are in the middle of a pandemic, when health news and information about health is important, what can we learn from john klein, Jackson Kelly and bringing benefits for survivors . It is an interesting time to be releasing this book because when i first started this i started reporting on black lung in 2011 and did multiple stories and a series of articles, at the time, i was explicit in my proposal, triumphing over evil, this is a story of ongoing injustice, that is an obstacle towards people would like to see a nice story, that doesnt happen in reality most of the time. Most of the stories i have done, we put a ton of effort into all, getting everything exactly right and i spent 18 months before and we put it out and it feels like we almost have given birth indigo still born into the world and nothing happens even though you think you reveal some sort of important injustice but with this case the story was different and i have been struggling to pin, the residence of the individual story of the miners and their advocates and the people who have been pushing for so long for a very modest measure of justice and fairness for what they have done for this country and so over the course of the 6 years i was working on this book i had a privilege of documenting remarkable changes in terms of new regulations and acted that should curb this disease, eventually eradicate it which should have been accomplished long ago and that includes john klein, basically a change he had been pushing for for 20 years that nobody else was thinking about or there was resistance or couldnt get any traction and in 2016 when this came across the finish line and johns argument, the actual regulatory documents in the federal register describing what happened and the injustice of his case and how that spurred him in part to act. The lesson to me was sometimes if you bring things to the 4 and expose injustices they are so egregious that people feel compelled to act and you need a lot of things to align and you have to have receptive audience. In this case there was a Labor Department in 201416 that was receptive to making these changes but it was an amazing confluence of pressure, people, government, outlining, there were some remarkable things, the battle is never completely won, there are things that can be improved, made a lot better and always the potential we can go the other way but for me it was really inspiring to see that sometimes people do step up and do the right thing. I want to close by asking what are you doing next . One minute each on what you are doing next. Im writing about the history of Birth Control which is very much on my mind. I have a toddler, Birth Control is one of the most urgent things i can think about right now. I have been cured for the near future of wanting to work on the book for a while. I am working on my job for the New York Times. Stories related to the governments response to this pandemic. We have about one minute and you have a question for the others you would send them off with in terms of their work . For chris it would have been how does the story, does the story still live with you . Are you in touch with everybody . Great question. To briefly answer that, yes. It has been a real joy. I am curious whether you think this would have played out differently the way every thing went down, less individual driven entity and more of an institution given the personality himself and things would be the way they did and there was a path forward. Absolutely. We are very short on time but the genius have a great flaw was everything arrested with an individual. Thank you for your book. I urge everyone to get mcclures citizen reporters, and the magazine the remade america. Thank you for joining. You are watching booktv on cspan2 on this holiday weekend, television for serious readers. Programs to watch out for this thanksgiving day, tonight at 6 00 pm eastern former president barack obama reflect on his life and political career, and the new biography of abraham lincoln, and Space Shuttle endeavor pilot terry burke provides an inside look at space travel and exploration. Find a complete schedule, booktv. Org or on your program guide. Here is a look at some of the books being published this week. Inlet us dream pope francis offers thoughts on how to build a better world. Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson examines incidents of racial violence throughout American History and hard years the country must confront systematic racism in a Long Time Coming and all the young men, ruth burks remembers her time as a caregiver of men dying of aids. Michael walsh examines historic battles where small armies refused to surrender in last stands and in mediocre, to the detriment of Society White men have been raised to believe they are superior. Find these titles this coming week wherever books are sold and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on cspan2. Welcome to the National World war ii museums evening presentation webinar. My name is jeremy collins
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