Top row: Julius Chambers, Nellie Bly, Upton Sinclair
Bottom row: Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker
There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.
—Theodore Roosevelt
The Man with the Muck Rake
April 15, 1906
The muckrakers pictured above include
Julius Chambers and
Nellie Bly, both of whom braved stays in insane asylums, as they were then known, to bring to light the barbaric conditions under which the mentally ill were imprisoned. Upton Sinclair's book on the meat-packing industry,
The Jungle, led to the creation of the FDA. The trio from
McClure's includes Lincoln Steffens, who exposed municipal corruption; Ida Tarbell whose work on Standard Oil exposed Rockefeller and the oil trusts' and Ray Stannard Baker, best known for his work on the coal mines, the unions, and scabs.
Today, we can probably include names like Jay Risen, Matt Taibbi, or the late Michael Hastings. There are many more, but one unexpected name on the list is that of John Grisham.
How he may get there is below the fold.
At the risk of repetition let me say again that my plea is not for immunity to, but for the most unsparing exposure of, the politician who betrays his trust, of the big business man who makes or spends his fortune in illegitimate or corrupt ways. There should be a resolute effort to hunt every such man out of the position he has disgraced.
—Theodore Roosevelt
John Grisham's legal thrillers have always had an edge. Usually, it was sharpened for use on big law firms. But lately, he has altered his targets, focusing on the "many and grave evils" of "the body politic, economic and social." Two of his recent novels seem focused on a particularly vile evil, Big Coal and the men who run it.
The Appeal
Published by Doubleday
January 29, 2008
355 pages
In The Appeal, set in Mississippi, a chemical company, after dumping toxic waste on a small town actually loses a jury verdict to its victim. The jury awards $41 million to a widow who lost her son and husband to cancer from the toxic chemicals. To the surprise of no one, the chemical company promptly appeals and the case heads to the Mississippi Supreme Court.
Unlike the standard legal thriller, most of the action in The Appeal happens outside of the courtroom. Mississippi, like many other states, elects its Supreme Court justices instead of using an appointment system. Naturally, this leads to the possibility of corruption by those with the most money to spend.
It just so happens that the CEO of the chemical company can easily afford a few million dollars to ensure a friendly bench. His Rovian henchmen set out to find and elect just such a stooge justice.
If the case sounds at all familiar, it may have something to do with the real life lawsuit that Massey Energy lost in a West Virginia court. No, the suit had nothing to do with toxic spills or leaks, but the CEO, Don Blankenship, had no problem spending $3 million to overturn a $50 million verdict:
But rather than trusting in the wisdom of the justice system, Blankenship tried to rig the outcome in his favor. In 2004, he spent $3 million — an enormous sum in West Virginia politics — to finance a political hit machine to take down Justice Warren McGraw, who was likely to serve as the swing vote in the court's decision. The group deployed every sleazy trick in the book, accusing McGraw of letting child rapists out of prison and putting them to work in local schools. The smear tactics worked: McGraw was defeated, replaced by an industry-friendly judge backed by Blankenship. In 2007, the court overturned the $50 million verdict against Blankenship by a vote of 3 to 2. His $3 million investment had saved him $47 million.
In the real life case, photos of Blankenship and the chief justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court vacationing together on the French Riviera surfaced, leading to a re-hearing of the case by the state court. In addition to the chief justice recusing himself, a justice who referred to Blankenship as "a clown" also recused himself and the court again ruled in Blankenship's favor.
The plaintiff appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found an "extreme" conflict of interest and said that the judge that Blankenship elected should have recused himself. He did. On the third time around, the state Supreme Court ruled once again in Blankenship's favor, this time citing a technicality that they claimed granted the state no jurisdiction over the case.
John Grisham made no secret of his use of this case for his novel. According to Rolling Stone, Grisham, during an interview with Matt Lauer said, "A guy owned a coal company, he got tired of getting sued. He elected his guy to the Supreme Court—and now he didn't worry about getting sued."
Sadly, instead of becoming angry that judges were for sale to the highest bidder, most of the reader-reviewers who had negative opinions of the novel had them because John Grisham did not write them the happy ending that they felt fiction should provide.
Gray Mountain: A Novel
Published by Doubleday
October 21, 2014
368 Pages
In Gray Mountain, John Grisham takes on Big Coal and the process of mountaintop removal mining. He does it with such realism that, at times, it doesn't feel like a novel as much as a virtual reality.
His protagonist in Gray Mountain is a 29-year-old, fourth-year associate at a corporate law firm that employs 2,000 lawyers in its Manhattan high rise. Samantha Kofer spends 100 hours a week reviewing documents for the firm's commercial real estate division. The money is good, it allows her to shop at Jimmy Choo's, live in Manhattan, and eat at hip new restaurants. When she can find the time.
The 2008 crash and the ensuing lay-offs allow her all of the time she needs as she too, falls victim to the recession and scrambles to find employment with a non-profit that will allow her to retain her health care (it is 2008) and the possibility of re-employment at the end of a year. She winds up at a legal aid clinic in the small town of Brady, Virginia, population 2,200.
The legal aid clinic, run by a woman with deep roots in this Appalachian coal-mining community, helps those who cannot afford lawyers for civil issues, like black lung disease compensation, family wills, or debt collection agency harassment. As Samantha immerses herself in the cases and the people, she realizes that there are secrets in Brady that everyone else seems to share.
Inevitably, she runs into the impact of Big Coal on the landscape and the life of Appalachia.
Mountaintop removal mine in Pike Co., Kentucky
But just as Upton Sinclair's protagonist in
The Jungle, Jurgis Rudkus, is not remembered as strongly as are the images of the meat-packing industry practices, the characters in
Gray Mountain are not as important, or as memorable, as the issues they address.
Don Blankenship single-handedly destroyed the United Mineworkers of America by going into an area, buying a union mine, shutting it down and then later re-opening it as a non-union mine. The loss of the UMW in the coal mining industry has devastated the mining country as the union provided the only real check on the owners. Politicians and regulators appear to be unable to resist the dollars from the deep pockets of the mine owners.
In the 1970s, Big Coal started mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. They have cut off the tops of 500 mountains to more cheaply access the coal stratum, using explosives to break up the rock and huge machines to move the overburden into the valleys below.
The explosions spread flying rocks and dust into the valleys where people live, sometimes killing them in their homes, usually just missing them. The detritus pollutes and alters the flow of the mountain streams, causing massive flooding and the loss of valuable wildlife habitat.
Overloaded coal trucks speed down the mountain roads, creating a nightmare for local residents who have to use the same roads. Between 2000 and 2004, there were 700 accidents involving coal trucks in Kentucky alone.
At least 300 million years old, the Appalachians are among the oldest mountains in the world
Before it can be sold, the coal must be cleaned of impurities. Those impurities, the chemicals used in the cleaning and the coal dust that remains, called slurry or sludge, and often containing arsenic, lead, cadmium and manganese, must then be stored. Coal companies will often dam up a strip mine and store it there. Or they will pump the slurry into unused underground mines where it can contaminate groundwater.
Don Blankenship lives near Lick Creek in West Virginia. According to the Rolling Stone article, his neighbors in Lick Creek became ill after Massey Energy started to pump slurry into a nearby underground mine. About the time Massey began pumping the slurry, the company put in a waterline between Blankenship's house and Matewan, a few miles away, where clean water was available. He did not offer to share that clean water with his neighbors who were unable to afford waterlines of their own. Libertarian capitalism in action.
Much of the wrong doing of Big Coal is covered, very accurately, by John Grisham in Gray Mountain, as is the violence. Many of the incidents that are dealt with in the novel are based on real events (a child was, in fact, killed in his bed by a boulder thrown from a mining operation) and real places. Black Mountain straddles the Kentucky/Virginia border. If you look at a satellite map, you can see the clear line of the border in the stripping of the mountain on the Virginia side. For a real time-suck, use a satellite map to "fly over" the Appalachian mountains, slowing down to examine those grayish blobs in the middle of the green forested mountains. Those aren't cities, those are wastelands.
This is the trailer for the documentary, "The Last Mountain":
Not only does "The Last Mountain" present the problems of mountaintop removal mining ("strip mining on steroids"), it also proposes a solution—a solution created by the men and women who live near Coal River Mountain, the Last Mountain of the documentary.
Should Gray Mountain ever make it to the big screen, as have so many of Grisham's other books, there is a chance, albeit a small one, that it could make a difference. The coal from mountaintop removal only accounts for 7 percent of our energy needs. But the price we pay for that measly amount of energy is exorbitant.
Even if Blankenship is ultimately convicted of conspiring to violate safety regulations, circumventing inspections and making false statements immediately after the disaster at the Upper Big Branch Mine, until we get the money out of our elections—be they judicial, executive or legislative—there will be more Blankenships in waiting with checkbooks at the ready.