Volume 19, Number 4 · September 21, 1972
A Maddening Story
By Harry M. Caudill
The Great Coalfield War
by George S. McGovern, by Leonard F. Guttridge
Houghton Mifflin, 383 pp., $8.95
An election for governor is underway in West Virginia this year and a young and rich man named John D. Rockefeller IV is running as a Democrat, and as a champion of coal miners and the poor. He wants to save the state from the ravages inflicted on land and people by mining companies and a corrupt and lawless United Mine Workers of America. Union leaders and mining executives loathe him, and a growing multitude of welfare recipients, war resisters, miners, students, environmentalists, and other reformers see him as the Mountain State's last hope to escape the misery of poverty, exploitation, and hopelessness. It is a measure of how much things have changed that this heir to the fabulous Rockefeller fortune is the grandson of the principal owner of Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation, that corporate dinosaur whose minions and allies killed miners and their wives and children in Colorado six decades ago with a cold-bloodedness once reserved for Indians and rebellious slaves.
Review, 2566 words
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