Marcia Biederman - Force: Dr. Elizabeth Hayes War for Public Health

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Copyright 2021 by Marcia Biederman

Cover photos, left and upper right, reproduced with permission from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Biederman, Marcia, 1949 author.

Title: A mighty force : Dr. Elizabeth Hayes and her war for public health / Marcia Biederman.

Description: Lanham, MD : Prometheus, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A Mighty Force is the first book dedicated to Dr. Elizabeth O. Hayess fight for public health on the American home front during World War II, for which she received national attention (and a victory under President Trumans Justice Department) for her protests against unsanitary conditions in the mining town of Force, PennsylvaniaProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021009209 (print) | LCCN 2021009210 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633887084 (cloth) | ISBN 9781633887091 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Hayes, Elizabeth, 1964 | Public healthPennsylvania. | WarHealth aspects. | WarEconomic aspects. | World War II.

Classification: LCC RA807.P6 B54 2021 (print) | LCC RA807.P6 (ebook) | DDC 362.109748/65dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009209

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009210

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Alan, my brother and oldest friend

T hree months after V-J Day and four months into a coal strike, Francis J. Erich was given an unpleasant letter to hand-deliver to a doctor. The letter came from the Shawmut Mining Company, which employed Erich, a large man, in a murky occupation. He described himself to census takers as a special police agent, but he had no badge or license. He did have a gun, but there was nothing special about that.

So-called Special Agent Erich worked for Shawmut Mining in St. Marys, an attractive little city nestled in a north-central Pennsylvania valley. From there, Shawmut Minings general manager oversaw its nearby mines, burrowed deep in the Allegheny Mountains. Yet the only addresses engraved on the letterhead were in the state of New York. The company was headquartered in bucolic Wellsville, just north of the Pennsylvania border. Its sales office was on the seventeenth floor of Manhattans opulent art deco Graybar Building, high above Grand Central Terminal.

The first sheets of the companys letterhead gave the year of its founding, 1894, and a helpful descriptor: Bituminous Coal. For lengthier correspondence, perhaps to keep the reader interested, a cartoon topped each subsequent page. Engraved into the header was a grinning groundhog reminiscent of Punxsutawney Phil, the end-of-winter forecaster of another Pennsylvania town, about an hours drive south of St. Marys. But the rodents of the Shawmut Mining logo had a tougher job than their weatherman cousin. Standing upright in the illustration, with helmets on furry heads and picks perched on shoulders, they looked ready to dig all day and mighty pleased to do so.

Hence, every letter sent a message before a word was typed. The absent, wealthy men in control of the mine saw their workers as cartoonish, content with their lot, clothed but not quite human. Recently, however, the tables had turned. It was management that looked cartoonish. In words inked on newsprint and read worldwide, Shawmut executives were being portrayed as greedy pigs, wallowing in mud and releasing a stink strong enough to waft across oceans.

TodayNovember 13, 1945Special Agent Erich would begin setting things to rights. He took the envelope on a twelve-mile drive to its recipient, Dr. Elizabeth O. Hayes, in a godforsaken coal town named Force. The letter gave her five days to clear out of her quarters. Until quitting in mid-July to enormous fanfare, Hayes had been Shawmut Minings company doctor. Now she was their nemesis.

Three hundred and fifty men from Force had followed the doctor off the job. They refused to go into the mines without a doctor on hand, and Hayes was the only one for miles around. Hayess tough talk about the filth of their coal town had catapulted her to media stardom. From Toronto to Manila, headline writers vied to write the most stomach-turning descriptions of Shawmuts sewage-sodden toilet towns.

Editorial writers declared these hovels unfit for human habitation. The consensus spanned the political spectrum, including some papers that normally cared no more about miners than they did about groundhogs. But the spokeswoman for this cause was nothing like the stereotypical hillbillies of the popular Lil Abner comic strip, a fixture of the same papers now championing Hayes. Though born and raised in the Pennsylvania hollows, Dr. Betty Hayes was a smartly dressed, wisecracking career woman out of a Jean Arthur or Rosalind Russell film.

Now, the mining company thought it had a way to get rid of her. Long after handing in her resignation, Hayes was still in Force, seeing patients in her company-owned house and going out on dozens of daily house calls. After negotiations with the miners resulted in assurances of their unified support, she agreed to stay put. As the only physician in a fifteen-mile radius, she could drive a hard bargain. The nearest hospital was in DuBois, eighteen miles to the southwest. An ambulance once sank in the mud of a mining-town road. In all its decades of collecting rents, Shawmut had never paved the streets. The only amenity introduced since the start of the century was electricity, added to homes when it came to the mines. The byways remained dark.

As one of Elizabeth Hayess sisters, Catherine, remarked from her own medical office in Philadelphia, the area was no place for a girl anyway. It has no future, no social life and has too much territory. In that territory lived four thousand people, many of them pregnant, sick, ill-nourished, or fond of handling firearms. The miners among them faced daily risks of crushing, explosions, and drowning.

To thousands of others who read the papers, she was now the Dr. Betty of countless column inches. At thirty-three, shed been christened the girl-doctor. Just weeks after the Nazi surrender, shed launched a new fight for democracy. In June, a suspected typhoid case had prompted Hayes to pay for private testing of the wells that provided Force with drinking water. Lab results showed that most wells were contaminated, a surprise to no one. The company had long done nothing to maintain the outhouses, and when hard rains fell, feces flowed down the streets and alleys.

With the company refusing to act and state health authorities sitting on their hands, the doctor and her allies went into battle. Hayes quit, demanding sanitation. The miners won back her services by walking out of the pits. The press called their goal the American standard of living. Shawmut Mining called it impossible.