Danger Dust

Hamilton walked around with a pen and pad in hand, listening.

One man told her about a young immigrant from Bulgaria who’d been working here but had seemed to go crazy a few weeks earlier; the worker was removed from the plant in a straitjacket and later died.

She heard of another man, also an immigrant, who was put to work making paste for batteries and had a habit of moistening his fingers on his tongue. He lasted ten days before he went home ill.

One foreman told Hamilton that few of his men could work for more than a few weeks before they called in sick. Almost all had suffered the same symptoms, starting with hallucinations.

The boss offered no payment for sick workers, and he didn’t appear to be making much effort to prevent them from getting sick. “Many times …

I met men who employed foreign-born labor because it was cheap and submissive, and then washed their hands of all responsibility,” she wrote. “They deliberately chose such men because it meant … a surplus of eager, undemanding labor.”