Thank you all. Thank you, thank you so much perrys. Went to welcome it to this session on behalf of humanitys tennessee. Tennessee Arts Commission and a built University Thoughts my honor to host the conversation today between two nonfiction authors who have created what reads as fiction. These are non fiction novels. And i can tell you that by the end of them youll either be rooting for the heroes, hating the villains or weeping with relief that justice is finally been done. So let me introduce you to our authors for today. We have an Investigative Reporter with an author writing arguably about the birth of investigative reporting. So let me bring to the stage the author of citizen reporters, ss mcclure, ida tarbell, and the magazine that re grows america, stephanie bolton. And also joining us today chris hanvey who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reports for the New York Times on how some lawyers and doctors rigged the system to deny benefits to coalminer stricken with black lung diseas disease. His reporting resulted in remedial legislative efforts and formed the foundation for the book that he has written out this year full of coal dust a fight for breath and justice in appalachia. Stephanie and chris, welcome. Thank you. Both of you tell stories of Truth Tellers and truth seekers. And sometimes in pursuit of social change. Sometimes in pursuit of readers in magazines. You tell stories of people with laws who were able to bring about these changes. Can we set the stage for our viewers by talk about who they were and then well talk about what they did and why it mattered. Stephanie let start with you. It was an assessment lure and ida tarbell and why did they matter . Sure. I like to think of sam mcclure and ida tarbell, sort of what you might call ghost history. Their influence is in journalism and the media world and how we can do culture today. But there needs there not commonly known. Acted okay telling their stories are very colorful remarkable personalities. Those were the same year, 1857 but they came from different circumstances. Core immigrated from ireland when he was a child to rural indiana he grew up in a Farming Household are the only books to read the bible pilgrims progress in the stepfathers agricultural catalog. And he worked as weight yearbyyear with incredible efforts through high school and college. By the time he came out he had no idea what to do. Is very much an outsider to the media world of his time. In this first career track job was bicycling instructor. The bicycle was a reached recent invention he made the leap from a cycling magazine his rise and outsider status are hard to sta stay. He seemed very widely as a quote from life magazine claiming nobodys hand has been more perceptible than his on the crank that turns the world upside down. So after this very deprived and starving origin story, look core developed almost a supernatural editorial vision. What stories were important to tell. Hes thrilled with the discovery of new writers. One of the writers was tarbell. Had a flawed personality and one that was remarkable. He had his own rags to riches story exhaustively to anyone who would listen. Clerking for the Pennsylvania Oil regent. And she also suffered a pretty challenging and that raised in a Prosperous Oil refining household, her father was driven into bankruptcy by the rise of Rockefellers Standard Oil when she was 15. That humiliation, the sense of trauma never really left her. She was also raised by staunch methodists who were 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 in the 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 are really came to admire her equally. So her name is the second in the subtitle. She is really the heroin and the protagonist of this book in the end. Not necessarily deliberate but something that came out of better research. She is best known today for her landmark series on standard oil. She led directly to the breakup of the monopoly in 1911. She cuts my core himself functional and held the machine together until a big implosion in a fall from political favor and 1906. Which is a climax and final disaster of the book. So in a nutshell that sort of takes you through the dual biography that is the plots of the book. Maybe provides the outline for some of the dramatic incident. I want to get to those. When the key players in your book. It many ways you as an Investigative Reporter was with the people in your book brought about the same kind of justice that ida tarbell did with her reporting. So tell us about john and the doctors and the other lawyers. As well as the miners who was such a key part of your book. Guest thank you. In my book theres really two primary characters. Although you could say theres certainly a whole cast of characters, they are almost standins for this community that kind of small but scrappy coalition of minors and some late representatives and lawyers and a few sort of idealistic doctors and activist who really have fought back against the coal industry. And they elicit doctors and lawyers. The way i really started on this was that i came to the realization and 2011 and reading a report as part of my day job covering labor, environment and health for the center for Public Integrity here in d. C. As a news outlets. Came across a report that had a sort of a sidebar that black lung was actually surging back. Especially in central appalachi appalachia. Those is a surprising finding. A lot of people still dont know that actually levels of disease of the severe form of the disease are at the highest level recorded today. That is worse than the 1970s, which was just after the initial law was enacted that was supposed to eradicate this disease. So that basically led me back to there is a movement of minors when they rose up basically for themselves. They took on the legal, medical force companies to control the dust which would virtually eradicate this disease, and then in the meantime that we would provide modest, fair compensation for people who got the disease. I was surprise he that 50 years later that has not been fully realized. Those promises we have not kept those. And it was while reporting in appalachia i met the first of the characters in my book, which is a he was a by then a lawyer named john kline, and he is really a fascinating character and i pretty quickly came to realize he needed to be one of protagonists protagonistk when i start evidence working on it six years ago. He came from upstate new york, to the coal fields of southern West Virginia in 1968 as this idealistic, antiwar, pro sort of poverty warrior in the as a vista volunteer actually, volunteered in service to america as par of the war on poverty, and he ended up staying in West Virginia after serving histories vista stipulate and work as a carpenter and then started a business where he built homes almost exclusively for people of modest means in the community who qualified for government low into loan program. Then 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 lung and then helping them apply for benefit under the federal program, just to get it started but at any time actually people who did this didnt actually represent miners because that was crazy and you couldnt even get lawyers to take these cases casr a variety of reasons. It was there john became fascinated with the system and more so enraged at the injustices he saw and was trying to understand why a lot of the people he was treating that the clinic was treating and he was helping file for bent fits who had black lung and very and i will were nonetheless not able to win benefits in the system. So he began representing them and he started to uncover what he felt like was a systemic 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 the large Coal Companies, and his he really started a 15 to 20 year fight no up ralph this and put an end to this, and it was partway through that he met the other primary character in my book who is a coalminer named gary fox, and gary was born in an old coal camp in southern West Virginia, across from a coal tubhold, one of the facilities where the store the coal, load it on the trains and so the coal dust would blow over and coat their homes. He his father was a coal minder who tied died when he was just a boy, likely of black lung but misdiagnosed as tuberculosis in those days daysd his mother cleaned home ares to people in the area and raised gary and his three other brothers by herself, and 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 wanted to provide for them, like so many people in the area, he went into the mines, and he worked for more than 30 years until he became quite ill and applied for benefits under the federal program and was wrongfully denied. And it wasnt until years later after he had been forced really to go back to work bus his wife had a chronic condition and needed Health Insurance and he had become much thicker and met john compline the two of them pursued this legal fight that is the crux of my book. Great. Thank you for describing the characters. Now i do see them as characters in a novel almost. So, stephanie, tell us about the genius that was mcclure, maybe some days almost a mad genius, certainly bipolar from everything you describe, and how he attracted around him not only ida tar pehl put other reporters who went on to tuned of define what Teddy Roosevelt eventually called mud raking. What was mccore. Mccore launched his agency with a skeleton staff and he was really the norm in the world of magazines at that time that eave article would come from free lapser, writer who worked for the same set of four or five general interest magazines. They were harpers, scriveners, the century, and the atlantic. Mccourse made a plash by dropping their price, being ten cents rather than 20 or 25cents and alongside discovering id ida tarbell she wrote an article but the street sweepers of paris. So the ask guess that mccor recommending the story and asked his Business Partner who is this and their she can really write. And he said i dont know but from her hand writing she is a middle age new England School marm and the was living in paris making a hard time living as a writer, mccore a offered her a salary job but she didnt want to leave paris about didnt have a chose and came to new york and started working for him. Other reporters that now legendary that ended up as mccorsre Lincoln Stefan who wrote a series on corruption in the city, and baker who i kept thing thinking of the wrote but colemaners, this case it was coalminers in pennsylvania who declined to participate in the strike. Baker wright one of the first series on lynching to make into it the mainstream press. That end up being read by the president. This gathering of reporters and the matching of the writer with the subject matter, which was really what mccors generous was, ended up rally fueling the magazines rise and incredible popularity. I think there was really this time when entertainment and Current Events converged right around the tomorrow of the spanish american war around 18991900. At the same item print was the only mass media, though publishers had this powerful platform to gain a readership and to make a difference in the minds of people who were maybe picking up the magazine to pass the time and would come away with it changed. There were many parallels between then and now that i ended up finding in the course of the research, and most strongly what comes through is the increasing acrimony between the press and the president who really wanted to sway the narrative about himself and wasnt able to control it as completely as he wanted to. Theodore roosevelt was an incredibly savvy pr operator, and very prolific as a writer himself, but the more investigation turned up the stories of corruption andtive function and injustice across america, the more people turned to him to change things, to reform the country, and the more he began to be irked and then infuriated by what the press was doing and a writer tells with readers. In addition to the journalism powerhouse, mccor is a place where fiction writers were discovered, so willie cather, jack london. The first Sherlock Holmes stories were brought to america by mccor and writer like robert louis city findson and rudyard kipling. And when ida tarbell was coming up, standard oil controlled upward of 895 of Oil Production and distribution in america. So in her work, i think she instituted some practices that werent necessarily common or even heard of at that time. She dug through incredible volumes of court documents. She was one of the first journalists at that time make point of confirming what a resource told her. She declined any offer of a gift or even a kind of pleasant way of passing the time with any of her interviewees who were part of standard oil. She had a series of interviews from the pr honcho and he joked he couldnt begin get her to drink a glass of milk in the office because she wanted to focus on the work. I think part of the reason the work is almost that idyllic situation that journalists had under mccor. He paid them very way, gave then expense accounts and years if they needed to produce a series. There was definitely an element of escapism in writing this book because the singers are so different for writers and journalists now. I think you can see the legacy in what ida tarbell did very much in writers like Rachel Carson or bob woodward, and the pioneers of new journalism in the 1970s, resurgence of magazine journalism and work like what chris is doing, documentary radio and tv as well. So mccourse is airmailing with a kind of birthplace of magazine with a kind of birthplace of journalism and literature but ida tarbells series set the morals for american Investigative Journalism that held objectivity as an ideal which hadnt necessarily been the case before. And set the bar for a new level of investigation of doing original work, and holding the the journalists holding themselves to a society of ethics, and maybe if i was going summarize the legacy of mccourse and tarbell those are the two main pillars. Lets go to one of those people representing that kind of journalism today, chris, you. Tell us the story of the Jackson Kelly law firm and john klines fight to up cover what they were doing. Well, im honored you would put me in the same category of those legendary muckrakers, but thank you. And i do see sort of a through line somewhat to what we are doing these days. But john, as i mentioned, was he was a lay representative and this is in the early 90s and starting to see what he felt like was this pattern of withholding evidence, and he sort of 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 this law degree at age 53. And he was well in law school that he had this came across while reading case law this theory of fraud on the courts, which is more than just garden variety fraud but a heightened level of fraud that is basically a systemic scheme to subvert the entire judicial system and thefeld felt like this applied to the conduct of this law firm, Jackson Kelly, and this law firm is really one that was so intertwined in the history of West Virginia and a lot of appalachia to a degree i didnt really realize, even when i was working on the original series until i came back to do the book and look more into the history. It was really the law firm trailed its roots back traced it roots back to land lawyers who largely wrote the laws that allowed out of state companies to basically and individuals to control huge swaths of the coal fields basically, and sort of led to a lot of this legacy of exploitation for resources that has dominated the history of West Virginia and a lot of a lot of that region, and they had really been there, this law firms lawyers had been there at ever stage, writing the constitution for the state, shaping its contures in legislatures and courtrooms and when there were me mine wars in the early 20th century. Who were trying to unionize the area and when there was this fight i mentioned to just recognize that black lung exists and its disabling and was worthy of compensation, the law firm was also on the other side of that fight, trying to lobby to prevent legislation to recognize the teaches and provide fair compensation, and theyve since been the premiere law firm for a lot of these Coal Companies, and what they ended up doing was i sort of tried to recreate some of what john had said he had seen and its very difficult to figure out exactly what was going on in these cases, these are not theyre not like court files where you fog to the court and request them. Theyre not open like that because these are administrative cases that have a lot of privacy protections for good reason. So, 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 their files and i end up going into the Labor Department lugging a whole butch of boxes of files and logging those, and came to see what john was claiming was actually correct, that there was this pattern of withholding evidence in critical caseses that caused miners to lose their claim, including gary foxs claim, the other primary character. So when john and gary finally got together