On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

John Henry is an American folk hero, possibly based on a real African American railroad worker who died helping to dig the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway’s Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia in the 1870s. At the time, tunnels had to be manually cut through rock. The biggest and strongest railroad workers, called steel-driving men, would use heavy hammers to pound long steel rods as deep as twelve feet into the rock of a mountain. The holes were then filled with explosives and detonated. In the legend, John Henry was the biggest and strongest of the steel-driving men. He supposedly wielded two twenty-pound hammers, one in each hand. One day, the railroad brought in a steam drill to replace the steel-driving men. John Henry, out of pride or an instinct for job preservation, challenged his boss to let him race the machine, one on one. The boss agreed, and all the railroad workers gathered to watch the battle between man and machine. John Henry and the steam drill were neck and neck for hours, but as they neared the finish line, the drill finally broke. John Henry kept going and won the contest, but he’d pushed himself too hard—as he struck the winning blow with his hammers, his heart gave out and he fell over, dead. The folktales never really get into what happens after that, but history would suggest that the boss repaired the steam drill and fired the remaining steel drivers as if the contest never took place.