Men and Dust (1940)
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Film Description
Men and Dust (1940)
Sponsor: Tri-State Survey Committee Inc. Production Co.: Lee Dick Inc. Director: Lee Dick. Writer/Camera: Sheldon Dick. Music: Fred Stewart. Editor: Jules V.D. Bucher. Narrators: Storrs Haynes, Will Geer, Eric Walz. Transfer Note: Scanned from a 16mm print held by the Library of Congress. Running Time: 16 minutes.
Documentary sponsored by a labor advocacy group to draw attention to the industrial diseases plaguing zinc and lead miners in the tristate region of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.
Note: Sheldon Dick initially came to the region to take photographs for a Tri-State Survey Committee report and stayed on to make Men and Dust. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner write that the tristate advocacy campaign was pivotal in alerting the public to the industrial health hazards faced by American workers in some industries.
Resources
Association of Documentary Film Producers, Living Films: A Catalog of Documentary Films and Their Makers (New York: Association of Documentary Film Producers, 1940), 42; Educational Film Catalog, comps. Dorothy E. Cook and Eva Rahbek-Smith (New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1940–41), 84; Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, “‘The Street of Walking Death’: Silicosis, Health, and Labor in the Tri-State Region, 1900–1950,” Journal of American History 77 (Sept. 1990): 525–52.