While we were busy pissing on each other over who knows best as to how to win over the working man, a true hero to the working man who showed how it’s done has quietly passed away.
Ken Hechler passed away on December 10th at the age of 102. www.nytimes.com/...
Ken was a tireless advocate for the workers of West Virginia. During his tenure as congressman from the 4th district in West Virginia from 1959 to 1977, he was the principal architect of the Coal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969.
The instructive lesson from Ken’s long and fruitful life is that his background would not have suggested he would have been a tireless advocate for the working man in West Virginia. Born and raised in New York, he was educated at Swarthmore College and Columbia University and served on the faculty of Columbia and Barnard after earning his PhD from Columbia. He then had distinguished service during WW2, which included interviewing the defendants in the Nuremberg trials, and more notably, participation in the capturing of the Ludendorff Bridge as a member of the 9th Armored Division. Ken later interviewed both the American and German soldiers involved and published the book The Bridge at Remagen: The Amazing Story of March 7, 1945. This book would later be made into a film.
After the War, Ken went to work for the Truman administration as an assistant to President Truman. During his time in Washington, he would also work as an advisor to Adlai Stevenson and was the associate director of the American Political Science Association.
But it was his appointment to the faculty of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia that would shape the remainder of his life as a politician. While there, he decided that he needed to walk the walk rather than stay in the classroom if he wanted to effect change, and ran for the 4th district congressional seat. He won it narrowly by running a populist campaign, appealing to the labor vote. Always an opponent of the West Virginia Democratic machine, he was known as a liberal Democrat and a bit of a rabble rouser, regularly touring the state in his trademark red Jeep.
Ken would later have his ups and downs politically, he ran an unsuccessful campaign for Governor in 1976, but was then elected as Attorney General in 1984, a post he held until 2001. He later tried more unsuccessful runs for congress, ran again for attorney general in 2004 at the age of 90 and ran again at the age of 94 in the special election to replace Robert Byrd.
His last campaign was his way of bringing attention to the destructive and devastating practice of Mountaintop removal mining. By that time, the political winds had shifted in West Virginia, and the very unions that he had supported for do long had turned against him for his stance on this environmentally destructive practice.
Ken’s life should be an instructive one for us. What he showed is that if you show up, make the time to make connections to people that on the surface, are of a different class and background from yourself, it is possible to find common ground and effect change for the common good.
RIP Ken.