The fact that the Arizona Diamondbacks and agent Scott Boras got into a public spat over the impeding free agency of Willie Bloomquist is, to say the least, the most absurd thing I’ve heard all day.
Luckily for Bloomquist, the Diamondbacks bought Boras’ high-end crack and resigned Bloomquist to a 2 year-$3.8 million dollar deal. It’s really hard to see how they could have spent that money otherwise….
On November 11, 1919, the people of Centralia, Washington, a small lumber town in the southwestern part of the state, celebrated the first anniversary of Armistice Day with a parade. However, town leaders and the local American Legion post decided to turn the parade into an attack upon Centralia’s Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) union hall, which they considered the center of subversion and sedition in their community. When the Legion reached the hall, they broke in and began tearing the place apart. What they did not expect was that the radical loggers had prepared an ambush. The I.W.W. had stationed at least two shooters on a hill approximately ¼ mile away. In addition, some of the workers in the hall had weapons. In the hail of bullets, four American Legion members died. Warren Grimm, a University of Washington graduate and lawyer, had not only fought in World War I, but had also served in the military’s anti-Bolshevik force in Siberia before returning to his home town of Centralia. Arthur McElfresh had spent eighteen months in the army in France. The third dead Legionnaire was Ben Casagranda, a Greek-American who went to war for his new nation. The fourth was another University of Washington graduate and member of the Centralia elite, Dale Hubbard.
Infuriated, the Legionnaires chased a man they thought was Britt Smith, the local I.W.W. secretary, but who in fact was Wesley Everest, an itinerant logger and I.W.W. member. They beat him severely and threw him into a prison cell with other Wobblies they had rounded up. That evening, still incensed, local men took Everest from his jail cell, possibly castrated him, and hanged him from a bridge on the Chehalis River. Trials quickly ensued for a dozen other I.W.W. members. A jury found eight guilty of second-degree murder, and they received sentences ranging from twenty-five to forty years at the Washington State Prison in Walla Walla. The I.W.W. claimed that the timber industry, the American Legion, and local authorities had railroaded the eight men into prison; and their cause served as a rallying cry for an increasingly marginalized I.W.W. over the next twenty years.
Violence in this little lumber town took place as forces of order battled against radicalized loggers over control of the timber industry. Throughout the first two decades of the 20th century, timber companies treated their workers like animals. Conditions in the timber camps were horrific conditions. Loggers dealt with adulterated food, fleas and other vermin in their overcrowded housing, straw for bedding, the smell of disgusting wet socks drying near the bunkhouse’s one heater, latrines located directly next to the dining hall so that they could smell feces when they sat down to eat, etc. They were paid next to nothing for their work and frequently ripped off by a collusion of timber operators and employment agencies who would force men to pay for jobs and then the job not be there when they arrived. These men also lived in all-male spaces, completely isolated from women in their remote camps. Thus, when men could get to town, the first thing they headed for was to purchase the services of a prostitute. They could not live with dignity either in the camps or when they returned to society. In desperation, and with the American Federation of Labor showing almost no interest in organizing these workers, they turned to the I.W.W.
Maybe I’m not being explicit enough. Let me clarify. In 1916, Red Cross doctor W.H. Lipscomb took a tour of Northwestern timber camps. He was outraged by all I mentioned in the previous paragraph. He mentioned one camp. It had bunkhouses that held approximately 80 men. Those 80 men had one sink in the bunkhouse. The company provided one towel for those 80 men. A new man came into camp. He was infected with gonorrhea. He used the towel to wipe places he shouldn’t. The bunkhouse witnessed an epidemic of gonorrhea among the men. In their eyes.
So you can see why workers would join a radical organization like the I.W.W. But the Wobblies were hated by the timber industry and local authorities. We have seen how the Everett police responded to the I.W.W. with murderous violence. They were not alone. A year before, in 1918, Centralia residents had destroyed the local I.W.W. hall. They figured they could do so again. Little did they know that the union would set up shooters on the hills surrounding the town and arm some of the men inside.
The I.W.W. was on the decline even before Centralia. The logging strike of 1917 had forced the government’s hand to intervene in the timber industry because it needed spruce and fir to build airplanes for World War I. The government sent in the military. Rather than operate strictly as strikebreakers, the military chose to mediate the situation. It forced timber operators to improve the camp conditions and give the military rights to inspect them. No improvements=no soldiers to log and no government contracts. In return, it created a paramilitary loggers’ organization and forced loggers to join it and renounced the I.W.W. in order to work. Most did, particularly since the government was providing them the safe working and living environments loggers were fighting for. Some refused of course, including the men still fighting to organize loggers in Centralia.
The Centralia Massacre was not the final blow for the I.W.W. in the United States, but it was close. The official repression of the Red Scare combined with organized violence against the union to make it all but irrelevant. It did retain a small presence in the Northwestern woods through the 1920s and even into the late 30s, though the successful unionization of loggers in the CIO and AFL after 1935 made the organization pointless. Still, loggers in 1919 and 1939 showed a great deal of respect for all the I.W.W. had done for them.
Mentioning the Centralia Massacre quickly became totally unacceptable in the community. Literally none of the participants on the Legion side ever told their story. They all took it to the grave with them. At some point, I think sometime in the 80s, Centralia residents commissioned a bunch of murals for their town representing their history. There are lots of scenes of white people settling the land, but nothing on Centralia. The labor hall in town put up its own mural, though it is kind of hard to see from the road because it is on the second floor. You have to know where to look.
Previous editions of this series have covered the creation of the CIO in 1935 and the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
I think every environmentalist is ecstatic to see the Obama Administration pull back on approving the Keystone XL pipeline, ordering it back into review at the State Department. Essentially, the pressure from environmentalists (and from factions within the Occupy movement, which helped publicize this) became too great. The key issue was that the pipeline was slated to go through the Sand Hills of Nebraska, a unique ecosystem. Bill McKibben says that this basically kills the pipeline. While that sounds optimistic to me, no one knows about these issues than McKibben, so I’ll take his word that this is a gigantic victory against environmental degradation and against dirty energy.
That was the mantra of the environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s when we as a nation learned not to litter and that we shouldn’t throw everything away. Of course, we still aren’t very good at it (and see Coca-Cola vetoing the National Park Service’s decision to ban disposable water bottles in the Grand Canyon for evidence).
Out of these three options, we’ve chosen the latter. Reduce, please. We’re Americans. We don’t fucking reduce. Reuse, what a pain.
So we recycle. It’s great. I can put my cans and bottles in a green box, put it out with the trash, never have to think about it again, and I can feel great about myself.
But what happens after the nice people take away your recycling?
Saint-Gobain Containers is hardly a household name in Seattle. But its hulking plant on West Marginal Way, in the heart of the Duwamish industrial area, is a key link in the regional recycling chain: It turns used glass into new bottles. The company bills itself as a “world leader” in protecting the environment and declares itself “committed to a sustainable future for not only our business – but the planet.” It is the largest maker of wine bottles in the United States.
But Paris-based Saint-Gobain, which operates the Duwamish plant under its Verallia brand, can claim another distinction: It has racked up more fines for violating the federal Clean Air Act than any other operation in the Northwest — $962,000 in the last five years, according to government records.
Oh.
This is not the only case either. The recycling industry has a very dark side. If you haven’t seen Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, I highly recommend it. The film follows the photographer Edward Burtynsky on his trip to China. Burtynsky is noted for his beautiful photos of deeply polluted landscapes. One of the most powerful scenes in the film is a visit to a village that works on recycling computers. Basically, they are hammering old computers to get out the valuable compounds that can be resold. But not only do the villagers breathe in toxic dust, but the water and soil is contaminated with heavy metals. And it’s not like these workers are paid well.
Recycling is theoretically a good thing, but it should be the least important of the three consumption-reduction strategies. Since we aren’t going to reduce, we need to commit to reuse. Ideally, grocery stores would have giant containers of products (ketchup for instance) that you could put your bottle under and squirt it in. Basically, everything should be in bulk and you would have to reuse containers. Of course, this would disrupt the plastic bottle industry and cause headaches for grocery store conglomerates, so it will never happen. But the current system of recycling is broken and we need to brainstorm solutions.
Count me as one who is quite glad that William Tecumseh Sherman sufficiently recovered from his severe depression to burn Georgia and South Carolina.
I spend a lot of time around college students. As do all the writers of this blog and an impressive chunk of the readership. I feel like I know the young person’s mind as well any professor can. And, as a graduate of the University of Oregon, I know that undergraduates like a good riot every now and again. But unlike Oregon, where people rioted in order to not have their parties broken up, Penn State University undergraduates like to riot in favor of child rape.
Now, I don’t know if anyone out here is really going to defend Penn St. students rioting in support of Joe Paterno doing nothing when he knew his defensive coordinator was raping children. But if you would, you might say that college football is corrupt and that it brings out the worst in undergraduates. And I would agree with that. I love college football, but I know the institution is rife with hypocrisy and corruption. I lived in Knoxville in the late 90s when the Tennessee Volunteers won their national championship. University of Tennessee administrators were very excited by this because applications for admission skyrocketed the next year. I was outraged–what school would even want students who were attracted to the institution because of its football program (outside of football players)? Tennessee of course. In Pennsylvania, although Penn St. is a very fine institution of higher education, I understand that the kind of kids who want to go to a football school go to Penn St instead of Pittsburgh or Temple.
But even given that these may not be our finest specimen of undergraduate here, who comes out in support of a coach who covered up child rape, even if he is an icon? A lot of people have a lot of soul-searching to do. And if my kid were involved in such a riot for such a reason, I would refuse to pay for their education at that school any longer.
….And of course the police do nothing to stop this riot but a bunch of students protesting at Berkeley, well, that’s a scary threat that needs to be crushed with maximum force!
On this date in 1935, the Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations) was created.
Ever since the failure of the Knights of Labor to organize all workers behind the 8 hour day in 1886, the American labor movement was primarily dominated by the American Federation of Labor. Led by the cigarmaker Samuel Gompers, it provided a conservative alternative to the radical ideology America’s industrial workers were increasingly finding appealing. The AFL defined itself as a moderate alternative that industry should recognize as a bulwark against radicalism. In doing this, the AFL excluded people it deemed undesirable to its image–women, blacks, Asians, children, and the masses of eastern Europeans toiling in America’s huge factories. This kept the appeal of radicalism very real for millions of Americans who found themselves increasingly desperate for union representation. They would join left-leaning unions such as the Industirial Workers of the World, or join anarchist or communist groups.
Of course, there was often a major division between Gompers and the AFL leadership on one side and the rank and file on the other. On the ground, the AFL often served as a radical force for change in local communities, though, as in the Seattle General Strike of 1919, the federation would throw its radical workers under the bus if it threatened labor’s moderate reputation.
Not only was the AFL’s rejection of radicalism a problem, so was its organizing model. Seeing itself as a group of skilled laborers who had trade consciousness but not class consciousness, Gompers and other AFL leaders rejected the idea of organizing by industry. Instead of organizing all auto workers into a single union, it would rather have 40 unions in the factory, each divided by the specific job one did. This fracturing undermined the ability of labor to act as a radical force for change, which was mostly fine by Gompers.
There were exceptions to this model. Probably the most important was the United Mine Workers of America. The UMWA came out of the incredibly brutal conditions of the late 19th and early 20th century Appalachian coal country, where companies ruled like lords over serfs, where violence against striking workers was commonplace, and where accidents took place at a rate similar to Chinese coal mines today. By the early 1930s, the UMWA was led by John L. Lewis. Lewis came out of the coal mines of the Midwest. Gompers hired him as a mining organizer in 1911 and by 1919, he became president of the UMWA. Lewis reinvigorated that union, calling a huge strike in 1919 that ended when Woodrow Wilson successfully won an injunction against them. Building on the still brutal conditions in coal country, Lewis used the nation’s dependence on coal to force better conditions his workers, who were usually quite willing to strike. This made Lewis hated by the nation’s business leaders but a hero to many who sought a more aggressive unionism during labor retrenchment of the 1920s. Although by no means a socialist (he was a supporter of Hoover in 1928 and Willkie in 1940), he knew how important radicals were to labor organizing and happily used them to further labor’s aims.
By the early 1930s, the increased destitution of the Great Depression led to a huge spurt in union organizing. Pressure to organize workers on an industry-wide basis mounted. John Lewis, among others, led the fight to include industry-wide organizing within the AFL. The AFL tentatively moved ahead with this beginning in 1934, but refused to fund the efforts. Meanwhile, huge industrial strikes started taking place in the face of conservative AFL leadership, including the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike and the Longshoremen’s Strike in San Francisco, both in 1934. After AFL President William Green and his allies slighted industrial organizing at the 1935 AFL convention, which led to Lewis punching Carpenters’ president William Hutcheson, Lewis and his allies began planning to leave the AFL.
On November 9, 1935, the UMWA, along with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and other industrial unions within the AFL created the CIO. Originally, the CIO, then called the Committee on Industrial Organizations, operated within the AFL, but when Green continued dallying on industrial organization, Lewis and others decided to split entirely. The CIO would have a major impact on American history in coming years, organizing some of the biggest workforces in America, including steel workers, auto workers, rubber workers, and electrical workers. Among its early successes were the Flint Sit-Down Strike, the battles to organize the steel plants, and eventually organizing Ford in 1941, a major success both in concrete and symbolic terms given Henry Ford’s hatred of unions. By 1938, the CIO had 4 million members; by 1945, this number had risen to 6 million.
Despite its early successes, the CIO never surpassed the AFL in membership. For one, CIO competition forced the AFL to become more aggressive organizers. For another, infighting between competing AFL and CIO unions in an industry became endemic and undermined labor effectiveness. In the timber industry, the CIO created the International Woodworkers of America to compete against the AFL unions, which operated under he auspices of the Carpenters. The two union newspapers spent more time hating on each other than attacking the timber industry.
The CIO was effectively neutered by postwar McCarthyism, which forced its leadership to kick out the communists that had served as such effective industrial organizers. By 1955, differences between the AFL and CIO were pretty small. The CIO merged with the AFL and thus began a new era of conservative union leadership that still plagues the labor movement today.
This series has also covered the Pittston Strike of 1989 and the Stono Rebellion of 1739.
Scott has already talked about some of the great stuff that happened last night. I want to build on that a bit here.
Scott discussed the failure of the Mississippi zygote amendment, demonstrating that at least for the time being, a majority of people in even our most conservative states are not totally insane.
The other big news of course was SB-5 in Ohio and I want to state just what a huge victory this is. In 2010, a motivated conservative base and an apathetic and dispirited Democratic Party created conditions that allowed John Kasich to defeat Ted Strickland for the governorship. Kasich received 1,889,180 votes for governor in 2010. SB-5 was rejected with 2,145,042 votes. I don’t know a single time in history when an off-year ballot measure had a higher voter turnout than an on-year gubernatorial election. Absolutely remarkable. Recent polls also show Obama crushing all Republican opponents in Ohio. This might not mean much now, but Ohio and Wisconsin have seen the Republican insanity up close and personal and have rejected it soundly.
Getting less attention but also very important is Wake County, North Carolina voting out the right-wingers who destroyed their integrated public education system. This is significant because of the evil influence of Koch-esque Art Pope had had over North Carolina politics since the Citizens United decision and shows that while you can buy elections, you can’t fool the people forever with money and dirty politics.
Even cities like Knoxville, Tennessee, one of America’s most conservative metropolises, voted in Madeline Rogero as mayor. Rogero is not only the first female mayor in the city’s history, but is the first non-right winger in my memory (I lived there for 3 years in the late 90s and was deeply involved in local politics and organizing).
Not to mention the successful recall of the loathsome Russell Pearce in Arizona, the restoration of voting rights in Maine, the reelection of Steve Beshear as governor of Kentucky, and several other positive races.
One can’t read too much into these elections, but they are obviously good signs for Democrats going into 2012. Moreover, it helps reinforce my belief that Occupy Wall Street and the Madison protests from earlier this year have gone a long ways toward changing the narrative of the nation.
Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic, not only one of my favorite books about the Civil War, but one of my favorite non-fiction books ever, has recently published a new book on John Brown’s raid. Titled Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, Horwitz demonstrates in lively prose the centrality of the Brown’s 1859 attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in creating the nation’s most deadly conflict.
Midnight Rising isn’t as profound as Confederates in the Attic. Nonetheless, Brown provides a straightforward and engaging story about one of the nation’s most polarizing figures, a man who still resonates with many people today. Horwitz’s Brown is a passionate, disturbed man, a failure in business and in everything else except agitating against slavery. Concerned with little other than eradicating the evil institution, Brown wrecks havoc not only on slaveholders who cross his path but his own family, terrorizing them one minute, creating devoted followers of them the next. Horwitz notes, and I think correctly, that Brown was almost certainly manic-depressive. His own writings admit that he felt great one minute and utterly horrible the next. In fact, Brown’s family had a significant history of mental illness.
The unhinged nature of Brown’s family was not helped by his actions. One of the most compelling parts of Horwitz’s story was how Brown’s 1855 attack on Kansas slaveholders at Pottawatomie Creek tramitized his sons who participated. Owen Brown, John’s oldest son did not want to participate. Convinced to do so, he went into a long depression because he personally killed one of the victims. The second son, Frederick Brown, basically went insane, castrating himself some time later. Even sons who did not take part, Jason and John Jr., began having major psychological problems after the raid. On top of this, since everyone knew Brown was involved, proslavery raiders quickly burned his home and possessions, leaving the family’s women poor, scared, and on the run, conditions that would be all too typical of life with John Brown.
Horwitz speeds through Brown’s first 55 years very quickly. Perhaps too quickly. By page 44 Brown is in Kansas and even that story is dealt with fairly rapidly. Horwitz wants to get to Harpers Ferry as soon as possible. He tells the story with aplomb, showing the convoluted ways Brown tried to make the operation work, his difficulty raising money (and his terrible business sense that led him to waste the money he did receive), how he gained his few followers, his plans for taking Harpers Ferry, and the disastrous results of his raid.
A point I frequently make to my students is how Southern politicians violently overreacted to every northern move to oppose slavery. Horwitz reinforces my feelings about this with his discussion of Henry Wise. Virginia’s governor in 1859 and an opportunist to the core, Wise sought to take advantage of the raid to improve his own political stock. A die-hard slaveholder and soon to be one of Virginia’s leading secessionists, Wise responded to Brown’s raid not with moderation, but by militiarizing his state, sending notices to the governors of Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania that his troops would invade their states in pursuit of future raiders. This outraged even the pliant and worthless James Buchanan, not that our worst president did much about it.
Wise and his henchmen wanted to ensure Brown and his followers were executed as quickly as possible. They skirted legal procedures to speed through Brown’s trial, then oddly allowed him to hold court with all comers until his death. Rather than turn Brown over to the federal government where he would have likely been dealt with slowly and according to proper procedures, Wise and his supporters turned Brown into a martyr.
Few northerners supported Brown’s raid immediately upon its conclusions. Even most of his fundraisers recoiled in horror, some finding reasons to get out of the country. There were exceptions. Henry David Thoreau spoke out for him. So eventually did Frederick Douglass, who Brown had met years before and immediately before the raid, a meeting in fact that led to one of Douglass’ protégés joining Brown’s forces.
Brown even impressed southerners like Wise with his manly bearing and courage. Expecting a coward, they met a man they both loathed and expected. Horwitz doesn’t talk in these terms, but I was struck at how well Brown fit the culture of antebellum heroic masculinity. The emphasis on bravery, honor, and violence was more powerful in the South and among the working classes in northern cities than among the evangelical Whigs and the new middle class. Brown may have believed in northern reform movements but his actions and bearing impressed those who believed that manhood needed to be fought in the streets, in the duels that were so common among southern politicians before the Civil War and even in the brutal beating Preston Brooks placed upon Charles Sumner on the Senate floor after Sumner insulted not only the South generally but Brooks’ relative, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler.
In the short term, Brown became a hero to abolitionists and African-Americans. And this leads to why I think Brown continues to fascinate us. We respect his stand for equal rights. Unlike even most abolitionists Brown was an anti-racist, thinking of African-Americans as absolute equals to whites. Slavery is our national sin. It needed to end by any means necessary.
On the other hand, I’ve been reticent to support Brown in the past because his example is held up by anti-abortion fanatics as a model of how to fight against an immoral system. This idea has had real consequences, including the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. How can we judge slavery so wrong that murder is acceptable to fight it (and say what you will about Harpers Ferry, but Pottawatomie Creek was definitely murder) and tell anti-abortion activists that it is totally different? Of course, it is completely different in my moral universe, but given that, unfortunately, I can’t apply my moral values to the world, the question comes down to the proper use of violence. Do we embrace Martin Luther King’s notions of nonviolence? Even King would not overstate the concept’s limits; certainly, he would not have spoken against Nat Turner’s violent rebellion in 1831 that put southern slaveholders on edge against a northern invasion. And if this rebellion were led by another Nat Turner rather than a northern white man with a death wish and a hope to bring the slavery question to a violent resolution, could any of us feel anything but support? There are no clear answers to these questions except a blanket denunciation of violence that can’t survive the real world. The only way I can accept Brown’s violence and not that of anti-abortion fanatics is relativism. It depends on the cause and one cause is right and one cause is wrong. I’m OK with my relativism on this issue. But it certainly means that Brown will remain a contested figure for generations to come.
1. Tomorrow Ohio voters go to the polls to decide on the fate of SB-5, the anti-union bill pushed through the Ohio legislature by John Kasich and his Tea=Partying friends. Polls show that it is going to go down to a resounding defeat. However, polls on ballot measures are notoriously unreliable, especially for off-year elections like this one. Both sides are pretty motivated so I’d expect a relatively high turnout for such an election and clearly turnout is going to decide this thing. It’s interesting that Wisconsin was the site of the major protests against anti-union bills, but it’s in Ohio where the successful pushback is likely to happen thanks to the law allowing state voters to turn bills into referendum. In Wisconsin, the chosen fight was the recall elections which did kick two Teabaggers out but kept control of the legislature in Scott Walker’s hands and made the likelihood of a successful recall of Walker less promising. In any case, this will be a big vote. If labor wins, it shows that real momentum in fighting back the class warfare of the Republican Party. A loss would be pretty devastating, emboldening Republicans and showing that labor can’t get the turnout necessary to listen to it.
2. Employees at a Dodge City, Kansas meatpacking plant have voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers. This is big news. Meatpackers busted their unions years ago by moving their operations to the rural Plains states and bringing in foreign laborers to toil away from media attention or communities of any size. These plants are extremely dangerous for workers, accidents are common, and death is hardly unknown. Organizers have had to overcome multiple problems, including the little fiefdoms of the packers in these rural communities, the fact that the packers have routinely reported themselves for immigration violations in order to deport workers likely to vote for unions, and a multiplicity of languages. In fact, all literature for the campaign was in English, Spanish, Laotian, and Vietnamese. So this is quite a victory, even if the big battle against National Beef Packing for a contract is forthcoming.
3. Not union-specific, but it’s hardly surprising that young people are growing increasingly desperate given the massively growing wage and asset gap between the old and young. As a person with a net worth well below zero, despite being a college professor in my late 30s, this is very, very frustrating. I’ve made the supposed right decisions, with far greater prospects than my parents ever had. I don’t engage in a lot of frivolous spending (with the exception of making sure I travel somewhere outside the country once a year), and work as hard as I can to not have credit card debt. Nonetheless, I can’t afford even a decent car, not to mention buying a house, saving for retirement outside of what is taken out of my paycheck, or have any kind of savings account. It’s when people realize that playing the game isn’t going to work for them that they start joining movements like Occupy Wall Street.
4. In an all-too-typical story, 60 farmworkers in Washington were stranded in the middle of nowhere when they were bused from Seattle to an farm (an organic farm nonetheless) where they were told they would be paid $25 for 4-5 hours of work, i.e., below the minimum wage. They refused and were left to find their own way back to Seattle. That the farmer works in organics is not surprisingly either. There’s been a lot of tension between farm laborers and organic farmers, particularly over the need for additional hard physical labor to weed ground crops if pesticides are not used. While that’s not the case here, there’s little to no evidence that organic farms treat workers better than conventional farms.
…..Remind me to never bring myself or my life up again in a post. I keep forgetting that the internet is neither a place for subtlety nor for serious discussion about issues. Rather it’s a place to be as big a jerk as possible. As you can tell, I am deeply dismayed that using myself as an example has taken away from the serious issues brought up not only in that link, but the other notes as well.
Although I don’t identify as a historian of technology per se, I have presented at the Society for the History of Technology before. And the technologies I deal with in my work are seemingly mundane–clean sheets, showers, fly-proof screens for meat. Not surprisingly then, I tend to believe that smaller day-to-day technologies are more meaningful for understanding the past than the big technological systems historians of the field have traditionally focused on.
Suzanne Fischer covered the recent SHOT meeting in Cleveland and is reporting for the Atlantic on some of the papers she saw there. Among them, Rachel Maines’ paper arguing for the importance of clean socks in fighting trenchfoot during World War II.
Trenchfoot, a condition where feet become necrotic due to excess moisture, took many casualties in the First World War as well as in the beginning encounters of World War II. In the Alaskan engagements in the early 1940s, 40% of the casualties were due to trenchfoot. It often caused permanent disability.
The simplest solution to trenchfoot was dry socks that fit well and were changed often. In World War I, the US textile industry, despite having the largest stock of knitting machines in the world, couldn’t scale up to the 150 million pairs of socks needed to outfit soldiers. So auxiliary factories were called into production: home knitters. Women, children and elderly people―anyone not on the front―were asked to knit socks, sweaters and hospital textiles. New hand-knitting technologies were deployed, including a pattern for knitting two socks at once. But these socks suffered from quality control problems. Maines quoted a veteran’s ditty:
Thank you kind lady,
Your socks are some fit.
I use one for a hammock
and one for a mitt.By the Second World War, the US had enough industrial capacity to provide all the socks soldiers needed, and home knitters weren’t needed for production. But trenchfoot remained a problem.
Interesting stuff. This also gives me a chance to plug one of my all time favorite history books, Maines’ The Technology of Orgasm, a study of how the vibrator developed in the late 19th century. I once taught this book in a class entitled “Food, Drugs, and Sex: Bodies and Environments in History.” The students loved the book but instead of talking about the Gilded Age, really just wanted to talk about how the story related to their own experiences today. Eventually I gave up moving back to the 19th century because in the end, if a history book touches people in a special way, it’s best to encourage that. No pun intended.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
