Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,903
By This is the grave of Emmett Roe.
You have likely never heard of Emmett Roe. But he was a murderous horrible person, one who made America worse for his existing. In fact, I don’t know all that much about much of his life. He was born in 1927 and grew up in the capitol region of New York. He went into food processing as a young man, based mostly in Troy, New York. He worked for Empire Foods and in 1960, left Troy to become a manager at a chicken plant in Moosic, Pennsylvania. Early in his career, he seems to have believed that labor and management should work together, common in the era of union power. That did not last long. But employees who remembered him in Moosic recalled him working on the lines with them when it got busy and caring when they got hurt. He was certainly known for his temper, but he would also hold big clambakes every summer and he doesn’t seem to have been worse than many other employers.
In 1970, Roe left Empire to run some fried chicken restaurants. They went belly up in 1973. He went back to Moosic, mortgaged his home, and bought the Empire factory. He renamed it Imperial. But he did not see Pennsylvania as his future. See, labor was cheaper elsewhere. In those years, the workers had unionized with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Retail Clerks. Roe hated unions. He was so angry that anyone would dare tell him how to run his factory that he decided to close it and move to antiunion locations in the South.
Among other states, Roe chose North Carolina. A state in bed with the agricultural industry if there ever was one, North Carolina regulators never inspected the factory because the budget for inspections was minuscule. In 11 years of operation, it received no fire inspections. The factory did undergo repeated inspections from the company’s poultry inspector. Workers complained about the terrible smell and quality of meat, with at least one telling an inspector that the meat processed into chicken nuggets was particularly awful. According to one survivor of the fire, the plant managers locked the door to stop workers from stealing chicken. This was the same excuse sweatshop managers gave to locking the doors at Triangle when that disaster killed 146 workers in 1911. Roe loathed his own workers. He saw them as dumb blacks, animals basically. He used to rant about how they would steal everything, even though there wasn’t any evidence for this. I suppose it did happen some, but it’s not as if was crushing his profit margins or anything. He just saw workers as the enemy. Roe, now working with his son Brad, also produced nasty meat, forcing workers to package chicken that had fallen on the floor.
So on September 3, 1991, thanks to Roe being a cheap bastard who didn’t care about the lives of workers, his chicken factory in Hamlet, North Carolina burned. He killed 25 workers that day.
The fire began when the deep fryer caught fire after a hydraulic line to a cooking vat failed, with obvious problems with it not found because of the company’s indifferent safety culture. It spread very quickly thanks to a combination of burning cooking oil, insulation, and exploding gas lines hanging from the ceiling. It didn’t help that all of the phones inside the building were nonfunctional. The workers at the front of the plant all managed to get out. But at the back of the plant the company did not place any fire alarms. Moreover, Imperial managers not only locked all the exits but sealed the windows as well. Those workers had nowhere to go. As an old plant, it was a maze of paths inside. The smoke meant they couldn’t find their way to the front. They were doomed. Like at Triangle, some workers did get out the back by breaking open a locked loading bay, but many died. On one door, near charred bodies, blackened footprints could still be seen, signs of the desperate attempt to escape. Eighteen of the dead were women. Most of the dead were African-American.
Roe basically didn’t care. He was angry that his investments in other plants around the South and in the beef industry in Colorado had not worked out. Dead workers were the least of his concerns and he showed little to no regret through the entire process after the fire.
There was both a state and a federal investigation of the fire. The state passed the buck. The state labor commissioner said that his department did not have enough money (true, thanks to the notoriously anti-labor North Carolina legislature. Even today, NC has the lowest union density rate in the nation. He also blamed the federal government for not enforcing safety standards (OK, but that is indeed passing the buck). As it turned out, Roe had not even filed basic paperwork with the state. He was notorious for ignoring both state and federal law, such as closing an Alabama factory without giving workers the legally required notice. He hadn’t filed for a business license in North Carolina! But this “pro-business” state just ignored all that stuff until they had federal investigations coming.
Three men faced charges for the fire. Roe, his son, and the plant manager all took plea bargains. Since Roe had personally directed the locking of the doors, he received a prison sentence of nearly 20 years, less than a year for each of the murders he committed. He served four years in prison. Imperial Foods also received an $800,000 fine. The factory was never reopened. 215 people lost their jobs. The federal government ordered North Carolina to improve its worker safety legislation or the government would do it for them. This did lead to the passage of 14 new laws, including a whistleblower law, as well as a near doubling of state workplace safety inspectors. The enforcement of all of this was still pretty not great.
Roe served four years. Given the impunity CEOs almost always have in this country, it’s kind of amazing. It was amazing enough that Don Blankenship, murderer of coal miners at Upper Big Branch in West Virginia, served a year in prison, during which he refashioned himself as a political prisoner and started what he hoped would be far-right campaigns for political office. Four years, that’s almost impossible to imagine for a murderous CEO today.
Roe spent the last years of life in Roswell, Georgia. He died in 2018, at the age of 91.
Emmett Roe is buried in St. Patrick Cemetery, Colonie, New York.
If you’d like this series to visit other murderers of workers, all of whom I hope are burning in Hell, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Oddly, both of the owners of the Triangle Fire largely disappeared from the record after the fire, though we know that they were later fined for opening another factory and locking the doors once again, as we know that employers who kill once will kill again. Thomas Drummond, the judge who ordered the military to crush the Great Railroad Strike in 1877, is in Chicago. Karl Linderfelt, the Colorado National Guard officer who murdered Louis Tikas to begin the Ludlow Massacre, is in Los Angeles. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.