Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  As I walked with Mike Schaff through the sugarcane fields of the old Armelise Plantation, or sat with Madonna in the Living Way Pentecostal Church, I was discovering good people at the center of this Great Paradox. How could kindly Madonna oppose government help for the poor? How could a warm, bright, thoughtful man like Mike Schaff, a victim of corporate malfeasance and wanton destruction, aim so much of his fire at the federal government? How could a state that is one of the most vulnerable to volatile weather be a center of climate denial?

  So, curious to find out, I began this journey into the heart of the right.

  2

  "One Thing Good"

  There he is, seated on his wooden front porch overlooking a trim yard in suburban DeRidder, Louisiana, watching for my car. He rises from his chair, waving with one arm and steadying himself on his walker with the other. A large-chested, six-foot-three man with a gray crew cut and jet-blue eyes, Lee Sherman, age eighty-two, beams me a welcoming smile. A player for the Dallas Texans football team (later renamed the Kansas City Chiefs) for two years, an Honorée in Who's Who of American Motors-ports, a NASCAR racer who drove 200 miles an hour in a neck brace and fire suit, and the proud purchaser of a water ski boat once owned by TV's Wonder Woman, Lee shakes my hand, apologizing, "I'm sorry to be on this thing," he points to his walker, "and not take you through the house properly." He doesn't feel like his old self, he says, but accepts his feeble legs good-naturedly. Given his dangerous work at Pittsburgh Plate Glass, he is happy to be alive. "All my co-workers from back then are dead; most died young," he tells me as he slowly leads me through a tidy home toward the dining room table on which he has set coffee cups, coffee, cookies, and a large photograph album.

  Driving north from Lake Charles through southwest Louisiana to DeRidder, I had passed a miscellany of gas stations, Family Dollar stores, payday loan offices, diners, and lush, green rice fields—crayfish were sometimes cultivated in the wet canals between rows of rice—flat on all sides to the horizon. Some 200 miles west of DeRidder, on land bordering Texas, lay a vast pine wilderness, once a no-man's-land where the legendary outlaws Bonnie and Clyde robbed and roamed. To the north lay soy, sugarcane, and bean fields, oil derricks nodding in the far distance. Southeast of DeRidder by 130 miles sat Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana. Along the great Mississippi, between it and New Orleans, stand majestic plantation manor houses surrounded by gracious skirts of green lawn where once lived the richest families in America. Now tourist sites, they are overshadowed by giant neighboring petrochemical plants, such as Shintech, ExxonMobil, and Monsanto.

  Lee has also become an ardent environmentalist due to things he had suffered, seen, and been ordered to do as a pipefitter in a petrochemical plant. Calcasieu Parish, in which he had worked for fifteen years at the Lake Charles-based Pittsburgh Plate Glass company, is among the 2 percent of American counties with the highest toxic emissions per capita. According to the American Cancer Society, Louisiana has the second highest incidence of cancer for men and the fifth highest male death rate from cancer in the nation.

  But Lee has recently volunteered to post lawns signs for Tea Party congressman John Fleming, who earned a score of 91 on the right-wing FreedomWorks scorecard and favors cutting the Environmental Protection Agency, weakening the Clean Air Act, and drilling on the outer continental shelf, as well as opposing the regulation of greenhouse gases and favoring less regulation of Wall Street. Lee is a regular at meetings of the DeRidder Tea Party, wearing his red, white, and blue party T-shirt featuring an eagle sharpening its talons. So why was Lee the environmentalist eager to plant lawn signs for a politician calling for cuts in the EPA? If I could answer this question, maybe I could unlock the door to the Great Paradox.

  Maybe I could also find the key to Lee's own journey from left to right. For years, back when he worked in a naval shipyard outside Seattle, Washington, he had campaigned for Senator Scoop Jackson, a Cold War—era liberal Democrat who championed civil rights and human rights. Brought up by a working single mother who fought in the shipyards for equal pay for equal work, Lee describes himself as "an ERA baby." When he came south for work in the 1960s, however, he turned Republican, and after 2009 he joined the Tea Party.

  We seat ourselves, pour our coffee, and I ask him to tell me about his childhood. Lee speaks slowly, deliberately, as if for posterity.

  "I was a dare-devil kid, one of seven boys. At around age seven, I roped down a bunch of poplar tree branches, tied myself to them, and released them so I could fly," Lee recalls with a laugh. "I flew pretty high"—he describes a broad arc with his arm—"and landed in a prickly blackberry thicket. It hurt. But my mom didn't come get me because she wanted me to learn a lesson. I didn't, though," he added. Lee drove cars long before he had a license, and at age twelve stole, flew, and safely landed a neighbor's biplane.

  Even at a younger age, Lee was an active child. "When I was about five, I got pneumonia and had to stay in bed for three months. My great grandma (a Native American who lived on a Crow reservation in Montana) sat on me, not with me, so I wouldn't get up. That's how she kept me still so I could learn to crochet."

  As a young man, Lee trained as a coppersmith in the U.S. naval shipyards outside Seattle, where his dad worked as an electrician. When traveling south for work in 1965, Lee was hired by Pittsburgh Plate Glass as a maintenance pipefitter and soon earned a workroom reputation as a mechanical genius. "He can make nuts and bolts and rods and pipes and estimate lengths to the millimeter without having to measure or re-measure them," Mike Tritico, the environmental activist, told me, when he put the two of us in touch. And on weekends Lee raced cars, one of his plant supervisors always asking on Monday how Saturday's race had gone.

  Lee was fearless and careful, a good fit for his dangerous job at PPG—fitting and repairing pipes carrying lethal chemicals such as ethylene dichloride (EDC), mercury, lead, chromium, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and dioxins. Mysteriously, these same chemicals had found their way into a nearby waterway called Bayou d'Inde—a bayou on which a Cajun family, the Arenos, had lived for many generations, and greatly suffered, and whose extraordinary connection to Lee we will learn.

  At one point, Lee narrowly escaped death, he tells me, taking a careful, long sip of coffee. One day while he was working, cold chlorine was accidentally exposed to 1,000 degree heat, which instantly transformed the liquid to gas. Sixteen workers were in the plant at the time. Noting that the company was short of protective gear, Lee's boss instructed him to leave. "Thirty minutes after I left," Lee says, "the plant blew up. Five of the fifteen men I left behind were killed." The next afternoon, Lee's boss asked him to help search for the bodies of the five dead workers. Two were found, three were not. Acid had so decomposed the body of one of the three victims that his remains came out in pieces in the sewer that drained into Bayou d'Inde. "If someone hadn't found him," Lee says, turning his head to look out his dining room window, "that body would have ended up floating into Bayou d'Inde."

  In the 1960s, safety was at a minimum at PPG. "During safety meetings," Lee tells me, "the supervisor just gave us paperwork to fill out. Working with the chemicals, we wore no protective facial masks. You learned how to hold your nose and breathe through your mouth."

  "The company didn't much warn us about dangers," Lee says, adding in a softer voice, "My coworkers did. They'd say, 'You can't stand in that stuff. Get out of it.' I wouldn't be alive today, if it weren't for my co-workers."

  The pipes Lee worked on carried oxygen, hydrogen, and chlorine, and when a pipe sprung a leak, he explains, "I was the guy to fix it."

  "Did you use your bare hands?" I ask.

  "Oh, yeah, yeah."

  Eventually the general foreman issued badges to the workers to record any overexposure to dangerous chemicals, Lee says, "but the foreman made fun of them. It's supposed to take two or three months before the gage registers you've reached the limit. My badge did in three days. The foreman thought I'd stuck it inside a pipe!" Such was
the scene in the late 1960s at the PPG plant in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

  Accidents happened. One day, Lee was standing in a room, leaning over a large pipe to check a filter, when an operator in a distant control room mistakenly turned a knob, sending hot, almond-smelling, liquid chlorinated hydrocarbons coursing through the pipe, accidentally drenching him. "It was hot and I got completely soaked," Lee tells me. "I jumped into the safety shower and had the respirator in my mouth, so I wasn't overcome. But the chemical was burning pretty bad. It really gets you worst underneath your arms, in between your legs, up your bottom." Despite the shower, he said, "The chemical ate off my shoes. It ate off my pants. It ate my shirt. My undershorts were gone. Only some elastic from my socks and my undershorts remained. It burned my clothes clean off me."

  Lee's supervisor told him to go home and buy another pair of shoes, socks, undershorts, Levis, and work shirt—and to bring in the receipts, to be reimbursed. A few days later, he brought his receipts into his supervisor's office. The bill was about $40.00. But his supervisor noted about the incinerated clothes that he had already put some wear into them. "You got about 80 percent use of the shoes and about 50 percent use of the pants," he told Lee. "In the end, taking into account discounts for previous wear," Lee notes wryly, "My supervisor gave me a check for eight dollars. I never cashed it."

  Lee's work at PPG was a source of personal pride, but he clearly did not feel particularly loyal to the company. Still, he did as he was told. And one day after his acid bath, he was told to take on another ominous job. It was to be done twice a day, usually after dusk, and always in secret. In order to do this job, Lee had to wield an eight-foot-long "tar buggy," propelled forward on four wheels. Loaded on this buggy was an enormous steel tank that held "heavy bottoms"—highly viscous tar residue of chlorinated hydrocarbon that had sunk to the bottom of kitchen-sized steel vessels. A layer of asbestos surrounded the tank, to retain heat generated by a heater beneath the buggy. Copper coils were wound around its base. The hotter the tar, the less likely it was to solidify before it was dumped. Inside was toxic waste.

  Working overtime evenings, under cover of dark, his respirator on, Lee would tow the tar buggy down a path that led toward the Calcasieu Ship Channel in one direction and toward Bayou d'Inde in another.

  Lee would look around "to make sure no one saw me" and check if the wind was blowing away from him, so as to avoid fumes blowing into his face. He backed the tar buggy up to the marsh. Then, he said, "I'd bend down and open the faucet." Under the pressure of compressed air, the toxins would spurt out "twenty or thirty feet" into the gooey marsh. Lee waited until the buggy was drained of the illegal toxic waste.

  "No one ever saw me," Lee says.

  The Bird

  Lee helps himself to a cookie, eats it slowly, and lingers over an event that occurred one day while he was alone on the bank with his secret. "While I was dumping the heavy bottoms in the canal, I saw a bird fly into the fumes and fall instantly into the water. It was like he'd been shot. I put two shovels out into the mud, so I could walk on them into the marsh without sinking too far down. I walked out and picked up the bird. Its wings and body didn't move. It looked dead, but its heart was still beating. I grew up on a farm, and I know about birds. I walked back on the shovels to the bank with the bird. I held its head in my right hand and its wings and body in my left hand. I blew into its beak and worked it up and down. Then it started breathing again. Its eyes opened. But the rest of its body still didn't move. I put it on the hood of my truck, which was warm. Then I left the bird to go check my tar buggy. But when I got back, the bird was gone. It had flown away. So that was one thing good."

  During the afternoon, Lee circles back to the story of the bird, alternating between it and the story of the tar buggy. "I knew what I did was wrong," he repeats. "Toxins are a killer. And I'm very sorry I did it. My mama would not have wanted me to do it. I never told anybody this before, but I knew how not to get caught." It was as if Lee had performed the company's crime and assumed the company's guilt as his own.

  But, like the bird, Lee himself became a victim. He grew ill from his exposure to the chemicals. After Lee's hydrocarbon burn, "My feet felt like clubs, and I couldn't bend my legs and rise up, so the company doctor ordered me put on medical leave. I kept visiting the company doctor to see if I was ready to come back, but he kept saying I shouldn't come back until I could do a deep knee bend." Lee took a medical leave of eight months and then returned to work. But not for long.

  After fifteen years of working at PPG, Lee was summoned to an office and found himself facing a seven-member termination committee. "They didn't want to pay my medical disability," Lee explains. "So they fired me for absenteeism! They said I hadn't worked enough hours! They didn't count my overtime. They didn't discount time I took off for my Army Reserve duty. So that's what I got fired for—absenteeism. They handed me my pink slip. Two security guards escorted me to the parking lot." Lee slaps the table as if, decades later, he has just gotten fired again.

  The Fish Kill and the Showdown

  Seven years later, Lee would meet an astonished member of that termination committee once again. There had been an enormous fish kill in Bayou d'Inde, the bayou downstream from the spot where Lee had dumped the toxic waste and rescued the overcome bird, a bayou on which the Areno family lived. A Calcasieu Advisory Task Force met to discuss the surrounding waterways, to describe them as "impaired," and to consider issuing a seafood advisory warning people to limit their consumption of local fish.

  Local waterways had long been contaminated from many sources. But in 1987, the state at last issued a seafood advisory for Bayou d'Inde, the Calcasieu Ship Channel, and the estuary to the Gulf of Mexico. The warning was shocking, the first in memory, and it called for limits "due to low levels of chemical contamination." No more than two meals with fish a month, it said. No swimming, water sports, or contact with bottom sediments. It was a very belated attempt by the state of Louisiana to warn the public of toxins in local waters.

  Instantly fishermen became alarmed. Would they be able to sell their fish? Would residents limit what they ate? Were they now being asked to look at fish not with relish for a scrumptious gumbo, jambalaya, or all-you-can-eat fish fry, but as dubious carriers of toxic chemicals? The carefully cultivated notion of harmony between oil and fishing—all this was thrown into question, and not just in Louisiana; one-third of all seafood consumed across the nation came from the Gulf of Mexico, and two-thirds of that from Louisiana itself.

  Many livelihoods were at stake. From net to plate—fishermen, grocery stores, trucking companies, and restaurant workers—all were furious at the government officials who had declared the seafood advisory. The government was a job killer, and many jobs were at stake:

  Shrimp provided 15,000 jobs,

  oysters 4,000 jobs,

  crab 3,000 jobs, and

  crawfish provided 1,800 jobs,

  including 1,000 crawfish farmers and the 800 commercial fishermen who catch wild crawfish.

  By 1987 several things had transpired that would affect the fishermen's response to the edict. For one thing, PPG was not alone. Other industries had been polluting so much that Louisiana had become the number-one hazardous waste producer in the nation. For another thing, the U.S. Congress had established the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Clean Air Act (1970), and the Clean Water Act (1972). In addition, many small grassroots environmental groups had sprung up throughout the state, led by homemakers, teachers, farmers, and others appalled to discover backyard toxic waste, illness, and disease. Around the time of the advisory, local activists were rising up against toxic dumping around Lake Charles and nearby Willow Springs, Sulphur, Mossville, and elsewhere, part of the "front-porch"—or "kitchen-sink"—politics of the 1970s and 1980s.

  Peggy Frankland, a lively woman now in her early seventies, the daughter of farmers, and a former homecoming queen in eastern Texas who now lives on a pecan farm in Sulphur not far from PPG, des
cribes the scene at the time of the seafood advisory: "We tore up my station wagon and my friend's husband's copy machine. We talked in churches, schools, met with Boy Scout leaders and officials in Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and Washington, D.C. People said we weren't Christian but animists who worshiped the Earth instead of God. We were called 'zealots' and country goats.' We tried to meet state legislators, who ignored us as silly housewives." As Frankland tells the story in her book Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement, "companies were treating our land and rivers like toilets, and we were standing up to it."

  As Frankland, a Democrat, noted, "We could say, 'Hey, there's a federal law about clean water. You've contaminated our water. How're you going to clean it up?"' But most of Frankland's activists are now Tea Party Republicans and, like Lee Sherman himself, are averse to an overbearing federal government, and even to much of the EPA. There it was: the Great Paradox through a keyhole.

  In the meantime, the Louisiana Department of Health and Human Services posted warning signs about fishing and swimming, signs promptly riddled with bullets or stolen. This, then, was the context when a member of the PPG termination committee had a surprise encounter with Lee Sherman.

  As Lee continues his story, we each take another cookie. Burton Coliseum, the largest public meeting place in Lake Charles at the time, was filled "with about a thousand angry fishermen and others in the fish industry." Lee continues, "When the meeting was called to order, it was standing room only. I could hear murmuring in the crowd. Oh, they were ready to kill the government.

  A row of company officials, including two from Pittsburgh Plate Glass, company lawyers, and state officials, all sat behind a table on a stage in front of the crowd. A state official stood to explain the reason for the seafood advisory: the fish had been contaminated. Citizens had to be informed. What had caused it? The officials from PPG seated on stage feigned ignorance. The meeting went on for twenty or thirty minutes, catcalls to the government officials rising from the crowd.