by Bryant Simon
Still, city leaders turned down the $50,000 secured by Representative Hayes, saying that it wasn’t enough to do the job the right way and pay for a full and necessary environmental impact study. In page after page of precise lawyerly detail, city attorney Stephan Futrell advised local officials against accepting the grant because of “unresolved liability issues.” Ten years and counting after the fire, the building remained up on Bridges Street, part of South Hamlet’s landscape of hopelessness.112
African Americans in Hamlet didn’t fully believe the budgetary or legal reasons for the town’s inaction. Some suspected that local white Democrats were playing politics with their part of town. They thought that the majority-white city council might have turned down the funding from Congress because its members didn’t want to help an embattled Republican. Others repeated rumors that local leaders didn’t want the Imperial site cleared for a memorial. This tension and mistrust in the black community was further evidenced by the fact that Loretta Goodwin swore that she heard that Mayor Abbie Covington and her family owned the property and that they wanted to sell it to another industrial firm and make a hefty profit, a rumor that, even if it was repeated, was entirely unfounded.113 For others, especially African Americans, the only explanation for the building’s still being there revolved around issues of race and class. “I honestly thought if it had been in an upscale neighborhood,” Annette Zimmerman said, “it won’t have taken so long.” “If this would have been in another neighborhood,” Allen Mask argued along similar lines, “it wouldn’t have been there that long, that’s for sure.” If Hamlet city leaders had wanted to build a new fire department on this location or something that the white community needed, there was no question, Mask maintained, that the “city . . . would find a way to get it built.”114
Finally, in August 2002, state senator Goodwin, with the help of PTSD researcher Lisa Amaya-Jackson, got the state’s health director, H. Dennis McBride, to declare the Imperial site “a public nuisance.” Once that label got officially pasted onto the property, lawmakers in Raleigh came up with a $78,000 grant to Hamlet to tear down the building.
“There [is] a great sense of gratitude that it [is] finally happening,” declared Reverend Legrand. “There [is] excitement for the victims. I hope it brings some healing for them.”115
Later that year, Congressman Hayes joined Reverend Legrand for a service at his church. After reciting prayers and singing songs, the congregation marched behind Legrand, armed with a sledgehammer, over to the Imperial site. Legrand and Hayes each took a whack at the building and then stepped aside as a backhoe started to claw at the plant’s remains. It took months to bust through the tangle of weeds and layers of concrete and steel and get everything removed.116
Hamlet is a small town, so it shouldn’t be surprising or ironic that one of the men who worked on the removal was fire survivor Annette Zimmerman’s husband.
Today, the property is cleared. It is a flat field of thick blades of grass mixed with batches of weeds and a few random bare spots. At one end, near where the loading dock once stood, sits a granite memorial not much bigger than an average-size tombstone. Leading up to it are twenty-five stepping stones. Framing the pathway are twenty-five matching crepe myrtle trees planted in a U-shaped formation. Maybe it’s the sun. Maybe there is too much of it and too little shade, but the trees don’t seem to be flourishing. They look thin and a little vulnerable, like a strong wind could snap them in half the next time it blows through. But, despite it all, they are still there.
Before the fire and the controversy over placing the Dobbins Heights firefighters on standby, and before the fights over the memorials, the lawsuits, and the building, Loretta Goodwin rented a house where squirrels raced back and forth across the attic floor. With the money from the lawsuits, she paid off her debts and settled into a modest 1950s-era bungalow on a quiet street with a church across the way and a school at the end of the block. She filled the place with leather couches and comfortable chairs and a matching dining room set almost too big for the space. Though no one would confuse her home with a mansion, it is big enough so that her children, grandchildren, and extended family have been able to live with her there on and off over the last two-plus decades.117
Twenty years after the fire, on a bright autumn day, the cloudless sky a perfect shade of Carolina blue, Loretta Goodwin sat in her living room with the shades drawn tight over the windows. She used to walk everywhere, she said. But now she doesn’t walk anywhere, not that there are many places to go in Hamlet these days. It’s too hard for her to breathe, and her legs hurt all of the time. She has trouble remembering little things. But even as she loses track of her keys and her purse, the fire stays with her. She still can’t sleep. Night after night, she stays up and stares at the television, trying to avoid the nightmares that might come. Sometimes she gets mad at network programmers if there isn’t anything on for her to watch.
Goodwin is still trapped by the fire, just like her town and the rest of the country are all still trapped by the same system of cheap that was the mean and divisive force behind the tragedy of September 3, 1991.118
EPILOGUE
When you’re a historian, people ask you all the time what you are working on. Over the last six years, I have told them, “I’m writing a book about a fire in 1991 in a chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, where John Coltrane was born, and where twenty-five people died behind locked doors.”
After hearing this, I usually get two follow-up comments.
“What year was that again?”
“1991,” I answer.
“Wow, that wasn’t that long ago.”
Then they say, “That sounds a lot like that fire in New York . . . at that sweatshop where all those people died.”
They are, of course, right. The year 1991 wasn’t all that long ago, and the fire at Imperial does seem like an eerie reprise of the disaster that took place at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York’s Greenwich Village eighty years earlier, when an eighth-, ninth-, and tenth-floor factory that produced women’s blouses caught fire.
As the workers in that cluttered facility heard the screams of “Fire!” on a March afternoon in 1911, they rushed to the stairwells and exits, only to find them locked. The doors had been shut, the owners later said, to stop the women on the line from stealing fabric and taking unauthorized breaks. Dozens of terrified laborers jumped out the windows to avoid getting burned alive. Down below, shoppers on their daily rounds, firefighters, and newspaper reporters looked on with horror as bodies seemed to drop down from the sky. The death toll from the fire reached 146, making this the worst industrial “accident” in the history of New York City. One hundred and twenty-three of the dead were women, most of them young and single; almost all of them Jewish and Italian immigrants.
The shock of the Triangle fire brought about a rash of new laws and a sweeping overhaul of industrial regulations in New York. Before he visited the victims’ families, State Assemblyman Al Smith was a typical Tammany Hall operative. Politics, to him, were about transactions, about handing out favors, collecting graft, and staying in power. After the tragic fire, he governed, writes David Von Drehle in his gripping book, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, “as though the ghosts of the Triangle were looking over his shoulder.”1
Smith’s political heirs, Frances Perkins (who watched from the street on the day of the fire and was the first woman ever to serve in the cabinet), Robert Wagner (longtime New York senator and sponsor of the most important labor legislation of the twentieth century), and, of course, his successor in the governor’s office and later president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, carried this spirit with them. The ghosts of Triangle followed them to Washington and made their way into the New Deal.
Whatever the shortcomings of the rash of legislation passed between 1933 and 1938, from its refusal to confront Jim Crow laws and practices to its caving to fiscal conservatives to its building of a safety net that from th
e start was riddled with gaping holes, the New Deal did change the nation.2 It established the principle, largely accepted by the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican Parties for the next four decades, that the government’s job was to protect the most vulnerable, provide a modicum of economic security, and foster equality, however vaguely defined.
The fire in Hamlet produced its own wave of reform. In the wake of the deadly blast at Imperial, North Carolina lawmakers enacted measures to authorize the hiring of new OSHA investigators and support staff, protect whistle-blowing employees against reprisals, increase fines for workplace safety violations, and require accident-prone businesses to institute in-house safety programs.3 Local and state officials, meanwhile, made sure fire departments investigated workplaces at least once every three years and drew up and kept on file pre-disaster firefighting plans. At a memorial ceremony to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Imperial fire, the state’s current insurance commissioner and chief fire marshal, Hamlet native Wayne Goodwin, declared, “By the lessons learned, workplaces are safer. So are our public buildings and our homes.”4
But the fire at Imperial did not, like the blaze at Triangle, change the statewide or national conversation. Cheap still reigned, a year after the fire, ten years after the fire, and today.
What happened at Imperial Food Products—the calculated neglect, deliberate lack of oversight, and piercing indifference to “folks like them”—was an extreme version of what was going on across the country at the time. Large swaths of the nation were being dragged back to the Gilded Age, back to a world of deregulation, monopoly control over labor markets, and mass economic and physical insecurity. What was new was the ideology—and the faith, really—behind the return of America, especially its small towns and rural crossroads, to yesterday.
Beginning in the middle of the 1970s, politicians, business leaders, and everyday people across the United States embraced the notion of cheap. They shared a collective belief in the power and virtue of cheap goods, cheap foodstuffs, cheap government, and cheap labor as the surest and fairest way to solve the most vexing problems that plagued the nation, from inflation to the loss of manufacturing jobs to government inefficiency to the need for greater personal responsibility to the push for less welfare spending. The wholesale acceptance of the social gospel of cheap, of getting more by paying less and worrying about the consequences later, shaped the decision making of economists, policy makers, consumers, and the Roes themselves. Cheap led food writers and chefs to herald the coming of cheap chickens without looking too closely at how these animals got so incredibly inexpensive in the first place. Cheap convinced policy makers that regulations cost too much and weren’t worth the trouble. And cheap made some people more valuable than others were and some places harder to see than others.
As horrifying and shocking as it was, the Hamlet fire was the nearly predictable outcome of the reign of the system of cheap, which extended far beyond Emmett and Brad Roe and their out-of-the-way factory. It became the central logic for decision making in the United States from the middle of the 1970s onward. Food scientists offered cheap food as a solution to poverty. The answer to a business slowdown was cheaper government. Flagging profits could be fixed with cheaper labor. Cheaper labor could be expected to get by on cheaper goods. And those cheaper goods would, it seems, blunt any popular outrage against the system of cheap. But all of this cheapness was bound to explode—and that’s what happened in Hamlet.
Hamlet is as ordinary as its name suggests. And it is, as locals joke, two hours from just about anywhere. But, at the same time, it is connected to everywhere and everything. Understanding what happened along Main Street and Bridges Street, why Emmett Roe opened a factory there in the early 1980s, why government officials left him and his plant managers alone, why his company processed the foods they did, the way they did, and why Loretta Goodwin needed a job so badly that she went to work somewhere where she couldn’t go to the bathroom without having to ask permission means identifying and naming the most fundamental and far-reaching shift in America in the last five decades: the embrace of the idea of cheap as a paramount social good and viable solution to social problems. This meant that while Hamlet might have looked like a place stuck in time with its slow pace of life and old-timey downtown drugstore serving cream sodas at the counter, it was in 1991 at the cutting edge of the assault on the ghosts of Triangle and the spirit of Fordism and the New Deal, on the ideas that higher wages and robust consumption were positive economic forces and that the government existed, at least in part, to provide security and protection for those at the bottom of society.
The fire at Imperial Food Products grew out of the disappearance of well-paying jobs on the railroad and the spread of minimum-wage work into the voids left behind. The Hamlet story is, then, the story of the emergence over the last forty years of an economically and physically vulnerable working poor as the largest segment of the American working class. It is the story of feverish state and municipal competition for employers and jobs and the resulting movement of industry to the South and to the nation’s hinterlands. In fact, it bears repeating that heavily rural North Carolina became, quite remarkably, the most industrial state in the nation by 1990. With the state government’s help, businesses created a new industrial geography to shore up flagging profits and to take advantage of isolated labor markets and isolated laborers, like Loretta Goodwin. Relocating to rural areas allowed companies to effectively silence workers and prevent them from speaking out against hazardous conditions and low pay. As a result, it was nearly impossible for workers to organize durable unions or even to see them as a viable counterweight to management. At the same time, the political economy of cheap that brought new businesses to the countryside diluted working people’s faith in government and government solutions to their problems because the government always seemed to be on the side of someone else. This is the story, then, of the origins of the world of today, a world marked by gaping inequalities and stunning political inertia.
This is the story of a company, like so many other companies in recent America, methodically assembling a cheap labor force. It couldn’t have done so without both of the major political parties in the United States backing deregulation and the lax enforcement of labor laws. But it also would not have been possible without the unintended consequences of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and larger liberal gains. Before the breakdown of legal Jim Crow, black women and men couldn’t, for the most part, work inside southern factories tending machines or standing along assembly lines. If an African American laborer got an industrial job, he (and sometimes she) worked on the outside of the plant unloading coal or inside sweeping cotton dust. The twisted logic of white supremacy somehow came up with the idea that black people couldn’t tend to machines. In the wake of the stirring marches and landmark legislation of the 1960s, legal segregation and some of the more explicit forms of gender discrimination ended, eliminating many racial and sexual categories of employment and creating a measure of equality of opportunity. But the breakdown of employment barriers did not generate economic equality in less-skilled jobs so much as it created larger pools of workers competing against one another in a world of dwindling prospects. In a sense, bosses like Emmett Roe could now exploit black and white labor, male and female labor, equally, and that meant that they got the labor they wanted cheaper, with some built-in divisions.5
Whatever equality black woman and men in Richmond County, North Carolina, gained at the employment bureau or under the warmth of Friday night lights, the roots, and many of the branches, of Jim Crow remained in place. Long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and long after the separate water fountains in the town’s train depot got pulled out of the wall, Hamlet remained segregated, a place where black people lived, prayed, and drank on their side of town and white people lived, prayed, and drank on the other side of the divide. Cheap didn’t change that or the suspicions and distrust that existed between white
and black people, distrust bred by a lifetime of disregard, neglect, and small and large aggressions, ranging from harsh words to demeaning rituals to police harassment and abuse. Cheap meant that when the all-white Hamlet city council couldn’t find the money in its budget to tear down the Imperial plant, black families thought the inaction was about race and how little black lives mattered. Addressing these sorts of inequalities had no place in the system of cheap, so little changed.
Still, like underpaid workers of all races across the world in the age of cheap, Loretta Goodwin knew that in this new order, with its holdovers from the old one, she was expendable. Indeed, Brad Roe and his Imperial plant managers reminded her every day of her vulnerability. If she complained, the foremen told her he would fire her. If he did, how would she support her family? Not with public assistance. That had been cut to reduce taxes and make things better for business. So she said nothing about the slippery floors, leaky connections from the conveyor belt to the machine box, absence of fire drills, or daily presence of mechanics who jerry-rigged machines with leftover parts to make sure that chicken parts kept zipping down the assembly line.
The Hamlet story is also the story of eating in the age of cheap. It stemmed from the triumph of convenience food, the spread of the microwave oven, and the falling-off in culinary knowledge in the United States. It is about the growing inequalities at the dinner table and about how the other half eats. Even more, it is about the glaring paradox of plenty in recent America where the wrong sorts of calories don’t cost much, though they are almost always unhealthy, both for the hungry consumers eating them and the frenzied workers who make them.