The Hamlet Fire

by Bryant Simon

  But mostly the Hamlet story is about the unaccounted-for costs of cheap. Cheap was not simply a business strategy, nor was it a personal price calculation or a “perceptual shift,” as the journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell maintains in her book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.6 The rise of cheap amounted to a new(ish) and, in the end, fiercer and narrower social imagining than the one fashioned by Al Smith, Frances Perkins, Robert Wagner, and FDR—one that borrowed from the pre-Triangle past and rose out of what the historian Daniel Rodgers has called the “great fracture,” a dividing line in American life between earlier notions of history and society that stressed collective sacrifice and common fate and a newer one that emphasized individual choice and personal outcomes.7 The shock of Watergate, the defeat in Vietnam, steadily declining wages, vanishing industries, and rising oil prices and widespread inflation together stirred a slew of new anxieties. When the New Deal–and Great Society–inspired policies of the past couldn’t fix these things in a hurry, a new and largely unstated accord emerged that borrowed from the business progressivism of North Carolina governor Jim Hunt and Hamlet mayor Abbie Covington and brought together Democrats and Republicans, the rich and the middle classes, northerners and southerners.8 Far better, the new majority asserted, to exchange more business for less government, because if the pie was no longer going to expand, at least the essential pieces should cost less. This broadly shared ideological accord helped to sweep away union protections and support for higher wages as a social good and to stymie the regulatory state that had been built from the Progressive Era through the Nixon years. As it did, it replaced the New Deal ideals of protecting the weak, social security, and broad-based economic equality maintained through higher paychecks and robust levels of consumption with an alternative political economy of cheap. This new set of ideas stressed reduced levels of government intervention (in some areas, though not all); lower pay, especially at the bottom of the economic ladder, to create more overall jobs; and everyday bargains, putting the individual consumer and her or his “right” to have something inexpensive ahead of community and the common good. In the world of cheap, social fairness came not through grassroots organizing, decent pay for steady work, or state action to oversee factory safety and the health of water and airways, but rather through choices of discounted food, inexpensive clothes, and easily replaced TVs, washing machines, and microwaves.

  On the surface, the new order seemed to work. Taxes fell. Government spending on social programs dropped along with factory inspections and the enforcement of health and safety regulations. As the proponents of cheap from both the Republican and Democratic Parties predicted, sticker prices did, in fact, fall during the 1980s. The average family of four spent 18 percent less on food during the Clinton years than it did during the Reagan years.9 Chicken, the era’s most industrialized food product, cost no more in 1983 than it had sixty years earlier in real dollars.10 Lower-priced fried tenders and other items allowed low-paid workers to stretch their paychecks and buy more at K-Mart and Kroger.

  Yet the new cost structure only made things look cheap. Scratch beneath the surface in Hamlet, or at a Walmart superstore today, and you will find the extremely high personal, communal, and political costs of cheap.11

  For working people, the regime of cheap was not an abstraction. It added stress and costs to every part of Loretta Goodwin’s life, from the furniture and VCR she bought on credit with high interest payments at a store along the highway to the wobbly house with squirrels running across the attic floor where she lived. Cheap decided what she did for a living, what she and her kids ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and when—or if—she went to see a doctor or dentist. As the relationship between Goodwin and the father of her children crumbled in a fog of disappointment, the railroad industry, long the mainstay of Hamlet’s local economy, pulled out of town for the most part. As the switching yards and maintenance facilities scaled back, shedding hundreds, even thousands, of well-paying union jobs, Emmett Roe smelled the town’s despair from afar. He bought the shuttered ice cream plant on Bridges Street and turned it into a chicken further-processing operation. This was happening just as Goodwin found herself alone and in need of money. Like so many in the world of cheap, she traded time at home with her children for time at work, relying on family, friends, and television programs for child care as she labored in the burgeoning fast food industry to produce low-cost, high-fat convenience foods for people just like her with low-paying jobs and little time to cook. She was paid poorly for this cooking and processing, so she depended on cheap food to get by. In fact, even with the overall drop in food prices in the 1980s, a substantial chunk of her paycheck went right back to food companies, like the one she worked for, to buy her family’s inexpensive meals of chicken nuggets and microwavable fries. Goodwin and her co-workers relied on the cheap foods they made to get by at home in terms of cost, calories, and time. These same cheap foods, though, led them down an unhealthy road of dependence on sugar, fat, and salt and through the door of an uninspected food-processing plant where the hum of the line and bark of the foreman left almost everyone stiff and sore with carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis. What Goodwin’s family ate for dinner wasn’t a matter of personal choice, as the architects of cheap insisted. It was about what she could afford in terms of price and time and what was available along the aisles of a Food Lion store in a strip mall in a small town in North Carolina.

  Cheap relies on one other essential factor—a carefully constructed cover-up. In 1991, three golden-fried chicken fillets made at Imperial Food Products along with an order of fries cost $1.99 at Shoney’s.12 This price, however, hid the real costs of the social system that allowed a company like Shoney’s to charge so little for heaping plates of calorie-dense foods. Covered up were the costs incurred in farm subsidies and the piles of debt taken on by the chicken growers, some of whom had been turned into “modern-day serfs.”13 The price didn’t include the cost of food stamps for the underpaid, road building for transport, the cleanup of waterways polluted by animal factories, or the health care outlays needed in order to address the myriad issues linked to obesity and the litany of other ills associated with chronic overexposure to sugary, salty, and fatty foods. At the same time, the system of cheap never paid a dime for the wanton cruelty it imposed on animals or the injuries suffered by workers while killing, processing, and further processing industrially produced chickens.14

  What was covered up the most, though, was the government’s role in creating the system of cheap. In North Carolina and across much of the rest of the country, a submerged yet powerful “cheap state” built highways and maintained ports, incarcerated tens of thousands, gave tax breaks to corporations, kept worker’s compensation costs as low as possible, paid for inspections of food products and elevators but not workplaces, and made sure labor unions fought uphill at all times to get a foothold or just gave up because it wasn’t worth trying to organize the most precarious areas of the economy. But the government largely remained behind the scenes, tucked behind the rhetoric of free trade and free choice and powerful and seductive narratives of individualism, self-help, and racial reconciliation. That cover-up made discovering alternatives to cheap difficult, and made it harder still to articulate the problem. Who wasn’t in favor of the democracy of lower prices for everyone?

  But this isn’t just a story about past cover-ups. The tragedy in Hamlet brought a flood of national attention to poultry plant working conditions and the woeful lack of government regulation in the food industry. Yet it turned out to be a startlingly brief moment of concern. The suffering in Hamlet generated legislative reforms in North Carolina, but nothing compared to the sustained attention of the Progressive Era leading into the New Deal or the sea change in the government’s role in industry generated by the deaths at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

  Six months after the Hamlet fire, unemployment benefits were running out for Imperial employees. Dozens still collected worker’s compensation check
s and waited for settlement payments to arrive from their lawyers’ offices. A few took advantage of grants for retraining and vocational education. But those looking for work couldn’t find much.

  After getting by for weeks on United Way vouchers, Thomas Oates, who had survived the fire without extensive physical injuries, got hired on the overnight shift at the Perdue Farms chicken plant in Rockingham for $5.45 an hour. If he lasted until the next spring, he would make an additional sixty cents an hour.15

  By then, though, the line speeds in poultry plants had climbed again. By 1992, less than a year after the fire, injury rates in the broiler industry hit a nineteen-year high. Yet, as a watchdog group reported, workers across the state were afraid to speak out for fear that they would lose their jobs. In fact, small-town poultry processors were already replacing African American and white laborers with immigrant workers, many of them undocumented and easily silenced, from Mexico, Guatemala, and, later, Haiti.16 Workers weren’t the only ones endangered.17 With chickens racing by faster than ever on the line, USDA inspectors couldn’t keep up. According to a 60 Minutes report in 1987, more than 35 percent of industrial chicken contained traces of salmonella, a bacteria caused by the contact of meat with animal or human feces. Twenty-five years later, that number, according to Consumer Reports, rose to around 90 percent. Poultry capitalism, in other words, remained an unaccounted-for public health threat.18

  Not long after the North Carolina General Assembly passed its spate of workplace reforms in 1992, the forces of cheap mounted their counterattack. One year after the fire, Republican lieutenant governor Jim Gardner chided state lawmakers for going “overboard” with safety regulations. “We’ve gone from having too few inspections,” he contended, “to having the second highest number of any state in the country.” Even though his numbers didn’t add up—North Carolina ranked at that point in the middle of the states for its ratio of inspectors to workplaces—the perception stuck.19

  In the fall of 1991, Hickory, North Carolina, businessman and U.S. representative Cass Ballenger told a reporter, “It’s embarrassing that it takes a fire like this . . . before the news media makes a big enough deal that people will say, ‘Okay, we’ll pay more tax money’ (for worker safety). It’s the squeaking wheel that needs the grease and this wheel apparently hasn’t been squeaking loud enough.” Four years later, Ballenger and allies like Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich didn’t want to hear anything about new spending. Both of these Republican congressmen rejected calls from Jesse Jackson and their union-friendly colleagues to spend more money to beef up OSHA. Instead, Ballenger launched a crusade against what he called the agency’s “gestapo” tactics and backed legislation that supported lower penalties for workplace safety violations, “warning tickets” to first-time offenders, voluntary compliance, and a license to retaliate against whistleblowers, as some read in the bill’s language.20

  But, this wasn’t just about the Cass Ballengers or Jim Gardners or Newt Gingriches of the world doing the bidding of business interests, and it wasn’t about new Democrat Bill Clinton, a friend to the Perdues and the Waltons, refusing to make workplace safety a campaign issue in 1992.21 It wasn’t even about the short memory of North Carolina lawmakers who in 1995, less than four years after the Hamlet fire, pushed to cut the state’s OSHA budget.22 Nor was it about local school boards and federal officials who didn’t think twice about making chicken nuggets and tenders a staple of school lunches. Anything on the plate, they seemed to say, was better than nothing for those didn’t have much money. All of these proclamations and (in)actions were about the ongoing triumph of cheap.

  The truth was, and is, that most Americans before and after the fire were unwilling or unable to give up on the apparent benefits of cheap or to imagine an alternative system of buying. Many believed in what one Walmart advertisement promised: “Save money. Live better.”23 While working people counted on the world’s largest retailer to provide them with discounts, most have, at the same time, lost faith in government. It just doesn’t seem to be working for them or for anyone around them. As the fire’s memory fades, this anti-statist thinking mixes with the growing faith in the power of lower prices. Together these forces make it hard to see how school lunch choices, cutbacks in spending on worker safety, tributes to post-racialism (and denials of the past), and Election Day decisions (including the decision not to vote) fueled the fire in Hamlet and made it an uncommonly common event in the expanding global order of cheap.

  These connections, though, were made clear by a fire in 2013 in a remote poultry slaughterhouse in China’s Jilin Province that killed 120 people and injured 60 more behind locked doors. This event tragically underscores the troubling fact that the murderous negligence of the social, political, and economic systems of cheap that lit the Hamlet fire in 1991 still burn in the world of today. It became painfully clear again, also in 2013, when a Bangladeshi clothing factory crumbled, killing more than a thousand workers who before the disaster had stitched together the inexpensive goods that, through a tangled web of jobbers and middlemen, filled the racks of Walmart and Benetton stores from Mexico City to Morehead City, North Carolina.24 The company that made these shirts and blouses had deliberately moved to where labor was abundant and where it faced little competition in hiring and firing. That way it could pay workers next to nothing and not worry about any interference from labor organizations or government officials. Like the Imperial plant, these out-of-the-way factories existed in closed worlds where elected, business, and press leaders created meticulously crafted silences, the kinds of silences that the system of cheap depends on to mute the voices of its victims, grind out steady profits, and pass along as much of the costs of production and distribution as possible to others, including to the government it says it doesn’t need and to the underpaid workforce it exploits and says is expendable.

  The most effective silencing, though, is the one that insists that these events, that these recurrent killing floors from North Carolina to China, are not part of a pattern or a system, but rather are disconnected accidents perpetuated by greedy individuals who exist outside of history. This is the sort of cheap analysis that disregards any alternatives and just continues to trumpet the virtues of low-cost lives and low-cost government over everything else. Retelling the story of the Hamlet fire with cheap at the core is one way to break the narrative cycle.25

  That’s why Loretta Goodwin is willing to push past her own personal pain, the piercing screams she still hears in her head and the thick black smoke she still feels in her lungs, to tell her story. She knows there is no happy ending just yet. But there is the hope that her story and the story of the Hamlet fire will be told over and over, like a prayer, so it won’t be repeated and no one will ever again have to die to work.26

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is a book about loss. Partway through the research and writing, it became more than a deep dive into the past as loss came to my family in several wide and sorrowful waves.

  Just after my dad died suddenly, Sharon Norteman, a close high school friend of mine, wrote me a condolence note. “Joy,” she said, “is always multiplied but grief needs to be divided.” She promised to carry a small piece of my pain, forever. Many others have done the same for me and my family over the last few years.

  At the same time, people knowingly and unknowingly helped by carrying pieces of this book for me, telling me their stories and sharing with me their insights.

  As I drafted the sections of this manuscript and struggled to find the right voice to unlock the larger meanings of the fire, I gave presentations at the University of Tokyo, University of Tubingen, Erfurt University, University of Delaware, University of Georgia, Princeton University, Mississippi State University, Vanderbilt University, and my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hopefully all, or at least most, of the smart comments, well-informed suggestions, and telling critiques I received in these seminar rooms and lecture halls found their way into the final version
of the book.

  Lots of colleagues and friends walked with me while I did my research and sat down to write. Lila Berman was the first person to read the first full draft of this book. In her characteristically funny and brilliant way, she told me just where I had been and where I needed to go. Geri Thoma read the last version and the first proposal and steered me in the right direction, toward Carl Bromley, my editor, and the other terrific people at The New Press.

  In between, Kevin Kruse, Alex Cummings, Beth Hale, and Roger Horowitz read drafts of chapters and whole sections and shared with me their voluminous knowledge of all things North Carolina, American politics, and chicken. My model of a department chair, Jay Lockenour, has been endlessly supportive. Gary Scales dropped his own work and amazing teaching to help me map the story. Jeff Cowie, Josh Cole, Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, Tyler Greene, Beth Bailey, Tom Sugrue, Joe Crespino, Martha Hodes, Steve Estes, David Farber, Robert Devens, Jim Giesen, Anne Marshall, Dave Grazian, Sarah Igo, Moshe Sluhovsky, Jim Cobb, Kat Charron, Peter Siskind, Susan Herbst, Richard Immerman, Drew Isenberg, Charles Fishman, Christian Lentz, Walter Licht, Alex Macauley, Tom Grimes, Sarah Milov, and Nina Mackert listened to me at conferences and over coffee and gently, and sometimes not so gently, pointed me in so many of the right directions. Usually the same directions that Peter Coclanis, Bob Korstad, and Jacquelyn Hall have been pointing me toward for years, decades even. One of my favorite people to talk to, Stephanie McCurry, just listened, and so did Heather Thompson, and Michael Kwass and Laura Mason, and so did my newer friend Juergen Martschukat. And thanks to Matt Lassiter for his steady quiet on the longest walk ever. And finally, I’m sad I won’t walk again with Michael Goldberg, but his voice and advice on commas and writing history is, hopefully, sprinkled across these pages.