The Hamlet Fire

by Bryant Simon

  78.See also notes and reports of an interview with William Morris in U.S. Department of Labor, “Imperial Food Products, Inc.: Accident Investigation Report,” p. 12, Investigation Number 18479204, December 30, 1991, in author’s possession. This is where he talks about OSHA. For other comments from Morris, see author interview with William Morris.

  79.Author interview with Annette Zimmerman.

  80.Henry L. Kitchin to Gary M. Johnson, January 13, 1993, Box, Imperial Fire, Hamlet City Hall, Hamlet, NC. On Fuller’s reputation as a good old boy, see interview with Ron Niland.

  81.On Fuller’s denial of this rumor, see author interview with Gary Johnson.

  82.Greg Trevor and Paige Williams, “Ex-Worker: Locked Door Was OKD, Hamlet Firefighter Given Key, He Says,” Charlotte Observer, October 10, 1991; and in NBC Dateline episode on the fire, episode in author’s possession. See a corroborating account about Fuller having a key, Department of Labor Investigation, interview #4, p. 22, in author’s possession.

  83.Glenn Sumpter, “Fire Chief Denies Department Okayed Locking Plant Door,” Richmond County Daily Journal, October 10, 1991; “Allegations in Letter Are Denied,” Richmond County Daily Journal, September 23, 1991. Author interviews with Ada Blanchard and Gary Johnson.

  84.C.E. Yandle, “OSHA adviser ties stealing to Hamlet deaths,” Raleigh News and Observer, November 21, 1991. See also, “Sad Chapter in Tragedy,” Richmond County Daily Journal, November 26, 1991. And see, in addition, “No Death Penalty for Workers Just Trying to Make a Living: Demand to Have Bradford Barringer Removed from the NC OSHA Council,” Box 35, Folder—Barringer Petitions, NCOSHP, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC.

  85.Annette Zimmerman remembered seeing Fuller in the plant a couple of times before the fire. Author interview with Zimmerman. See also author interview with Calvin White. White believes that Fuller had surely been to the plant before the fire.

  86.Author interview with Frankie Moree.

  87.Fuller quotes from “Phantom Fire Inspections,” Raleigh News and Observer, September 6, 1991; and Steve Riley, “Betrayal of Trust,” Raleigh News and Observer, December 11, 1991. Last quote from Our Jobs, Our Lives: A Work in Progress, documentary (Black Workers for Justice, 1991), available at American University. See also Randy Diamond, “Panel Will Consider Fire Inspection Rules,” Raleigh News and Observer, September 9, 1991; John Drescher, “In Hamlet Fire, Government Safety Nets Gave Way,” Charlotte Observer, September 22, 1991; David Perlmutt, “Owner May Reopen Plant Hit by Fire,” Charlotte Observer, September 18, 1991.

  88.Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), 53.

  89.Author interview with Frankie Moree.

  90.Land quoted by Ruffin, “Dreams of Better Days.” On Roe’s reliance on “employment services,” see the documentary Out of the Ashes (O2 Productions, 1994), available at the North Carolina Department of Labor, Raleigh, NC.

  91.“Poultry Plant Fire Victims Mourned in North Carolina,” National Public Radio, September 6, 1991.

  92.Author interviews with Goodwin, Zimmerman, and Lorrie Boyle; Paul Taylor, “Ashes and Accusations,” Washington Post, September 5, 1991; and Out of the Ashes (O2 Productions, 1994).

  93.Out of the Ashes (O2 Productions, 1994).

  94.Author interview with Ada Blanchard.

  95.John Drescher and Ken Garfield, “Workers: Doors Kept Locked—Plant Owner Could Face Criminal Charges,” Charlotte Observer, September 5, 1991.

  96.Author interviews with Abbie Covington and William Sawyer.

  97.Emmett Roe to Employee, n.d., Box, Imperial Fire, Hamlet City Hall, Hamlet, NC.

  98.Rose DeWolf, “Philaposh Targeting Owner of Plant Hit by Deadly Fire,” Philadelphia Daily News, November 20, 1991. John C. Brazington, “Victim’s Kin Asks for Penalty for Death,” Philadelphia Tribune, November, 22, 1991.

  3: Chicken

  1.Shoney’s menu circa 1990, purchased on eBay, in author’s possession.

  2.Some put this date at 1987, but others put it at 1992. On the latter date, see Pew Environmental Group, “Big Chicken: Pollution and Industrial Poultry Production in America,” (2011), available at www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/peg/publications/report/pegbigchickenjuly2011pdf.pdf; and “History of Poultry Production,” available at www.uspoultry.org/educationprograms/PandEP_Curriculum/Documents/PDFs/Lesson2/HistoryofPoultryProductionver3Pres.pdf. On chicken’s triumph in 1987, see David Amey, “PCC—Bone of Contention,” Broiler Industry, (August 1989), 54; and Peter Applebome, “Worker Injuries Rise in Poultry Industry as Business Booms,” New York Times, November 6, 1989. See also Donald Stull, Michael J. Broadway, and David Griffith, eds., Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995).

  3.Marlon Manuel, “Chicken Coup: Beef? Pork? Nope, it’s power to the poultry as we scarf tons of the meat that definitely has legs,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, January 25, 2004.

  4.Daniel Gross, “The Poultry Boom: It’s never a good time to be a chicken, but now is really awful,” Slate, January 26, 2005, available at www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2005/01/the_poultry_boom.html.

  5.On the price in 1923, see Timothy Smith, “Changing Tastes: By End of This Year Poultry Will Surpass Beef in the US Diet,” Wall Street Journal, September 17, 1987. On the historic shift in prices and choices of meat, see Clement E. Ward, “Twenty-Five Year Meat Consumption and Price Trends,” Oklahoma State Report, AGEC-603.

  6.On the innovations in poultry production, see among other sources, William Boyd and Michael Watts, “Agro-Industrial Just-In-Time: The Chicken Industry and Postwar American Capitalism,” Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring, edited by David Goodman and Michael J. Watts (London: Routledge, 1997), 192–93; and Annie Potts, Chicken (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 139–40.

  7.Lu Ann Jones, Momma Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); LaGuana Gray, We Just Keep Running the Line: Black Southern Women and the Poultry Processing Industry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 22–23; Wenonah Hauter, Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America (New York: The New Press, 2012), 199.

  8.On wartime eating and rationing, see Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); and Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 43–46.

  9.The history of Cagle’s is drawn from Paige Bowers, “Cagle’s,” New Georgia Encyclopedia (original entry 2008), available at www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/cagles; and “History of Cagle’s,” available at www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/cagle-s-inc-history/. For extremely useful overviews of the history of the chicken industry in the United States, see John Steele Gordon, “The Chicken Story,” American Heritage (September 1996), 52–67; Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 103–28; Andrew C. Godley and Bridget Williams, “The Chicken, the Factory Farm, and the Supermarket,” in Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart, edited by Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 47–61; and Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation.

  10.On the independent streak of the southern yeomanry, see Steve Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  11.Monica Richmond Gisolfi, “From Cotton Farmers to Poultry Growers: The Rise of Industrial Agriculture in Upcountry Georgia, 1914–1960,” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2007), 105, 110, 121–22, 125; Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformatio
n, 40–48; and Potts, Chicken, 150.

  12.Christopher Leonard, The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 237.

  13.On the rise of the poultry industry in the South, see “Southeast Economic Justice Network,” September 7–9, 1990, December 2, 1988, Box 35, Folder, Southeast REJN September 1990, NCOSHP, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC. See also Applebome, “Worker Injuries Rise in Poultry Industry”; Tony Horwitz, “Nine to Nowhere,” Wall Street Journal, December 1, 1994; and Susan Traylor, “Poultry Worker Tells Panel She Was Disabled on Job,” USA Today, September 12, 1991. See also a more detailed story from Human Rights Watch, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in US Meat and Poultry Plants” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2004), 40.

  14.For more information on the shifting geography and scale of chicken production, see Pew Environmental Group, “Big Chicken.”

  15.David Kirby, Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010).

  16.Solomon Iyobosa Omo-Osagie II, Commercial Poultry Production on Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore: The Role of African Americans, 1930s to 1990s (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2012), 79.

  17.Gisolfi, “From Cotton Farmers to Poultry Growers,” 128 (Jewell quote), 155 (second quote). On indentured servitude and modern-day serfs, see Leonard, The Meat Racket, 3. See also the insightful John Oliver show, “Chickens,” available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9wHzt6gBgI.

  18.Boyd and Watts, “Agro-Industrial Just-In-Time,” 198; Hauter, Foodopoly, 199; Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 23.

  19.William Boyd, “Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production,” Technology and Culture (October 2001), 637; Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table, 132; and Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation, 43.

  20.Leonard, Meat Racket, 5–6; Hauter, Foodopoly, 199; and Potts, Chicken, 150.

  21.N.R. Kleinfield, “America Goes Chicken Crazy,” New York Times, December 9, 1984.

  22.Kleinfield, “America Goes Chicken Crazy”; Nicholas Kristof, “Arsenic in Our Chicken,” New York Times, April 4, 2012; Potts, Chicken, 153–58; and Deena Shanker, “Chicken Is Killing the Planet,” Salon, September 16, 2013, available at www.salon.com/2013/09/16/chicken_is_killing_the_planet. On de-beaking, see Maneka Gandhi, “Here’s Why Beak Trimming of Chicks Is a Senseless Act of Cruelty,” FirstPost, August 22, 2016, available at http://www.firstpost.com/living/heres-why-beak-trimming-of-chicks-in-poultry-farms-is-a-senseless-act-of-cruelty-2969954.html; and “Debeaking,” available at www.upc-online.org/merchandise/debeak_factsheet.html.

  23.See a reprint of the brochure, “What’s Wrong with McDonald’s,” as well as additional background information, at www.mcspotlight.org/case/factsheet.html.

  24.Most of the documents for the McLibel Case are available at www.mcspotlight.org/case/trial/verdict/verdict_jud2c.html. See also George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 124–25; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 234–37; and McLibel, (Spanner Films, 2005).

  25.For more on this, see Gabriel Thompson, Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 142–43. See also Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrial Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

  26.See also Thompson, Working in the Shadows, 137.

  27.Kathleen C. Schwartzman, The Chicken Trail: Following Workers, Migrants, and Corporations Across the Americas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), xiii; and Sarah Miller, “What We Don’t Know About Chicken and Fish,” Grist, available at grist.org/food/what-we-dont-want-to-know-about-chicken-and-fish.

  28.Richard Behar and Michael Kramer, “Something Smells Foul,” Time, October 17, 1994; Newsletter: “Hamlet Response Coalition for Workplace Reform,” September 1994, Box 31, Folder, Hamlet Response Coalition, 1995, Federal OSHA Reform, North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Project, SCH, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC. On the fecal soup, see “Five Little Known Facts About Chicken Meat That Affect Your Health,” Healthy Habits Hub, August 12, 2016, available at healthyhabitshub.com/5-little-known-facts-about-chicken-meat-that-can-affect-your-health; and Linda Carney, “Chicken ‘Fecal Soup’ Contamination,” August 20, 2013, available at www.drcarney.com/blog/entry/chicken-fecal-soup-contamination. For more on line speeds, see Judy Mann, “Hard Times at Perdue’s Plant,” Washington Post, March 10, 1989.

  29.In addition to the data cited by Peter Applebome, “Worker Injuries Rise in Poultry Industry as Business Booms,” New York Times, November 6, 1989; see Frank Swoboda, “U.S. Act to Reduce Repetitive Motion Injuries,” Washington Post, August 31, 1990; Susan Traylor, “Poultry Worker Tells Panel She Was Disabled on Job,” USA Today, September 12, 1991; C.E. Yandle, “OSHA Adviser Ties Stealing to Hamlet Deaths,” Raleigh News and Observer, November 21, 1991; “North Carolina Poultry Worker Fact Sheet,” Box 65, Folder: 1910, Southerners for Economic Justice Records, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC.

  30.Applebome, “Worker Injuries Rise.”

  31.Manuel, “Chicken Coup.” On price trends in meat, Ward, “Twenty-Five Year Meat Consumption and Price Trends.” The phrase “chickenized” to imply a relentless downward pressure on meat prices comes from Leonard, The Meat Racket.

  32.See this scene from The Wire at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e10ZPVafUA.

  33.Douglas Martin, “Robert Baker, Who Reshaped Chicken Dinner, Dies at 84,” New York Times, March 16, 2006.

  34.The information on Baker and his background is drawn from Kleinfield, “America Goes Chicken Crazy”; Martin, “Robert Baker”; “Robert C. Baker: Creator of Chicken Nuggets and Cornell Barbeque Sauce, Dies at 84,” Cornell Chronicle, March 16, 2006; Maryn McKenna, “The Father of the Chicken Nugget,” Slate, December 28, 2012, available at www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2012/12/robert_c_baker_the_man_who_invented_chicken_nuggets.html; and Colin Schultz, “Love Chicken Nuggets? Thank Cornell Poultry Professor Robert C. Baker,” Smithsonian Magazine (December 31, 2012).

  35.Author interview with Regenstein and “Free Bird: Remembering Robert Baker,” Cornell Alumni Magazine (May/June 2006). For a good description of chicken preparation in rural communities in the early part of the last century, see Lu Ann Jones, “Work Was My Pleasure: An Oral History of Nellie Stancil Langley,” in Work, Family, and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century, edited by Melissa Walker and Rebecca Sharpless (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 31–33.

  36.See Baker’s co-authored article with C.A. Bruce, “Further Processing of Poultry,” in Processing of Poultry, edited by G.C. Mead (Boston: Springer, 1995).

  37.On budgets and how they vary by class and on the figures showing that the poor spend as much as 30 percent of their income on food even after food prices fall, see Michael Carolan, The Real Cost of Cheap Food (London: Routledge, 2011), 75; Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997), 88–119; Derek Thompson, “Cheap Eats: How America Spends Money on Food,” The Atlantic, March 8, 2013, available at www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/cheap-eats-how-america-spends-money-on-food/273811; Economic Research Service, USDA, “Household Food Spending by Selected Demographics in the 1990s,” available at www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/aib773/31731_aib773e_002.pdf; and USDA, “Food Prices and Spending: Food Spending as a Share of Income, 2014,” available at www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/40096_food-prices_fig10png/food-prices_fig10.png?v=42472.

  38.Gerald J. Fitzgerald and Gabriella M. Petrick, “In Good Taste: Rethinking American History with Our Palates,” Journal of American History 95 (September 2008), 392–404; and Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner i
n 1950s America (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). For more on convenience and cooking, see Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006, originally published 1989), 124–25; and Hank Cardell, Stuffed: An Insider’s Look at Who’s (Really) Making America Fat and How the Food Industry Can Fix It (New York: Ecco, 2009), 4. On the impact of this trend on chicken production and producers, see author interview with Scott Russell.

  39.On household labor, see Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997). See also Melanie Warner, Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal (New York: Scribner, 2013), 206; and David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 201, 216.

  40.Warner, Pandora’s Lunchbox, 205–6. See the chicken industry’s response, David Amey, “Competitive Challenge for Frozen Foods,” Broiler Industry (March 1990): 70–71.

  41.“Future in Fast Foods,” Broiler Industry (November 1989): 70–71. On the microwave and the transformation of cooking, see Margaret Visser, “The Meaning of Meals: A Meditation on the Microwave,” Psychology Today (December 1989). See also Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 249; and Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), 188.

  42.Greg Crister, Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2003), 32; and Tracie McMillan, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table (New York: Scribner 2012), 197.