The Hamlet Fire

by Bryant Simon

  43.Pollan, Cooked, 186–87.

  44.For an example of one of these waves of price competition, see Chip Pearsall, “Overstocked Poultry Processors Losing Millions as Prices Drop,” Raleigh News and Observer, April 13, 1980. See also Marj Charlier, “Chicken Growers Face Leaner Earnings as Salmonella Publicity Takes Its Toll,” Wall Street Journal, July 20, 1987; and Boyd and Watts, “Agro-Industrial Just-In-Time,” 199.

  45.Shapiro, Something from the Oven, 26.

  46.Charlier, “Chicken Growers Face Leaner Earnings”; and Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table, 117–18. For more on the question of taste, see Schatzker, The Dorito Effect.

  47.Charlier, “Chicken Growers Face Leaner Earnings”; Kleinfield, “America Goes Chicken Crazy”; and Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation, 22–23.

  48.Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table, 76.

  49.McKenna, “The Father of the Chicken Nugget,” and Kleinfield, “America Goes Chicken Crazy.”

  50.Author interview with Regenstein.

  51.Michael Moss, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (New York: Random House, 2013).

  52.McKenna, “The Father of the Chicken Nugget.”

  53.Kevin G. Salwen, “McDonald’s Revenue Flow with Franchisees May Help It Profit from Prolonged Drought,” Wall Street Journal, June 21, 1988.

  54.John F. Love, McDonald’s: Behind the Arches (New York: Bantam Books, 1995), 340–43; and “Rene Arned,” available at mcdonalds.wikia.com/wiki/Rene_Arend.

  55.John Bryan Hopkins, “A History of Chicken Nuggets,” Foodimentary, March 15, 2102, available at foodimentary.com/2012/03/15/history-chicken-nuggets. On the Tyson/McDonald’s deal, see Leonard, The Meat Racket, 95; Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 140–42; and Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation, 26–28.

  56.Doug Stark, “The South’s Poultry Plants Thrive,” Baltimore Sun, September 8, 1991; and Marlon Manuel, “Chicken Coup.”

  57.Carole Sugarman and Tom Sietsema, “Nugget Mania: The Low-Down on the Country’s Hottest Snack,” Washington Post, November 5, 1986; Schatzker, The Dorito Effect, 38–39. On hot dogs as exemplars of industrial meat, see Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table, 75–77.

  58.Moss, Salt, Sugar, Fat, 105 (quote), 305 (on salt 302–18); and James Hamblin, “Look Inside a Chicken Nugget,” The Atlantic, October 21, 2013, available at www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/look-inside-a-chicken-nugget/280720.

  59.Quote from Sugarman and Sietsema, “Nugget Mania,” and author interview with Scott Russell.

  60.Author interview with unnamed source.

  61.On competition in poultry capitalism, Kleinfield, “America Goes Chicken Crazy”; and Leonard, The Meat Racket.

  62.Author interview with Scott Russell. On early profits for poultry companies derived from nuggets, see Scott Kilman, “R.J. Reynolds Net Doubled in 4th Quarter,” Wall Street Journal, February 15, 1985.

  63.David Zuckerman, “Chicken Tenders Advertising Blitz Unleashed by Burger King,” Nation’s Restaurant News, April 7, 1986. On the notion of chicken and healthiness as opposed to red meat, see Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation, 27, 30–31.

  64.Peter O. Keegan, “Chicken Chains Leap Out of the Frying Pan,” Nation’s Restaurant News, August 5, 1991.

  65.On the content of Imperial food, see Ben Stocking, “She Hid in Prayer to Flee Fumes,” Raleigh News and Observer, September 15, 1991. On food trends in 1991, see “Hormel Expands Chicken by George,” Broiler Industry (July 1989): 18.

  66.On the increased pace of work at Imperial in the months leading up to the fire and on cutbacks by the company, see author interviews with Martin Quick and Georgia Quick.

  67.Reference to maggots from Steve Riley, “Labor Agency Called Negligent—Panel Releases Report on Hamlet Tragedy,” Raleigh News and Observer, December 4, 1991, while Ben Stocking reported on Oates’s encounter with Brad Roe in his article, “Life and Death at Imperial,” Raleigh News and Observer, December 8, 1991. For additional accounts of the processing of green and rancid chicken, see author interview with Martin Quick and various interviews from Department of Labor Investigation, in author’s possession.

  68.C.E. Yandle and Jim Barnett, “The Road to Ruin,” Raleigh News and Observer, December 10, 1991. On the Mrs. Kinser operation, see author interview with Bill Sawyer. Still, this section on the state of the Roes’ businesses relies heavily on the deep and thorough research of Yandle and Barnett and a subsequent author interview with Yandle.

  69.Yandle and Barnett, “The Road to Ruin.”

  70.Ben Stocking, “Life and Death at Imperial.” On school lunches and budget cuts, see Susan Levine, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  71.Steve Riley and Randy Diamond, “U.S. Probing Safety at Imperial Plant in Georgia,” Raleigh News and Observer, September 5, 1991; Steve Riley, “Imperial Pa. Plant Was Cited—Serious Violations Found Twice in ’80s,” Raleigh News and Observer, September 14, 1991; and “Poultry Firm Earlier Fined for Violations,” The State, September 15, 1991.

  72.The history of Haverpride presented here is, again, largely drawn from the excellent reporting of Yandle and Barnett, “The Road to Ruin.”

  73.On Lyle’s actions, see Yandle and Barnett, “The Road to Ruin,” and interview with confidential company source.

  74.On the demise of Haverpride and its impact on workers, see Yandle and Barnett, “The Road to Ruin”; and Judy Aulette and Raymond Michalowski, “Fire in Hamlet: A Case Study of State-Corporate Crime” (early draft of article), p. 21, Box 35, Folder, Judy Aulette Paper, NCOSHP, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC.

  75.“Hamlet Fire Latest in a Long List of Imperial Setbacks,” Richmond County Daily Journal, September 16, 1991; and Hamlet Meeting, n.d., Box 35, Folder, Hamlet Organizing Contacts, NCOSHP, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC.

  76.John Hechinger, “Chicken Processing Under Attack,” Charlotte Observer, September 4, 1991. Author interview with Niland.

  77.See again Yandle and Barnett, “The Road to Ruin.” See also “Hamlet Plant Owners Weigh Bankruptcy,” Rock Hill Herald, September 29, 1991.

  78.Author interview with Martin Quick.

  79.For a larger framing of these issues, see Jacob S, Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  4: Labor

  1.The spine of this chapter is based on an author interview with Georgia Quick; supporting documents were supplied by her lawyer, Woody Gunter, in the author’s possession; and genealogical research into Quick’s background was conducted by Diane Richard, also in author’s possession. For some similar stories of women working in the food industry and with a framing around the idea of cheap, see Dale Finley Slongwhite, Fed Up: The High Costs of Cheap Food (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014).

  2.On cotton production in North Carolina, see North Carolina Business History, “Cotton,” available at www.historync.org/cotton.htm. See also Peter A. Coclanis and Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “Selling Which South? Economic Change in Rural and Small-Town North Carolina in an Era of Globalization, 1940–2007,” Southern Cultures 4 (Winter 2007): 86–102.

  3.On the decline of steady work for men in the countryside, see Cynthia M. Duncan, Worlds Apart: Poverty and Politics in Rural America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 123.

  4.It seems like this was a somewhat widely used tool against working people, at least that was what some in the AFL-CIO believed. “Policy Resolutions, November 1981,” p. 73, AFL-CIO Records, AFL-CIO Bound Pamphlets, RG-34-002, Box 23, Folder 30, Special Collections, University of Maryland, Silver Spring, MD.

  5.Department of Labor Investigation, Interview Number 4, p. 7, in author’s possession.

  6.Department of Labor Investigation, Interview Number 4, pp. 11, 22, in author’s possession; and “Some Facts on the Imperial Food Products Murders in Hamlet, NC,”
Box 35, Folder, Hamlet Organizing Contacts, NCOSHP, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC.

  7.Author interview with Lorrie Boyle.

  8.On the gloves, see Ben Stocking, “Life and Death at Imperial,” Raleigh News and Observer, December 8, 1991. See also, on the chicken policy, Jim Schlosser, “We Are Going to Die,” Greensboro News and Record, September 8, 1991.

  9.Department of Labor Investigation, various interviews, in author’s possession.

  10.Department of Labor Investigation, Interview Number 6, pp. 15–17, in author’s possession.

  11.In addition to the author interview with Georgia Quick, see “Testimony by Mary Bryant,” June 1992, NCOSHP, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC.

  12.B. Drummond Ayres Jr., “Factory Fire Leaves Pall Over All-American City,” New York Times, September 5, 1991.

  13.Paul Taylor, “Escape from Fire Is a Rare Piece of Luck for Poultry Worker,” Washington Post, September 6, 1991.

  14.On the rules about slips and falls, see Hamlet Meeting, n.d., Box 35, Folder, Hamlet Organizing Contacts, NCOSHP, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC. See also author interviews with Mark Schultz and Lorrie Boyle.

  15.Department of Labor Investigation, Interview Number 5, p. 23, in author’s possession.

  16.Details about Gail Campbell come from Kemlite Video, Charles Becton Personal Files, Durham, NC, copy in author’s possession.

  17.For similar descriptions of shopfloor friendships and relationships among poultry workers, see LaGuana Gray, We Just Keep Running the Line: Black Southern Women and the Poultry Processing Industry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 84.

  18.Gregg LaBar, “Hamlet, N.C.: Home to a National Tragedy,” Occupational Hazards (September 1992): 29.

  19.“Testimony by Mary Bryant,” June 1992, NCOSHP, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC. See a similar view expressed by an Imperial worker in Bob Edwards, “Poultry Plant Fire Victims Mourned in North Carolina,” NPR, Morning Edition, September 6, 1991.

  20.Author interview with William Morris.

  21.Author interview with Joseph Arnold.

  22.Bobby Quick, no relation to Georgia, quoted by Judy Aulette and Raymond Michalowski, “Fire in Hamlet: A Case Study of State-Corporate Crime,” p. 23, Box 35, Folder, Judy Aulette Paper, NCOSHP, SCH, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC.

  23.Lee May, “Plant Fire Unlikely to Spur Major Reforms,” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 1991.

  24.On the movement back to the South, see James Cobb, The South and America Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 190–91; and Dan Bilesky, “New Life, Blacks in City Head South,” New York Times, June 21, 2011.

  25.Information about Bellamy comes from Ben Stocking, “Life and Death at Imperial,” Raleigh News and Observer, December 8, 1991. See also Dave Moniz, “New Life Cut Short in Hamlet Fire,” Columbia State, September 6, 1991.

  26.Taylor, “Escape from Fire,” and Doug Stark, “The South’s Poultry Plants Thrive,” Baltimore Sun, September 8, 1991.

  27.Osha Gray Davidson, “The Rise of the Rural Ghetto,” The Nation, June 15, 1986, 820.

  28.Cobb, The South and America, 190.

  29.Anderson quoted by Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966–1999 (New York: Free Press, 1999), 67.

  30.Davidson, “The Rise of the Rural Ghetto”; and Osha Gray Davidson, Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996). See also Coclanis and Kyriakoudes, “Selling Which South?,” 86–102. See also the portrait of a small town in crisis in Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). See similar accounts of the struggles in small towns during this period in Nate Blakeslee, Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town (New York: Public Affairs, 2005); and Richard Rubin, Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South (New York: Atria Books, 2002), 31.

  31.For a profile of the economy of Richmond County, see MDC, Inc. (Chapel Hill, NC), “Three Faces of Rural North Carolina: A Summary Report to the North Carolina Commission on Jobs and Economic Growth” (December 1986): i. On unemployment, see Taylor, “Escape from Fire.”

  32.William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1997).

  33.“Hamlet’s Streak of Misfortune Began on Friday,” Richmond County Daily Journal, April 12, 1991; “Seems Like Crime Is on the Rise,” Richmond County Daily Journal, September 3, 1991; Karl Stark, “Sudden Horror of Fatal Fire Overwhelms Tiny N.C. Town,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 8, 1991.

  34.Author interview with Cordelia Steele.

  35.Jane Ruffin, “Dreams of Better Days,” Raleigh News and Observer, December 9, 1991; and MDC, Inc., “Three Faces,” Appendix C, p. 12.

  36.Author interview with Reverend Harold Miller; and Coclanis and Kyriakoudes, “Selling Which South?” 96.

  37.Author interview with Josh Newton.

  38.MDC Inc., “Three Faces,” Appendix C, p. 12. Coclanis and Kyriakoudes, “Selling Which South?,” 96; and Jane Ruffin, “A World Apart: Economic growth of North Carolina’s rural areas,” Business North Carolina (April 1992). See also George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).

  39.Gordon Edes, “From Hamlet to Megalopolis: Dodgers’ Franklin Stubbs Seems to Have Arrived to Stay,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1996; and author interview with Martin Quick.

  40.Author interview with Martin Quick.

  41.Author interview with Martin Quick; and Taylor, “Escape from Fire.”

  42.Author interview with Larry Lee. See also William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

  43.David Sirota, Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain The World We Live in Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 175, 197.

  44.Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press: 2010), 50–51. See also Heather A. Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97 (December 2010): 702–34.

  45.On Detroit, see Thomas Sugrue’s classic book, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequity in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

  46.Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 166. See also on the point of men and family, Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 112–37; Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000); and, of course, Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged. Cynthia M. Duncan makes a similar link between urban and rural ghettos in her book, Worlds Apart, 126–27.

  47.Author interview with Annette Zimmerman. On welfare spending, see Cobb, The South and America, 202. On Imperial, see “Some Facts on the Imperial Food Products Murders in Hamlet, NC,” Box 35, Folder, Hamlet Organizing Contacts, NCOSHP, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC.

  48.Gray, We Just Keep Running the Line, 70.

  49.Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir (New York: Bloomsbury 2013), 83–84, 131. For more on Richmond County and the rise of single-parent households, see “Richmond Shows Gain in Families Headed by Women,” The News, June 16, 1975, Charles McClean Papers, Box 2, Folder 6, UNCC, Charlotte, NC. See also U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing, 1990: Social and Economic Characteristics North Carolina, Table 2: Summary of Labor Force and Commuting Characteristics, available at www.census.gov/prod/cen1990/cp2/cp-2-35-1.pdf. See also Dean Bakopoulos’s novel that explores the disappearance of working-class men, in this case white men, as their jobs disappear, Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon (Orlando, FL: Harvest Books, 2005).

  50.On
the larger phenomenon, see Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 68–69; and Robert O. Self, All in the Family: A Realignment of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 110–11.

  51.Ward, Men We Reaped, 131.

  52.Andrew J. Cherlin estimates that 75 percent of undereducated women sought employment in 1990. That was up from 38 percent thirty years earlier. This again explains something of the jump in the labor market participation. See Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 148.

  53.In his book on the 1970s, Thomas Borstelmann makes an interesting argument about the egalitarian impulse coming out of the 1960s and its somewhat counterintuitive impact on inequality; see The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 6.

  54.Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (New York: Vintage, 2000), xiv. See also Gray, We Just Keep Running the Line, 64–65.

  55.Vanesa Ribas uses this term in her book on hog-processing workers in a small town in North Carolina, On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 62.

  56.Lillie Belle Davis, A New Beginning: It’s a Blessing to Be Alive (lulu.com books, 2004), 11–14.

  57.Author interview with Zimmerman. See a similar response in Gray, We Just Keep Running the Line, 53.

  58.Budget estimates drawn based on what the survivors of the fire reported their needs were after the fire, Reverend James Bailey, Disaster Relief Fund Treasurer, January 28, 1992, Box 33, Folder, Correspondence, NCOSHP, SHC, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC; Peter Kilborn, “In Aftermath of Deadly Fire, A Poor Town Struggles Back,” New York Times, November 25, 1991; and Lawrence Naumoff, A Southern Tragedy in Crimson and Yellow (Winston-Salem, NC: Zuckerman Cannon Publishers, 2005), 46, 52. See also 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; and Anne Draper, “Crisis in the Family Budget,” (1980) AFL-CIO Records, AFL-CIO Bound Pamphlets, RG-34-002, Box 23, Folder 58, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.